Oesterreichische Post Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's Earnings Call of Austrian Post Q1 2026 Results. I am your operator for today. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] We are looking forward to the presentation.

And with having said this, I hand over to the Head of Investor Relations, Harald Hagenauer.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this conference call of Austrian Post. Today, we would like to discuss our Q1 results. Here with me in the room is Walter Oblin, our CEO; and also our CFO, Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner. I would like to hand over to Walter. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our Q1 results.

Let me start right away on Page 2. I think the summary is the environment continues to be quite challenging both on a macroeconomic level as well as for the postal industry Europe-wide and also in Austria. The market environment, on the one hand, provides some positive perspective as the longest recession after the Second World War is forecasted to be over. At the same time, geopolitical uncertainties and the Middle East conflict weighs on the macroeconomy and tariff measures and different regulatory proposals both on the EU level as well as on a national level have the potential to disturb e-commerce markets.

The 2 mega trends dominating our industry for the last years are -- continue to be present and continue to dominate our industry. Number one, digitization of communication with declining letter mail volumes and direct mail as a result. And second, e-commerce continues to fuel growth in parcels, but this -- all this in a quite competitive and volatile environment.

Page 3 gives a summary of the key developments and of the key topics in Q1. In Austria, an accelerated decline of letter mail for this single quarter of around 9%. We do not expect this figure for the full year, but we have seen a rise in letter mail decline over the last roughly 18 months. Second, there is a good parcel growth in a large part of our portfolio, both in Austria as well as in CEE, 10% and 9%, respectively, a little bit less in Turkiye, but also here on the positive side, we are in growth mode again despite a regulatory burden given that the threshold for imports, for customs, for Chinese Asian parcels has been taken away, and there is a substantial reduced inflow of Chinese parcels into Turkiye. So in this context, the 2%, I think, are quite okay.

On the revenue side, again, here, the positive news, revenues are up by 0.9%. This despite what I said happened in Turkiye and this despite the quarter where we did not have any revenue from our telecommunications business, neither from the old cooperation which ended in December 2025 nor from our new telecom offering, which only started on April 1. On the earnings side, the quarter was, as expected, weaker than last year. EBIT down EUR 7.7 million -- sorry, EBITDA down EUR 7.7 million at EUR 93.8 million and EBIT down EUR 11.6 million, basically 3 main drivers. One is the silent period in telecommunications. Second, a challenging market environment, in particular, competitive environment in Eastern Europe. And third, the already mentioned absence of Asian volumes in Turkiye.

Three highlights to mention on the positive side. One is the closing and initial integration of euShipments, an e-commerce fulfillment company based in Bulgaria with a presence across Eastern and Southeastern Europe, including also in selected Western European markets. We feel very positive about this company. Second, a very good quarter of bank99 with an -- with a profit of more than EUR 2.5 million in the first quarter. And third, the successful start of YELLLOW. YELLLOW is our telecommunications brand that we launched on April 1 with an MVNO offering, which has been well accepted in the first month.

Page 4 gives you the usual overview of Austrian Post. One thing to remind you that as of this quarter, we are switching to a somewhat modified segment reporting. We have decided, given that the bank99 now has reached a level of maturity, that we want to present it as a stand-alone segment. Accordingly, we have taken the retail, the Austrian retail segment or retail element of the segment and included it in the mail segment, which we now have named Mail, Retail & Services. In the middle, E-Commerce & Logistics is mostly only a renaming. We think that E-Commerce & Logistics better reflect what we are doing here, given that we are a partner for e-commerce companies on the logistics side.

Page 5 summarizes the strategy we decided and communicated a year ago. Our vision is to be a leading logistics and services group, reaching more than 150 million people in Austria, Eastern Europe, Turkiye and beyond. Three core elements. One, post and beyond in Austria. We want to be a strong post in Austria, but beyond that, offer key services for consumers, including financial services, telecommunication services and potentially more in the future, all integrated into one consistent ecosystem. Second, international e-commerce. Our aspiration is to be one of the even -- or maybe even the leading e-commerce partner in Austria, Eastern Europe, Turkiye and beyond for e-commerce retailers, be they small, be they large. And third element, one group, operationally excellent. This means that we want to stronger harmonize across the group, stronger integrate, stronger exploit efficiencies with the aspiration to be operationally excellent in whatever we do and to be a leader in the application of modern technologies.

Let me now go through the core elements of the strategy, starting with the Austrian business and here, again, starting with the incumbent mail business. Letter volumes continue to decline now for the 17th or so year. This first quarter at a rate of 9%. In total, we've lost around 60%. Similar development on the direct mail side with a relatively stable development on unaddressed mail, but a stronger decline on addressed mail. Revenues overall still declining substantially less than volumes. Mail remains a large and profitable cash-generating business with revenues of beyond EUR 1 billion last year.

Also, our tariffs shown on Page 7 remain moderate if compared across Europe with other countries. So I think there's also some leeway still, some headroom for further price increases without pricing ourselves out of the market. We have increased prices on the standard product May last year, on other products, so registered mail, international mail, direct mail effective January 1 this year. And so I would still expect some further price increases on the standard product or on the core letter product still this year in the second half. So much on mail.

Moving to our bank. bank99 is developing quite well. It's well accepted in the market, constantly receives positive feedback from different customer surveys, second year in a row, best customer service among retail banks in Austria, which I think is remarkable given that the bank is only 6 years old and has a quite small marketing budget compared to the main retail networks such as the Sparkassen sector or the Raiffeisen sector, 300,000 consumers, EUR 4.2 billion balance sheet. Last year, breakeven with an income of -- with a net income of EUR 1.5 million. A very good start into the first quarter with an EBIT of EUR 2.6 million. This includes a smaller one-off, but still we are on a good record of expanding our profit also for the full year. We will expand our asset offering, so our offering of stocks and ETFs, so the ability to trade, to buy and sell single stocks as well as ETFs in the coming months. We are working also on a focused SME offering to be launched in the second half of the year, and we are constantly working on automation and cost efficiency.

Our self-service network is being expanded month by month. We are soon reaching the -- or surpassing the threshold of 3,000 postal access points. With that, we have increased the number of postal access points by more than 60% over 2.5 years. And this self-service network is well accepted by consumers. Last year, 35 million transactions, I think, is a number that speaks for itself.

Page 10. Our mobile offering has been launched in time, in budget on April 1. The idea is similar to the bank. We do have a strong postal ecosystem consisting of a brand, of a retail network, of digital channels and offering customer frequency that we can use to cross-sell and to add further services. This is the plan for YELLLOW, the brand we launched on April 1. YELLLOW is an MVNO offering, which is running basically on the network of A1, the Austrian telecom incumbent. We offer a very focused, transparent, simple offering consisting of mobile phone rates, hardware, internet rates and a few additional packages.

The positioning is to offer a quality network at quite affordable rates, combined with consulting and service close to customers in our retail network, which is the densest retail network in Austria in the telecommunications sector with 340 postal branches and 1,300 postal partners. This has -- this offering has been received well on the market. We are fully on plan with customer acquisition rates over the first month. And this despite a very price-aggressive competition given that there is a battle between 2 other mobile companies going on in Austria. But our positioning here with the retail network is the main sales channel has proven very effective in this context.

Moving to Page 11 to our E-Commerce & Logistics business. We have expanded our presence, now operate in more than -- yes, in 15 countries with last-mile networks in most of these countries and with now the acquisition of euShipments, also a logistics and e-commerce fulfillment offering for cross-border e-commerce in Eastern Europe. The idea is also to expand this to Austria and Turkiye and also selected Western European markets step-by-step in a CapEx-light business model.

Let me start going through the geographies, starting with Austria on Page 12. Again, 10% growth in Austria, quite strong momentum. We are gaining market share and gaining new customers on an already strong level -- against an already strong level in 2025, including customers such as Vinted, which is the European category leader in the secondhand C2C business, quite strongly growing business segment, also revenue-wise with 9.5%, a good revenue growth.

Moving to Eastern Europe. Here, light and shadow, good volume development with plus 9%. EBIT-wise, we are not satisfied. The competition is quite price aggressive, in particular from the side of new entrants on the parcel locker side. But we see that in some markets this competition is not sustainable, such as in Hungary, where one competitor has announced to exit and where we have engaged in a transaction, which is still not closed yet as we are still collecting the necessary approvals. So overall, a good revenue development in Eastern Europe, but not satisfying profitability in the first quarter, and we are addressing both operational as well as strategic levers to get to a profitable -- get back to a profitable growth path.

Moving to Turkiye on Page 14. Here, as I said, a regulatory discontinuity with very restricted import rules for parcels from Asia, which have led to a drop of volumes of around 5%. Still, the company was able to achieve a net growth of 2% and revenue-wise, including also price increases and inflation, plus 20%. Of course, there is inflation in these numbers. So overall, again, challenging quarter in Turkiye, but we are looking more confidently in the next quarters.

Page 15, a short glance on euShipments.com. Company is based and founded in Bulgaria. Bulgaria will -- is targeting revenues of about EUR 55 million for the full year. We have fully consolidated the company as of March 1, see good profits, good growth, good customer satisfaction, are trying to integrate this where reasonable and where necessary with Austrian Post Group, are trying to use the platform of Austrian Post in other markets to also support geographic expansion and think that this e-commerce, logistics offering will help us growing profitably in Eastern Europe, but also in Austria and in Turkiye. So much as an overview on the most important developments in our strategy 8 weeks after we communicated the full year results. And I'm now handing over to Barbara who will give you more details on our financials.

Thank you, Walter. Also welcome from my side. In line with our guidance we gave with full year results, Q1, we expected weaker, and yes, it's weaker. But we are showing some growth on the revenue side, about 1%. As Walter just mentioned, with March, we are also including the revenues of euShipments, but we did another fully consolidation of Agile Actors. It's our IT company in Greece. I will come later on because this has also some impact on our balance sheet.

EBITDA and EBIT are in line with our expectations, but of course, they are down by EUR 8 million on the EBITDA side compared to Q1 2025 and also down by EUR 12 million compared on the EBIT side. We are still showing a stable balance sheet with low debt. Financial debt to EBITDA is showing up at 0.3x. And the logistics equity ratio is 27%. I will also do some comments on this later on when we are going through the balance sheet. We were able to produce a strong operating cash flow. Also there, I will spend some words later on.

Walter already mentioned the change in our segment reporting. We already did, I think, a first intro on this with the Q4 results. So we have now a clear result reporting on the bank99. And I think this also helps you to go on with your estimates in a better way.

If we are coming to Page 18, Walter already mentioned the situation on the market, the tough situation on the digitalization side on the mail business. And we also saw that the pricing measures could not offset the volume declines there. We also lost revenues on the telco side due to the silent period. This we will be able to recover within the coming quarters. On the E-Commerce & Logistics side, we really had a great Q1 in Austria with a strong growth of nearly 10%. In Turkiye, we just saw the volume development. But due to the inflation and FX, in total, we see minus 2.7% on the revenue side in euros. CEE, there we had a very weak Q1 in 2025. And we see that there the revenues are coming back and we see there good growth on the parcel side, on the volume side and also on the revenue side. Bank, also Walter already commented, why are the revenues lower? It's due to the lower interest rate level we saw in Q1 2026.

Coming now to the earnings, we already went through. So what do I want to mention there? We are lacking the telecommunication income, so we saw the revenues of about EUR 7 million we lost, and it's falling through, I would say. On the other hand, on the e-commerce side, we have had a good profitability in Austria on the parcel side in Turkiye and also in CEE. There's room for improvement as competition is -- was really intensive there. Bank, EUR 2.6 million of EBIT. That's a really good improvement compared to last year, but there is also onetime positive effect of about EUR 0.8 million. So please do not take EUR 2.6 million times 4 for the full year EBIT of the bank, it will be a little bit lower. But the bank is really doing well. Coming to corporate/consolidation. So there, we see a minus of EUR 5.7 million. It shows that the cost savings programs we are running at the overhead side and the focus there.

Going now into the detailed profit and loss account. I only want to have a short discussion on the financial result. There we have the negative impact out of the valuation of the put option for Aras Kargo. We had there a valuation effect of minus EUR 8.4 million in the financial result 2026. In 2025, in the first quarter, we ended up with plus EUR 4.4 million. So you're seeing there we have a quite high swing. This is what we cannot really steer. It's really depending on inflation and FX in Turkiye. Also, the tax rate is suffering due to this because this valuation effect, we're not able to take the tax deductible.

Going now into more details on the segment side, Mail, Retail & Services. There you see the development of the different segments within this segment. And what I want to address is that we saw that on the direct mail and media post, the mail decline in the addressed segment, and in the unaddressed segment, the business was better. The EBIT of this segment suffered due to the loss of telecommunication income where we are trying hard to come back to levels of before.

On the E-Commerce & Logistics division side, I think everything was said. Profitability is suffering out of Turkiye and CEE and good profitability on the Austrian side. There, we are also showing in group logistics solutions, the result of euShipments, which amounts for about EUR 5 million on the revenue side and about EUR 0.8 million on the EBIT side. Division Bank, I think everything said.

Then coming to the balance sheet. You can see a decrease on the equity side compared to end of 2025. It's coming out of the put options we got out of the acquisition of euShipments. So it's the liability we booked against equity and for Agile Actors and euShipments. So for both together, it amounts for about EUR 75 million. And on the other hand, I think the balance sheet is quite stable. Financial debt is at EUR 124.2 million and equity ratio still amounts for 27% for the logistic part.

Coming now to operating free cash flow. Our cash flow from operating activities amounted for about EUR 79 million. We did some investments. It's a little bit more than EUR 20 million. The most -- the biggest spend we did in the first quarter of 2026 was the acquisition of euShipments, and we had a payout of EUR 59.1 million. So free cash flow before money market investments was EUR 8.7 million.

So where did we spend our money in the first quarter? Mainly in Austria for our expansion of the logistics center in Salzburg-Wals, also for some e-vehicles and, on the other hand, also for our out-of-home business internationally. Now I would like to give back to Walter for the outlook for 2026.

Thank you, Barbara. Let me close with the outlook for the full year. I think as a summary, a stable outlook, a rather confident outlook that assumes that we can catch up most of what we are behind the prior year in Q1 over the next 3 quarters. In terms of market environment, of course, there is some uncertainty, but the core trends of the declining mail volume and increasing -- still increasing e-commerce markets, the market environment remains pretty stable. On the parcels side, we have some uncertainty from different levies on parcels, mostly from non-EU countries, which are still not 100% clearly defined. So we will have to see how this affects parcel volumes.

On the revenue side, for the overall group, we expect a slight revenue increase similar to what we've seen in Q1, potentially a little bit above that. This will be the net of decline in mail in the mid-single-digit range, so a higher volume decline offset by certain price effects, a revenue growth on the e-commerce side in the upper single-digit range and a slightly growing income also on the bank side. So overall, we expect growth for the full year. We continue to invest, as Barbara said, with a CapEx guidance of EUR 140 million to EUR 160 million with our Salzburg Logistics Centre as the main big project included here and the expansion of our electric fleet as the other big investment program -- part of the investment program.

And on the earnings level, the target is to achieve earnings that are in line with the last years, with the bandwidth of the last years, of course, depending on the macroeconomic environment and on the Turkish lira-euro exchange rate. But overall, as I said, we do expect to catch up some of the decline that we've seen in EBIT versus last year over the next 3 quarters. So with that said, I would like to thank you for your attention, and we are now happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And there is Ingo Schmidt.

This is Ingo Schmidt from Montega. First of all, congratulations on the solid set of operational results in Q1. My first question is about Aras Kargo. You know that the drop in Asian import volumes is a temporary effect due to the new customs rules. Based on what you see now, when do you expect these volumes to recover? Are you already seeing a stabilization in the second quarter? And secondly, on CEE and SEE, you mentioned continued margin pressure in the region. Could you maybe explain a bit more how euShipments can help you over time? Should we mainly think about higher parcel volumes? Or can services like fulfillment also help to support margins going forward?

Well, thank you, Ingo, for your questions. On Aras Kargo, as you said, there has been this discontinuity on the customs side. We do expect Chinese volumes to find other ways into Turkiye and part of the volume to be over time absorbed maybe by Turkish e-commerce platforms, which are in, to some extent, anyway in the hands of large Chinese e-commerce groups. Overall, we are optimistic that both revenue-wise as well as EBIT-wise that the next 3 quarters will be better than the first quarter. There is a variety of initiatives underway, in particular, focusing on SMEs, which where we see potential for Aras Kargo. And what we've seen in April confirms that we seem to be on a good way.

On CEE, I think there are also a number of initiatives ongoing. You are aware that there is one strategic project, which is the acquisition of an exiting competitor in Hungary, which should help if this acquisition goes through. There are a number of initiatives on the operations side, but also initiatives which go in the direction of a stronger integration across the group, exploiting synergies between companies that in the past have more acted on a stand-alone basis where we're now trying to stronger integrate across the group, exploiting synergies on the cost side, but also presenting the group stronger as a region to large international customers. And again, here, the volume development in the first 3 months makes us optimistic that volume-wise, we are on the right way.

Maybe I can answer this question. So what we are focusing together with euShipments to roll out the concept of euShipments in countries where we are already. So this means going to Turkiye and other countries where we want to do fulfillment for the customers. But what we want to avoid is only shifting parcels to Austrian Post and subsidiaries because then this would put the business model of euShipments at risk. So this is not -- of course, it will help our entities with some volumes, but it's not the focus to ship every parcel coming from euShipments with our entities. So it's more the rollout of the fulfillment business and also getting new customers in these countries.

We move on to the next participant [ Ms. Helene Yveline ].

This is Marco Limite from Barclays. I've got a few questions on your E-Commerce & Logistics print in Q1. So clearly, Austria volumes quite strong. CEE volumes also not bad and Turkish volumes up 2%, revenues in euro a bit down year-over-year. But overall, top line was good. EBIT was down year-over-year. So first question is -- I mean, how the EBIT in Austria, so Parcel Austria only, developed on a year-over-year basis on the back of 10% volume growth? Did we see growth in Austria in terms of EBIT? Would be the first question.

And then the second question is on your CEE business because you're growing volumes 9%, but revenue a bit less. But overall, you are flagging competitive pressures affecting on margins. So as your 2030 strategy is about growing more in CEE, the question to you is, I mean, does that make sense strategically? Do you think that you can grow volumes but also EBIT? And yes, if you could just explain why you are seeing these margin pressures at the moment? And how you think you can, let's say, solve the problem and grow, not only top line, but also EBIT in the future if these are such challenging markets?

And then third question on your wage increase from the 1st of July, whether you have had negotiations, whether you expect any challenge, let's say, from the current situation, Iran increasing fuel price and therefore possible inflation going up. And therefore, are unions already asking for higher wage inflation than what you were expecting maybe a few months ago?

Marco, thanks a lot for your comprehensive questions, which also allow me to address a few topics that we did not cover in our presentation. I think very important ones. So let me start from the back, Iran crisis. I think the good news is that, directly, there is very little impact on our business. So we are not present in any way in the region where there were military actions, so neither Iran nor UAE nor Saudi Arabia, point one. Point two, on energy costs, we are relatively relaxed given that in Austria, we have electrified already 60% of our fleet, point one. Point two, we are on HVO, so not on oil-based diesel but on vegetable. So I think you're aware what HVO is. So there is also a price fix at least for the year 2026. So we are relatively relaxed on energy costs. And for the remaining exposure to diesel, we are well hedged given that there are also price -- so-called diesel floaters in our pricing. Yes. So energy cost is not an issue. Of course, the secondary effects of the Iran war on the global economy will also -- at some point in time, and nobody knows to what extent this will hit Europe and Austria. But I think the good news is so far direct effects almost none.

Third question, so I'm moving back up, was on the collective wage negotiations. We closed these negotiations last week or the week before last week. So the outcome was a 3% increase as of mid-September. So this is, on the one hand, a little bit below inflation. So the relevant inflation was roughly 3.4%, so we closed at 3.0%. And second, it will not start July 1, where -- which is the typical effective date for our wage negotiations, but only on September 15, so 2.5 months of saved, yes, wage increases, which should also help to relieve -- yes, which would help on the cost increase in the second quarter. So overall, I would say satisfying results. Of course, such a wage negotiation is a difficult one in tough times, but we feel quite good about the outcome. And so we do not expect any further wage increases for the next 12 months.

Then your second question was on Eastern Europe. So to summarize, where should the improvement come from? On the one hand, as mentioned, we are strategically trying to gain market share with also inorganic moves such as in Hungary, and we're looking at other options. Second, and in the end, we are in an economies of scale business where market share counts. And in some of the countries, we still -- we need to benefit. We need more market share and would benefit from further market share. So we're looking for strategic ways to increase market share. Second, we are in a big out-of-home initiative. All those markets are at different speeds migrating towards out-of-home delivery. In Hungary, we see that this can go quite fast. So there is an advantage of pure out-of-home plays, at least for a certain time. But we are catching up fast, improving our out-of-home footprint, and we do expect some improvement from that.

Third, as mentioned, we are working on synergies across countries, both on operations, but also on the sales side where we are aggressively establishing group sales. And this leads me back to the strategic question of why do we think it's wise to grow and invest also in Eastern Europe. We think we will benefit from being able to offer a region, a larger region. We think Austria in itself is in a consolidating industry too small as a stand-alone entity to operate. So we think this region gives us relevance, gives us scale and gives us, in particular, high-level scale in negotiations with large customers. And therefore, we still think that our strategy is the right one. But of course, you are right that Eastern Europe currently is a very competitive market, but we think over time this industry will also consolidate. And as we are seeing in some markets, some of the competition is not sustainable.

May I add something? In addition, we're working on the logistics network side. We are coming up with a new logistics hub in Budapest in the second half of this year, which will also help us on the cost side. And also, we will be able to handle higher volumes. And also in Slovakia, we are going to get more efficiency in our logistics network with a 2-hub system. So also on the cost side, a lot of things are happening there.

And Marco, I think your first question -- and sorry for missing out on that -- was the profit development in Parcel Austria, so in e-commerce, logistics Austria, yes, this has gone up. So the volume has translated also into improved absolute profitability. And we see that our investment, the capacity we have installed, that we benefit from increased market share and increased scale, given that a substantial share of cost has a fixed cost characteristics.

[Operator Instructions] And ladies and gentlemen, there are no more questions on the line. And therefore, I hand back to you, Mr. Hagenauer.

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. Thanks for participating in this call. Of course, as always, if you do have some more questions today or the next days, don't hesitate to call us. Thank you very much and have a nice weekend.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's earnings call of Austrian Post's Full Year 2025 Results. I am Ingmar, your operator for today. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] And with this, I hand over to the Head of Investor Relations, Harald Hagenauer.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this conference call of Austrian Post. Today, we would like to discuss the full year, the Q4 and also recent trends of the company. Here with me in the room is Walter Oblin, our CEO; and our CFO, Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner. I would love to directly hand over to Walter for the presentation. So please go on.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our full year results for 2025. As a summary upfront, the environment has been challenging, continues to be challenging. But we can show today, I think, quite solid results for the full year that prove our resilience and stability.

Let me start on Page 2, highlighting the context in which we operate. Overall, the longest recession in -- the longest postwar recession in Europe is most likely coming to an end. Until 2 weeks ago, the forecasts on inflation and GDP were relatively positive. In the meantime, we've seen the Iran war change a number of things and uncertainty has come back. Given all this, there are still 2 dominant drivers of transformation within the postal industry. Number one, the continued decline of Letter Mail and Direct Mail coming from the digitization of communication. And second, the growth in e-commerce driving parcel growth across geographies.

In this context, we have, I think, shown a quite stable development. This picture, this chart summarizes the key indicators for the full year 2025. Revenue is EUR 3.043 billion. EBIT, EUR 197 million. We continue to operate in 3 business segments with very different drivers and characteristics. Mail, our Austrian legacy business, is still an important and profitable business with revenues of EUR 1.155 billion. Second, Parcel & Logistics, our growth engine, with, in the meantime, EUR 1.720 billion revenues, by far the largest business in our group, a portfolio consisting of, in the meantime, more than 14 geographies.

And third, Retail & Bank. This is a combination of our Austrian retail network with bank99, a small but growing business where I think the most important highlight of the last year was the breakeven of bank99. Let me also remind you here, and I will come back to that later, that as of 2026, we will slightly adjust our segment reporting, moving the retail part of the Retail & Bank segment to Mail, basically bundling all USO-related businesses while at the same time showing the bank as a pure segment.

In this challenging context, Page 4, we have shown a solid business development based on a quite good Q4. Revenues, as over the first 3 quarters already shown, slightly below a strong 2024. 2024 included 2 quite substantial positive one-offs. One was a super election year in Austria with 4 countrywide elections contributing revenues of EUR 40 million. In the absence of these, we -- our Mail business, of course, showed a stronger decline. And second was a positive combination of Turkish lira and inflation in the country. In total, a positive one-off in 2024 of roughly EUR 80 million. Given these positive one-offs in 2024, we are quite satisfied with the revenue development, also with the EBIT and EBITDA development in 2025 as all important P&L lines are significantly above 2023, and the strong growth that we've shown in 2024 has consolidated on a high level.

The basis for whatever we do in the company is our strategy LEAD 2030, a strategy that we worked out over the last -- so about 1.5 years ago and communicated last May. 3 business directions. Number one, we want to be a strong post in Austria, but we want to be -- we want to go beyond post. We want to be a leading provider of key services, postal services, banking services, telecommunication and potentially more in the future. Number two, international e-commerce is our growth opportunity. We are already today reaching 150 million people in a region consisting of Austria, Eastern Europe and Turkiye. And in this region, we want to invest further in profitable growth and become one of the leading e-commerce partner for online retailers in this region.

Number three, one group, operationally excellent. This includes 2 dimensions, stronger integration across the group, across our portfolio of countries and businesses. And second, operational excellence as an aspiration across our value chain with strong focus on efficiency and technology. And in the middle, 3 overarching values and guidelines. One is sustainability, where we have a few lighthouse projects including our e-mobility and PV in Austria. Second, customer focus across whatever we do. And third, a strong company culture and the aspiration to be one of the leading employers in our respective skill groups. In -- with this strategy, we are transforming the company at accelerated speed.

Here, this Page 6 shows a few highlights in Austria the last year. In Mail, we implemented several changes on products and pricing to adjust for the declining volumes. At the same time, we are pushing for regulatory reforms. bank99 reached breakeven and achieved a number of important milestones, and we're looking optimistically into the future of this bank. In 2.5 weeks, we will launch our YELLOW mobile phone offer and extend our service offering by -- through an MVNO offering. And last but not least, in Austria, a strong network initiative extending our number of postal access points from 1,800 to almost 3,000 within 2 years.

Within the international e-commerce thrust, some important expansion steps in Eastern Europe, most recently 2 acquisitions in Bulgaria and Hungary, a strong push on our out-of-home network, in particular, with lockers. And under strategy pillar #3, I think it's worth mentioning that we have started a comprehensive program called Operations 2030 that will transform the way we operate and deliver in Austria fundamentally over the next years. Second, important investments across our important regions. We will, next week, launch a project in Salzburg, one of the last logistics centers that we haven't either built new or expanded. We're in the middle of a big expansion project, a new logistics center in Budapest in Hungary. And same is true for a big site in Istanbul.

Page 7 shows you our international footprint. In total, 15 countries. Austria, Eastern Europe, Turkiye and beyond Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Georgia as countries where we have logistics networks on the ground. In Germany, we are still present with a sales subsidiary and a minority share in AEP, a pharmaceutical discount wholesaler, which we have decided to divest. And in Greece, we are present with an IT nearshoring provider, which both serves Austrian Post but also the third market.

Page 8, moving to now our individual businesses. Page 8 shows you an overview of the Letter Mail business, long-term development. We are now in the 18th year of mail decline, 60% of volume roughly has been lost. Similar development but not as pronounced on Direct Mail and Media Post. In total, revenues are still on a significant level with EUR 1.1 billion revenues from Letter Mail and Direct Mail and Media Post. You see that we have achieved a revenue decline that is much less than the volume decline.

So constant price and product adjustments have helped stabilize the business. It is still a profitable business. We're doing everything to keep it relevant and affordable. Part of that are tariffs that are relatively moderate compared to other European countries. So the standard letter in Austria still only costs EUR 1, and the premium product delivered next day, EUR 1.30. I think this shows you that we also have room to further increase prices without pricing ourselves out of the market.

Page 10, a few facts about the development of our bank99. bank99 was founded 5 years ago on April, so now almost 6 years ago, but last year finished the full -- the fifth full business year. In the meantime, we have a balance sheet of EUR 4.2 billion, a quite risk-averse balance sheet with a loan portfolio that consists of mortgage loans and consumer loans. The whole balance sheet has proven to be very robust and resilient throughout the last years, which have shown quite a lot of stress on bank balance sheets with high inflation. We were able to deliver the promised breakeven last year with an IFRS earnings of EUR 1.5 million. We hope to move further into positive numbers this year. We also made our initial first placing on the bond markets with a preferred senior bond with a volume of EUR 85 million. Before that, we got an investment-grade rating.

So a number of milestones that have been achieved last year, and there are clear priorities for 2026. First, further expansion for distribution channel and full focus on gaining further customers and cross-selling across existing customers. Number two, extending our securities offering. Number three, extending our product portfolio for SMEs. And number four, a clear focus on discipline -- cost discipline and efficiency that already helped us last year reach the breakeven in the second half of the year.

Moving to our Austrian retail network. We were in a big forward initiative and a big expansion across Austria with self-service facilities, extending the number of postal access points from 1,870 to 3,050 as a target for this year and almost 3,000 implemented end of last year. This is extremely well received by consumers. Last year, 35 million shipments either shipped or received by self-service stations and with a strong growth, all that with a strong growth of 8% compared to 2024.

In good 2 weeks, April 1, we will launch a new mobile phone offering. We have been present in telecommunications throughout the existence of Austrian Post, most recently as a distribution and as a sales and distribution partner of A1. Now we are launching an MVNO, again, in cooperation with A1, the leading Austrian telecom provider and telecom incumbent. The position of this will be high quality at affordable rates combined with service by our employees, by postal employees in our dense network consisting of postal offices and postal partners. And we are convinced that there is a similar opportunity for this telecommunication offering as for our bank offering.

Moving now to strategy pillar #2, strong growth in international e-commerce. Page 13 shows you the development of our international, our group parcel volumes across the last years -- over the last years. So last year, a year of consolidation after strong growth the 2 years before. Volatile Chinese customers contributed to some volatility also throughout the 4 quarters. Q4 was quite good, in particular in Eastern Europe, and we were able to come back to the level of 2024 after a difficult start into the year. In Austria, continued growth.

Page 14, showing more depth on Austria. Last year, 232 million parcels delivered, so full year growth of 3%, Q4 growth of 6%, translating in good revenue growth. We continue to gain customers based on a superior quality that we offer.

And Page 15, as a result, we are the clear market leader in the Austrian parcel market with a market share in the total market of 56% in the growing B2C market of 63%, followed by Amazon and DPD, all of them with substantially lower market shares.

Moving to Eastern Europe. Page 16 shows you our Eastern Europe portfolio of group companies complemented by our newest acquisition, euShipments, which we closed last Friday, which is not consolidated, of course, in the figures shown here. Last year, 78 million parcels after more than double-digit growth in 2024, a year of consolidation with a lot of volatility among Chinese e-commerce platforms.

Page 17 gives you an overview about euShipments. We think a very interesting addition to the group was recently added to the -- included in the group, in the Financial Times group of 1,000 Europe's fastest-growing companies. What is the service offering of euShipments? It's basically a one-stop shop e-commerce offering for small- and medium-sized customers that want to ship -- that want to serve international consumers.

So euShipments provides the software integration into different marketplaces, the core logistics fulfillment, so warehousing and the pick-and-pack service and then connects to a portfolio of different last-mile providers. Austrian Post today already is one of them, but the company will continue to maintain a multi-vendor last-mile network. Last year, EUR 50 million in revenue, 16 million parcels handled for 1,300 business customers, and the company has shown very good growth.

Page 18, moving to Turkiye. Again, here also a lot of volatility with Chinese e-commerce platforms, number one. And number two, continued insourcing by the 2 biggest Turkish e-commerce platforms that results in a smaller non-captive share of the total market. Aras Kargo last year, in a year of consolidation, with strong growth on the revenue side, but this is mainly driven by inflation. Translated in euro, a small decline given that 2024 was a very favorable relationship of inflation to currency decline.

We aspire to push growth stronger over the next years, moving to Page 19, through various strategic initiatives driving growth in Turkiye but also internationally in countries like Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan, putting quality first, improving quality of delivery service where it does not meet the highest standards, and the continued focus on efficiency.

Across the group portfolio, we are pushing out-of-home network options. I mentioned Austria, but also outside Austria, we are targeting roughly 10,000 locker and out-of-home locations, so 10,000 lockers and around 20,000 total out-of-home locations. And we are making good progress. And we also recently communicated an acquisition in Hungary, which is not closed yet, which will add roughly 1,100 lockers to our Hungarian parcel company.

We are investing across the portfolio. Page 21 shows you that we have clear targets for expanding our sorting capacity both in Eastern Europe as well as in Turkiye, some bigger projects underway.

And Page 22 illustrates that we are across geographies transforming the way we operate in our core logistics. Direct-to-locker tours is one important element, end-to-end acceleration making sure that we offer large e-commerce platforms an opportunity to deliver next day when the customers ordering late at night, and that our value chain is ready for very late cutoff times and automation and robotics will further increase our efficiency.

With that said, I hand over to Barbara, which will -- who will give us more details about our financials.

Thank you, Walter. Also, warm welcome from my side. As already said, the year 2025 was a -- quite a challenging one, but Austrian Post was able to deliver a stable performance. So starting with revenues of EUR 3.04 billion, we were able to increase our revenues by 11% versus 2023, but compared to 2024, we had a decrease of minus 2.6%. EBIT of EUR 197 million, up by EUR 3.5 million (sic) [ 3.5% ] versus 2023, but a minus 5% versus 2024. I will come later on to the reasons why we were not able to achieve the results of 2024. Balance sheet, solid balance sheet structure with low debt. Financial debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 0.2x and, logistics equity ratio of 30%. And what we also were able to deliver in 2025 was a strong cash generation, but also there I will spend some words later on.

Coming to Page 24. Revenues, as already said by Walter, the Mail business was decreasing in 2025, and we had a super year of elections in 2024, which had an impact of about EUR 40 million on the revenue side. So it's fair to compare 2023 to 2025, but even then, on the Mail side, we see that the business is going down. Parcel & Logistics revenue up by 0.4% in a different environment on the CEE side and also in Turkiye, as already mentioned by Walter. In CEE, we saw heavy competition and also the loss -- and also, we lost in Q1 one important Chinese customer. But in Q4, we were able to pick up by 7.2%. In Turkiye, we were expecting a rather strong Q4. But end of November, we had a cyber attack, and due to this, we lost volumes and also revenues in Q4. Austria, plus 5.8%, also with a very strong Q4 up 7.2%. Retail & Bank, due to the low interest rates, the revenues decreased by 8.8%.

Coming now to the profitability, with EUR 197 million, we showed solid earnings. Coming to Mail business, there we had a decline in volume and positive special effects in 2024, as already mentioned. EBIT is down by EUR 30 million, but what we -- I already mentioned the elections in 2024, and this was the boost for the results in 2024. On the Parcel & Logistics side, we saw an earnings increase in Austria due to higher volumes and prices and an intense competition in Turkiye and in CEE.

In CEE, we were also facing uncovered fixed costs out of the out-of-home investments, where we're quite sure that we are able to cover them within the coming years. Retail & Bank, we were very happy that bank99 delivered breakeven. And the whole segment, Retail & Bank, we are now showing for the last time, was able to show an EBIT of EUR 6.9 million. On the corporate side, we see the impact of cost cutting. On the other hand, also the sale of properties, and we also had negative effect in the previous year due to provisions we had to take.

Coming now to the more detailed P&L. I only want to focus on staff cost. If you take the year 2024 and the year 2025, you see that we were able to decrease staff costs even we had an increase on the wage side mandatory to the collective agreements in Austria. We were able to cover this. On the other hand, also on the operating cost side, we were able to decrease the cost. So cost discipline in all areas were also supporting the EBITDA of EUR 413 million and the EBIT of EUR 197 million. On the financial result side, we had a positive impact in 2024 out of the devaluation of the put option of Aras Kargo. And on the other hand, also higher interest rate were supporting the financial result. Profit for the period, EUR 134 million, which ends up in earnings per share of EUR 1.96.

I only want to go very fast through the 3 divisions, starting with Mail division. There we see the decrease on the EBIT margin coming from 12.7% in 2023 and going down to 11.2% in 2025. Also on the Parcel & Logistics side, due to the negative impacts coming out of Turkiye and CEE, we were ending up with an EBIT margin of 4.7% compared to 6% in 2024. Retail & Bank division, there we had in Q4 a negative impact of a provision which has to be taken in Q4 in the bank. Due to this, Q4 was not that good, but this we already expected. So even then, bank99 showed up with a result of EUR 1.5 million and the whole segment with EUR 6.9 million.

Coming now to the balance sheet where we also see a growth coming from bank99 on the one hand side. And on the other side, we were increasing our bank financing. And also -- we also have more cash in our balance sheet as we already prepared the M&A payments in Q1 2026. On the other hand, you also see that we were able to increase our equity up to EUR 767 million.

The positive development of the operating free cash flow of EUR 280 million was coming from a positive tax credit for profits for 2022 received already in Q1. On the other hand, we also decreased maintenance CapEx in 2025 due to the weak business environment. This was driving our operating free cash flow. On the other hand, we also spent EUR 17.2 million in further growth projects.

Coming now to CapEx. CapEx down to EUR 126 million, 17% out of this spent internationally and 83% in Austria. Money was going to the vehicle fleet, on the other hand to our out-of-home business and to our postal stations' parcel machines.

Also on the sustainability side, we're well on track. The key message is out of this. In 2025, we already had 60% CO2-free delivery in Austria. We were also able to build up our photovoltaic systems to 20-megawatt peak. We already have 6,360 electric vehicles. We had 36.2% women in leadership. We had no fatal work-related accidents, gender pay gap of 3.2%. And also on the governance side, we were further able to improve with actions like a group-wide certification on the procurement side, with a group-wide supply chain management and with a group-wide measurement of customer satisfaction.

Coming now to the decarbonization road map in Austria, we were able to decrease our logistics-related carbon emissions by 21%, mainly coming out of our electric vehicles. And the ESG indicators, I already mentioned, the decrease on the logistics-related carbon emissions. E-vehicle fleet, I already mentioned, there we were able to increase the number of vehicles by 21.5%. I would like to hand over again now to Walter to say something about the dividend policy and also to give you the outlook. Thank you.

Thank you, Barbara. Yes, our dividend policy for 2025 is EUR 1.83. It is a stable dividend. We are thus delivering on our promise of being an attractive and stable dividend stock now for almost 20 years since the IPO in 2005. We have been delivering attractive dividends during the financial crisis of 2008 and '09. We have been delivering dividends in 2020 during the pandemic and in the years following also during the Ukraine war.

And with this dividend proposal and with our full year results, moving to Page 37, we continue a 17-year track record of stability, resilience, promise and deliver, combined with decarbonization of logistics, and also stick to our attractive dividend policy.

Let me wrap up this presentation with the outlook for the running year. I think, as said in the beginning, the big 2 megatrends will continue to shape our business. Mail will continue to show a volume decline, slightly accelerated in Austria. At the same time, Parcel growth is fundamentally driven and continues to be driven by growth in e-commerce. However, we see here intense competition across our regions, uncertainties related to regulatory reactions to the growing inflow of Chinese parcels across our countries. With that said, we do aspire and forecast a slight revenue increase in 2026.

Again, here a reminder of the change in segment reporting from 2025, where we, over the last years, have reported in the 3 segments: Mail, Parcel & Logistics and Retail & Bank, to a segment reporting as of Q1, where we regroup the retail network into the Mail segment. We will call it Mail, Retail & Services. Second, Parcel & Logistics, content-wise, pretty much unchanged, but we will rename it into E-commerce & Logistics because we think this is what it's fundamentally about, growth in e-commerce. And third, we will show the pure bank99, given that the bank now has critical mass will contribute positive earnings to the group.

Page 39, continued outlook on investment, again, in the -- a little bit higher than last year but on the level of previous years, EUR 140 million to EUR 160 million, with bigger investment in our Salzburg logistics center, continued build-out of our locker network and further electrification of the vehicle -- electric vehicle fleet. On the earnings side, we forecast and target broadly stable earnings in the order of magnitude of previous years. We want to mention and point you to the fact that we expect a weaker first 6 months for the full year and stronger second 6 months, in particular, Q1 will be negatively affected by a silent period in telecommunications where we neither have revenues from the old cooperation with A1 nor from the MVNO, which will only be launched in -- on April 1.

At the same time, we do have launch costs and costs for changing -- for physical changes in our retail network. Second factor weighing on our results is a challenging market environment in Eastern Europe. And third, we have seen a quite strong reduction in inflows of Asian parcels in Turkiye following a, yes, basically, an abolishment of a threshold for duties to be paid for imports. And finally, I think I repeat our dividend proposal of EUR 1.83 per share and of course our commitment to stick with our dividend policy also for the next future years. Thank you very much for your attention, and I'm looking forward to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have the first participant. And Mr. Schmidt.

First of all, congratulations on the strong 2025 results and your great progress as a green fleet. It's very impressive. But given the situation in the Middle East, how are you managing the rising oil prices and increasing geopolitical risks? And are these risks already fully included in your 2026 guidance? Or do you see a threat to your margins if the situation stays this way?

Yes. Thank you, Ingo, for this very important and obvious question. It allows me a little bit to comment. Let me first start, how are we affected by the war in the Middle East. I think the good news is there is no country in our portfolio, with the slight exception of Azerbaijan, where I think a rocket hit, that is directly involved into the war. Turkiye so far, and we hope that stays like that, and I think there's a good probability that it will not be involved in the war, has not been affected by the war, rather continues to be a moderator and a facilitator to come back to peace.

So first good news is there is no direct extension of the war into any of our portfolio countries. Number two, the -- I would say the results or the impact of the Iran war is not fully priced into our guidance because it was more or less draft in letters and around 2 weeks ago before we published our annual report. But I think at this point in time, it is for us still far too early to really have a good grasp of what the impact will be. I think it will be -- it will very much depend on how long this war will go on and how long, in particular, the choke of oil and gas supplies will last. The good news here is that in Austria we are not that much dependent on oil anymore with 60% of the fleet electrified and more than 20% of electricity coming from our own roofs.

We have at least somewhat decoupled us from oil price. But of course, overall, with an increase in oil prices and gas prices, also electricity will -- so indirect, there is an effect, but I think the good news is that energy prices have a relatively small share of our total cost. So I think it's too early to tell. There is some degree of optimism that will not have very substantial long-lasting effects on the European economy. And with that said, of course, we will update this guidance in May.

And we move on to the next participant, [ Ms. Iseline ].

[ Maybe just 3 questions on our side. In Bulgaria, you have disclosed EUR 50 million revenues in 2025. Would you be able to disclose expected EBIT for 2025 in your half-year acquisition? ]

I'm sorry. We cannot understand you. The line is very bad. I don't know what we can do. Can you maybe just retry, maybe with a different microphone or...

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

I was saying the first question is on the acquisition of Bulgaria, in Bulgaria of euShipments. So you have disclosed EUR 50 million revenues in 2025. Would you be able to disclose the expected EBIT for '25 and perhaps the acquisition price? The second question is, where should we expect profitability to be for the bank division in '26? And thirdly, can you maybe explain the moving parts from the change in the telco service and how much headwind you expect in the short term from this change?

Yes. So first, you're right, the euShipments showed a revenue of EUR 50 million. Please bear with us that we're not disclosing margins or the transaction price, but it was a good margin. We see good growth, and we are optimistic that we can maintain both good growth and good margins. Number two, profitability of the bank. I think the aspiration is to be a middle to higher single-digit million euro figure in earnings before tax for this year.

And I think the third question was on the change in telecom revenues and contribution last year versus this year, if I understood you correctly. So last year, we roughly had EUR 20 million in revenues from the terminated A1 cooperation. And this year, we -- given that we only launched the service April 1, we probably will end up with a smaller single-digit million euro figure in revenues. There is, of course, some -- also some cost reduction which we have taken in the meantime to reduce the delta on an EBIT level. But in particular, in the first half year, there will be a significant charge or significant delta versus last year.

So -- and we move on to the next participant, Mr. Slotboom.

Hear me now?

Yes.

Okay. I had a follow-up question on euShipments. What kind of business is it really? I have to get a bit of a feel. You don't disclose the margin. But is it more like a fulfillment business? Like, bpost has a couple of things like that, Radial and Active Ants. Is it something comparable to that? That's the first question. The second question I have is about the 30% you don't own in euShipments, have you made an arrangement to -- with the sellers to be able to buy them out in due course as well? I can imagine that you want to keep them involved for the time being. And the third question is more of a clarification question. You said something like last year were revenues on the back of the A1 contracts, the telephone contracts, was that in the first quarter or was that on a full year basis? Those are my questions.

Thank you for your questions. Let me start with the last question as it's easy, the EUR 20 million were for the full year. Then on euShipments, so let me try to explain the business model. Basically, it's a one-stop full service offering for small- and medium-sized customers that want to do cross-border e-commerce. So basically what the company provides is, first, a software that helps companies very quickly integrate into e-commerce platforms, be it Amazon, be it Temu, be it smaller local e-commerce platforms with a lead time of less than 2 weeks. So one, software integration.

Number two is warehousing. Number three is the pick and pack for individual orders. And then number four is they basically offer last-mile solutions, not their -- they don't operate own networks, but they basically have contracts for a number of countries with different providers, including Austrian Post, but not exclusively. And basically, they sell this full-service offering to small- and medium-sized customers.

Okay. So as far as the last mile is concerned, they use third parties. It's an asset-light model. Does the asset-light thing also cover the warehouses and that sort of things, or do they own the warehouses themselves?

No, it's leased.

It's an asset-light model based on outsourced last-mile operations and leased warehouses. I still have to answer your second question, which -- what was the question? Are there options for the remaining 30%? Yes, there are put and call options to allow 100% takeover for Austrian Post, but also to put for our partner. But we believe there is a lot of value in the strategic cooperation, and there is a lot of optimism that we will remain partners for longer. But let's see how it works out there.

[Operator Instructions] And in the meantime, we have received no further questions, and therefore, I hand back over to Harald Hagenauer.

So thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for being in this call. If you do have some more questions in the next days, please don't hesitate to call us. We are available for you. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you will be disconnected. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this conference call of Austrian Post, where we would like to discuss the third quarter and the 9-month figures of the company. Here with me in the Board is Walter Oblin, our CEO; and Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner, our CFO. And I would like to directly hand over to Walter to answer.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our Q3 results and our outlook for the full year, including a strategy update.

Let me start on Page 2 with our environment. I think for those of you who follow the postal industry, it's quite clear, we operate in a challenging market economic -- we operate in a challenging economic environment. The macroeconomic context remains subdued and the postal megatrends continue to be quite pronounced.

Mail continues to shrink in a somewhat accelerated order of magnitude. At the same time, e-commerce and parcel remains the growth opportunity, however, with strong competition in all markets. In this environment, I think we have shown that we operate a solid and stable business model.

The numbers after 3 quarters are as shown on Page 3. We are a little bit behind our 2024 figures, but substantially above 2023 revenues. Let me remind you that 2024 was a year with a number of positive one-offs.

On the one hand, there were three countrywide elections in the Austrian Mail business, which helped support revenues. And on the other hand, we had a relation of Turkish lira inflation to the currency development, which was very favorable.

Let me just point you to two figures. Turkiye revenues in 2023 after 3 quarters as opposed to 2024, a growth of 33%, which did not come from volume growth, but mostly from an inflation that was much higher than the currency depreciated. In the absence of such positive special effects, such positive one-offs, the megatrends and the economic environment is dominant.

We see that we operate and let me move to -- no, sorry, we see -- we'll come to that later. We see that we grow in Parcel, however, on a relatively low growth rate given the special effects last year. And in Mail, we see a decline. EBITDA and EBIT also a little bit below last year, but above the last, I would say, "normal year" 2023.

Page 4 reminds you of our new strategy that we communicated in Q2 in May. Our ambition is to be one of the leading logistics and services group in the region of Austria, Eastern Europe, Turkiye and beyond with three core pillars. One is we want to be the clear leading market player in the Austrian postal market, but we want to go beyond post. We want to be a leading provider of key services, post, bank, telecom and potentially further services.

Second, international e-commerce is our main growth opportunity. There, we want to be the leading partner for e-commerce platforms and online retailers in our region. We are reaching today already 150 million people with daily high-quality delivery networks and want to invest and grow in this region. And third, we want to strongly exploit the synergies with a one group approach and with operational excellence and technology leadership.

Let us use this framework to go through our core businesses, starting on Page 5 with our incumbent letter mail business. Here, we see now in the absence of positive one-offs as already mentioned elections last year, we see the pure volume decline.

This year, a little bit accelerated, minus 8%, similar order of magnitude on the direct mail media post side here, we see a trend towards digital advertising and a crisis of the stationery nonfood retailers, which continues to lead to volume declines.

The Austrian letter mail market, moving to Page 6, remains one of the cheapest in Europe. And so we think that we -- that our strategy to offer good quality services at moderate prices continues to keep mail relevant. We want to stick with that strategy.

At the same time, this also, I think, shows that we have headroom in increasing prices without losing our customers, and we already got regulatory approval for a number of tariff adjustments as of January 1 next year. These will be mostly on -- these will be mostly outside the core standard mail products, so registered mail, international mail, direct mail or the letter mail product, I think we look for some adjustments during the course of the year.

So much on mail. Let's move to our bank. bank99 has had a number of very positive events over the last months, including the harmonization of two core banking systems on the Easter weekend. We have seen good continued growth. We continue to operate a very stable, risk-averse balance sheet.

And most recently, we made our debut on capital markets with the issuance of a preferred senior bond with a volume of EUR 85 million, which was 2.2x oversubscribed. That followed an initial rating by Moody's at the investment-grade level.

So I think -- we think bank99 is becoming an adult, and we are satisfied that in the fifth full year since launching bank99 in the Austrian marketplace, we are very optimistic to reach breakeven for the full year. After 3 months -- after 3 quarters, we are already showing a positive result, and we are optimistic for the fourth quarter. And going forward, which gives us a lot of optimism is a number of very positive ratings of bank99 on the consumer side.

So #1 in customer service among Austrian retail banks, top mortgage loan product, #2 in current account product that in the competition of very established, very strong Austrian retail banks with a lot of marketing spend, I think makes us very optimistic that the concept of a focused retail bank that leverages the Austrian Post platform has a strong future ahead.

Moving to Page 8. We continue to strengthen our network, our postal network in Austria through self-service 24/7 solutions. These are very well accepted by customers. Last year, 32.4 million shipments handled by our customers through self-service solutions. This year, we are already seeing a double-digit increase.

So we'll -- definitely we'll see more than 35 million shipments for the full year. So this is very well accepted by the marketplace, and we continue to strengthen our network. We have moved from 1,900 postal access points to, in the meantime, almost 2,900 for the full year. We'll reach around 3,000.

And with that, we have in urban areas, a density where the aspiration of the so-called [Foreign Language], so to be really within short walking distance is reality. In Vienna, 75% of consumers have a self-service outlet within 250 meters. So the [Foreign Language] translated is the so-called slipper distance or the distance where you don't need to put on your sneakers, where you just can stay in your slippers.

Let's move to Page 9. Our telecom offering. We remain in a partnership with A1, the Austrian telecom incumbent, until the end of this year in the distribution -- sales and distribution partnership. After that, there will be 3 months of silent period.

And in Q2, the beginning of Q2, we plan to launch an MVNO under postal brand. This project is running quite well. We are now in the process of rebranding our branches, and we are very optimistic that this mobile offering will be well received.

Let's move to our parcel business, Page 10. We continue to grow in the Austrian market after strong growth last year, a little bit of consolidation, but still 2% growth volume-wise, 5% growth revenue-wise. We continue to be the clear market leader with the strongest network in place, in particular, in the growing B2C market.

And given that we are now starting the Christmas peak season, there is a number of services that we have put in place to allow for a very convenient online shopping by Austrian consumers, ranging from a relaunch of our AllesPost service, so a service where we provide a virtual address irrespective of which last mile carrier the sender has chosen, the recipient can receive all parcels by Austrian Post.

We have equipped our Post App, which has 2 million downloads in Austria and 460,000 active users with features where you can more or less real time during the course of the parcel arriving at your door, redirect the parcel to wherever you wish, be it the next postal sub-service station, be it next branch, be it a specific place at your home. And we continue to see an increasing number of customers using those services.

Moving to Eastern Europe. There, we started out -- we started into the year with some challenges on the volume side, given the volatility of Chinese volumes in Q3, we got back to a growth record after -- this compared to a quite strong last year, where in the first 3 quarters, we grew 19%. So Q1 to 3 cumulated, we are still 3% below last year, but that will still mean 16% growth over 2023. So overall, I would say, a solid development in Eastern Europe. However, the market is very competitive there.

Page 12, brief update on Turkiye. Turkiye remains the most important and biggest foreign market for Austrian Post, revenues of more than EUR 360 million in the first 3 quarters, a plus of 5.3%. This year, inflation and currency is not as favorable for Austrian Post as it was last year.

Therefore, in euro numbers, not that strong growth that we've seen last year. Volume-wise, we are relatively stable in a very competitive market in Turkiye where the core e-commerce platforms continue to build out their own networks in Turkish lira, given the inflation, we still show a strong growth.

Moving to Page 13. Technology remains an ever more important success factor in our industry. I already talked about the Post App, which is very successful. We are increasingly using automation and robotics in our operations, are rolling out an integrated operating system, a self-developed one in Eastern Europe and continue to deploy technology across all areas.

With that said, let me hand over to Barbara, who will give you more details on our financials.

Hello. Also a warm welcome from my side. Let me start with the financial highlights for the first 9 months of 2025. Due to the outstanding year 2024 with the elections Walter already mentioned, we decided to do the comparison not only with 2024, but also with 2023, and I think this absolutely makes sense.

In terms of top line growth, the first 9 months of 2025 implied a 1.1% decline compared with the same period in 2024, but a 12.3% increase against 2023. Similarly, EBIT was down by 6.6% if compared to 2024, but up by 3.4% against 2023.

Other highlights of the first 9 months in 2025. We still have a very solid balance sheet structure with a very low debt. Net debt to EBITDA amounting for 0.4x, logistic equity ratio at 29%. Also a very strong cash generation with an operating free cash flow higher than in the recent year with a cash flow of EUR 240 million.

Coming to the next slide. Looking into greater details of revenue development, the decline in Mail continues at minus 7% compared with the first 9 months in 2024, but remains only 2.3% below 2023. In this context, major elections in 2024 provided an additional revenue of about EUR 35 million. I think that's very important to consider.

While we achieved a continued growth of Parcel & Logistics in Austria, as already mentioned by Walter, and also in Turkiye, we suffered a 3.9% decline in parcel in CEE, which is largely due to the massive peak of parcels from Asia in the first half of 2024, driven by a very strong e-commerce business in CEE.

Finally, the top line in Retail & Bank was down by 4.5% year-on-year, which was essentially a result of low interest rate.

Coming now to profitability. When applying the same analysis for EBIT on the next slide, group EBIT declined by 6.6% versus 2024 or 3.4% versus 2023 with earnings in Mail being down by 21.2% and in Parcel & Logistics by 26.6% year-on-year.

I would just want to add that we managed to increase earnings in Austria on the back of good volume growth and price development, whereas intense competition and also some investments done for the out-of-home business in Turkiye and CEE impacted the profitability in these market segments. Overall EBIT decline coming from volume was compensated up to a certain extent by cost efficiency measures, which I will come to on the next slide.

Please have a look on staff costs and also other operating expenses, where you can see our cost discipline already initiated in Q1 2025 as we saw the market not really getting up, not picking up and also seeing that Mail business is sharper declining than expected.

EBIT of EUR 135 million is about EUR 5 million higher than in 2023, but down more than EUR 9 million compared to 2024. Earnings per share, EUR 1.41. That's a decline. But on the other hand, we were able to increase earnings per share compared to the first 9 months of 2023.

Coming now to the segments. I think a lot of things already mentioned. I think main message of key income statement for Mail division is that this lack of elections in 2025 is the main reason for the decrease in all under segments of segment Mail division. But what we also have to mention is that the division still has a very good EBIT margin of 10.7%.

Coming now to Parcel & Logistics division. Similarly, there, we see revenue was up by 2.8% and then taking into account the reporting change of Logistics Solutions, up by 3.9% year-on-year with strong growth both in Austria and Turkiye and -- but in Turkiye, mostly supported by the Turkish lira.

However, it's worth mentioning that we face strong competition in our markets and also note some volatile customer volumes, especially in Turkiye and CEE. This resulted in an EBIT decline of 26.6% compared with 2024. But there, we also have to mention that in the year 2024, we have a sale of property of EUR 6.5 million, which is also stated on the slide.

Coming now to the third segment, Retail & Bank, already said that there, we have a top line decrease of 4.5%. That's mainly coming from the low interest rates in Europe. In Retail & Bank, we are particularly encouraged by having achieved the breakeven now, as already said by Walter in bank99 and also in the branch network, we took great efforts on the cost savings side.

I already mentioned the solid balance sheet. Coming now to the financial debt, which amounted for a little bit more than EUR 160 million. Also considering IFRS financial debt -- IFRS 16 financial debt, it's about EUR 526 million. Financial debt to EBITDA 0.4x and financial debt, including IFRS 16 versus EBITDA 1.3x. This is also the basis for further dividend payments and also for further growth in Austrian Post.

The cash flow shows a solid picture with an improved operating free cash flow and also free cash flow for the logistics business. If compared against the same period last year and in the wake of having completed our major investments in processing logistics centers in Austria, we had maintenance CapEx down by more than EUR 10 million and growth CapEx by about EUR 4 million. In turn, bolt-on M&A was up by EUR 1.6 million year-on-year.

Let me reiterate that our financial strategy of focusing on free cash flow generation allows not only for providing sufficient cash for our dividend commitment, but also investment opportunities for future growth.

Slide 23 shows our CapEx development since 2020 with a massive investment program for logistics centers, mainly in Austria. This program has now been largely completed. There's only one project to be done. It's in Salzburg-Wals. This will be done in 2026 and 2027.

We see CapEx in total is below the level of previous years. In line with these trends, a number close to EUR 150 million is expected for the full year 2025. On the right-hand side, you can see current investment split of about 2/3 of CapEx done in Austria and about 1/3 done in the international subsidiaries. International subsidiaries mainly means electric vehicles and on the other side, out-of-home business.

I now want to hand over to Walter for giving the outlook.

Yes. Thank you, Barbara. Let me close our presentation with the outlook for the full year and the first glimpse into 2026. So I think as a summary, we are cautiously optimistic. We do not expect the market environment to substantially improve. The megatrends of declining mail volume and the growing e-commerce market characterized by heavy competition will remain.

In this context, we do expect a broadly stable revenue development on the back of the strong increase in the previous year with a modest decline in the order of magnitude that we have seen for the first 3 quarters for 2025 for the full year. And in 2026, we do expect and target a slight increase again.

I think on the individual segments, I more or less already said the important things. On Mail, we do expect a steady decline with some support from tariff increases. On Parcel & Logistics, we do expect further growth. Of course, there is always the Turkish lira to euro exchange rate that we are dependent on. And in Retail & Bank, we do expect a slight fall in gross revenues due to the lower interest rate environment.

In our group P&L, we show gross income and provision income. And for next year, also the discontinuation of the A1 partnership will result in a short-term decrease of revenues of approximately EUR 20 million in 2026. Despite all this, again, for next year, we do target a small growth again.

On the CapEx side, Barbara already mentioned that for this year, we do expect roughly EUR 150 million in cash CapEx. And I would say for next year, roughly similar order of magnitude. And on the earnings side, our aim remains to be a stable earnings -- to show a stable earnings profile.

Earnings 2025 are expected to be slightly below the extraordinary strong prior year, in line with the performance during the first 9 months. So expect a few percentage points below last year and for 2026. And this is a cautious outlook into the next year in a volatile environment. For 2026, Austrian Post targets a broadly stable earnings development in the order of magnitude of previous years.

So thanks again. Thanks for listening to our presentation, and we're now happy to take questions and answers.

And the first question is from Patrick Steiner, ODDO BHF.

Patrick Steiner speaking. I have four in total. I will take them one by one, if that's okay. First one, could you give us please some more information or maybe some numbers on your plans to become a regional network operator in Austria?

How can you leverage your current infrastructure, the kind of planned revenues, user numbers? You just mentioned the temporary EUR 20 million revenue decline due to the discontinuation of the partnership in 2021. I mean, if you just could give us some more info on this, this would be appreciated.

Yes. As mentioned, we will discontinue our current distribution partnership with A1, and we will launch an MVNO as of Q2 next year. While we do not disclose our precise targets for that, I think our bank shows a good benchmark.

After 5 years, we have been able to acquire 300,000 customers. This, in our view, is a reasonable 5-year benchmark that is also relevant for our new MVNO and it fits well with the run rate of sales numbers that we've seen in the past.

In terms of profit contribution, do expect some start-up losses in the lower to mid-single-digit numbers in the first 2, 3 years. But of course, we do expect positive earnings contributions to Austrian Post relatively soon.

Okay. Great. You also mentioned that you would potentially like to offer further services apart from telecommunication, banking services. Could you maybe give us some examples if that's possible?

I think the European postal companies show that positioning as a provider of basic services fits well with a postal brand that stands for trust, that stands for proximity and there are no specific plans that I'm ready to talk about.

I think for the moment, the three pillars, post, financial services and telecommunication, are our clear focus. But I do not -- cannot exclude that we will have some ideas going forward to strengthen and broaden this service proposition.

All right. Understood. A third one, you mentioned that you received regulatory approval for tariff adjustments in February next year for non-letter mail products, if I understood correctly. And for letter mail products, you seek to increase tariffs throughout the year, so a bit later. Can you give us more information on the magnitude of the targeted price increases as well as why you aim to address the letter mail part later in the year?

We just had a product and tariff reform on the core mail products in May of this year, so just more or less 5 months ago. And our current regulatory framework, and that is also an answer to your question on the order of magnitude basically allows us to increase prices in line with inflation across the whole product portfolio.

And this is, I would say, the order of magnitude we have seen around 3% to 4% inflation in Austria over the last 12 months. And I think this is the order of magnitude across a business that is worth roughly EUR 1 billion in revenues that we aspire to gain from price adjustments.

Okay. Perfect. Last one from my side. You highlighted the implementation of this integrated operation system in CEE/SEE and in Turkiye. What kind of benefit in terms of cost savings or delivery KPI improvements do you expect from that?

I think we're not in a position to and we should not expect strong cost savings. I think we are -- I think the main target was to become independent to leverage synergies across the group to offer one interface to our big e-commerce customers and to enable further growth in volume, but also in innovative new services going forward.

This is an in-house development out of our Turkish Aras digital subsidiary. And we are in the midst of the rollout. This is running well, and we expect to gain more traction from that over the coming months.

And the next question is from Marco Limite from Barclays UK.

I've got a couple. So the first one is on your '25 guidance. With Q3 results, you were guiding for EUR 200 million. Now the wording is slightly changed. So my question to you is if you could give an indication on Q4. I mean Q3 was kind of a bit down year-over-year. Shall we expect broadly the same trends also for Q4 as Q3? Is the first question. Maybe if you can reply to that, and then I will move to the second.

Well, I think the interpretation of the wording should be more or less look at the results over the first 3 quarters. We are down a little bit above 1% in revenues, and we are down a mid-single-digit number in earnings. And I think that is roughly the picture we do expect for the full year.

There is quite some uncertainty in it, in particular, on the revenue side. The most important unknown variable is the Turkish lira, where you could calculate different scenarios. and depending on where the lira comes out at the end of the year, will -- the revenue will be higher or lower.

And let me remind you that we are accounting our Aras Kargo revenues under the hyperinflation accounting standard, which basically means that we use the exchange rate at the end of the year for more or less recalibrating the revenues we have already shown. So the lever of the exchange rate on the last day is quite big given this hyperinflation accounting standard.

And on the earnings side, this -- I think that there is no strong message in the readjusted wording. I think we've just tried to be a little bit more precise. I think on the revenue side, there is some -- a little bit -- yes, we are a little bit more precise in the sense that the current -- the guidance so far was some stability and stability -- currently, we do expect a slight decrease in revenues.

But on the earnings side, I think we're pretty stable, and it's a little bit modified wording referencing to the results that we've shown after the first 3 quarters.

Okay. My second question is on your '26 outlook because I think there are quite a few moving parts when we think about the Retail & Banking division. So I think in your Slide 7, I'm just trying to pull it, yes, Slide 7, you are showing bank99 earnings up a bit compared to the 9 months. So I guess, up -- '26 up year-over-year as well.

But then you are mentioning interest rates down next year and then EUR 20 million less revenues from A1 and some losses from start-up costs from the launch of your own network. So any indication of, let's say, the net effect, what sort of EBIT level we should expect in the Retail & Banking unit in '26?

Yes. Thanks for that question. And sorry for the misunderstanding, maybe some wording is resulting in. So let's distinguish three things. One is the top line shown in our group P&L.

There, we show gross interest and gross provision income, which means that in a landscape of decreasing interest rates, even if we have growth on number of customers and even with an expanding interest margin, we show probably slightly decreasing gross revenue in our group P&L.

In our solo accounts for the bank, we report -- as any bank, we typically report net interest and net commission income, which is stable to increasing. And then we're talking about profit before tax. And then sorry for the misunderstanding the word earnings trend bank99 on Page 7 might have induced.

So with earnings, here, we mean profit before tax, and here, in 2024, we had a loss in a single million digit order of magnitude, this year, we have breakeven, so a small positive number. And for next year, we expect a positive result for bank99 in the order of magnitude of a mid-single-digit million euro figure.

Sorry, your line just broke up. When mentioning the number you said you expect EBIT mid-single-digit figure for next year?

Yes. So last year, mid-single-digit negative. This year...

Breakeven.

Breakeven. Next year, mid-single-digit positive.

Okay. But this is...

Million euro.

Yes, this is just the bank...

This is just the bank, yes.

Or shall we -- what kind of number or range we should think about the Retail & Banking unit in '26?

So in the year 2026, we are going to report bank99 as a segment for itself and the MVNO will be shown in the Mail business. So there will be a restatement and a new segmentation of our business.

We think we are more transparent if we show the pure bank as opposed to the retail network including the bank because the retail network is heavily induced by internal transfer prices from Mail and Parcel. And so we will present our figures as of next year, showing the Mail, including the retail network, showing our international parcel and e-commerce business, and third, showing the pure bank99.

Okay. Makes sense. And let me squeeze a third one. Just to confirm what you have said on a previous question. So the 3%, 4% price increase on EUR 1 billion revenues is from the 1st of Jan, and then we should expect a new wage increase from the 1st of July in Austria in '26. Is that right?

By and large, yes. I mean the increase on the Mail side will be a combination of the hangover or the spillover or however you want to call it, from the product reform, product tariff reform as of May 1, where in the first 5 months, we haven't seen it this year. So we will -- in the previous year comparison, we will see the price increase still effective.

It will be a combination of price increases outside the core Mail products as of January 1, and it will be some price adjustments during the course of the year, which are not determined yet and which will still require regulatory approval, but where we are confident that with the inflation that we see in Austria that at some point in time, we will have enough degree of freedom to raise prices further. And so overall, I would say this order of magnitude is a reasonable assumption to work with.

Okay. So the price increase won't be on the 1st of Jan? Will be over time in '26?

Yes. So it's a combination of price adjustments on different products at different points during the year, some residual impact on the first 5 months from an adjustment May 1 last year on the core Mail product, price increases effective January 1 on core non-Mail products. And then again, some adjustments on the core Mail products during the course of the year, still undetermined.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to hand the conference back over to Harald Hagenauer for the closing remarks.

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for being in this call of Austrian Post. If you do have some more questions today or the next days, just don't hesitate to call us up. We are available. Thank you very much. Good night. Goodbye.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Österreichische Post First Half 2025 Results. [Operator Instructions] Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Harald Hagenauer, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, to this conference call of Austrian Post, where we would like to discuss the financial results of the first half of the last year -- last month. And here with me is our CEO, Walter Oblin; and our CFO, Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner. And I would directly like to hand over to Walter. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to welcome you to our half-year results. As a summary upfront, the environment continues to remain challenging. However, I think we've shown resilience and can present solid results today. Moving to Page 2, a few sentences on the environment.

As a summary, the environment remains challenging, both in Austria, where we are in the third year of a recession as well as in Eastern Europe and in Turkey, where we continue to see high inflation. In Austria, there is cost pressure on the public sector. The government tries to consolidate the budget. The stationary retail is in a continued crisis mode, all of these in putting pressure on mail volumes. And on the parcel side, the international trade conflicts create uncertainty and subdued customer demand, which overall leads to subdued growth in parcel volumes.

Against this context, I think we, as I said, have shown resilience and can show to you quite solid results for the first half year. We've shown here the 2-year development as I think the development from '23 to '24 puts the '25 figures in the right context. Compared to last year, we report a revenue decline of 1.1%. This, however, after a growth of 17.2%, where in absolute terms, roughly EUR 100 million came from Turkey, where it was mostly an effect of high inflation combined with a stable currency. An effect which has not been present this year.

This year, Turkey has been almost flat despite some volume growth in euro terms. And for the rest of the portfolio, the decline in mail volumes was larger than the growth in Parcels, leading to a decline of 1.8% for all volumes, all revenues outside Turkey. Again, this after an unusually high growth last year of 10.3%, where also one-off volumes resulting from 2 countrywide elections in Austria provided a special boost.

On the profitability, both EBITDA as well as EBIT below last year, 5.7% EBITDA, 11% EBIT, but pretty much on the level of a good year 2023. And a lot of the decline in EBIT can be explained by the absence of elections and positive one-offs in mail as well as by the development in the Turkish currency. However, also the outlook remains challenging in terms of the overall environment.

So we have implemented additional initiatives, both on the revenue side as well as on the cost side, different growth initiatives. We try to stronger penetrate large international e-commerce platforms by offering them the Austrian Post portfolio of companies as one region out of one sales interface with ideally one product and one IT interface. We continue to invest in out-of-home offerings through a strong initiative on the local side, both in Eastern Europe as well as in Austria.

We have indirectly acquired a small competitor who exited the market in Slovakia. And we continued our international expansion out of Turkey into Azerbaijan and made first cautious steps into Georgia and Uzbekistan. On the cost side, we have taken several measures to adjust the staffing, both in operations as well as on the retail network side on somewhat lower volumes. We have doubled down on moving mail volumes to a slower economy product, which in the meantime is the standard product in the Austrian market, both for national as well as international volumes.

We try to leverage synergies across the group, have integrated various affiliates into the parent company, and we have initiated group-wide cost optimization in administrative areas, which already have started to show effect in Q2. Page 5 summarizes the strategy update we communicated in May.

Our ambition is to become a leading logistics and services group, reaching more than 150 million people in Austria, Eastern Europe, Turkey and beyond with 3 core business pillars. Number one, we want to be a strong post in Austria. But more than that, post and beyond in Austria, we call it, In particular, this means that beyond defending our market leadership in Austria on the postal side, we want to grow bank99 and also offer a post-owned telecommunication offering as of next year.

Pillar # 2, growth in international e-commerce. This is our obvious growth opportunity. We cover here a region with 150 million people with growth momentum, and we continue to invest in this region. Pillar #3, one group is operationally excellent. We think there is more to gain from a stronger integration across the group on the sales side, on the operations side, on core functions and technology and efficiency has become part of our DNA, and we continue to invest in leading-edge technology to drive efficiency.

Let me now use this framework to give you an update on business development and strategy implementation along those 3 core business pillars, starting with our Austrian Mail business. Letter Mail continues to decline in Austria. We're now in the 17th year of mail decline versus last year, roughly 7%. Last year, a strong election year with in the first 6 months, 2 countrywide elections. This year, pretty much apart from the Vienna municipal election in the first quarter, no more elections are coming. So we see the pure volume reduction.

On the direct mail side, a similar trend here, the consolidation on the nonfood stationary retailers is ongoing. At the same time, food retailers continue to work with postal advertising mail, direct mail, both unaddressed as well as addressed as their main promotion form.

We continue to be in the lower 1/3 of European tariffs here in a European comparison. Our strategy is to offer high-quality services at affordable rates, both for private customers, but even more importantly, for business customers. We have successfully implemented a product reform as of May 1, where we made the economy product to the standard product.

So the standard product in Austria across all customer segments now has a run time of 3 days. Premium continues to be offered as an additional service. And as a result, around 85% of the mail volume in Austria is already in the standard product. And this product, we can bundle every other day in the last-mile delivery.

Moving to our bank on Page 8. I'm very happy to be able to tell you that bank99 showed a positive result for the first 6 months for the first time in its history, in its fifth full year now since the launch of the bank in April 2020, as I always say, out of the home office into a full lockdown. The bank has a balance sheet of around EUR 4 billion, roughly 300,000 customers.

We think that the business model to use the ecosystem of Austrian Post was a trusted brand, a dense retail network consisting of postal branches and postal partners. And all that combined with strong and impactful digital channels that this business model is working. We continue to attract easily customer deposits and also loan production is going quite well in a challenging Austrian credit market.

So a very positive first 6 months for bank99. A very important milestone was also the successful migration of the core banking system of the former ING retail business to the outsourced core banking system of the Bank. We are also proud that bank99 is increasingly showing up on the top spots in different customer service. Here, you see some awards that bank99 has received over the last months for us a sign that after 5 years, bank99 has a strong awareness among Austrian consumers and not only awareness, but also a positive innovative service-focused reputation, and this makes us optimistic for the near future.

In our Austrian marketplace, back to the postal core business, we continue to implement a comprehensive self-service initiative. Last year, 32.4 million shipments were handled through self-service facilities by Austrian consumers. This number has grown 12% in the first 6 months, and we continue to roll out self-service facilities.

By the end of the year, we expect around 3,000 postal network points. Here, we're coming from 1,900 2 years ago. And the addition is pretty much only self-service. These facilities are adopted very well by consumers in larger cities such as Vienna, we are also rolling out full self-service branches. You see some pictures here, which again are very well accepted by the Austrian market.

Moving to Page 11. We last quarter communicated that as of next year, we will lift the cooperation with A1 on a new level. We will launch a mobile virtual network operator under a post-owned brand as of Q2 next year. The preparations for this offering are well underway, and we are very optimistic about this new service offering.

Page 12, moving to our parcel market, starting with Austria. Austria has seen growth continued in 2025 after a very strong growth last year, in particular in the first half year, 3% volume growth, 5% revenue growth despite subdued consumer demand. In Eastern Europe, we had a rather challenging first quarter. Also to put this in context, last year, we grew 27%, mostly through the influx of quite volatile Chinese volumes. Against this strong growth, we are down 70% compared to last year, which means that we're still up roughly 20% compared to 2023.

And Q2 showed a quite positive approach towards last year's volumes. In Q2, we were almost reaching last year's volumes and a similar trend in Turkey, where Q2 was better than Q1 in Q2, 4% volume growth. We continue our expansion towards Azerbaijan, which is running quite well and made first steps into Georgia and Uzbekistan. The business model is always similar.

We are following Turkish e-commerce platforms in their expansion into these markets. We are working with partners in those respective markets with a very risk-conscious approach. And in Azerbaijan, we have already -- we are already at a high single million-digit revenue number with a positive earnings contribution.

Also in Eastern Europe, we are expanding our out-of-home network. Our target is to -- in the group to have more than 20,000 out-of-home points by the end of next year. Currently, we stand at around 1,600. We are in the midst of a very strong push in Eastern Europe, which is running according to plan. We continue to invest. We continue to invest in infrastructure and capacities, both in Austria as well as international. We yesterday in the Supervisory Board made the decision to start the implementation of the last outstanding logistics center renewal and expansion in the city of Salzburg on the existing site.

This project will go into construction next year. And with that project, we will conclude the rebuild and expansion of the Austrian logistics center networks. By then, we will pretty much have touched every logistics center and substantially expanded capacity, improved speed for the Austrian market.

But also internationally, we are investing in growth. We are in the midst of a project in Budapest, which should open next year a new hub in Budapest, which has been a core center of the growth in Eastern Europe with a lot of Chinese volume coming to Europe via Budapest. And then also in Istanbul, we are in the planning phase for a large logistics center north of Istanbul.

We also invest heavily into technology, both in hardware, software, robotics and automation systems. Here are some examples. We equipped all Austrian mail and postmen with new handhelds last year. We are successfully piloting robotic technology in our sorting centers and in our e-commerce fulfillment business called Systems Logistics, we are successfully operating in an AutoStore location, a highly automized 3D storage and order picking system where we are serving Austrian large e-commerce players in e-commerce fulfillment.

Concluding this strategy update with an update on sustainability. We communicated a few weeks ago that by the end of the year, we will have fully switched the city of Vienna to CO2-free last mile. We are rolling out electric mobility across Vienna. And to our understanding, this will be the first largest city in Austria where a whole postal network is completely CO2-free, only pedestrians, e-bikes and electric mobility.

We are already across Austria standing at more than 50% electric fleet. And the plan, the road map towards CO2-free delivery across Austria in 2030 is defined. This train is running and electric mobility in the meantime, has positive total cost of ownership compared to combustion engines. With that said, I hand over to Barbara, who will give us more detail on the financials.

Thank you, Walter, and very warm welcome also from my side. Let me start with the financial highlights for the first half of 2025. When we set revenue and operating profit into the context of the previous 2 years, this reporting period compares well with the first half of 2023 and was even close to the top line of the result of 2024 despite all the special effects last year.

The other observation I would like to make is that we continue to have a strong balance sheet with a low level of debt and on the other hand, also a strong cash generation compared to last year. But let me go into further details of revenue development on the next slide. If you take top line growth over the last reporting periods, group revenues were down by 1.1% compared to the first half of 2024, but up to -- up by 15.8% between the first half of 2023 and the same period in 2025, with Mail down by 2.6%, Parcel & Logistics increasing by 30% and Retail & Bank up by 23.4%.

At the divisional level, Walt already mentioned the special effects from elections in Mail 2024 of about EUR 20 million. In Parcel & Logistics, we had a positive FX effect last year in Turkey of about EUR 65 million. In addition, a reporting change in Logistics Solutions should be mentioned in the first half of 2025, but this accounted for only 1 percentage point difference in revenue growth on the parcel side.

Parcel Austria showed a revenue growth of 5.2%, whereas Parcel in Southeast and Eastern Europe is volatile due to the volume shifts from Asia clients with a big increase in volumes in Q1 2024 of 44% and in Q2 2024 of 13% because of the volume push of a parcel consolidator. This year, the volume development in this region was in Q1, minus 13% and in Q2, only minus 1%.

In turn, Parcel Turkey was up by 2.6% over the same period last year, but a significant 80% if compared with the first half of 2023. This puts our long-term ambition in this market into better perspective despite the volatility in exchange rates and continuing high inflation. Turning the page and applying the same divisional analysis for earnings. EBIT was down by 11% compared to the prior year, but only slightly below EBIT in the first half of 2023.

On a comparative basis to the same period last year, the main moving parts were the volume decline and lack of special effects in mail and lower profitability in Turkey and CEE. I'm particularly pleased to report positive earnings for our Retail & Bank division with an EBIT of close to EUR 5 million in the first 6 months of 2025. This is based on positive contributions from bank99 as well as a good earnings development of the branch network.

Next page, we present the group income statement for both quarterly and half-year periods and would just add the following observation from my perspective. We talked about revenue development already. And on the cost side, we make our best effort to keep them under control. Staff costs, for example, despite various salary increases through collective labor agreements from last year and also from July 2025 onwards, we managed to keep staff costs quite stable year-on-year.

Other operating income includes proceeds from property sales of about CHF 5 million and indexation of rent and leases. Also other operating costs show a slight increase, mainly due to higher IT expenses. Bottom line, EBIT was 11% down year-on-year due to lower profitability, but still on the level of 2023.

Going through the income statement for each division and starting with mail, the revenue decline of minus 5.9% year-on-year or minus 2.6% compared to 2023 was based on 2 main developments, ongoing digitization efforts by major customer groups like banking, insurance or telecoms as well as the cost pressure in the public sector and the lack of the EUR 20 million special effects from elections in Austria last year.

Ultimately, the strong volume decline and top-line pressure resulting in lower profitability. Looking at the income statement of Parcel & Logistics, we are pleased with revenue growth in Austrian and Turkey, but see some volatility in the region of Southeast and Eastern Europe. This had to do with the push of volumes last year from the parcel consolidator, as already mentioned.

Revenues in Turkey rose by 2.6%, which had positive effects over the same period last year. Despite the positive top-line development in Parcel and Logistics, reduced profitability in Turkey and CEE resulted in lower earnings. Finally, Retail & Bank was slightly below the revenues of the previous year to the lower interest rates, but achieved a significant 23.4% increase if compared with the same period in 2023.

Having mentioned the turnaround of the bank by fully integrating the IT system of ING Bank Austria and further improving the cost structure of our branch network, we are pleased about the first earnings contribution of bank99 and are now focusing on further developing our banking operation. Still further development of bank99 will remain challenging with interest rates coming down from 4% in June last year to 2% now.

On the next slide, we present the debt factor, and I would highlight here not only the continuing low debt with net debt to EBITDA of only 0.5x or 1.5x if IFRS 16 on lease contracts is included. This provides us with optionality for both organic and inorganic growth opportunities. Our strong operating free cash flow is certainly a very important highlight of the first half of 2025.

As you can see from the comparisons with 2024 at the bottom of the page, the higher cash flow from operating activities, excluding core banking assets, was up compared to last year. More importantly, the operating free cash flow, which is the main metric for dividend payout, is up by 9% compared to the previous year.

Maintenance CapEx as well as growth CapEx were a bit under the level of last year. This brings us to the next page, which shows CapEx development over the last 5 years with a range between of EUR 140 million to EUR 160 million. That is a level we also expect in the future. We are finalizing our expansion program in Austria with an extension in Salzburg next year and the year after and we will focus on the CEE and Turkey regions in line with volume developments there.

In 2025, we aim for a stable CapEx of EUR 150 million to EUR 160 million despite having spent only EUR 41.3 million so far. But as you know from previous years, we tend to have higher CapEx requirements in the second half of the year.

With this, I come to the end of my presentation and hand back to Walter to give the outlook.

Yes. Thank you, Barbara. Let me conclude with the outlook for 2025 for the full year. In general, we expect the market environment to stay challenging in all areas. However, our target to come out at stable revenues and stable earnings remains intact. On the revenue side, currently, our target is revenue at the prior year level, of course, dependent on the development of the Turkish lira-euro exchange rate.

On the CapEx side, as already mentioned by Barbara, an order of magnitude of EUR 150 million to EUR 160 million is what we expect to spend. And on the earnings side, our targets remain unchanged. earnings in the order of last year's EBIT, so an order of magnitude of around EUR 200 million. And with all that we've seen also over the last weeks, we are quite confident that this target is achievable. Thank you for listening, and we're now happy to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question goes to Patrick Steiner of ODDO BHF.

Patrick Steiner speaking. Three questions from my side. I will take them one by one, if that's okay for you. The first one, looking at the segment level, especially, could you walk us through your assumptions of the drivers affecting the second half of the year in order to arrive at your EUR 200 million EBIT guidance? And what are the main risk factors in your view?

I think in general, we do expect to come back to slight growth on the partner side across our portfolio. The seasonality of last year was, in particular, a very strong Q1 with a special influx of Chinese volumes, in particular in Eastern Europe. this peak is behind us.

The second half of last year was not as strong. Also, the main one-offs on the mail side were in Q1. In addition, we have the impact of the product reform with a tariff increase on the mail side. And with that and with several initiatives on the cost side, we are optimistic and confident to reach the EBIT guidance.

Perfect. Very clear. Second one, on Page 22 in the presentation, you stated the 6.45% salary increases mandated by collective bargaining agreements as of the beginning of 2021. I'm just curious, the number seems a bit high to me. Could you please provide maybe a bit more color from which regions is coming? Or is this an aggregate number? I mean any information on that would be helpful.

Yes. So the 6.45% is the collective -- is a result of the collective wage agreement of -- that was negotiated in March '24, effective July '24. So this is kind of more than a year ago. The most recent result was 2.8%. So this is always -- has always been inflation plus 0.2%, 0.3%. And so we're talking about something that was negotiated 18 months ago. And the most recent change that is -- so to what misunderstanding, we negotiate in spring with effectiveness July 1, always. And the latest result, as I said, was 2.8%.

Okay. Very understandable. And last question. If I understood this correctly, you were stating 3% volume growth in the Austrian parcel business in the first half. Correct me if I'm wrong, please. And could you maybe give us more information that number for Q2, if possible?

I think we are careful given some of the volatility that we've seen over the last months with precise percentages, but I would say a low to mid-single percentage point number is what we expect. It's a little bit lower than what we expected a few months ago, but we do expect -- we do expect growth for the full year.

And the next question goes to Christoph Schultes of Erste Group.

I have a couple of questions actually. The first are related to the Parcel & Logistics business. The first one would be the decline in the SCE segment, which is related to the decline in Asian volumes you mentioned in your presentation a couple of times. Do you think that this is, in general, that the trend is now broken?

Or is this, in your opinion, just a weaker quarter in a long-term positive development? And in particular, also maybe incorporating or thinking about the trade tariff discussions. So maybe you can give us the kind of base scenario you have for the SCE segment in the next couple of years?

Yes. So overall, we see quite aggressive growth of Asian e-commerce platforms continuing in some areas with quite innovative, very cost-efficient business models. So I don't think the trend is broken. I think we have to get used to more volatility. I think both in terms of volume and promotional activity. These customers have more intrinsic volatility, but also their loyalty to partners for logistics is less than what we are used to for European and U.S. clients.

So in general, we do expect continued growth. Also if you look at what happens with MediaMarkt in Austria. So the takeover by JD.com, I think a very capable Chinese e-commerce platform, brings a new player to Europe. And we also have seen -- to and the likes very aggressively expanding and really going to a next level. If you follow their communication, local to local is their next horizon.

So basically, they are expanding their Chinese -- shipping Chinese goods to direct to Europe. They're expanding that model or complementing it by acquiring local producers and retailers, online retailers in Europe to serve the European market and thus going head-to-head against other e-commerce platforms. So I think it's much too early to write further Chinese growth off. I would rather expect them to continue to grow at the expense of European online retailers.

Okay. Great. And then you mentioned in your presentation also that you see again some in-sourcing ambitions and activities of an international e-commerce platform. And when I think back in the last quarters, you stated several times that you see e-commerce platforms rather giving back volumes to you and you were also able to gain market shares in this -- in the B2C segment. So do you think that you can lose now market shares again?

I think that message was focused on Turkey. I think in Austria, we see some kind of stability at least for the time being. And in some quarters, we gained a little bit more market share of some of the big -- particularly one big e-commerce platform in some quarters, a little bit less. But overall, I think there we have reached some equilibrium, at least for the time being.

In Turkey, we have 2 big customers that have grown their own delivery over the last years, which has also led to growth in Turkey growth -- volume growth for Aras Kargo become more flattish. I think also there, these customers have come to a point where further substantial in-sourcing is not something that we do expect in the near term.

Okay. And then I have 2 more questions, if I may. The one would be looking at the development in your retail and bank division, this was surprisingly strong in this quarter. Were there any positive one-offs at least you did not mention any.

You have reached more than EUR 5 million in the second quarter. And then I know you mentioned also the declining interest landscape we are looking at, but can we expect clear positive contributions in this segment also in the next couple of quarters and years?

So bank99 did a great job in the first half of 2025. There were some smaller onetime effects. So we did some provisions for the migration and -- but this was only a small effect. So we were -- we did not use them. And on the other hand, there was also a positive impact of retail.

So what you can expect for the second half of the year is please do not take the results of the first half 2x. So this will not happen. You already said, okay, the interest rates went down. This is also why we are rather cautious on the bank side, but we are committed for breakeven. So this we say. And on the other hand, we also had some positive effects on the retail side. But this is more or less an internal calculation.

And my final question would be also looking at your segment reporting EBIT in your corporate division. This was also the best of the last 3 years on a quarterly basis. And I was wondering, I mean, you mentioned there that you did -- this was partly due to some real estate portfolio cleanup. So I would be interested in what this exactly was? And secondly, what do you expect for the EBIT line of the corporate division also on a normalized level in the future?

Okay. So Austrian Post has a rather big portfolio on the real estate side. A lot of old branches we have old post offices, which are not in operation any longer. And what we did and we also do in the future is, so there are some low-performing real estate where we say, okay, we have to invest. And on the other hand, the return on the leasing side, rent and leasing side is not that high. So we are selling them off. So the impact in the first half of the year was about EUR 5 million.

We also expect to have this contribution also in the future. These are smaller things. So the EUR 300,000 sale of real estate, and this is the size of the single transactions. And I'm expecting it to go on also in the future for the coming years. On the other hand, on the corporate side, you also see the impact of our cost measures we took. This is on the one hand side, personnel costs and on the other hand, also consulting costs and other costs.

And the next question goes to Marco Limite of Barclays.

I've got 2. The first one is just a follow-up on what you have just said around the outlook for the Consumer Service and Banking unit. Did I get right that you mentioned that we should expect the unit still to be still at breakeven for the full year? Yes, that will imply second half down EUR 6 million EBIT. Maybe I got that wrong.

And the second question is on your letter volume decline in the second quarter. We have seen letter volume decline accelerating versus Q1. And to be honest, also some of other post operators in your geographical area have shown a high single-digit letter volume decline. What are your thoughts around the outlook for the second half of the year and going forward for letter volumes?

Thanks, Marco, for your questions. I will answer the second one and ask Barbara to take the first one as a follow-up to her last answer. On the letter mail side, we have seen roughly a 7% decline over the first half.

This is the order of magnitude that we do expect for the next months and quarters. Digitization is ongoing in Austria. There are limited positive impulses. The government is consolidating its budget. So we do expect this somewhat increased rate of return for the next quarters.

And sorry, just to follow up on this. I mean, Q2 was lower than Q1. But then I think in Q3 '24, you also had elections. So Q3 this year will also have very tough comps, right? So we should expect even faster letter volume decline in Q3 than Q2?

I'm talking about rather adjusted numbers, yes. So where we try to take out the one-offs, I would say, as an intrinsic underlying trend, we take roughly the 7%. And then last year, of course, we -- in Q3, we had the parliamentary elections. So Q3 unadjusted, we should expect a little bit stronger decline.

On the Bank and Retail side, so what are we expecting for the full year? I would say it's more, I would say, EUR 1 million to EUR 2 million to EUR 3 million of EBIT for the full year. Because we have some positive impact on also retail is only internal charging. And there, we had a special effect in the first half of the year. And due to this, I'm expecting bank and retail to come down a little bit.

Okay. And maybe another follow-up question on one of the previous questions from a colleague. So in Corporate Center, I mean, we had minus EUR 44 million in 2024, now we're running at a very low run rate. I mean, shall we still expect, let's say, high single-digit to EUR 10 million per quarter of losses or that has reduced now normalized?

I think, Marco, please bear with us that we do not provide guidance on a quarterly result per division. I think if I look at the past, there is quite some volatility, in particular on the corporate side, given the impact of interest rates on our provisions and several things.

However, I think what we can say is we have taken additional initiatives on the cost side, in particular, in administrative areas from vacation, bringing down provisions for vacations to marketing spend, and we should see some of those savings also on the corporate segment.

And the next question goes to Henk Slotboom of the IDEA!

One question from my side. A lot has been said about the Chinese platforms and how you're benefiting from it. At the same time, during the presentation, you said a couple of things like the loyalty of the Chinese is less. They are known to be tough negotiators. How -- and there is the uncertainty of the EC, European Commission, which is weighing measures as well.

How do you think all of this -- what is the rationale of the move towards accommodating more of the Chinese volume? Because what it does to your margin probably is that it will cause pressure on your margins? Or is it so that you can safely use the volume they generate in the countries outside of Austria that it helps you to develop more critical mass in those markets? That was my question.

Well, thank you. I think a very good question. I think overall, our aspiration is to be a market leader in Austria and one of the leading logistics providers in e-commerce in Eastern Europe and Turkey. And as such, I think we also have to work with large Chinese platforms as I do expect them to grow in market share and be a core driver of growth over the next years. Point one.

Point two, yes, these are challenging customers. But of course, we only work with them if there is a positive contribution to our P&L, which we have seen over the last year since we've been working with them. And third, I think coming to your question on -- if I understood it as a question, correctly, what will be the impact of European regulation on Temu, Shein and the like.

My personal opinion, but I might be right or might be wrong, is that this will have a limited impact. I think the -- whether there is a EUR 2 surcharge or not will not make a big difference as very often the cost difference between similar goods on Temu, Shein or wherever compared to European retailers is much more than the EUR 2, and that will not make a very big difference.

And second, as I mentioned earlier, they are already anticipating stronger regulatory barriers and trying to build up suppliers, logistics platforms also in Europe. This is this local to local, what you can observe with Temu. And finally, I think that Europe will have to try to keep a somewhat friendly relationship with China as otherwise, given the difficult relationship with the U.S., I think European industry will suffer on both sides in the West as well as in the East, and I think this will not be a good scenario for Europe. But that's a personal opinion.

Okay. Well, I agree with you on the EUR 2 surcharge that it won't make a difference. But maybe as a follow-up, there's also been a lot of talk about the safety of products sold by Shein, Temu and that sort of things. And in that case, they could face a heavier fine, and that could more constitute an obstacle for them to ship stuff to Europe than just a EUR 2 surcharge per parcel. But again, I fully agree with you on the remarks you made on the EUR 2 thing.

Yes. I think in general, as far as we have got to know them, I think these are very capable companies. These are very financially strong companies. These are platforms that have emerged as winners in a very competitive EUR 1.4 billion consumer market in China, and we should not underestimate their aggressiveness and their ability to adapt to whatever challenges they face.

And I think they will learn to cope with and they will become better in eliminating products that are not compliant with European regulations. And I think that will not substantially limit their growth. Of course, there will be some ups and downs. But in general, I would expect them to grow further.

[Operator Instructions] Okay. There seem to be no further questions. So let me now hand back over to Harald Hagenauer for some closing remarks.

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for participating in this call. If you do have some more questions, don't hesitate to call us today or the next days. We are available. And if not, of course, we wish you a very nice weekend. Goodbye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.