Lanxess Ag Ord (LNXSF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

warm welcome to everybody to our Q1 conference call from my end as well. As always, we begin by asking you to take notice of our safe harbor statement. And with me today is our CEO, Matthias Sarrath, and our CFO, Oliver Stratmann. Matthias will start with a short presentation, and then we will open the floor for your questions. With that, I'm happy to hand over to Matthias. Please go ahead. Thank you, André, and welcome to everybody on the Q1 conference call. Today I will start the presentation on page 4 and all in all I would like to say and state that Q1 has been a straightforward quarter. No surprises vis-à-vis our expectation that we have communicated to you guys in March. Only one comment on the segments. All segment divisions improved. but we had a quite sharp increase in consumer protection. This is largely driven by the fact that Q1 2024 was simply a deplorable comparable base. That was the quarter where we had the severest impact on the destocking in agro, which continued in the following quarters in 2024, but more or less came to an end with Q4 2020. And now in Q1, we see that agro comes back to normal ordering, while the entire industry is not back to happy times yet. So with this, I move into the group key performance indicators. EBITDA is up by roundabout 32 percentage points, which is a big step according to our communication but of course still at low levels, but fortunately better than Q1 24. Working capital in Q1 increased lower than Q1 24, but this is the normal seasonal increase driven especially by sales pickups and thus receivables are making up the majority of the increase versus Q4. which is the normal seasonal development thus also net debt versus q4 moved up on the back of an increase in working capital and as we have communicated beginning o...