Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to AGRANA's conference call presenting our results for the first half 2026/27. You already got some insights in our figures when we published an ad hoc announcement regarding our full year guidance revised on the 28th of September.

Today, we will provide you with more details also on the segments. As announced in our invitation, a presentation is available in reference to this call, and you can find this presentation, as always, in the IR section of our website.

Our CEO Stephan Büttner and our CFO Franz Ennser will hold today's presentation, which is divided into three parts: we will start with an introduction and will focus on the highlights of the first half, we will go on then with a segment overview also referring on the key financial KPIs, and finally, we will conclude with an outlook for the remaining financial year. The presentation will take about 20 to 25 minutes, and afterwards, the lines will be opened to answer your questions.

Now, I may pass over to our CEO, who will start this presentation with slide number 4.

Thank you, Hannes. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our conference call for the first half of the 2026/27 business year.

Overall performance in the second quarter and also in the first half of the business year were according to our expectations, despite the fact that the market environment is still very challenging. We see again an increase in energy prices, also raw material prices, especially wheat and corn.

Despite these very challenging environment, we were able to improve our operating performance versus prior year, and we're also consistently working on our strategic projects. When we look at the key figures, our revenue, €1.7 billion in the first six months of the business year.

Operating profit amounted to €57.4 million. Exceptional items significantly decreased to €1.2 million, and the EBIT therefore €63.5 million versus €28 million in the previous year.

Free cash flow stable in the first half of the year, -€9.2 million. This is a, yeah, significantly decrease versus prior year, due to an increase of working capital on one hand, higher stock levels in sugar, and on the other hand, the cash out for the acquisition of the Emba company.

Net debt therefore, €464.1 million versus €421 million in the previous year. Gearing, 41.2%, still in an acceptable range, and equity ratio increased to 46.2%.

Focus still in the current business year is the integration of Austria Juice and Mercato Emba, the two acquisitions that we recently made. Both companies are more or less developing according to plan.

Only issue that we are facing right now in the operative performance in Austria Juice is that we have the second year in a row a frost in Hungary, resulting in a, let's say, 90% loss of the apple harvest, causing us significant, yeah, utilization rate losses, and this is at the moment difficult to compensate. We also signed the purchase agreement of Esarom on the 9th of September 2026, a further step in our portfolio strategy.

We think that this is very important acquisition. Esarom is a well-established company developing flavors, beverage compounds, bases, powders, emulsions, functional blends, and stabilizers for the beverage industry, yeah, with a very long history, very traditional company with a lot of expertise and complementary sales regions, more oriented in the eastern part of Europe.

The company operates two production sites, one in Austria, with around 400 employees, and the revenue that they generated in the previous year was €112 million. Now we are in the process of the merger control, we are waiting for the antitrust approval.

We hope that this will be finished maybe in the first quarter of the next business year, around March or April 2027. Purchase price, the valuation of the company was a nine factor 9 EBITDA.

This is the enterprise value, this amounts to €150 million. We already starting, of course, let's say, with respecting the guardrails concerning antitrust with a preparation of the integration of Esarom.

We have a constant exchange with the actual management there, and so we are on making good progress as well. Let me please now hand over to Franz Ennser, and he will inform you about the raw material situation.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone.

Basically, the framework conditions for our industry in the food and agricultural sector, they are really highly volatile. I think everybody's well aware of the drought situation, especially in Central, Western, and Eastern European areas, and this is affecting both availability, but also the price trends for the key raw materials, meaning talking about wheat, talking about corn.

Also related to energy, energy markets are, of course, quite strained now, which is the logic effect of the ongoing war situation both in the Middle East area, but also in Ukraine and Russia. We have been able to perform in our biorefinery in Pischelsdorf in the first half of the year better than the year before, we were able to process even higher volumes for the products of wheat and, of course, also wheat starch and also ethanol.

We have started up our potato starch factory in Lower Austria in Gmünd by the end of August. Our contracted volume, which was around 154,000 tonnes, will only lead to a crop of estimated 70 to 80,000 tonnes of starch potatoes as a result of the drought weather condition or dry weather condition, especially during the summer months.

Yesterday evening, we have started up also the Austrian sugar factory in Tulln, while the factories in the countries Slovakia, Czechia have already started up, as well as also Romania and Hungary will start most likely by the end of next week. In total, we have contracted close to 60,000 hectares of sugar beets.

Unfortunately, the yields this year will be significantly impacted, of course, also by the dry weather condition and lack of rainfall. For Austria, our best guess is that the crop will result in yields of 55 to 60 tonnes per hectare, meaning that we will most likely finish our campaign in early January 2027.

In our Sugar segment, the total volume of processed sugar beets will be in the dimension of 3.2 to 3.3 million tonnes of sugar beets. As already mentioned by Stephan Büttner, we have an impact in terms of our raw material availability in the Austria Juice business area of juice concentrate, especially in Hungary, but also partly in Poland.

We had impacts also on selected soft fruits like raspberry, blackcurrants, and aronia berries, where we have seen tremendous price increases versus the prior year. Basically, these increasing costs could be forwarded to the customers.

In terms of our energy costs on page 13, I think this graph just illustrates that the levels which we had before the Ukrainian war started in '21/'22, these levels we will most likely not be able to reach anymore. We do expect, of course, also impacts due to this increase of energy prices compared to the prior year.

In terms of our investments, we have been investing close to €45 million in the €43 million compared to the €45 million, pretty much in line with the previous year. The majority of our investments has been done in the Fruit and Beverage Solutions segment.

We basically focused on some investments into the food service business, but also given the rising demand, especially for protein-containing yogurts in the US, we increased our capacity in our food preparation plant in Lysander in the state of New York. In the Starch and in the Sugar, we have basically focused on either capacity expansion, but also sustainability investments, including into also here efficiency projects for improving our yields and our overall, let's say, production excellence activities.

Our plan for the total year 2026/27 amounts around €110 to €130 million. The majority will be invested into the Fruit and Beverage Solutions business.

This overall investment sum is slightly below our budgeted depreciation of around €117 million. This is it in a nutshell about raw materials and investments.

Thank you, Franz. Let's have a look at the financials.

Already mentioned, group revenue, €1.7 billion, yeah, a slight increase of 0.5% versus prior year, mainly resulting out of the increase in revenue in our Fruit & Beverage Solutions segment. The increase is 4.3%.

Stable revenue in Starch, and a further decline in Sugar, mainly driven by the lower sales prices in average. When we look at the development here of the quotations, world market sugar prices, we see, and we think, yeah, that the bottom line was reached in the previous months.

Now we will start to see an increase in the quotations. Franz already mentioned, also across the whole Europe, we expect a significantly smaller crop in sugar beets.

Therefore, the overstocks, yeah, let's say, we will get rid of the overstocks, leading to a more balanced market situation in sugar, and this will also lead in the coming months to an increase in sugar prices. When we look at the EBIT development by segment, we see a decrease of 11% in our Fruit & Beverage Solutions segment.

This is really driven by the crop failure in Hungary in Austria Juice. This is a fruit juice concentrate business, more commodity type of the business.

We cannot compensate that. This cost us around €10 million, and could only partly be compensated by our recipes business, which had a very solid performance in the first half of the business year, and could also further improve the performance versus prior year.

Here we are absolutely on the right track. In Starch, we also see an improvement versus prior year, mainly coming from the ethanol business, which is showing quite a solid and good performance in the first half.

When we look at our Sugar business, here you can see, of course, on the EBIT level a very significant improvement, but it's not only on EBIT, because we also here had extraordinary items out still of the closure of our two factories in Leopoldsdorf and Ružovany, which amounted to approximately €20 million, but when we deduct this, you can still see that our operative performance is significantly improving, also when we compare to our competitors, which clearly shows that we made our homework in the last three years. Let's have a look at the outlook.

As we already reported, we expect a very significant increase in EBIT, and also an increase in revenue for 2026/27 versus prior year. We are also on track with our savings out of our Horizon program.

Outlook by segment: Fruit & Beverage Solutions, revenue moderate increase, EBIT moderate reduction due to the challenges in Austria Juice with the apple juice concentrate production; AGS Starch, a steady development in revenue, and a significant increase in the EBIT; and in Sugar, a moderate reduction in revenue due to the decreasing price levels, especially in the first half of the business year, and a very significant improvement on EBIT level. Outlook for the third quarter: so last year, we had an EBIT of 20 €28.4 million.

For the actual third quarter in this business year, we expect it to be very significantly above this €28.4 million. Thank you very much for your attention.

I hand back to Hannes Haider, who will inform you about the financial calendar.

Thank you. Before we go on with the Q&A session, I just wanted to point out that end of September, we published our financial calendar for the next financial year 2027/28, and you can find all relevant IR dates also on our website.

We will now go on with the Q&A session.

Yes, hello. I have three questions in my side.

Could you explain the main drivers of the working capital outflow? This is the first one.

The second one, could you give us more details on what you expect in term of synergy from the [unclear] and provide an indication of the frame time required to capture this [unclear]? On your Starch EBIT increase in Q2, could you [unclear] ethanol versus the underlying starch profitability?

Sorry, we have a connection problem. We cannot understand you.

Can you repeat? Ms.

Hamdani,

could you please repeat? Please.

Do you hear me well?

Yes, now we can hear you, yeah.

Okay. The first one is, do you explain what are the main drivers of the working capital outflow in Q2?

Okay? The second one is on the synergy from Esarom acquisition.

Could you provide an indication of the time frame required to capture this benefits? Okay?

Then the third one is regarding the Starch EBIT increase in Q2 also. Could you explain how much of this improvement come from ethanol margin versus underlying starch profitability?

Do you, yeah?

Yes, we got you,

yeah. Very

very challenging questions. Thank you.

Let's start with your first question, working capital. We had an increase of €29.8 million.

This is, of course,

this is coming from the AGRANA Starch business mainly. We had an increase in stocks here, as well in our Sugar business.

On the other hand, yeah, higher receivables, and also lower liabilities. In total, but it's €30 million versus prior year, it's not significant, I would say, yeah.

The major impact on the free cash flow is really coming by more than €50 million of the payouts for the acquisition of Emba. Also, we sold half of our factory, AGST in Romania, to Ingredion last year, and these both issues, they amount to more than €50 million.

Second question, Esarom, yeah, it's very difficult, first of all, to say how long the merger control process will take, yeah. This can be 5 to 6 months.

Our biggest concern actually is Russia. Our lawyers told us that this can take also up to 10 or 11 months.

We will see. In the meantime, we are preparing everything once the merger control process is cleared, that we will be able to very quickly bring together the added value business of Austria Juice with Esarom.

The added value business of Austria Juice amounts to approximately €50 to €60 million currently. Then this in total with the Esarom business we will have a revenue of around €170 to €180 million.

There, we, yeah, we expect a constant margin EBITDA between 15% and 20% for the near future. Then, of course, we will work on the synergy effects, mainly our MOTION project, where we are looking for a replacement in the procurement side for natural flavors, which we will then make more in-house.

Of course, also we can speed this up with the capacities and the knowledge of Esarom. We will also further try to increase our third-party flavor revenue, and therefore, yeah, we need to implement also the equipment in the locations where we think that the markets are there.

Our first target market is Australia. I cannot tell you right now how long this will take, but we are already right now starting with planning the integration, bringing things together, and working on projects where we can get out synergies more quickly when we talk about the in-house sourcing, especially of natural flavors.

Then we're already working on the site concepts, yeah: what are we going to do with the sites in Austria, from Austria Juice and also from Esarom, that we have a very good network. It's work in progress.

We will see, of course, already in the next business year after the merger clears the results of Esarom, and then, yeah, we will constantly be working on market synergies, but also there are potentially some cost synergies. I hope this answers your question.

This is a difficult question because I cannot really quantify when what will happen in terms of synergies, yeah, but, of course, this is a very strategic acquisition, and it will bring us forward quite quickly with our plans of expansion and growth in our Fruit & Beverage Solutions segment. Of course, ethanol is more or less responsible for the improvement of our results in Starch.

This is the main driver.

Thank you.

Thank you for taking my questions. Hello, everyone.

My first question would be on sugar pricing. I think that's on the new campaign that started.

I think it's time for negotiations in September, October, if I'm not wrong, with industrials, but also and above all the beet growers. My question is, were you able to secure higher prices than last year?

Or are you locked for this year on low prices, which is quite important regarding the fact that you're expecting a huge drop on the yield? Meaning that you will have a factory utilization and higher production costs to handle this year.

Thank you.

I would say it's mixed, yeah. On one hand, we cannot always decide when we lock in the contract with our customers.

When they start in negotiations and they want to buy, then, of course, we also have to make contracts with our key customers. This starts usually around July, August, and so on.

Of course, this was a time when we were not able to assess whether this will be a bumper crop or like in the previous year, or a small crop, or a normal crop. You have to take the decision, you have to take the train when it's coming.

Of course, we also have contracts in place where we do not already see a significant increase in sales prices, but then, of course, things are developing, and we also have already contracts in place with higher prices. Overall, I would say that it more or less outweighs the additional costs that we will see in this campaign for the actual business year.

We have the underutilization. These are the costs that we have to book already in the actual business year, and we will be able to compensate for that.

This amounts to approximately €10 million to compensate for that by higher sales prices, yeah. This is all I can say.

We see an increase in prices. Can we fully leverage that?

Not fully, but partly. Of course, we also have an issue on the capacity side, but this is also limited because we already closed two sites.

Sugar, as you can see, is getting less and less effector, especially when we see an increase in prices in the coming months. Then, what we think also in the next business year, I think what I already said is that the toughest times are behind us, I would say.

Very clear. Thank you.

Second question on FBS. You evaluate the impacts of the poor juice campaign, I think in Hungary.

You said €10 million. My question is more on the time length of this impact.

Will it weight on profitability for the rest of the fiscal year, also maybe for '27/'28? Can you tell me, please?

Thank you.

This is a campaign business in the fruit juice concentrate. It's like same cycle as in sugar.

We start harvesting, processing in September around, and then we have a marketing year, and then the contracts last till the new harvest begins in September 2027. We expect, of course, let's say, a not so good performance in the fruit juice concentrate business for the next 10, 11 months, yeah.

Thank you very much.

Can I answer right now?

Or, okay, two more questions, please.

Thank you. I'll try to answer now.

The first question is the major factors behind the recently raised EBIT guidance. This is primarily driven by AGS.

As we already mentioned, we see in Sugar that our restructuring measures, yeah, let's say, are translating in, I would say, lower production and also structural costs. Starch, as we also mentioned already, is benefiting from the significantly improved bioethanol margins.

The combination of these two factors resulted in a much stronger result in the first half of the business year than we expected, and we think that we are able to carry this forward and also see this positive impact for the full business year. Do you expect segment AGS Sugar will switch to black numbers?

Look, I've already mentioned, I think the first half of the year, we have approximately -€3 million EBIT. We do not expect an operating performance in the second half of the business year which shows a positive result.

This is logical. We have increased prices partly.

On the other hand, we are facing this approximately €10 million impact minus due to the underutilization of our plants, due to the very poor harvest. This is something that we have to book fully in the actual business year.

The revenues, they will spread over 12 months starting from September with partly higher prices, we cannot fully compensate that. We will see on the operative level potentially a minus.

I cannot exactly tell you the run rate, but it must be somehow, I would say, including this impact of the underutilization, maybe around €2 million per month. What we still have in our hands is the sale of the land in Leopoldsdorf, where we closed the factory, where we, of course, also expect a significant revenue stream, also with a positive impact on our EBIT.

Therefore, I cannot tell you now. It can be in total, it can be a close race, yeah.

Third question: significant improvement of the financial results. This was driven by three main factors: so first of all, the net financial debt could be decreased as a result of our strong working capital performance; therefore, interest burden is reduced; also, the interest rate hedging and improved financing margins are a factor; so we have also a new OeKB financing and this also supports the better results; but also most important, the foreign exchange result improved significantly due to our, I would say, currency exposure management and a reduction in negative carry on foreign currency swaps, yeah.

For sure, the main factor is the foreign exchange results here.

Thank you. As there are no further questions, thanks for your interest in AGRANA and your participation in the call.

We wish you a nice remaining day and a successful day. Bye.