Gurit Holding AG (0QQR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Thank you very much and good morning. I welcome you to the presentation of our first half 2023 results. I'm here in GURT's corporate office in Zurich together with my colleague Philipp Wirt, our CFO. You have seen that we announced a change in the board of directors this morning, so I'm happy to have both Rudolf Hardon and Philipp Royer here with us in the room as well, providing additional background and be ready to answer questions during the Q&A session. Let's start and I have a look at today's agenda first. I will start the presentation by providing you a business update, highlighting the key activities and achievements of the first half of this year, and comment on the most recent events. Philip Wirt will provide details on the financials before I will spend a bit more time explaining our view on the markets and our full year outlook. Following the presentation, we have scheduled the Q&A session. So let's start with a review of the first half of this year. And I think I can say that this was overall a successful first half for GURIT. Our legacy businesses, so excluding the structural profiles business, were performing much better than last year. Our Western wind customers started to order blade molds again, driving sales and profitability of our manufacturing solutions business. Our new PET extrusion sites in India and Mexico increased their operational performance after a period of ramping up. The marine and industrial business saw continued strong demands, in particular for our recycled PET foams, as well as our high-performing core cell products. And the multitude of cost-out and profitability improvement measures, which we initiated last year, started showing the expected results. Strategically, we are progressing with the implementation of our long-term str...