Lonza Group AG (0QNO) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Thanks to all of you for joining our call today. Before we start the presentation, let me share with you our disclaimer regarding forward looking statements made by us. This is also available in the online version of our presentation for you to download and read in your own time, I guess. Before we move to the details of our half year results, let's briefly look at the agenda that we prepared for you today. I will start with an overview of our H1 performance and some of the key highlights from across our business. I will then hand over to Philippe, our CFO, who will take you through the financial results in detail. After that, I will return to provide an update on the performance of the individual business platforms and conclude with our outlook for the rest of the year. Following the presentation, we will take a short two minute break and return with a live video stream for our Q and A session. Let me start with a top line overview of our H1 performance. We delivered a strong performance across all three of our business platforms. All of this essentially spot on or even better than our expectations at the beginning of the year. This strong performance reflects the sustainable, robust demand for our offering, the depth of our customer relationships and the disciplined operational execution by our global One Lonza team. Together with some favorable phasing, these strengths taken together enabled us to deliver sales of CHF 3,400,000,000 and a CER sales growth of 16% compared to H1 twenty twenty five. The core EBITDA reached CHF 1,200,000,000, which represents a high margin of 34.8%, an increase of 4.4 percentage points versus H1 twenty twenty five. Alongside the strong sales growth and further margin expansion, in H1 twenty twenty six, we improved our free cash flow by...