Yes. Thank you very much, and also a warm welcome from my side.

Welcome to the Friedrich Vorwerk Earnings Call 2025. I will, for everybody who is not in detail familiar with Friedrich Vorwerk, run you very quickly through the main topics of our company and then give you a short market update about the latest developments in our main markets.

Then I will hand over to Tim for, of course, the financial figures, which are key to this meeting here. And then I will give you a business update about our current projects we are running at the moment, at least the large ones.

So yes, Friedrich Vorwerk has been active since founding in 1962. So with more than 60 years of experience in the business of engineering and constructing energy infrastructure here in Germany, mainly.

We can look back at numerous very successful projects in our highly attractive main market, which is natural gas transition, electricity transition, clean hydrogen transition, and of course, adjacent opportunities where we sum up our activities in district heating, CO2 treatment and transport and treatment of biomethane. Today, we are operating from 14 locations within the north, mainly in the north of Germany with more than 2,200 well-trained employees.

And yes, due to the energy transition, which is still going on here in Germany, we can look back at a very strong order intake already also in 2025. So we were able to acquire projects in a total volume of almost EUR 1 billion in 2025, which is an increase of 27% compared to the figures of the year 2024.

Yes, where do these order intake come from? Main customers here in our 3 markets are, of course, the large TSOs operating the energy transport grids, not only in Germany, but also in the middle of Europe.

So it could be in terms of electricity transition companies called TenneT and Amprion in looking at the market in clean hydrogen transition and natural gas transition, we have customers like Open Grid Europe, Gasunie and others. But of course, you can also find petrochemical companies and cable manufacturers within our customers.

Yes. So what's the latest market update.

First, I want to focus on the development of -- since German government has agreed with the EU Commission to set up new power plants in Germany. These very flexible power plants are necessary to support the production of renewable energy, mainly driven by wind and solar farms.

And at times, you don't have wind and solar available. You need to have an energy source, which can be ramped up very quickly.

So Germany is planning to install roughly 10 gigawatts of capacity in terms of gas-driven power plants. And that, of course, is an opportunity also for Friedrich Vorwerk Group, both in pipeline construction to run new natural gas pipelines and later on also hydrogen pipelines towards these gas-fired power stations.

But also, we have a division in our plant construction department, which can supply the necessary fuel gas systems to supply those turbines delivered by companies like Siemens, GE or others. Other latest developments since we have all heard that the hydrogen economy has been struggling a bit over the last month.

German Parliament has passed a so-called Hydrogen Acceleration Act. Main part of that is, of course, to install the so-called core grid for hydrogen transport in Germany, which could be the nucleus to develop the hydrogen industry in Germany because it will cut off costs for transport of hydrogen when the core grid is available and consumers and also producers of hydrogen can be easily connected to this grid.

But also they want to secure and make investments in hydrogen production here locally in Germany easier and more reliable for the investors. And of course, all our other businesses like natural gas transition is also still ongoing since new LNG terminals are still developed on the coast of Germany.

So the Bundesnetzagentur has just published the first draft of the new grid development plan, combining the investments in natural gas grid development and hydrogen grid development. And this plan looks out to the year 2035 with still investments in the natural gas grid of roughly EUR 3 billion.

And they also found out that probably developing the core grid for hydrogen will be more costly than predicted 2 years ago. So the revised plan for setting up the hydrogen core grid roughly sketches out investments of EUR 25 billion instead of EUR 20 billion, which was estimated before.

So also here, in the market of natural gas and hydrogen, huge potential for our company's group. And therefore, I would like to hand over to Tim for last year's financial figures.

Thanks a lot, Torben. And also a warm welcome, everyone, from my side to today's earnings call.

Overall, 2025 was a fantastic year for Friedrich Vorwerk. We achieved record-breaking results across all KPIs, successfully completed 2 acquisitions, secured numerous new major projects.

And last but not least, we launched our proprietary welding robot in collaboration with our subsidiary, 5C Tech. Therefore, I'm very pleased to now present these strong results in detail.

In terms of revenue, we've steadily increased over the course of the financial year and delivered a fantastic final quarter, which despite the seasonal nature of the business, nearly matched the strong performance of Q3. Overall, we benefited from favorable weather conditions in fiscal year 2025, not only in Q4, but especially in the first quarter when we were able to resume work after a short winter break on many projects as early as mid-January.

This point, I would also like to briefly note that the first quarter does not always benefit from good weather conditions. This year, for example, in 2026, we've seen a harsher winter again after a long time with plenty of ice and snow, particularly in Northern Germany, resulting in a question of production stoppages even in February.

However, depending on weather conditions in the next quarters that are more relevant in terms of revenue and earnings, we expect to be able to offset at least parts of this effect over the course of the year. For the full year 2025, we generated revenue of EUR 704 million, representing a remarkable 41% increase over the previous year.

This was primarily due to our continued success in recruiting new employees, which led to a 15% increase in the average number of employees as well as an increase in productive hours per employee, higher equipment utilization and, of course, some pricing effects. The electricity segment's share of revenue has contributed -- has continued to rise, now standing at 52%, making it the primary driver of growth in 2025.

While this is largely attributable to A-Nord, we are simultaneously working on several medium-sized projects in this segment, such as BorWin6, the Baltrum HDD project and several converter stations as well. 2/3 of the current order backlog is attributable to this segment.

So continued growth is expected here. At the same time, we anticipate a significant growth momentum from the Clean Hydrogen segment as larger subprojects on the hydrogen core grid are also expected to be put out to tender in the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, we expect additional growth in the adjacent opportunity segments in 2027 and the following years due to the German government special fund. The development of profitability was particularly impressive in the fourth quarter with an EBITDA margin of almost 29% and EBIT margin of almost 25%, even taking into account the dilutive effect of the cost plus fee contract in our major A-Nord project.

In addition to the favorable weather conditions already mentioned in Q4, our success in claim negotiations, which typically take place in the fourth quarter was a key factor in the exceptionally high margin, along with higher earnings from joint ventures, which increased by nearly EUR 10 million compared to the same quarter of previous year. Accordingly, we also concluded the 2025 financial year as a whole, thanks to our high-quality order backlog and a flawless project execution were successful.

We increased the EBITDA margin by 7 percentage points from 16.2% to 23.2% and more than doubled EBIT from EUR 59 million to EUR 137 million. Despite the tremendous 40% growth, we still managed to further reduce trade working capital, which along with the higher profitability, played a significant role in improving the net cash position.

As a result, we were able to increase net cash by more than EUR 100 million compared to previous year, bringing it to EUR 262 million at year's end. It should be noted, however, that the trade working capital is always at its lowest level at the end of the year and rises as the construction season progresses.

These swings between summer and winter can amount up to EUR 80 million or even EUR 90 million. With regards to capital allocation, our top priority remains investing in organic growth, specifically in the purchase of new pipe layers, drilling rigs, cranes and excavators and of course, our welding robots.

We've budgeted approximately EUR 50 million for this in 2026. Furthermore, we will certainly be open to pursuing a larger M&A deal again provided we find the right target and of course, at a reasonable price.

And finally, we would like to share the company's success with shareholders in form of a significantly higher dividend payout, consisting of EUR 0.70 base dividend and a EUR 0.40 special dividend. Let's now take a look at the development of order intake.

In addition to the conventional order intake figure, we've already introduced a new KPI last year, the total project volume acquired. This new KPI also includes a proportionate project volume from the joint ventures in which Vorwerk is involved.

And therefore, in our opinion, provides a more transparent view of the actual order situation regardless of the structure of the contract. The total project volume acquired rose by 29% to EUR 991 million in 2025, while conventional order intake at EUR 538 million is around 20% below previous year.

The main reasons for this are, on the one hand, a shift in the order structure towards more joint ventures, especially in H1 2025. And on the other hand, our already well-filled order book, combined with a limited capacity of our resources.

The order backlog, which corresponds to the conventional order intake figure declined, therefore, slightly to EUR 1 billion for the reasons stated before. We've learned from several investors that the communication regarding order intake and the contract structure is not yet clear enough.

Therefore, we are currently working on reporting an order backlog KPI that includes our share of joint venture projects as well, starting with the Q1 report. And I expect that this additional metric will provide a transparent picture for all shareholders by then at the latest.

Yes, and then based on our consistently high-quality order backlog, we expect our growth trajectory to continue in 2026 with revenues in the range of EUR 730 million to EUR 780 million. It should be noted that following 2 years of very high employee growth, we intend to slow down the expansion of our workforce somewhat in 2026 to give the organization and the administrative functions the opportunity to grow at the same pace while simultaneously focusing our recruiting efforts on attracting senior construction and project managers.

At the same time, revenue growth is somewhat slower in 2026 due to the higher proportion of joint ventures. And this change in the project mix also means that we are now forecasting absolute EBITDA instead of EBITDA margin, specifically in the range of EUR 160 million to EUR 180 million for 2026 as this number is unaffected by the order structure.

This guidance also takes into account the slightly softer Q1 2026 due to the adverse weather conditions. With that, I'd like to hand back to Torben for the business update.

Yes, Tim, thank you very much. And of course, we did pick for this meeting our most outstanding projects at the moment.

Please remember that during the year, we are operating on more than 500 smaller, midsized and also large projects. So we can, in this meeting, only give you a glance of the most outstanding projects.

And I would like to start with the natural gas business here. It's a project we've already been working on last year.

It's the so-called EWA pipeline, which is a 48-inch pipeline running from the caverns of Etzel towards compressor station of Wardenburg. This pipeline will continue in size of 40-inch towards the station of Drohne, which is more to the Rhine-Ruhr area, so in the south of the area.

We have already finished the construction on EWA last year with a pressure test and the handover to the customer. So there's already gas on this pipeline.

And the WAD pipeline is construction progress at the moment. We have already started in January with the first wells on site using our new welding robot, PX2 developed by our subsidiary, 5C Tech.

We have completed roughly 400 wells on the project this year. And again, with very, very low mistakes in the wells.

So it's -- the repair rate is definitely under 2%, which is very good in terms of fully automatic welding. Yes, changing actually over to the next natural gas pipeline project, which is, at the moment, our still largest project executed in a joint venture between the Habau Group and the Friedrich Vorwerk Group, compromises of 2 pipelines.

First, the ETL 182 with a diameter of 56-inch and the ETL 179.200, which is a 36-inch pipeline. Altogether, a mid-3-digit million euro project and both pipelines are being executed by the same joint venture combination.

As you can see in the picture below, we have already started some civil works to erect the pipe yards that has been done already in 2025, and we have already received most of the project pipes, which are purchased by our customer Gasunie. And we've actually started in the latest weeks to make preparations for the first loading procedures, so for the tunnel crossings and for the horizontal directional drilling, operations are already in place and will be executed in due course of this year.

And then maybe next slide, we are not only active in pipeline cable laying, but our plant division construction is also very busy with a new project at a gas metering station called Groß Koris. This is the main metering and supply station for the company, ONTRAS.

Here, we have a project to renew the full installation at Groß Koris with a volume of mid-2 million-digit range. And we have to deliver the full scope of engineering and also construction activities and will then commission the new plant as is foreseen at the moment in 2028.

And the system will already be constructed in a hydrogen-ready way. So later on, once the usage of natural gas in the system is over, it can be easily converted to use for clean hydrogen and meter and also regulate the hydrogen being transferred in the grid.

Next project is also a hydrogen project, which we have already been working for 1.5 years. This is the so-called HH-WIN project.

So the city of Hamburg is trying to set up a hydrogen grid in the Port of Hamburg. Key figures here is an electrolyzer plant, which is located at the former power -- electrical power station of Moorburg, where about 100 megawatts equality of hydrogen is being produced and then fed into the Habau Grid, so the HH-WIN grid.

And Friedrich Vorwerk has already executed 3 lots of this newly established hydrogen grid. And we have been recently awarded with 2 new lots to set up this hydrogen grid.

The first lot involves actually a micro tunnel of almost 200 meters where we later on install the piping DN 300 for the transfer of hydrogen. And the following lot compromises of roughly 1,500 meters of new build hydrogen pipeline.

But besides those existing projects where we've already started execution, we are, of course, still busy in our estimation department working on new estimates for new projects. Just to give you a small idea what could be coming up over the next years.

In terms of pure natural gas transition, we are at the moment, working on estimation for the so-called Spessart-Odenwald-Leitung, which is also DN 1000 pipeline, about 115 kilometers long for Terranets and also other projects coming up from Open Grid Europe, setting up the core grid for hydrogen here in Germany. And also for Gasunie, new projects like ETL 187, which is directly in conjunction with the current project ETL 182, is at the moment in tendering phase and execution and commissioning would then be in '27, '28.

But also still very attractive is the electrical market, where we are now facing the so-called second wave of large-scale electricity highways, projects like NordOstLink Section 2, SuedOstLink and SuedOstLink+ are being tendered out over probably end of this year and beginning of next year. And these projects will be commissioned in the mid-2034s -- in the mid-2030s.

So also here, a huge potential also after 2030 for our company's group. And under adjacent opportunities, we were able to already win lot of the Rheinwater transport pipeline.

This is a very large diameter pipeline, 2.2 meters in diameter that will later on transfer water from the river Rhine to flood the coal mines of RWE. And at the moment, we are working on the next lot to establish this water transfer pipeline.

And also a very new business to our company, the transport of CO2 is ongoing. So the first tender we have received is the CO2 link from Lagerdorf, where Holcim is operating a cement factory towards the port of Brunsbuttel is on the table at the moment.

Commissioning is foreseen for 2029 and tendering phase ongoing and probably construction phase will be '28 to '29. So this, of course, can only be done if we can establish to grow our headcount and our number of employees where we were very successful last year.

So today, we can look at a workforce of more than 2,200 employees. Of course, the labor market within Germany, especially due to the low capacity in building construction, we were able to employ a lot of new blue-collar workers we could integrate in our projects.

And probably during this year, we will definitely have a focus on growing our engineering staff and our overhead staff on the construction site. So challenge will be also to look for well-educated project managers and construction managers to manage all the blue-collar employees we were able to attract over the last month.

Yes, that's it from our side. We are happy to receive your questions either by phone or by chatbot, and happy to answer them.

I wanted to ask just on the Q1. Is there any more color you can give roughly in terms of what we should expect in a year-on-year comparison just to avoid any sort of nasty surprises.

The second question would be, what should we expect for headcount growth broadly in '26? And then the third question is, you mentioned sort of slowing down headcount growth, but then you also said that you would be willing to do a larger M&A or potentially do a larger M&A transaction.

So how do we kind of square those 2 kind of comments? Because I guess a larger M&A deal would also involve many new employees.

So just any color there would be great.

Well, we've seen compared to the year before, some weeks of weather-related production stoppages in February, combined with the growth of the headcount could be possible to see a rather flat Q1 in 2026 in terms of revenue growth. And as I said, which could potentially partly be offset by stronger quarters in Q2 and Q3 as the overall share of Q1 on the full year revenue isn't that relevant.

Regarding the headcount growth, when we talk about slowing down recruiting efforts, this is only in terms of organic growth, meaning directly hiring people, not including any M&A. From organic growth side, we expect to grow headcount by 5% to 8% in 2026 and any M&A would be add-on, on that.

And of course, usually, we also acquire project managers and the respective engineering and administrative functions when doing a larger M&A deal.

Well, we've always communicated that we see the margin potential in the mid- to long term at our company between 20% and 22%. However, in particularly strong years as in 2025, it's also possible to achieve an even better margin, more than 23% due to basically a flawless project execution, good weather conditions and so on.

But on the long run, we feel pretty confident with 21%, 22%.

Yes. As we already communicated last year, A-Nord project is expected to be slightly delayed with completion now anticipated in summer 2027 instead of end of 2026 due to missing permits.

We are still in discussions regarding adjustments to the bonus-related milestones. And these discussions have been ongoing for some time.

We do not yet have a definite outcome on these discussions, but we remain still confident and hope to sign their respective contract amendment in the course of the second quarter 2026. And based on this information, at least a portion of the contract liability we've already included into the books since and accrued over the project duration.

Part of that could be reversed once this amendment is signed in the second quarter. However, we did not factor in any positive impacts from that amendment as it is not signed yet.

Great. Just a follow-up on sort of -- you mentioned kind of the JV share of projects is obviously going up.

Should we expect that kind of level of the JV income you saw in '25 to be roughly the same in 2026? Or how should we think about that?

All the new JVs we entered into last year, we expect to -- that the net earnings of the JVs will even increase compared to 2025.

I have a quick question regarding to the current geopolitical situation. With the energy crisis already on the way and inflation likely to rise similarly to 2022, which had a significant impact on Friedrich Vorwerk, how are you prepared for such a scenario?

Well, first of all, we were able to have a better negotiation position in most of the contracts that are in the order backlog at the moment. So most of the contracts have included price escalation clauses.

So we can -- on the most bigger projects, we can forward the price escalations to our customers, although, of course, not to 100% because they are mainly bound to indexes which are more general, for example, the steel index or the crude oil index, which is not always 100% equivalent to the products we are actually using in our projects. But in the end, we can at least -- we are at least in a way better position this year than in 2022.

Also in 2022, most impact was from a plant construction project where we had to bring a lot of material to the project. If we look at the current large-scale projects we are operating on, it's mainly the pipeline projects where the bare pipe is supplied by our customers.

So we are mainly supplying equipment and personnel, so services, which are, at the moment, not that much affected as back in 2022.

I've got a few questions on margins. One is, are there any kind of older projects which have lower margins in them that which are running out and should be supportive to the group margin outlook once they do?

And what about the margins implied in the order intake? Can we assume that they should be at a premium to the margins you've seen in 2025?

Or should it more be in the region of the long-term potential of 20% to 22% you've been hinting at?

Well, there are currently no such legacy projects in the current order backlog, although we still have the dilutive effect from our major project A-Nord, which will run until summer 2027, where the base margin is definitely lower than the group average. Apart from that, there are no legacy projects with low margins.

And well, I mean, we have already seen such strong margins in 2025. We do not expect that we can further increase this margin profile.

And therefore, rather to suggest that you can assume the long-term potential at around 21%, 22% for the next years.

In your order intake you had in 2025, we should already assume this? Or is this still at the margins you've seen in '25?

Well, the margin profile calculated in those projects is roughly on the same level as we've seen the year before. However, on the one hand side is the calculated margin.

On the other hand side, is the actual project execution on the fields. And this has also a major impact on the earnings in the end.

At the moment, there are no plans for any share buybacks. We've decided to instead increase the dividend and to also pay out the special dividend of EUR 0.40 per share.

Adding on the answer from Torben regarding Iran, the major impact for us at the moment is, of course, the higher cost for fuel, especially diesel. To give you some color on that, the total cost of diesel last year was around EUR 12 million.

So it's not the largest position in our P&L statement. And we've, of course, already hedged some of the amounts needed already before the war in Iran.

So there will be, of course, some effect, but not a significant one.

But on the other hand, the crisis also has a positive impact on the market because at the moment, customers are really pushing the projects and trying to get more LNG receiving capacity in Germany, which then, of course, also means constructing new pipelines and constructing new plants, which is then also good on the market side for us.

Well, that's definitely a thing to consider this year as we are pretty well on track on the older mid- to long-term outlook. So maybe we can expect to see a new outlook in the second half of this year.

Yes. Thank you very much for listening.

I think especially this year, we can look at some very, very interesting projects we can execute for our customers. And please stay with us and hear the latest news from our projects in the future.

Have a good time around the world. Bye-bye.

Bye.