IMCD N.V. (IMCDY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello and welcome to the IMCD only Q3 2023 results analyst call. My name is Laura and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and for the duration of the call your lines will be unlistenedly. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your questions. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Piet van der Slicke, CEO, to begin today's conference. Thank you. Thank you, Laura, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Hans Kormans and I welcome you to our analyst conference call on the third quarter of 2023. With us this morning is also Valerie de Lebrun, who will take over from me as CEO as of January 1st. She will briefly introduce herself after my remarks. Before commenting on our results, I would like to give some context about the economic environment we are operating in. From the Q3 presentation of BASF, we learned that world chemical production without China decreased with more than 4%. Perhaps more important for our business is that the manufacturing indexes of the Eurozone and the United States have contracted for respectively the last 16 and 11 months. It shows the difficulty of the economic environment we are working on. Despite this, our European partners and our results in APEC actually performed quite satisfactory, but we saw a decrease in orders in our industrial segments in the third quarter, in particular in the Americas. I would like to remind you that we grew our EBITDA in the first nine months of 2022 with 51%. After the first nine months of this year, EBITDA decreased with 6% Forex adjusted. And th...