ARKAF - Arkema S.A. (ARKAF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript
2025-05-10 10:04:04 ET
Arkema S.A. (ARKAF)
Q1 2025 Results Conference Call
May 7, 2025 05:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Thierry Le Hénaff - Chairman and CEO
Marie-José Donsion - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Martin Roediger - Kepler Cheuvreux
Aron Ceccarelli - Berenberg
Alex Stewart - Barclays
Chetan Udeshi - JPMorgan
Emmanuel Matot - ODDO BHF
Geoff Haire - UBS
Tony Jones - Redburn Atlantic
James Hooper - Bernstein
Matthew Yates - Bank of America
Laurent Favre - BNP Paribas Exane
Tom Wrigglesworth - Morgan Stanley
Presentation
Thierry Le Hénaff
Hello. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. So welcome to Arkema's Q1 2025 Results Conference Call. Joining me today are Marie-José Donsion, our CFO; and the Investor Relations team.
As always, to support this conference call, we have posted a set of slides, which are available on our website. I will comment now the highlights of the quarter before letting Marie-José goes through the financials. And at the end of the presentation, we'll be available to answer your questions as usual.
After a challenging macro in 2024 during which Arkema delivered a good performance, the market environment in Q1 2025 remains difficult with volatility and also lack of visibility, reinforced as you well know, by the ongoing uncertainty around trade tariffs that has driven certain customers, particularly in the U.S. to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. As a result, the demand was globally slow across most of our markets in Europe and the U.S. in the first quarter, while Asia remained solid with significant growth. Note that there were some exceptions in the market with well-oriented markets like electronics, which again supported PIAM's significant development.
In this context, Arkema results held up well with EBITDA slightly down at EUR 329 million for the quarter. Our Specialty Materials, which represent 93% of our total sales and which are the core of Arkema strategy showed a good resilience with EBITDA close to last year level with a 3% decline, supported by the strong growth of high-performance polymers following on from the positive momentum of last year. On the opposite side, Intermediates, which is 7% of our sales, decreased significantly due to refrigerant gases that are expected to stay weak in the second quarter before they start to improve. Looking briefly at the performance of our 3 Specialty Materials segments. In the Adhesives segment, our ongoing work on efficiency, our strict control of operation as well as our continuous dynamic price management enabled us to mitigate the weak demand environment in Industrial Adhesives in Europe and North America, while the Construction business was rather stable....
Arkema S.A. (ARKAF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript