Heidelberg Materials Ag (HLBZF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Gentlemen, welcome to the Heidelberg Materials full year results 2024 conference call. I'm Moritz, the call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Christoph Bäumel, Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, operator. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone that dialed in. Great that you're all here. We are in the room, as always, with Dominic and René and the IR team, and look forward to your questions later. But for now, I hand over to Dominic for our prepared remarks. Dominic. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everybody, and thanks for joining our annual results 2024 call. We open up with another year of success and progress. You've seen the presentation. I'm looking at the executive summary, basically sharing with you that the RCO hits a record high of 3.2 billion euros. The EBITDA margin jumps up to 21.3%, and it's absolutely in the corridor of 20% to 22% that we took as a target in our 2021 Capital Market Day. Transformation accelerator, initially we shared with you last time, target 500 million. We are well on our way. I'm sure we'll get into some more details down the road. Free cash flow sits at a very healthy 2.2 billion euros, which drives the leverage down to 1.2 times shareholder return, first time above 1 billion in one year in a combination of progressive dividend and share-by-back. We have cancelled the shares of the first wave of the second share-by-back, and we will sta...