Thank you. Good afternoon, and a very warm welcome to our today's conference calls.

We would like to give you an overview about the business development of the first 3 months in 2026 and a short overview on the current sentiment today. Andreas Klein, our CEO, and Thomas Dippold, our CFO, will lead the presentations and will answer your questions.

Let's start, I hand over to Thomas Dippold for the financials.

Hello everybody, this is Thomas. It's my pleasure, my privilege to guide you through the results for the first quarter and as a summary we can clearly state that our top line as we already anticipated and I think as everybody of you joining this call already know is influenced to a large extent by discontinued unprofitable activities which we closed down in the course of the year 2024 and therefore we cannot repeat this unprofitable sales in this year.

We also suffer in some sales drops in Graphite Solutions and also Process Tech and the three effects all in all stand for, which you can see on this slide here on slide number 3, they stand for a reduction of our group sales of €50 million or 21.3% coming from €234 million in the first quarter last year to €184 million this year. As I said, €28 million clearly can be attributed to the discontinuation of the carbon fiber activities in Lavradio and Moses Lake which we closed roughly at half year 2025.

In Graphite Solutions we still see weak demand from our silicon carbide customers, their inventory levels are still very high. However, what we're trying to do there is on an individual customer basis we try to renegotiate with them in a partnership way some specific adjustment of the CDP contracts and one of them is already in Q1, but I come to that when we talk about Graphite Solutions in particular.

For the first time since 4 years, the continuous growth, at least in profitability and a roughly stable sales platform, also Process Tech suffered a severe downturn in the market. We have anticipated that also in a way, we had always as you remember that in the second half of last year already a declining book-to-bill ratio and this now kicks in and therefore also our sales in Q1 for Process Tech suffer.

These three factors influence our top line. However, we managed to keep the EBITDA pre on a group level in I think just a moderate decline.

Our EBITDA drops by €4 million coming from €33.5 million in the first quarter 2025 and in the first 3 months of this year we reached €29.6 million, it's a decline by 11.6%, which is less than the decline in our top line. Where does it come from?

We have lower contributions of course from the high-margin silicon carbide business in Graphite Solutions, we have lower contributions from Process Technology where in the past, you remember that, we also saw margins of about 25% and beyond, but we can compensate that with continuous cost saving and our ambition to keep the cost intact. Our EBITDA pre margin increased to I think a very healthy 16% for a company which is so capital-intensive like us and this is exactly as we predicted Q1 and which is exactly in line with our guidance.

We come to that later in the next chapter. Now on slide number 5 coming to the individual business units.

Graphite Solutions, as I already just pointed out, suffers a 8.8% decline in the top line, which stands for €10 million coming from €116 million last year to now €106. This is influenced in the top line, in sales, in EBITDA and also in cash by one settlement with one of our CDP silicon carbide customers where we anticipate future sales in the course of the year and make it already a payment right now, we kind of anticipate future sales, but also have a kind of a breakup fee in that where we adjust the conditions of the contract.

There's maybe more to come, but Andreas will talk about that later in the chapter when we talk about guidance and outlook and strategy. As I said, we are still suffering from a sluggish demand in silicon carbide customers.

The other markets that we see there are also burdened by some difficult macroeconomic environments. That our GDP is hardly growing, you know how the overall economic situation in Europe in particular, but also worldwide in general looks like and therefore there's no real spark that our sales go into an opposite direction if we leave out the small, medium reactors, but they're also part of the strategy and Andreas will touch the latest status on that in his chapter.

EBITDA-wise, I think we also managed it quite well that our EBITDA dropped only from €21.6 million last year in the first 3 months to first quarter 2026 €18.4 million this year, which is minus 14.8% or minus €3 million. The negative impact comes from a decline in the high-margin silicon carbide products which hit then the bottom line overproportionately.

We try to do our best in order to keep our cost in the right way and I think if you see the decline in the margin only from 18.5% last year to 17.3%, I think this is a remarkable achievement when you see that your super super-high-margin business goes down in a way as it does in Graphite Solutions. Coming to Process Tech, and as I said, for the first time since many years we have to report a major decline in sales and also EBITDA for this business unit.

Where does it come from? We see a postponement and a lot of uncertainty in the meantime in the chemical industry, even a lot of maintenance projects and also some overhauls and parts and service business is really declining significantly for us, and other investment projects where somebody builds up a new synthesis plant or heat exchanger really came to a standstill and everybody's waiting that the bottleneck gets solved and we have a little bit more visibility and clarity whether or not these investments are really viable.

Our order intake also in the first 3 months stays below our sales, this is also for the next months we don't expect a real recovery. When you look at our overall performance in the first 3 months of the year, then we're coming down from €36.5 million to 25.5, which is a 30 million decline, 30% decline, sorry for that, and a minus €11 million in our top line.

This is really remarkable how hard it hit us in Q1 and this of course also hits our bottom line. As this is a project business and we only are left with some fixed costs, our profitability declines by 62% coming from €11 million to now €4 million.

The absolute impact with minus 7 is not that much given the impact on the group, but relatively of course for Process Tech this is a big decline that we're trying to fight against in the upcoming months. The margin is now 16.1%, which is not bad at all given the historic averages that we've seen of course in the past.

In the last 2, 3 years, we had a very special economic situation for us where we had margins above 25% and beyond, but we always said that 18 is a very good margin and I think we came close to that and maybe we can recover a little bit in the course of the year. Now for the first time I can introduce our business unit Fiber Composites.

As you probably can remember, we merged our remaining carbon fiber activities with the Composite Solutions business unit starting from January 1st, with the start of the new year 2026, we only have Fiber Composites. In the end, you can just add those two business units together.

There's hardly inter-business unit consolidation effect. In the end, you just can add the two together.

This is more or less the right figure. There we see also the impact from the discontinued business which I started my presentation with.

We're coming from €76.6 million first 3 months last year now to €47.7 million. This is a decline by €29 million.

I said €28 million is the decline of the discontinued businesses of the carbon fiber and more or less this is now the new normal, that they roughly have 50 million in a normalized and like-for-like activity. This is a decline by 37.7 million, but as I said, the big chunk of it comes from the discontinuation of the unprofitable businesses of carbon fiber.

The profitability, however, increased significantly. There are many factors in that.

On the one hand side, we are only left with the profitable remains of the carbon fiber business. We have a steady and healthy Composite Solutions business which also pays in for that and also our BSCCB JV, which is consolidated at equity, contributed €4 million to that.

If you exclude the €4 million, then our new business unit has a operative result of €5 million and this is roughly a 10% operative margin. If you include BSCCB, then it's 18.9.

I think it's a super healthy recovery that we've seen and I think it was a very stringent and consequent restructuring that we did last year, and I think the result of that can be seen now where we are only left with profitable businesses there. Then maybe a quick look on the bottom line of the P&L, the cash flow and maybe also some balance sheet figures.

Our net result turned positive. Last year in the first 3 months of the year, we were left with minus €6 million, which was thanks to the fact that we had €16.6 million restructuring and one-off costs in the first quarter.

There are also some purchase price allocation depreciation there, when you look at in our quarterly report you see 17.7 if I'm not mistaken. Now we see €5.9 million, it's a big turnaround by €12 million from minus 6 to plus 6.

I think this is the other strong message: we only are left with €1.4 million restructuring and one-off costs in Q1. This is exactly what we told you 3 weeks ago when we presented our full-year figures for 2025.

The restructuring is over to a large, large, large extent. We only have some couple of smaller remains which we digest in the course of the year, but when you see that the first quarter is only affected by €1.4 million, I think this clearly underlines what we said 3 weeks ago.

Our free cash flow is again positive and increasing from 5.1 to €6.4 million like-for-like despite the fact that last year we also had some cash-wise restructuring cost, but we expect the free cash flow to be on the level of last year also for your full-year figure, we are on a good way to achieve that. Last but not least, thanks to the good free cash flow, our net financial debt declines a little bit again, we have a very healthy leverage ratio of 0.7.

Our equity ratio is getting closer to 40% again. We are at 39.5 and the ROCE is roughly 10%, I think these are very, very, yeah, steady and solid figures that we can report there.

For the outlook and the guidance, I hand over to Andreas, who will lead through that chapter.

Thank you very much, Thomas, and also a warm welcome from my side. The guidance just a couple of weeks ago in the next slide.

You even know that slide, the €720 to €770 million sales level we guided leading to an EBITDA pre of €110 to €130 million. However, I would like to highlight two topics in the assumptions part of that slide because they have been particularly reconfirmed in the last couple of weeks.

It's number 1, the assumption of an overall weak economic development and uncertain geopolitical environment. Of course, we all know that this has been underlined by the ongoing Middle East conflict, the Strait of Hormuz developments, and also recently the further tariff activities.

Overall all paying into ongoing uncertainty and of course for many of our industries, for many of our customers, that's a negative development because it doesn't enable our customers to take the decisions needed. The second thing I would like to highlight is that we do not foresee a recovery in the semiconductor and automotive sector for 2026 yet.

This has been confirmed by the development in Q1 and further customer discussions and of course also the uncertainty and the tariff developments paying into the automotive sector doesn't help the downstream demand for these applications. Digging a little bit deeper, in the next slide, I would like to give you some more details on the current sentiment and how we see it.

As already mentioned, we see ongoing high uncertainty especially in automotive and chemicals impacting basically all our three business units, as already commented for the Q1 performance by Thomas. We see availability and prices of raw materials and energy negatively impacting key markets, so that's adding to the uncertainty and the weak economic development we were already seeing.

Of course that's a lot driven by the developments in the Middle East. However, we are quite relaxed on the cost side in the short term because a rather nice hedging rate for the year 2026 and also constructive discussions with customers to forward these cost impacts in the chain should be able to limit the effects from the cost side as much as possible.

In the area of defense, that's the third point commenting on the current sentiment, we see the budgets feeding slowly through the chains. Especially in the Western Government hemisphere, all these big funds are arriving at the primes in the defense industry, they're feeding through the tier 1 and tier 2 steps, and this is what we need to create the certainty and the commitments for us to finally ramp up that business in the area of defense and generate contribution from that business as anticipated in our Strategy 2030 plan.

What do we focus on at the moment in light of these developments? We mentioned one example already from the semiconductor side that impacted already Q1.

We are in negotiations with our silicon carbide customers, with the CDP customers, to, yeah, bridge the situation we are currently in together with still high inventories in the chain, although we see them continuously decreasing, and bridging from that situation in a sustainable, long-term cooperation and the growth future we foresee for silicon carbide as an important demand driver for SGL. The second thing is we are expanding project development in the defense sector, a lot of network, cooperation activity in the highlighted applications fields in defense from our strategy work, and these discussions, that networking, that intensification leads now to, yeah, piloting steps and a step-by-step ramp-up of that business, hopefully having the potential to impact 2027.

As for this year, we didn't take into account any more significant contributions from defense yet. Last but not least, and this is for sure the most present activity with a rather short-term impact, you know that from the publication, from the announcement we did in January, we are working intensely on ramping up the full value chain—it's quite a long value chain—in our network for the X-energy projects and the orders we had received.

We are operationally well on track in that regard, and this is why we can also here reconfirm the impact of the $100 million over the next 3 years from these orders. The three focus areas to the right side of this slide, they are all paying into SGL Growth 2030.

We can clearly confirm we are intensifying the implementation activities for the long-term strategy, and we consider ourselves to be well on track to leverage the potential as soon that is possible in the respective markets. Many thanks for your interest, and we are looking forward to your questions now.

At the moment, I don't see any questions. It seems that our press release and quarterly statement are very clear in our messages.

I think we give you an additional minute or one, two to write your questions. Then I think it's everything really clear.

Maybe you have upcoming question in the next hours or days. Give me a call that we can answer your information needs.

Thanks a lot for your time. I know it's a busy day today of announcement of quarterly statements of other companies.

Thanks a lot for your participation, and have a nice afternoon. Goodbye.