Evonik Industries Ag (EVKIF) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q22026 earnings conference call. I am Shari, the chorus call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Christian Kullmann, CEO. Please go ahead. Thanks a lot and a very warm welcome to our Q2 audience conference call and thanks to everybody for joining us this morning. An especially warm welcome goes again to our new CFO, Michael Rauch, who's sitting here next to me. Michael. I am really glad that you did good stuff with us in the last month and that you are taking an active role for the first time on this call today. As usual, I will start with selected strategic highlights, Michael then will comment on our strong Q2 results, before I will take over again to discuss our upgraded outlook. As you know, From our pre-release, we recorded a second quarter above expectations. Actually, this was the best quarterly result in four years. But we are not resting on this short-term success. We know that structural challenges remain for the sector and for Evonik. What is in our hands, we are actively addressing with determination. And we can show really good progress in the first six months of this year. To demonstrate that we deliver on our promises, let me show you a slide that we already presented in February. I can only reiterate, we have more potential, even more potential than others. And we are going to realize this potential. On cost reduction, we have extended...