Hello and thank you for standing by. My name is Regina and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Syensqo Second Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sherief Bakr, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Regina. Hello everyone and welcome to Syensqo second quarter 2025 earnings call. I'm Sherief Bakr, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today in Brussels by our CEO Ilham Kadri, our CFO Christopher Davis, as well as Peter Browning, President of the Specialty Polymers business unit. Going forward, and in addition to our usual quarterly results discussion, we plan to invite one of our business unit presidents to our earnings call from time to time to provide the investment community with a greater understanding of their business and to participate in our Q&A sessions. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded and will be accessible for replay on the Investor Relations section of our website later today at syensqo.com/investors.
I would also like to remind you that during this call we will be making forward-looking statements regarding our future business and financial performance that are subject to risks and uncertainties. The slides related to this presentation along with today's press release are also available to download from our website. Okay, turning to today's agenda, Ilham will begin with an overview of the quarter with Peter covering the performance of Specialty Polymers. Chris will then go into more details on our financials before turning the call back to Ilham, who will discuss our outlook for the balance of the year. We will then be happy to take your questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ilham.
Thank you Sherief and good afternoon. Good morning to everyone. The second quarter of the year saw us deliver on our outlook in a challenging and uncertain market environment. The combination of our specialty positioning and unique value proposition, strong balance sheet, and ongoing focus on what we can control has, and we expect it will continue to, support our performance as we navigate the elements that are out of our control. In our first 18 months as an independent company, we have made great progress to advance our strategy and strengthen our foundations to support future growth and value creation. In times like these, the separation has enhanced our ability to accelerate change to become leaner, more agile, and to better serve our customers and capture market share.
For example, we are ahead of schedule as we complete our separation from Solvay, running our standalone ERP system since May and taking full ownership of shared service environments. We will be moving faster and further to delayer the organization and to realize our structural cost savings, scaling our hunting culture and sharpening our value proposition to win with customers, which is already translating to incremental growth and market share opportunities. Focusing our investments on attractive growth projects that will create long-term value and advancing our strategy to become a purer play specialty company with a divestment process that is well on track. Turning to the highlights for quarter two, Chris will take you through the details in his remarks, but we had another quarter of resilient pricing and margin performance in our core segments despite the temporary headwinds impacting year-on-year volume growth in Specialty Polymers.
As previously flagged, on a sequential basis, EBITDA of EUR 330 million increased by 8%, resulting in an EBITDA margin of 21.1%, up a healthy 190 basis points versus quarter one, supported by our cost saving programs.
And.
Excluding the Other Solutions segment, which as you know is planned for divestment, our EBITDA margin was above 23%, approximately 200 basis points higher than our overall margin level achieved in quarter two. Sticking with initiatives that are within our control, I'm also pleased with the progress we have made as we complete our separation from Solvay. Overall, we are ahead of schedule, and having successfully completed the key milestone around our standalone digital infrastructure and shared services, we remain fully on track to meet our year-end targets, which will allow us to drive for additional levels of simplification and cost savings. As Chris will discuss, we also completed the EUR 1.2 billion bond issuance, which further enhances our strong liquidity profile. Cash conversion remained healthy at 72%, and we continue to execute our EUR 300 million share buyback program, completing the third tranche.
We are now halfway through the total program and will commence the fourth tranche today. As you can see on slide 6, it has been another busy few months for Syensqo since last quarter's call as we continue to execute our strategy. This has included bringing new and differentiated innovation to support our customers, bringing more sustainable and high-performance solutions across our portfolio, as well as establishing new partnerships with industry leaders, which we believe can also provide new sources of growth. During the quarter, along with our Composite Materials leadership team, I attended the Paris Air Show, meeting with many customers, both existing and new, in the civil S.p.A.ce and defense and advanced air mobility sectors. What was clear was there are strong growth opportunities in all of these sectors. Civil aeroS.p.A.ce has record levels of new orders.
Defense spend is expected to increase significantly across the globe, with opportunities to gain share through new program builds and additional sources of growth in unmanned aircraft vehicles, or UAVs, S.p.A.nning multiple applications. In addition to the significant long-term demand in all of these areas, what struck me was how our innovation is at the core of our customers' needs, how we make any flying object lighter, leading to less fuel consumption, lower CO2 emissions at a lower total cost of ownership. I was also thrilled to announce our new collaboration with Microsoft, which will leverage their leadership in AI-driven innovation with our research and innovation capabilities. Most notably, the partnerships give us early access to Microsoft Discovery in the private preview stage.
In addition to gaining these first mover advantages, we are co-creating an agentic AI-driven innovation first platform that has the potential to transform the way we do science and accelerate our time to market. Before turning the call over to Chris, I wanted to make some high-level comments on our segment's performance in the quarter and I'm happy to be joined today by Peter Browning, the President of Specialty Polymers, to share some insights as well as answer any questions when we get to the Q&A session. As a reminder, Syensqo's mix of revenue and earnings reflects our position as one of the leading pure-play specialty materials companies. In Q2, more than 70% of our EBITDA was generated by our high-margin material segments where we saw a 70 basis points sequential margin expansion, reaching approximately 30%, and despite lower year-on-year volumes, we continue to see stable net pricing.
Composite Materials saw another quarter of strong underlying demand and solid margin performance despite the continued impact of destocking at Boeing. Excluding this, civil aeroS.p.A.ce sales increased by 2% compared to Q2 2024. As a reminder, our exposure to a mix of civil aviation customers, S.p.A.ce and defense applications, and a number of new programs demonstrates the strong value proposition of our range of products as well as a healthy mix of growth drivers. I will now turn the floor over to Peter to take you through Specialty Polymers.
Thank you Ilham and good afternoon everyone. It's my pleasure to have the opportunity to share some insights with you on the Specialty Polymers business and our performance in Q2. As a reminder, Specialty Polymers is Syensqo's highest margin business and our value proposition is based on our ability to work with our customers to solve their toughest application challenges. We use the widest range of high performance polymers and technologies in the industry. We focus on ensuring our customers have the lowest cost of ownership so they can win in their marketplace.
In addition, our end market exposure to attractive growth markets such as lightweighting, electrification and energy efficiency in automotive, ultra high purity materials for semiconductor fab construction, better and safer solutions in healthcare and high performance and the most sustainable solutions for the energy sector give us a compelling opportunity to structurally outgrow the broader market for the years to come. Looking at it in a different way, we're positioned at the very top of the polymer performance pyramid. This is reflected in our industry leadership position and the deep customer relationships we hold, our breadth and depth of innovation capability and our strong and consistent margin performance. Since the separation from Solvay, our customers have appreciated the greater focus that we've been able to bring to them, notably the acceleration of our joint innovation projects.
Turning back to our Q2 performance, we delivered resilient underlying volume growth in a pretty challenging market environment with another quarter of strong margin delivery as Ilham referenced. As expected, the second quarter was impacted by shorter term headwinds in electronics which offset growth in healthcare, food and pharma packaging and even a slight growth in automotive. Excluding electronics, we saw 3% year- on- year volume growth on a sequential basis. Specialty Polymers delivered 7% net sales growth supported by healthy volume growth and stable pricing resulting in an improvement in our gross margin versus the first quarter. As I just mentioned, we saw strong year- on- year growth in healthcare, particularly in biopharma, and our pharma and food packaging businesses continue to show steady growth in electronics.
I was pleased to see that the destocking in our semiconductor foundry construction business is easing, and also strong interest in our proprietary non-fluorosurfactant sealing technologies. This is a market first where we're targeting opportunities in semicon production in really, really demanding industrial applications. This should further extend our leadership position and support long-term growth. Clearly, the external market context remains a challenging one, so we're very much focused on what we can control, bringing new value to our customers as rapidly as possible, leveraging the type of artificial intelligence investments Ilham mentioned to identify new opportunities, and rigorously managing our cost structure. These are all strong foundations to support our faster-to-market growth ambition over the longer term. With that, let me pass you back to Ilham to cover the rest of the businesses, and I look forward to answering any questions you may have.
Thank you, Peter. Turning to Performance and Care, where we delivered 4% year-on-year growth led by Novecare, supported by increased demand in agro and home and personal care. For Technology Solutions, we continue to see growth in mining solutions, again supported by market share improvements at the segment level. The line EBITDA margin exceeded 19% and saw a healthy sequential increase, up 150 basis points. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chris to go through our financial performance in more detail.
Chris.
Perfect. Thank you very much Ilham. Good morning and good afternoon to everyone on the call. As Ilham mentioned, it's fair to say that 2025 has been defined by heightened trade tensions and policy unpredictability, leading to widespread uncertainty and delays in investment as caution takes hold. This has led to different behaviors in customer order patterns, including a wait and see approach which has impacted visibility across the broader value chain. Despite this, I am pleased to report that we finished the second quarter of 2025 slightly above expectations. With that in mind, let us turn to slide 9 which summarizes our second quarter financial results. For the second quarter, net sales totaled EUR 1.6 billion. Volumes were down 3%, primarily due to the expected lower demand in Specialty Polymers and lower volumes in both Composite Materials and Technology Solutions.
I will talk more about the sales drivers of each business segment in a later slide. As I've previously mentioned, we remain committed to defending our gross margins as this reflects our value proposition as a specialty chemicals company and how we manage both our sales and cost of goods sold. In this respect, our gross margin at 32% continues to reflect our specialty value proposition and has improved on a sequential basis driven by a favorable mix of Specialty Polymers sales and continued pricing benefits in Composite Materials over the past six quarters. Since the inception of Syensqo, we have continued to demonstrate our ability to defend pricing and maintain cost discipline over the period, particularly in the materials segment. Regardless of the impact of volumes at EUR 335 million, underlying EBITDA for the second quarter is slightly above expectations.
Turning to operating performance by segment on slide 10, within Specialty Polymers, sales revenue reduced by 9% compared to the prior year. Excluding the translation effect of FX, Specialty Polymers revenue was down 6% primarily due to the expected lower volumes in electronics. However, as Peter referenced, the second half is already showing signs of improved orders into the electronics segment and is in line with our expectations. On the positive side, volumes in the second quarter improved in healthcare and food and pharma packaging applications on the back of market share gains, a return to more normalized buying patterns and a large order in the healthcare S.p.A.ce. Revenue from composite materials at EUR 288 million showed a decrease of 7% compared to the prior year. Excluding the translation effect of FX, composite materials revenue was down 3% primarily due to lower sales to the automotive segment.
It is important to note that the second quarter of 2025 is the third highest sales quarter in U.S. dollars on record since 2019, demonstrating the recent sustained improvement in demand for both civil aeroS.p.A.ce and S.p.A.ce and defense customers. The other highest quarters were the first quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2024, being the two comparables used today. In addition, pricing also continues to remain strong in composite materials despite the expected impact of lower sales to Boeing. Increased sales to other commercial aviation programs and S.p.A.ce and defense applications drove a strong performance in the quarter, with all other civil aeroS.p.A.ce customers increasing their sales year on year. Sales to S.p.A.ce and defense applications improved 2% in the quarter. At this stage, we expect the Boeing destocking to continue into the second half of the year.
The net result in our materials segment is EBITDA of EUR 269 million in the quarter and a strong EBITDA margin at 30%. Novecare delivered sales of EUR 347 million and Technology Solutions sales were EUR 164 million. Within Novecare, agro sales increased 31% year- on- year. Whilst we have seen a shift of product mix to lower margin product in the agrochemicals markets, the end of destocking in the first half of 2024 and the strong recovery in Latin America and EMEA markets has resulted in demand returning to more balanced levels. Home and personal care sales increased 8%, driven by share gains in targeted business across Asia and a rebound in demand from distributor customers in the North American market, with customers opting for lower cost alternatives.
Technology Solutions continues to benefit from new business and customer wins and higher reagent consumption in copper mining, which continues to show growth in this high margin segment. This has been offset by a decline in sales to building and industrial applications in the lower margin polymer additives segment. EBITDA margins in Technology Solutions are the second highest margins in our business and have improved against both the prior year and sequentially as a result of an improved mix of sales to mining activities. The net result is that Performance and Care delivered an EBITDA of EUR 98 million in the quarter and an EBITDA margin of 19% within the Other Solutions segment. EBITDA was EUR 8 million in the quarter with an EBITDA margin of 5%. The net effect of what I've just described is reflected on slide 11.
As mentioned on the previous slide, stronger volumes were experienced in a number of sectors including healthcare, food and pharma packaging, agro, home and personal care, and mining applications compared to the prior year. That said, the lower volumes in electronics is the single largest driver at a Syensqo Group level of the year-on-year decline in EBITDA. Whilst Composite Materials is lower on the back of strong comparables, the business continues to perform well with improving demand across all customer applications. Absent the lower sales volumes in electronics, Specialty Polymers volumes improved year on year, reflecting the shorter-term headwinds in semicon foundry construction activity within materials. Cost savings resulted in a reduction in fixed costs in the quarter. The net result is a decline of EBITDA of EUR 22 million in the Materials segment compared to the second quarter of 2024.
In Performance and Care, strong sales from Technology Solutions and Novecare were offset by higher input costs, most notably oleochemicals, as well as higher labor costs within Novecare. This resulted in a year-on-year EBITDA decline of EUR 11 million in the second quarter of 2025. Other Solutions declined by EUR 12 million compared to the prior period. The net result is EBITDA of EUR 335 million for the quarter, which includes an adverse variance of EUR 12 million year- on- year associated with a stronger euro against our basket of currencies including the U.S. dollar. As a reminder, the impact of the EUR 12 million from FX is based on a prior year comparable rate of $1.08 to the euro compared to our second quarter actual of 1.14. As we entered 2025, our assumption for 2025 was an exchange rate of 1.05.
Where we stand today, rates have increased to around 1.17 with some market participants predicting rates as high as 1.2 for the remainder of the year. This impact is purely translational for Syensqo. Turning to capital expenditure, our total capital expenditure for the quarter was EUR 113 million, bringing the capital expenditure for the first half of the year to EUR 289 million. This remains in line with our expectations and in line with our updated capital expenditure envelope of less than EUR 600 million for the year. Included within the EUR 113 million is growth capital expenditure of EUR 63 million primarily related to spend on the Specialty Polymers facility in Tavaux, France, the Galden capacity expansion in Specialty Polymers in Spinetta, Italy, as well as automation and capacity debottlenecking in Composite Materials.
As a reminder, 2025 is expected to be a peak year of capital investments driven by significant spend on the Tavaux site and the transition to a separate digital and IT infrastructure from Solvay. Our focus going forward is therefore on leveraging our existing S.p.A.re capacities that we have today to meet future volume growth. This requires no additional capital expenditure. Secondly, investing in smaller and faster organic growth opportunities where the market exists and where we are at capacity, thereby accelerating our strategy. This includes increased investment in adhesives capacity and Composite Materials, debottlenecking our Welland plant to increase capacity for mining customers, and an increase in capacity of Galden to service semiconductor demand in Specialty Polymers. These are areas where we are winning and finally our focus will be on maintaining our investment grade credit rating and rewarding shareholders in line with sustainable cash generation.
As indicated, we have updated our capital expenditure guidance to be less than EUR 600 million in 2025. Given the limited visibility in the current environment, we will remain disciplined and agile, carefully managing capital expenditure and cash to balance our shorter term targets with longer term value creation. Where we are winning and where the returns are compelling, we will continue to invest and where they aren't, we won't. Moving to operating cash flows on slide 13, the generation of strong operating cash flows remains a key focus for the business. Consistent with historic practice, the operating cash flows in the second quarter were impacted by the annual payments of employee incentives in respect of the prior financial period of some EUR 120 million and an absorption of EUR 63 million into trade working capital in the quarter.
The net result is that operating cash flows for the quarter was a positive EUR 20 million, bringing the last 12 months cash flow from operating activities to EUR 751 million and a cash conversion of 72%. Free cash flow to shareholders for the quarter was a - EUR 67 million. As Ilham will outline later in the presentation, our expectation for free cash flow for the full year is approximately EUR 350 million. As we approach the final quarter of 2025, we expect a meaningful reduction in trade working capital, in particular inventory as we slow down production in the face of the current demand environment. This is expected to result in a release of well over EUR 100 million in cash and will be most noticeable in the latter part of the year.
Additionally, and as disclosed in the financial report with the recent dismissal by the Italian Supreme Court of Edison S.p.A.'s appeal, we expect to receive a further EUR 90 million in the second half of the year for losses, damages, and costs that were awarded in Syensqo's favor. These two items along with the second half earnings are expected to support a significant improvement in cash generation in the second half of the year, aligned with our outlook of full year free cash flow to shareholders of approximately EUR 350 million. As I said in the first quarter of the year, 2025 remains a year of transition from a cash perspective. With the separation from Solvay in late 2023, there remain separation costs to be incurred so that Syensqo can operate as an independent company.
As we head into 2026, the situation will improve significantly with reduced spend on separation activities and a finalization of growth capital being spent on the Tavaux site. Together these account for more than EUR 200 million of cash outflow in 2025 that will not repeat in 2026 and beyond. Turning to our financial position, I am pleased to report that we continue to have a strong balance sheet with our net debt at EUR 2.2 billion, a gearing ratio of 26%, and a leverage ratio of 1.7x . The increase in net debt is fully aligned with prior comparable periods with the second quarter historically impacted by the timing of the payment of the annual dividend and variable compensation in respect of the prior financial year. Both gearing and leverage ratio are expected to improve in the second half of the year as it did in the prior financial period.
We continue to have strong levels of liquidity available as demonstrated by the EUR 1.7 billion of undrawn committed bank facilities and a further EUR 1.3 billion of cash on hand as at 30 June 2025. Finally, I'm pleased to report that in the second quarter of the year we successfully closed our second senior bond issuance of EUR 1.2 billion split in two tranches, namely EUR 600 million with a six-year maturity and EUR 600 million with a ten-year maturity. The ratings of the bonds are aligned with our corporate ratings, being BBB and Baa1 with S&P and Moody's respectively. The transaction was met with strong interest, with the participation of more than 125 institutional investors and an order book that was more than four times oversubscribed, thereby allowing us the opportunity to tighten pricing on the day.
The net result is not only do we have a strong balance sheet with low levels of gearing, but also a balanced debt maturity profile. With that, I'll now hand you back to Ilham. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Chris. Looking into the balance of the year, there is clearly a lot of uncertainty in the world. Based on current information, we continue to believe that the combination of our balanced regional footprint and mitigation actions positions us to see a limited direct impact from tariffs. Nevertheless, as referenced by Chris, a number of industries are facing increased demand challenges and uncertainty, which has also impacted near-term visibility across value chains. Our focus continues to be on what we can control to navigate the short term, strengthen our foundations for future growth, and accelerate our transformation to become a purer play specialty company. Turning to our outlook for the balance of the year, the high-level takeaway is that based on the assumptions we shared at the end of February, our 2025 outlook is unchanged as shown on the left-hand side of the slide.
However, with better visibility into the impact of FX and tariffs than we had versus last quarter's call, we have now updated our outlook to reflect current FX rates. Unexpected impacts of tariffs, which we estimate to be approximately EUR 100 million split roughly two-thirds on FX and one-third on tariffs. As a result, our outlook is now as follows. Underlying EBITDA of approximately EUR 1.3 billion, CapEx to be below EUR 600 million, and free cash flow of approximately EUR 350 million for the second half of the year. As both Peter and Chris mentioned, we continue to expect the easing of headwinds in semiconductors. While we started to see the benefits of cost savings in quarter two, we continue to expect this to become more visible in the second half.
In closing, the second quarter saw us deliver on our outlook with improved margin in our core segments, supported by our strong value proposition and focus on what we can control, a combination we believe will serve us well as we navigate the coming quarters and position us for future profitable growth. With that, we are ready for your questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Ilham. We'll now move to the Q and A session, and I kindly invite you to limit yourself to one question and one follow-up and to rejoin the queue as necessary in order to allow more analysts to ask their questions. Regina, can we please have our first question?
Our first question will come from the line of Nicholas Whitting with Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to dig into the outlook basically for the electronics and how is that sort of shaping up for the rest of the year, and if you could comment on that regionally please, that'd be great.
Yeah, thank you, Nicola. The question was on electronics and auto.
Yeah'
Electronics.
Electronics. Okay, in electronics, and you know, Peter is with us and I'm sure there will be more questions. Semicons in H2 are expected to improve versus the first half, driven by the end of destocking we've seen. You know, we've been talking about destocking for a while as our key semiconductors customers are expected to take full contract volume as we speak. With that, we expect Specialty Polymers to have a stronger second half. We expect resilience margin performance to continue, supported by our strong value proposition. This is Nicola, not a wishful thinking. Maybe Peter, you can tell our audience that this is real and you see the first orders coming in.
Yeah, sure. Within semiconductors we're heavily exposed to foundry construction, and we've got really quite good insight on the sellout of our major customers, so often in applications like ultra high purity water piping systems. It's that sellout and that understanding of the inventory of those customers that leads us to confidence in our second year growth outlook. Back to you.
Ilham.
Thank you. Back to you, Sherief.
Next question, please.
Our next question comes from the line of Geoff Haire with UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. It's really good help. I just want to ask a question about the materials business. Since the formation of Syensqo, the margins in the business have declined on a year-on-year basis, I think with the exception of Q4 last year. Certainly from the commentary you've provided, it seems to be mainly coming from pressure in specialty polymers. I was wondering if Peter could sort of help us by, I know you won't give us the exact numbers, but if you could help us understand where the margin profile is in specialty polymers relative to history, peak, trough, or has there been any structural changes in the business which means that margins are structurally lower. I've got another question after that.
Thank you very much, Geoff, maybe I'll start. It's a good question. Let me start and then Peter, you can jump in on Specialty Polymers. If I go back to full year 2023, the EBITDA margin in our material segments were around 33% compared to around 30% in quarter 2. Right. Those are the facts. Unpacking this a bit, Geoff, we have seen higher growth in Composite Materials and despite the improvements in their margin, obviously this had an unfavorable mixed impact on the segment's margin given that Specialty Polymers, as you all know, has a larger margin than Composite Materials. Maybe Peter, you can go through the Specialty Polymers piece.
Yeah, sure Ilham. Within Specialty Polymers, it's really a question of mix. Our net pricing over the activity has been very sticky, resilient. We have given back some pricing, we've got some benefits from raw materials, but we've really focused on keeping our percent gross margin. I think looking forward, what we see is a really quite interesting opportunity in terms of operating leverage as and when our volumes return, because we've already spent CapEx to build capacity. We have the assets in place and we should be able to serve additional demand, which will translate through into quite healthy incremental margins.
Geoff, do you have a follow-up?
I just also wanted to ask a question. Sorry. In your introductory remarks you talked about the work you've done at Syensqo since the formation 18 months ago and you talked about value creation. Could you outline a little bit more about what the value creation is you've seen in the last 18 months?
Thank you, Geoff. I mean it's a startup company, you know, with the legacy, but still 18 months, you know, of existence. What we've done is really separate from Solvay. I know this is a hidden part of the job. It's the plumbing, it's the infrastructure. You didn't see it and we didn't want you to see it. It's so critical for standing up, you know, a company. What we've done is separating our ERP system, IT, IS, and GBS. We hired 800 people in 500 days, believe it or not, to separate fully. We accelerate the separation in tough markets because you know, we can double down and that is allowing us now, as we engage in the second half, to engage in the new operating system by delaying our organization further, simplifying it quicker than by the end of this year, preparing for 2026.
We also focus obviously on our research and innovation. We've been reviewing our pipeline. We told you that we moved to more archetypes which are, you know, short, faster than longer term. This has been done, you know, in the company. We focus on our capital investments and you've seen us, you know, outside Tavaux, which will end up this year. We move to fast and quick and high returns type of capital investment and actually some of them are actually going to Galden, for example, on GenAI and semicon from specialty polymers or the bottleneck in the mining solution. The hunting, hunting culture, right, is not easy.
We're not here because it's easy and turning our company to more entrepreneurship and you know, it's good actually to do it and start a new company in a tough environment because that, you know, pushes management to really reform, reform faster and focus once we control our costs, our relationship with our customers, and discipline capital allocation. Back to you.
Next question, please.
Our next question comes from the line of Aron Ceccarelli with Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hello, good afternoon. Have a question on specialty polymers. Given your broad portfolio in specialty polymers, perhaps one of the broadest in the market, would you consider M&A as a strategy to strengthen your position in a specific polymer or to expand to new markets? The follow up to that is we've seen Victrex adopting more aggressive pricing strategy in a bid to drive volume growth. How is Syensqo responding to this? Thank you.
M&A, let me start and maybe we'll talk about the PEEK. Right. Peter, if you can prepare yourself. I think we've been very disciplined in the past year, six years, all over about M&A. I think we had a history of M&As specifically in Specialty Polymers. I remind you in the past 20 years Specialty Polymers doubled its revenues through M&A first and then organically. We've been very disciplined for the reason that we were a mixed bag. Separating from Solvay made us a purer player. We are still, you know, considering divesting, as you know, non-core, which will make us even purer. We have a lot of organic opportunities, Aron, right, in our organization.
You've seen, you know, building capacity in Specialty Polymers, in mining, composite materials is a fabulous opportunity in defense application where budgets are being doubled, right, in Europe or India, where I visited India just a few weeks ago. There are a lot of organic opportunities where we have the talent, the competencies, and the cash, right, to put there. Peter on PEEK.
Yeah. Thank you, Ilham, and thanks for the question, Aron. I think that it's important to see our business as a collection of segments, and we're really focused on delivering differentiated value through innovation in specific market segments. Whilst of course we make PEEK, Victrex make PEEK, we don't really compete head on in the new business that we're doing. We build strong customer intimacy and a unique value proposition. I think that's a general way of looking at our business. What we're trying to do is bring our investment in R&I to solve the problems of our customers. We work with those customers really closely to co-develop solutions, and we make those solutions work, and that builds an extremely strong customer loyalty and makes it very difficult for someone else to penetrate those businesses using pricing as a tool.
Back to you, next question.
Our next question.
Our next question comes from the line of Chetan Udeshi with JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Chetan, your line might be muted.
Yeah, it was.
Thanks.
Hello all. First question I had was if I look at your guidance, you know, it sort of implies H2 flattish versus H1 more or less. We know Q4 is seasonally, you know, weaker just because of number of days. Does that imply that you are expecting third quarter to be sequentially better than second quarter? Maybe if you can help us with the phasing between Q3 and Q4 that you have assumed in your full year guidance. Overall, the second question was a bit more strategic, I would say. Ilham, you've talked a number of times, not today, but you know, in the past about, you know, getting that hunting spirit within your sales team to grow the business.
I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, your volumes don't show that, you know, and maybe it takes time, but I just wanted to compare and contrast and know Peter is on the call, so this is a good question for him as well. You know, EMS-Chemie is the benchmark for specialty polymers industry, at least in terms of margins. When I look at their volumes, their margin development over the last 12 months, they've been able to grow volumes, they've been able to improve margins, and that's what probably some would argue the hunting sort of success is visible. I'm just curious, where are you in that curve of hunting for new business and when do we actually see the upside from that?
Yeah, thank you Chetan, great questions. Let me start with the phasing maybe, or you want Chris to do it? Let's Chris talk a bit.
Okay. Just looking at our phasing and our full year, given all the geopolitical uncertainty and dynamics around tariffs, I think it's pretty fair to say that it'd be difficult to be precise at this time. What you can appreciate is that volumes can flow from one quarter to the next. On this call, what we've deliberately done is updated our full year outlook and we expect EBITDA to be approximately EUR 1.3 billion. I think you need to also keep in mind that in the second half of the year, we expect our results to benefit from two primary drivers, one being the end of destocking in semiconductors that Peter spoke about, which we can already see in our order books and should drive around a EUR 40 million tailwind to the second half of the year versus the first.
Secondly, the phasing of cost savings, which are balanced to the second half. However, as we've pointed out today, this will be offset by FX and tariffs. As we've explained, in this environment, with all the uncertainty, orders can flow from one quarter to another and we're actively engaged with customers to really get a better view on the shape of the second half, especially in Specialty Polymers. Right now our focus is really on delivering the targets for the full year that we have set and we're ready to meet potential changes in demand should they materialize.
Yeah. On your second question, Chetan, which is indeed a good one and as you said, the hands-in culture is not that easy. It's painful but easier to restructure and manage what you control like costs. You know the hunting culture, any culture takes time. We are not here because it's easy. Let me tell you what I'm doing as CEO and maybe Peter, prepare yourself as the President of the Specialty Polymers GBU to respond. Establishing a hands-in culture, what does it mean? It takes training, it takes rehiring, it takes building accounts management processes and enhancing for new accounts, which we are doing. All of our senior leaders, the top 30, are now sponsors of customers or non-customers to really get that hands-in mindset with the salesforce but also at the top of the company. We're using Syensqo.
This is our GenAI sales bot we launched in May, which is growing in scale by the way in the automotive sector. We prioritize actually Peter's business and we are rolling it out globally. It takes time. Maybe Peter, you can give our audience a bit of color and examples on the hands-in culture within your business.
Yeah, thanks Ilham. Just a starting observation that our overall portfolio is a bit different from that of EMS-Chemie, but nevertheless I think when we look at something that's comparable, we would be comfortable that we've outperformed the underlying auto market in the first half of the year.
You know them well because you competed with them in your engineering times.
Exactly. I've been competing with them for about 15 years now because in the engineering plastics business I was really head on with them. When we look about hunting, first of all we've created the opportunity for our salespeople to sell things. We've doubled our compounding in China, we've expanded in North America. Every week every one of our salespeople is in a weekly win room sessions moving opportunities forward. Every one of the visit reports that our salespeople put in the system, I'm reading, I'm interacting with them, I'm speaking with all my Commercial Directors every month and I think we're pretty clear as an organization about where our priority is and this is absolutely what it is.
Chap.
You also change the incentives and have campaigns on one more deal, and you know there are lots of cool things going on. We can share offline.
Thanks.
Back to you.
Next question, please.
Our next question comes from the line of Katie Richards with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I had one on the destocking impact at Boeing. You're saying that this might continue into the second half of the year. I also saw that Boeing itself is facing the possibility of another strike, this time affecting some of its defense lines which I believe Syensqo supplies to the F/A-18 if I'm correct. I just wanted to hear from you about whether there was any read across to Syensqo here and the delay in the recovery.
Thank you, Katie. As you mentioned, we heard the CEO of Boeing who has indicated that company is managing the situation, noting that the scope of the potential strike is much smaller than obviously the last year one we all remember. Regarding our exposure, Katie, to this site is very small and it's catered. There are several programs by the way, not only the F/A-18, there is the 777X, the F15, and the MQ25. Its exposure remains very small. We currently don't expect this to have much of an impact on us. Back to you.
I'm happy to deal with the question about the destocking in the second half of the year. I think you've seen within composite materials we had a really strong first quarter and even our second quarter of this year was very strong. There will be a delay into the second half of the year, but we don't believe that over the full course of the year the delta is going to be far different from what we described at the beginning of the year. It's all good for the full year basis.
Great, thank you.
Next question, please.
Our next question comes from the line of Thomas Wrigglesworth with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. My first question is aimed at Peter, really. In terms of looking at the business two to three years out in terms of the end market and products that you'll sell versus, say, the last five years, what are you expecting to see as the big changes? Is it this semiconductor rollout that's really going to change, and is there a wide variance in margins between the end markets that you serve? Is a semiconductor solution a higher margin solution on average than a solution you might sell to automotive or a consumer electronics product? That's my first question.
Yeah, go ahead, Peter.
Okay, thanks Tom. Interesting questions. If we look five years out, what I would expect to see being a bigger part of our portfolio. First of all, electrical vehicles, substantial driver, really strong tailwind for this business over a longer term period. Secondly, I'd expect to see significantly more in semicon. That business is cyclical, but there's a great underlying growth trend. Lastly, I think there's a really meaningful opportunity to continue developing the business in healthcare. In terms of the margin structure between those three businesses, we really focus on applications which are challenging and complex, and we tend to earn strong margins in each of the businesses in which we participate. I'm not sure you should expect to see a significant difference.
Okay, thank you, thank you very much for that.
The good news is the diversification of your portfolio not only in terms of technologies but in terms of markets we serve. There was a name of formidable competitor EMS-Chemie which brings us to compounding. We are high performance polymer makers but we do also compounding. Maybe you can explain what we are doing in China, for example, in India.
Yeah, no, there's a couple of really good emerging market things. I think the first thing is we've tried to put all the decision making for our Chinese business in China, so we're quick, we're reactive, and we can seize opportunity. On India, it's an interesting production location, it's low cost, there's great technology, great competency there, and it's a really interesting basis for export as well as being a fast-growing market in its own domain. I think what we've tried to do is set the local teams free so they can build a business whilst providing them support on leading edge innovation and access to capital they need to grow.
Interesting color. I can ask a separate second question on the cost savings which we're now starting to see emerge. I'm going to dangerously join two dots. It looks like SG&A was down around EUR 50 million year over year and in your bridge on your EBITDA corporate costs improvement is up EUR 15 million. As we think about, I'm just trying to kind of get a sense of the phasing of the EUR 200 million fixed cost savings that are going to come through by 2026. Also, what's kind of going to come through in the second half, am I joining the right dots? That is, we're getting a kind of 30% drop through now from the headline number to the actual profit improvement. Secondly, you know, what do we see in the second half?
I mean, Christopher Davis touched on it but didn't actually give us a number for the second half in terms of the cost savings.
Yeah, so what we've always said is it would be EUR 200 million run rate by the end of 2026. Obviously, we said that equates to three years of inflation. Just to give people a sense of the magnitude, the lowest level of that savings will be 2025. We always said it was back-end weighted in 2025. The second half of the year, where we said there would be a EUR 40 million uplift as a result of savings, we got some of that in quarter two. You're right. You can see it in the corporate savings. Some of it relates to reduced spend in R&I, that's our cost savings program, and some of it relates to lower labor costs, and there's an element of timing on that.
Our final question will come from the line of Matthew Yates with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hey, afternoon everyone. Thanks for having Peter on the call. I think everyone's found that incredibly useful. Two quick ones. Can you clarify the lower polymer pricing in autos? Is that net pricing or is that raw mat pass through? The second question, just on Other Solutions, you've got profits down, let's call it 50% either year on year or sequentially. Is that a function of the end markets or is there an issue here that the assets have become somewhat orphaned? There's an issue around sort of morale and performance in this interim period where you review your strategic options. Thank you.
Yeah, no, I mean let me start with the second one and Peter, you can answer. You know the Specialty Polymers and the auto pricing. No, there is, I mean listen, when a business is under our roof, it stays under our roof with the same care and there non core doesn't mean that, you know, these businesses are not good businesses. They are good businesses in the right hands of the right owners that are going to thrive. The process is on. Our people are fully, you know, committed to do that. We knew what's going on and I think you know the symptoms of some of them since a while. Even when I joined Solvay on the oil and gas and the shale gas and the aroma specifically on the commodities side. Nothing new. I think the team did really a good job.
We isolated them, we fix them, we restructured them and now they are in the processes on track to get them exit our business on the Specialty Polymers and the auto pricing.
Yeah, in terms of pricing, I think we're really not a pass-through pricing type of business. We try to be a little bit more intelligent than that, and we try to work out where we have additional pockets of value we can capture and where it's better for us to give some pricing up in order to gain share. I think over the first half of the year, as you've seen, we've seen quite a pleasing trend on gross margin. At least from my perspective, we're doing pretty well on that.
I must congratulate Peter and the team, and I think the audience remembers that. The stickiness on nets, on pricing, and the net pricing, which we've been socializing with you for a while. On the specialty polymer side and the specialty businesses in general, this is how I measure the specialties, on net pricing and the gross margin. Back to you, Sherief.
Thank you. I believe we have no further questions. That ends our session for today. Thank you for your participation and good questions. As usual, the Investor Relations team will be here to answer any remaining questions that you have. Have a good day.
Thank you.
That will conclude today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.