Oesterreichische Post Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's earnings call of Austrian Post for the results of the first half of 2026. I am Ingmar, your operator for today. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session and if you would like to ask a question, you may click on the raise your hand. We are looking forward to the presentation. And with this, I hand over to the Head of Investor Relations, Harald Hagenauer.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this conference call. Today, we would like to discuss the half year results of Austrian Post. Here with me in the room is our CEO, Walter Oblin; and our CFO, Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner and I'd like to directly want to hand over to Walter.

Thank you, Harald. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our results for the first half of 2026. As a summary upfront, I think we are able to show solid results in a challenging environment. Let me start on Page 2, providing an overview of both our challenges but also our opportunities and the key figures of our first 6 months. We see a lot of headwinds in the market, digitization in Austria, leading to an accelerated letter mail decline on the parcel side, a quite competitive market, in particular, in Eastern Europe and Turkey. And for the second half year, a variety of taxes and duties will be imposed on parcels, both from an EU as well as on a national level.

On the other hand, we see big opportunities E-commerce remains a growth market. And as I will explain to you during this presentation, there is a lot of strong momentum in the e-commerce market in our portfolio, both in Austria as well as in our international portfolio. And in Austria, our broader services strategy, multiservice strategy is taking off quite well with our bank and our telecommunication offering developing nicely. So we continue to invest in growth, both in e-commerce as well as in Austria. This growth strategy is showing impact. I think we are quite satisfied that for the first 6 months, we showed good growth momentum, plus 3.8% group revenue growth. EUR 1.4 million in the first 6 months even more than the 3.8, 6.7% in Q2.

And on the earnings side, as expected, we have started into this year with a somewhat weaker earnings level with clear reasons for that. One is an accelerated mail decline. Second is the transition in our telecom business, where last year, we still had revenues from the cooperation with A1 and third reason is an intense competition in Eastern Europe, combined with regulatory driven decline in Asia volumes in Turkey. However, we look confident with a lot of confidence into the next 6 months, and we remain committed to our guidance to deliver an EBIT in line with previous years for the full year.

Page 3 shows you our strategy. Our vision is to become a leading logistics and services group in our core region, consisting of Austria, Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey and beyond. 3 core pillars of the strategy post and beyond in Austria, implying that we are committed to defend our strong market position in the postal business in Austria. But beyond that, we want to become a leading provider of key services to Austrian households, including financial services, telecommunications and potentially more in the future.

Second, international e-commerce is our growth opportunity internationally. Internationally, we are clearly focused on parcel and e-commerce. And we have invested in this business also this year with 2 acquisitions. I will comment on later on. Third element, 1 group. We believe there are even more synergies to exploit across our portfolio of regions and businesses and operational excellence is a key success factor with technology playing an increasing and a very important element in that. And the green circle in the middle of our strategy, we are and remain committed to 3 core values. One is sustainability; second, customer focus; and third, the people focus of aiming for an attractive company culture.

Page 4 shows you that we have achieved important milestones in implementing the strategy on post and beyond in Austria. We are investing into our network in Austria, in particular, in the self-service element of our network. We have built up roughly 1,500 24/7 access points. lockers and self-service branches. And with that, we have surpassed the threshold of 3,000 postal points and now have the densest network in the history of Austrian Post. Point two, our bank 99 is developing well, EUR 4 million EBIT contribution in the first 6 months. I think it's a very nice progress from the breakeven results of last year. We have launched our telecommunication offering yellow on April 1 and have seen a strong customer ramp-up fully according to plans in a quite competitive Austrian telecommunication market.

On international e-commerce, we can show very good growth in Austria, with parcel volumes in Austria showing growth of 9%. And we have executed 2 acquisitions. One has been closed, the other 1 signed. One is EU shipments, a fast-growing fulfillment business based in Eastern Europe, but reaching beyond Eastern Europe showing strong growth and strong margins. And second, we 2 weeks ago, signed the acquisition of Express, 1 of the leading parcel networks in Serbia, which we will merge with our own company, City Express in Serbia creating the -- or 1 of the leading parcel networks, private parcel networks in Serbia.

Moving on to our core businesses along the strategy framework, starting with our letter mail business, still more than EUR 1 billion of revenues. We see a somewhat accelerated decline in Austria, driven by both the government saving across all ministries and also regional governments saving in all areas, trying to save money in all areas but also, of course, corporates in Austria in a stagnating economy trying to save on communication spendings. We still managed to show a revenue decline that is more moderate than the volume decline and we continue in the execution of our strategy.

Moving to Page 6, by trying to migrate most of the volumes into a slower plus 2, 3 products or so-called standard product. In the meantime, we have already around 85% of our volume in the slower standard product, and we have implemented 5 days ago, a price increase on the premium service from 130 to 190 million, which will help us in the second quarter. stabilizing revenues, but also migrating even more share of the total mail market in the slower product, why does that help us because we bundle the delivery of the standard products on 2 days a week. So effectively, we are moving to a twice a week mail service for the bulk of mail.

Page 7, an update on Bank99 after a quite challenging ramp-up over the last 5 years. And finalization of the merger of PANK99 with the retail business of ING that we acquired in '21 and where the last step was the harmonization of 2 core banking systems last year, we are now 100% focused on the market. And this 100% market focused in combination with an improved cost structure pays off, and we see it in the bottom line. a EUR 4.2 million EBIT contribution of Bank 99 in addition to contribution margin delivered into the postal network, I think, is a nice development, and we are very confident that Bank99 can deliver even more revenues and profits over the next years. 1 element to improving and supporting growth in Bank99 is the offering of an asset management business.

So basically, the offer to consumers to buy shares, ETFs, savings plans and other products. This has been missing so far. And with that, we have a more or less complete product range for retail customers, both payment services, checking account as well as loan products as well as asset management services. So nice development of our bank. Page 8, similarly nice development of our -- of our postal network in Austria. We have passed the threshold of 303,000 postal access points. The growth has come from 24/7 lockers and subservice branches, which are increasingly accepted by consumers, last 35 million transactions handled through self-service facilities, Market research shows us that the 24/7 locker is already the most preferred access point to the postal network in Austria has already surpassed branch offices and postal partners.

We continue to operate branches because these are the point where we can deliver and sell other services and of course, also the postal services with around 300 branches. So I think we have a quite consolidated network already. And we also remain committed to maintaining a good number of postal partners across the country. Page 9, as already mentioned, our mobile offering under the brand yellow, as the name says, very close to the postal brand positioned in a way that it maximizes the strong postal brand in Austria. The launch of this business has gone very smoothly and customer ramp-up has been accomplished fully according to plans.

We already have a very good 5-digit number of customers. our positioning is clearly successful. What is the positioning? It's a quality network in cooperation with the Austrian telecom incumbent, combined with fair and affordable prices, not necessarily the cheapest ones and that is our differentiating factor with service and advice in postal branches and with postal partners. And we see that 90% of customers come from the postal branch channel as opposed to digital channels. It is a strong focus on an elderly population population that still looks for advice and people that help them with their mobile offering.

And we think this is a nice customer segment where we are seeing a lot of potential. Moving to our parcel business. You see here the footprint of parcel networks we have in Austria, Eastern Europe and Turkey and beyond in a total of 15 geographies and we have made 2 very important inorganic steps over the last months. One is the acquisition of the company EU shipments based in Bulgaria with a strong footprint, both in Bulgaria and Romania, but also servicing SMEs beyond those markets. We have closed that transaction in March this year and are seeing nice growth coming from this nice margins.

And 2 weeks ago, we signed the takeover of 100% of the shares of Express 1 of the leading parcel networks in the Serbian market. And as I said, we will merge this with our company at City Express and substantially improve our market position in the Serbian market. Moving to Page 11. This gives you the overview of how different libraries and taxes will impact our parcel business in these markets. So in Turkey, more or less as of October last year and early this year, the -- any minimum threshold on duty-free imports was removed. So all parcels from Asia have to go through customs. This had a strong impact on volumes that we also saw in ours cargo.

In the EU or -- in the EU and also impacting our parcel business in Austria and in Eastern Europe, in the EU markets, a de minimus customs rate of EUR 3 per customs category and parcel was introduced on July 1. We have seen a decline of -- across the board, roughly 30% in the first months. This -- to put things into perspective, on an exposure of roughly 10% of parcels across the group that come from Asia. In Austria, it was less than that, around 8%. In Austria, also the impact was a little bit lower than the 30% and we have already seen a recovery of volumes over the last weeks.

We think that the big e-commerce platforms will change their business models. We'll learn how to deal with those levies, how to show them vis-a-vis the buyers and online shops and I think we'll quickly react and find ways to deal with that. Then in Austria, on October 1, a parcel tax of EUR 240 will be introduced on or platforms and retailers that make more than EUR 100 million in revenues. So this will impact probably 70% to 80% of all Austrian parcels. And finally, on November 1, the EU plans to introduce an additional levy of per item category or a parcel. The detail is still not clear.

But of course, the combination of these levies and taxes will have at least a short-term impact on our growth. We -- while we do not have full clarity clearly on what the impact be and how it will develop over time. We think that for the full year, we will still show a good growth in our parcel business. But in the next 6 months, the growth will come down from double-digit growth to somewhere in the mid-single-digit growth figures.

Yes. With that said, let's have a look at Austria, in Austria, a very strong momentum in the parcel business, plus 9% growth in volumes, 10% in revenues shows that our market position is based on service advantages on quality advantages and also on, I think, tier cost advantages coming from scale, coming from efficiency, coming from investments. We continue to invest in Austria in infrastructure, in IT, in our network in new services. Our Sunday delivery is developing well. and continue to defend our market leadership in the market.

Let's move to Eastern Europe. Page 13. Good growth, 8% volume growth, 7% revenue growth. However, a quite competitive market, impacting margins, a battle for market share going on there. Accordingly, also, our margins have suffered -- we are turning every stone in Eastern Europe, both organizationally, stronger integrating across countries operationally, trying to capture efficiencies and strategically investing in those markets, both organically in the buildup of own locker networks, but also in acquisitions.

Moving to Page 14. The acquisition of Express that I have already mentioned, will help to strengthen our market position in the Serbian market creating the -- yes, 1 of the leading parcel networks in Serbia, adding EUR 36 million revenues to our top line and offering substantial synergies between our existing companies and Express, which we will start on day 1 after closing to by driving forward the integration of 2 networks.

Moving to Turkey on Page 15. Turkey remains our biggest foreign market, roughly EUR 500 million in revenues for the full year. The volume has been impacted, as already mentioned by changes in customs, in particular, for Asian parcels, Accordingly, growth has been lower than anticipated before that. But still, we have seen at least a slight growth and good growth in revenues coming from a still high inflation in Turkey, although it has come down, combined with a relatively stable currency, which also had an impact on our put option accounting, which Barbara will comment on in a few minutes.

Page 16, our acquisition in e-commerce fulfillment, we see a substantial opportunity in Eastern Europe, in Central and Eastern Europe by complementing our strong position in the last mile with fulfillment services. We think that the business model of EU shipment, which basically provides a bundle of services to SMEs, ranging from software integration into large e-commerce platforms to warehousing, consolidation and shipping transport and invoicing and returns management without necessarily operating the last mile themselves. And this business has shown good growth, double-digit growth over the last years is serving 1,300 SMEs, so quite balanced customer structure, nice margins. And for the first months in our portfolio, we have consolidated it in March.

We have been very happy with the development of shipments, and we will continue to invest in this fulfillment business with the aim to become 1 of the leading providers of logistics services for e-commerce companies in Central and Eastern Europe. So with that, I have given you an overview on the implementation of our strategy and the development in our core business lines. And I now hand over to Barbara, who will give you more details on our financials.

Thank you, all. Also welcome from my side. Let me start today with our segment reporting to go through the segments to better understand afterwards our results. So mail branch and services, we started the segment reporting only with first quarter of 2026, also includes branch services and our telco business, together with letter mail business solutions and also Direct Mail and Media Post. So this segment amounts for about 36% in the first half of 2026. Then we have the big block of e-commerce and logistics, where the Austrian parcel business, also the International Parcel business as well as the food fulfillment business e-commerce services are considered and this amounts for 59% of our revenues.

And then we have our youngest and smallest segment, it's the bank, the Pure bank we are showing now with about 5% of our revenues. Let me come to the next slide. Revenues Water already mentioned. EBIT is down by EUR 11.7 million to EUR 187.7 million. Due to the weak business we saw in different segments, I will come back afterwards. Balance sheet is still very solid with a low financial debt amounting for 0.6x net debt to EBITDA only considering the financial debt and also logistic equity ratio of 24%. What we also showed in the first half of the year is a cash flow of EUR 117 million, which is also quite solid. I do not want to spend too much time on the revenue side, even the news are good.

So growth of 3.8% and different pictures in different segments Walter already commented on. Let me go through our profitability to our EBIT. There, you can see the sharp decline on the main branch and services side by meet minus EUR 21.1 million compared to last year. Main reasons, the volume, the decrease in volumes and on the other hand, also the lack of the Delco business with P1, we still did in the first half of 2025. Rather good profitability on the e-commerce and logistics side, driven by the Austrian parcel business as well as by our fulfillment business, where we're not that happy with its profitability in also there, Walter already mentioned that we are facing strong competition and also in Turkey, with the customs on Chinese parcels, starting from the beginning of the year. But in Turkey, we already saw good improvement in June 2026.

Let me come now to the detailed income statement, where I want to put your focus on our staff costs. If you compare our staff costs in the first half of 2025 with the first half of 2026. You see an increase if you take the increase, it's mainly coming out of the inflation in Turkey with on the other hand, with the expansion of our scope of consolidation, that's mainly in shipment, but also our HLX stores, our Greek IT company. Otherwise, we were able to take out the cost on the personnel side with the wage increases we were facing. EBIT, EUR 73.3 million. I would like to come to the financial side with the next slide because there we see a tremendous decrease on the financial results side, and it's mainly driven by the valuation of the put option of Argos cargo, where you can see on the right-hand side, discrepancy between the high inflation and the changes in FX rates in the first half of 2026.

The total impact of inflation and FX was amounting for SEK 20 million. And this is the main reason for the sharp decrease on the financials. Going through to our segments, main message of mail France and Services division is that the stronger volume decline and limited price effects in mail combined with the transformation of the telco business, reduced profitability in H1 2026. E-commerce there, the positive revenue and earnings development in Austrian in e-commerce fulfillment, high competition and price pressure in CEC negatively impact earnings. So as we already commented on.

Bank division, there, we see now a sound and profitable course. We did the IT migration of the core banking system. And what we see is that bank division is delivering good results every month. Coming to our solid balance sheet, balance sheet mainly depends on the balance sheet of Bank99. There, we are quite stable. And where I wanted to spend some words on is the equity. Equity declined due to the payout of dividends in April amounting for very close to EUR 124 million. On the other hand, we also did the initial consolidation of a shipment and actors in the fourth quarter of 2026. And this also had a negative impact on the equity.

Coming now to our operating free cash flow. Our maintenance CapEx in the first half of 2026 amounted for EUR 2.4 million. Out of this, about EUR 11 million of green investments for e-mobility and e-charging infrastructure. Operating free cash flow amounting for EUR 116.6 million, gross CapEx of EUR 12.3 million and EUR 59.3 million for the acquisition of even shipment. Coming to the split of our CapEx, 27% of CapEx were done internationally, mainly coming from Budapest and Slovakia, but also for our out-of-home initiative in the currency and 73% were done in Austria, mainly in our logistics hub in Soborg and the initiatives already mentioned on the green investment side.

Green investment with this had come to the kickoff of our initiative. Vienna became the world's first major city with a population of over 1 million to achieve 100% CO2 free last mile delivery. And this -- there, we had a celebration with Ameren, which was really recognized very positively in the media. With this, I want to hand over to Walter.

Yes. Let me close our presentation with the outlook. As already mentioned, we confirm our guidance. that we have already communicated in the last quarters. Overall, the market remains challenging. We don't see immediate relief on the volume decline of mail. However, we see continued volume increase. However, in the second half of the year somewhat burdened and burdened by the levies and taxes that I mentioned. What does that mean in revenues and EBIT on a group level, we aim for a slight revenue increase for the full year despite the mail volume decline. On the mail side, as mentioned, we have implemented a price increase on the premium price product, which should stabilize mail revenues.

And also on a quarter by quarter per quarter comparison, the delta in telecommunication will become smaller for the full year we talk about roughly EUR 20 million in decline versus last year. In e-commerce and logistics, we continue to expect growth for the full year despite the levies however, reduced growth in the second half year. Bank, we more or less expect a continuation of the positive development of the first 6 months.

As Barbara mentioned, we do expect to invest roughly EUR 130 million to EUR 160 million in CapEx in logistics infrastructure, IT and in locker networks. And on the earnings side, we remain committed to target operating earnings in the order of magnitude of recent years. So bandwidth in the order of magnitude of EUR 180 million to EUR 190 million. plus/minus. You may ask the question, where should the improvement come from?

On the 1 hand, we expect improvement from the price increase in the -- on the premium letters. We do expect an improvement in Turkey in the next 6 months coming from product price measures, but also from efficiency measures that we have implemented in the first 6 months, and we have already seen strong impact in June. And third, we do expect support from the acquisitions, which we have made, in particular, on the earnings side from e-commerce fulfillment. Of course, we are living in volatile times and visibility is somewhat constrained. So we continue to see both opportunities and risks.

On the risk side, it is the decline of letter mail volumes and the duties and levies and taxes on parcels where the impact is still unclear. Of course, the currency and the implications on our -- on certain noncash effective accounting positions remains a risk. At the same time, also an opportunity, of course, depending on the development of the Turkish lira. But we also see opportunities basically on the cost side in Eastern Europe, Turkey, but also in Austria.

We are continuously working on inorganic strengthening of our portfolio, and we are in an early phase of negotiations with the federal government. Some of you may remember that we have a dispute around social security contributions way back in the period from 1996 to 2008. All this is fully provisioned. So any positive outcome of negotiation should be positive impact on the cash. So -- we remain cautiously optimistic to again make a little bit -- translate the EBIT guidance into specific numbers. in the last years. We had an EBIT in the order of magnitude or in the range of EUR 188 million up to a few million above EUR 200 million. So that is basically the bandwidth that we guide here. And with that said, thank you very much for your attention, and we now look forward to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] So the first question is from Marco Limite. [Operator Instructions]

[indiscernible]

We can hear you, but we can hardly understand you.

Okay. Sorry for that. First question is on the mines. I appreciate the team mentioned on slide for exposure I'm wondering whether you can provide that exposure by captures your exposure on the volumes well, and whether close out supply as came at a -- that will be my first question.

It was very hard to understand you. I heard the first part of your question, addressing the topic of de minimus. And if I understood it correctly, the question what is the exposure by countries? If that was the question, we have -- in Austria, we -- the Asia share of volumes is around 8%. In Eastern Europe, it's low double-digit figures and the impact in July, and let's really regard it as a very early indication of the short-term impact, and let's not forget, after such a change, there are a few days of technical issues where some systems might not be working, maybe some advanced purchases where people have bought end of June to avoid the 3 years.

So it's very hard to really from the first weeks to project anything into the future. But the impact has been more on -- in the order of magnitude order of 25 below 30% in Austria above that in Eastern Europe. And so for the full group, we are talking about 10% share of Asia parcels that our exposure to volumes and that 10% have decreased to 7% in July. We expect that number to improve, as I said, why? Because first technical issues are being solved. Second, e-commerce platform learned how to handle this and how to optimize the way they show it in the -- during the online buying process and they are also building up inventory and fulfillment centers in Europe, some Chinese customers that have already done that before.

There, we see clear difference. There, the impact is much smaller, if at all visible. So we do expect that Chinese e-commerce platforms will recover from that -- from those losses. May take some time, but we think that after July, we should expect a lower decline that we have seen in July. I don't know if I answered your question because it was really very hard to understand anything.

I will try to speak very slowly for my second question, which is on your main vision you're announcing big or to use price increases on being tenders. Can you clarify how much of your volumes is coming of letters. And then second question is about a round of yellow revenues. Shall we expect allow to get to EUR 7 million revenues already in Q3 or maybe Q4 or maybe next year? What's the indication there.

Thank you, Marco. I think I understood 75%. I think the third question was -- please correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't premium letters, the exposure as you rightly said, there is a significant price increase from EUR 130 to EUR 190. There is a strategic intent behind it, which is to migrate even more volume from the premium letter, which we deliver every day, 5 days a week to the slower product, which we bundle on 2 days per week. We already are in the area of around 85% standard letter share. So 15% share left in the premium letter, and we expect that price measure to further decrease this share on the 1 hand, allowing us to save further costs in bundling and not touching households anymore, in particular, on the country side, on the 3 other days, just to give you an order of magnitude, the average Austrian household today receives once a month a premium letter.

And so we are really in an area where every letter that is not being sense in the premium product helps us to leave out 1 stop for the mailman. And at the same time, of course, EUR 0.60 on EUR 1.30 is a quite significant price increase. And for the -- for Q4, this should also support revenues. And on yellow, to be honest, I did not fully understand the question. I'm guessing it was around the EBIT impact. So last year, we had a ramp down of our Telecom Corporation. So we had EUR 20 million of revenues for the full year, $13 million in the first 7 in the second. This year, we had nothing in Q1 and the ramp-up in the -- starting from Q2. So in Q3, so the delta between the 2 years will become smaller from quarter-to-quarter.

Very last question. Shall we expect the second half in the mansion still to be down year-over-year or the price increases plus Yello ramping up in the second half in is flat around few years

So I would not expect it to rise, but it should be, in relative terms, it should be better than in the first half.

And we now move on to the next participant, Ingo Schmidt.

Thanks for taking and congratulations on this portion in the first half First, on your expansion strategy. The integration of EU shipments is already showing good top line results, and you announced the acquisition of the Express and Serbia. How do additions strengthen your competitive edge in the CEE region compared to local players? And second, regarding the international market environment. You mentioned persistent price pressure in CEE and Turkey as well as new glory hurdles for Asian e-commerce imports.

How much of these post poles do you expect to offset full your July price adjustment? And what is your outlook on Asian parcel volumes for the rest of the year? And finally, on Bank99 performance, after the very strong Q1, the bank segment normalized in Q2 with an EBIT of EUR 1.6 million. How should we think about the underlying earnings trajectory of Bank 99 for H2 given the lower interest rate environment and ongoing customer growth.

Yes. So on bank line, of course, there is some uncertainty as you correctly already implied in your question on the interest rate environment. Overall, we see a rather supporting interest rate environment for the for the next 6 months. And I would say roughly take the first half year and multiplied by 2 roughly. Of course, there is some uncertainty, maybe a little bit lower than that, maybe a little bit higher. Rather, I think 100% is already the upper bandwidth, but overall, we see now a good run rate of, yes, maybe EUR 1.5 million to EUR 2 million per quarter if there are no substantial changes in the interest rate environment.

On the expansion in e-commerce fulfillment. I think if we look strategically at -- we believe in the region, Eastern Europe, we see margins on -- in parcel networks under pressure, in particular, where we do not have a strong market position. We think that is an opportunity for players that offer a broader bundle to less dominant customers. So smaller and medium-sized customers where the strong competition on the carrier side is basically an opportunity. And so therefore, we think this acquisition and the ability to serve with a broader e-commerce offering should help us to strengthen our Eastern European business. And so if you look at it combined to support margins.

And third question on cost pressures and price increases, yes, we are always trying, of course, to compensate cost increases through price increases, the competitiveness of the market environment sometimes makes it difficult. I think in Turkey, and that was where we mentioned price increases. We are quite confident that price increases will help us improve our margins substantially in the second half of the year. In Eastern Europe, I think we do not yet have substantial clarity to provide a very clear guidance at this point in time.

And then I think the final question was on Asian portion volumes outlook, I think I've already talked a lot about that. So there is a little more clarity as visibility is still low, please bear with us that for the third parcel levy that comes in November, we don't even know how it will work. So it's hard to project the impact on parcel volumes. But overall, we think that, again, let me remind you, the exposure of our group to Asian customers is around 10% of our volume. So this is not nothing, but it's 1% and not more.

And we think that the 30% decline that we've seen in July is already at the bottom and it should become better after that because the second fee on Asian parcels across the group will only come in November. It will be EUR 2 smaller than that. And we think by then a lot of customers, Asian platforms will already have adjusted their business model.

I think there was another question on Serbia. So we signed the acquisition, but we are still waiting for me to control clearance. So due to this, we cannot name the effect on our results in the year 2026. On the other hand, this acquisition will, of course, strengthen our position there. .

Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much and all the best for the second half of the year.

And the next participant is Henk Slotboom.

Yes. Is it better? .

Now, we can hear you clearly.

Okay. Perfect. First is a clarification question. I heard you talking about the fulfillment business. Am I right to understand that you see it as part of the Parcels business and not as a potential future 3PL division, let me put it in those phases as a segregated business. So more in the sense of a, call it, I would almost say an end-to-end solution, but that's not the right expression. The second 1 is -- you also mentioned that you saw increased activity from the Chinese marketplaces, building their own or renting their own warehousing in the countries where you are active.

In some countries, we already see that they are taking the next steps. I look at Joy by, for example, they've taken the last mile delivery with Joy Express in the round hands. We see the same with Xero and Gulfo. How do you look at that? Is the arrival of the Chinese in the mid-mile a prelude for more competition from the Chinese on the last 1 as well.

Let me start with the first question of the fulfillment business. So we are very new in this business. And maybe the coming years, it might become a new segment, but for the time being, it will stay within e-commerce and logistics.

And I think the question was also do we -- is our plan to operate -- operationally to integrate that with the last mile carriers. I think the answer is no. I think we -- the value proposition is to be the integrator and to offer the best last mile solution for a given country, and we don't want to weaken that value proposition by a too strong integration with our carrier networks in Eastern Europe. And we see it, let me put it maybe in some other sense, also some kind of hedge with increasing competitive intensity, some of the margin shifts from the carrier networks to level up to the buyers of last mile services. And if you're on the buyer side, you benefit from lower prices, which we see with the U shipments, yes. So the answer is no immediate integration.

And I think in terms of size, this is still far from an own division. On Chinese competition, yes, I think we have to expect everything from Chinese competitors. They certainly do have an ambition to cover additional value chain elements and last mile is an obvious one, but these markets are already quite competitive, competitive and again, the share -- the customer share of Chinese e-commerce platforms is limited. So we have limited exposure to Chinese e-commerce platforms and our intention to strongly increase that is limited.

And we have 1 last remaining participant with a question, Mr. Steiner. We still can't hear you. You are dialed in by phone. So please dial star to me yourself. That seems not to be possible for Mr. Steiner to join unfortunately. We have no more received questions, and therefore, I hand back to Harald Hagenauer.

Yes. So thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for participating in our call on a Friday afternoon. And we hope that all your question could be answered if it's not possible, wasn't possible for acoustic clear. So please send us an e-mail or call us the next day, and we can come back, of course. Thank you very much. Goodbye.

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

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.