Demant As (WILLF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to our conference call following the release of our interim management statement for Q1 2025 after market closed yesterday. For the call today it's business as usual and we plan to run through the presentation followed by a Q&A session. The presentation should now be available on our website. As per usual we plan for the call to last no more than one hour in total including the Q&A session. On the call today, we have Søren Nielsen, our President and CEO, René Schneider, our CFO, and myself, Gustav Høgh, from the IR team. That's it for the practical elements, and now over to you, Søren. Yeah, thank you very much, Gustav, and welcome everybody. I will today take you through business highlights and key financial takeaways, quick review of the business area, and we will take you through the outlook as well, and then get to Q&A. Business highlight in first quarter. We have seen a negative development in the global hearing aid market coming from increased macroeconomic uncertainties, most importantly in the U.S. market. And this is different than our original expectation. So I'm sure you have already seen we lower our full year guidance for market growth. I think this is number one key takeaway. As expected, hearing aids was impacted by strong comparison base, strong introduction last year, as well as the change strategy in managed care and the following laws of share there, but below expectation solely due to the soft market developments. Hearing care continues to deliver solid organic growth well above the market growth rate, and we continue to consolidate distribution in line with our strategy and the underlying consolidation taking place in the market. The market for diagnostic instruments continues to be soft, impacting growth, alth...