Wacker Chemie Ag Ord (WKCMF) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Walker Phinney AG Q1 2026 conference call. I am Sandra, the call school operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Jörg Hoffmann, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, operator. Welcome to the Wacker Chem EIG conference call on our first quarter 2026 results. Dr. Christian Hartl, our CEO, and Dr. Tobias Ola, our CFO, will walk you through the presentation, the press release, Our IR presentation and detailed financial tables are available on our webpage under the Investor Relations section. Please note that management comments during this call include forward-looking statements involving risks and uncertainties. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statement in today's presentation and look into our 2025 annual report for information on risk factors. All documents mentioned are available on our website. Chris? Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our earnings call for the first quarter of 2026. Despite the ongoing weak demand in many of our customer industries, WACKER had a solid start to the year. Group sales came in at 1.41 billion euros, 5% below last year. This was primarily due to FX headwinds. On the other hand, EVDA climbed by 45% year over year, to 173 million euros. The primary driver to the higher EBITDA was our paid cost program, followed by pull-forward effects from customers. We have made good progress w...