LNXSY - LANXESS Aktiengesellschaft (LNXSF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-05-12 05:21:08 ET

LANXESS Aktiengesellschaft (LNXSF)

Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call

May 8, 2024 7:00 am ET

Corporate Participants

Andre Simon - Head of Investor Relations

Matthias Zachert - Chief Executive Officer

Oliver Stratmann - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Jonathan Chung - Morgan Stanley

Sam Perry - UBS

Matthew Yates - Bank of America

Martin Roediger - Kepler Cheuvreux

Jaideep Pandya - On Field Research

Georgina Fraser - Goldman Sachs

Andreas Heine - Stifel

Rikin Patel - BNP Exane

Tristan Lamotte - Deutsche Bank

Sebastian Satz - Citi

Konstantin Wiechert - Baader Helvea

Presentation

Operator

Hello, and welcome to the LANXESS Q1 2024 Results Investor Relations Call. Throughout the call all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and afterwards there will be a question-and-answer session. Please note that this call is being recorded.

Today, I'm pleased to present Andre Simon, Head of Investor Relations. Please begin your meeting.

Andre Simon

Yes. Thank you very much, Sara, and a warm welcome to everybody to our Q1 '24 conference call from my end as well.

As always, we begin by asking you to take notice of our Safe Harbor statement. And with me today is our CEO, Matthias Zachert and our CFO, Oliver Stratmann. Matthias will start with a short presentation, and then we will open the floor for your questions.

With that, I'm happy to take over to Matthias. Please go ahead.

Matthias Zachert

Thank you, Andre, and welcome, everybody, on this conference call for Q1 '24.

I start with -- slides for the presentation has been dispatched. On Slide 4, we show that as far as year-on-year performance is concerned, we clearly acknowledge a very tough comparison. Q1 '23 was our last somewhat okay quarter, and it was the best quarter in '23. So the comparable base is definitely here, the toughest for the running year. And this is the case for sales, but also for profitability. So if we make the year-on-year comparison, no doubt, a tough quarter.

We would like to shed light, however, on what we see in the markets. And here in Q1 versus Q4, but as a matter of fact, also versus Q3 and Q2 last year, we see in many of our industries that volumes are picking up, exception, clearly, agro. Agro started destocking later than other industries, and this accelerated in the second half last year, turned out to be tough in Q4 last year, but now quite severe in Q1 and still severe in Q2. And from the indications we are getting from our customers, improving in the second half.

So for the other industries, we clearly see also in Europe that destocking has come to an end. Customers are starting with regular quarterly orders, like they used to do in the past, at lower levels though, but they start to confirm orderly commitments. This is a change to '23 when all customers basically just wanted to destock....

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