Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the AGRANA results for the first half of the 2026/27 conference call. I am Moritz, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Hannes Haider. Please go ahead, sir. Yeah. 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 revise on 28th 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 COO, 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. Finally, we will conclude with an outlook for the remaining financial year. The presentation will take about 20 - 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 four. Thank you, Hannes. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. 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 are also consistently working on our strategic projects. When we look at the key figures, our revenue, EUR 1.7 billion in the first six months of the business year. Operating profit amounted to EUR 57.4 million. Exceptional items significantly decreased to EUR 1.2 million. The EBIT, therefore, EUR 63.5 million, versus EUR 28 million in the previous year. Free cash flow are stable in the first half of the year, EUR -9.2 million. This is a 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, EUR 464.1 million, versus EUR 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 Mercator-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 utilization rate losses. This is, at the moment, difficult to compensate. We also signed the purchase agreement of esarom on 9th September 2026, a further step in our portfolio strategy. We think that this is a very important acquisition. Yeah, esarom is a well-established company developing flavors, beverage compounds, bases, powders, emulsions, functional blends, and stabilizers for the beverage industry. With a very long history, a 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 EUR 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, so around March or April 2027. Purchase price. The evaluation of the company was factor 9 EBITDA. This is the enterprise value, so this amounts to EUR 150 million. We are already starting, of course, let's say, with respecting the guardrails concerning antitrust with the preparation of the integration of esarom. We have a constant exchange with the actual management there. Here 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. 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 material, meaning talking about wheat, talking about corn. Also related to energy markets, 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 tons, will only lead to a crop of estimated 70,000 tons - 80,000 tons 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 60,400 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 tons - 60 tons 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 million tons - 3.3 million tons 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, black currants, and aronia berries, where we have seen tremendous price increases versus the prior year. But basically, these increase in 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 2021, 2022, 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 EUR 43 million compared to the EUR 45 million, so pretty much in line with the previous year. The majority of our investment has been done in the Food 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 yogurt in the U.S., 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, 2027, amounts around EUR 110 million -EUR 113 million. The majority will be invested into the Food and Beverage Solutions business, but this overall investment sum is slightly below our budgeted depreciation of around EUR 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, EUR 1.7 billion. A slight increase of 0.5% versus prior year, mainly resulting out of the increase in revenue in our Food and 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 that the bottom line was reached in the previous month. Now we will start to see an increase in the quotations. As I already mentioned, or Franz already mentioned also, across the whole of Europe, we expect a significantly smaller crop in sugar beets. Therefore, 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 Food and Beverage Solutions segment. This is really driven by the crop failure in Hungary. In AUSTRIA JUICE, this is a fructose concentrate business, more commodity type of business. We cannot compensate that. This cost us around EUR 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 the prior year. Here we are absolutely on the right track. In starch, we also see an improvement versus the 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 Hrušovany, which amounted to approximately EUR 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 the prior year. We are also on track with our savings out of our Horizon program. Outlook by segment. Food and Beverage Solutions revenue, moderate increase. EBIT, moderate reduction due to challenges in AUSTRIA JUICE with the apple juice concentrate production. ACS-Starch, steady development in revenue and a significant increase in the EBIT. 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 the EBIT level. Outlook for the third quarter. Last year, we had an EBIT of EUR 20.4 million. For the actual first quarter in this business year, we expect it to be very significantly above this EUR 20.4 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 at the end of September, we published our financial calendar for the next financial year, 2027/28. You can find all relevant IR dates also on our website. We will now go on with the Q&A session. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin with the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from Fatma Agnès Hamdani from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead. Yes. Hello. I have three questions on 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 esarom synergy and provide an indication of the frame time required to capture this? On your starch EBIT increase in Q2, could you [audio distortion] ethanol versus the underlying starch profit? Sorry, we have a connection problem. We cannot understand you. Could you please repeat? Do you hear me well? Yes. Now we can hear you. Yeah. Okay. The first one is, could you explain what are the main drivers of the working capital outflow in Q2? Yes. Okay. The second one is on the synergy from esarom acquisition. Could you provide an indication of the timeframe required to capture these benefits? Okay. The third one is regarding the starch EBIT increase in Q2 also. Could you explain how much of this improvement comes from ethanol margin versus underlying starch profitability? Do you. Yeah. Yes, we got you. Okay. Very challenging questions. Thank you. Okay. Let's start with your first questions, working capital. We had an increase of EUR 29.8 million. Yeah. This is coming from the ACS business, mainly. We had an increase in stocks here as well in our sugar business. On the other hand, higher receivables and also lower liabilities. In total, about EUR 30 million versus prior year. It is not significant, I would say. The major impact on the free cash flow is really coming by more than EUR 50 million of the payouts for the acquisition of Emba. Also we sold half of our factory, AGFD in Romania to Ingredion last year. These both issues, they amount to more than EUR 50 million. Okay. Second question, esarom. It is very difficult, first of all, to say how long the merger control process will take. This can be five to six 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 EUR 50 million - EUR 60 million currently. Then this in total with the esarom business, we will have a revenue of around EUR 170 million -EUR 180 million. There 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. Therefore, we need to implement also the equipment and the locations where we think that the markets are there. Our first target market is Australia. Okay. 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 our synergies more quickly. When we talk about the in-house sourcing, especially of natural flavors. We are already working on the site concept. 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 is work in progress. We will see, of course, already in the next business year after the merger control, the results of esarom. We will constantly be working on market synergies, but also there are potentially some cost synergies. Okay. I hope this answers your question. I mean, this is a difficult question because I cannot really quantify when what will happen in terms of synergies. This is a very strategic acquisition, and it will bring us forward quite quickly with our plans of expansion and growth in our Food and Beverage Solutions segment. Of course, ethanol is more or less responsible for the improvement of our results in starch. This is the main driver. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from Baptiste de Leudeville from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Thank you for taking my questions. Hello, everyone. My first question would be on sugar pricing. I think on the new campaign that started, I think it is time for negotiation in September, October, if I am not wrong, with industrial, 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 are 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. Yeah. I would say it is mixed. On one hand, we cannot always decide when we lock in the contract with our customers. When they start the 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, so you have to take the train when it is 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 cost 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 EUR 10 million to compensate for that by higher sales prices. This is all I can say. We see an increase in prices. Can we fully leverage that? Not fully, but partly. But of course, we also have an issue on the capacity side, but this is also limited because we already closed two sides. Sugar, as you can see, is getting less and less a factor, 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 impact of the AUSTRIA JUICE campaign, I think in Hungary, you said EUR 10 million. Yes. My question is more on the time length of this impact. Will it wait on profitability for the rest of the fiscal year, also maybe for FY 2027/28? Can you tell me, please? Thank you. Yeah. So before performance in the juice business, it's a campaign business in the fruit juice concentrate. It's the same cycle as in sugar. We start harvesting and processing in September around, and then we have a marketing year, then the contracts last till the new harvest begins in September 2027. So we expect, of course, a not-so-good performance in the fruit juice concentrate business, for the next 10, 11 months. Yeah. Thank you very much. So there are no further questions by voice at this time, but some questions from Ms. Urbankova from Erste Group reached us by written form. The first question is: what are the major factors behind the recently raised full year 2026/27 EBIT guidance? Yeah. Can I answer right now? Yes, please go ahead. Or, okay, two more questions, please. Okay, then the second question is: do you expect that segments ACS-Sugar will switch to black numbers in full year 2026/27? And the third question is: what was the major reason behind the significant improvement of the financial results in Q2 2026/27? Okay. 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 ACS. As we already mentioned, we see in sugar that our restructuring measures, 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. We think that we are able to carry this forward, and also see this positive impact for the full business year. Do we expect the segment ACS-Sugar will switch to black numbers? Look, I already mentioned, so I think in the first half of the year we have approximately EUR -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 EUR 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, so we cannot fully compensate that. So we will see on the operative level, potentially in 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 EUR 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. In total, it can be a close race. Third question, significant improvement of the financial results. This was driven by three main factors. 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. 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. The main factor is the foreign exchange results here. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star and one at this time. It looks there are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Hannes Haider for any closing remarks. 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. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.