Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call, results for the Q1 2026. I am Matilde, the Conference Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Claudia Kellert. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to our today's conference call. We would like to give you an overview about the business development of the first three months in 2026 and a short overview on the current sentiment today. Andreas Klein, our CEO, and Thomas Dippold, our CFO, will lead the presentation and will answer your questions. Let's start. I hand over to Thomas Dippold for the financials.
Hello, everybody. This is Thomas. It's my pleasure and my privilege to guide you through the results for the first quarter. As a summary, we can clearly state that our top line, as we already anticipated, and I think as everybody of you joining this call already know, is influenced to a large extent by discontinued unprofitable businesses activities, which we closed down in the course of the year 2024, and therefore we cannot repeat this unprofitable sales in this year. We also suffer in some sales drops in Graphite Solutions and also Process Tech. The three effects all in all stand for, which you can see on this slide here on slide number 3.
They stand for a reduction of our group sales of EUR 50 million or 21.3%, coming from EUR 234 million in the first quarter last year to EUR 184 million this year. As I said, EUR 28 million are clearly can be attributed to the discontinuation of the carbon fiber activities in Lavradio and Moses Lake, which we closed roughly at half year 2025. In Graphite Solutions, we still see weak demand from our silicon carbide customers. Their inventory levels are still very high. However, what we're trying to do there is on an individual customer basis, we try to renegotiate with them in a partnership way, some specific adjustment of the CVD contracts.
One of them is already in Q1, but I come to that when we talk about Graphite Solutions in particular. For the first time since four years, the continuous growth, at least in profitability and a stable, roughly stable sales platform, also Process Tech suffered a severe downturn in the market. We have anticipated that also in a way. We had always, as you remember that in the second half of last year, already a declining book-to-bill ratio, and this now kicks in and therefore also our sales in Q1 for Process Tech suffer. These three factors influence our top line.
However, we managed to keep the EBITDA pre on a group level in, I think, a moderate way, in just a moderate decline. Our EBITDA drops by EUR 4 million coming from EUR 33.5 million in the Q1 2025. In the first three months of this year, we reached EUR 29.6 million. It's a decline by 11.6%, which is less than the decline in our top line. Where does it come from? We have lower contributions, of course, from the high-margin silicon carbide business in Graphite Solutions. We have lower contributions from Process Technology, where in the past, you remember that, we also saw margins of about 25% and beyond.
We can compensate that with continuous cost saving and our ambition to keep the cost intact. Our EBITDA pre-margin increased to, I think, a very healthy 60% for a company which is so capital intensive like us. This is exactly as we predicted Q1 and which is exactly in line with our guidance. We come to that later in the next chapter. Now on slide number 5, coming to the individual business units, Graphite Solutions, as I already just pointed out, suffers a 8.8% decline in the top line, which stands for EUR 10 million coming from EUR 116 million last year to now EUR 106 million.
This is influenced in the top line in sales, in EBITDA and also in cash, by one settlement with one of our CDP silicon carbide customers, where we anticipate future sales in the course of the year and make it already a payment right now. We kind of anticipate future sales, but also have a kind of a breakup fee in that, where we adjust the conditions of the contract. There's maybe more to come, Andreas will talk about that later in the chapter when we talk about guidance and outlook and strategy. As I said, we are still suffering from a sluggish demand in silicon carbide customers.
The other markets that we see there are also burdened by some difficult macroeconomic environments. You know that our GDP is hardly growing. You know how the overall economic situation in Europe in particular, but also worldwide in general, looks like. Therefore, there's no real spark that our sales go into an opposite direction if we leave out the small modular reactors, but they're also part of the strategy, and they also touch the latest status on that in this chapter. EBITDA-wise, I think we also managed it quite well that our EBITDA dropped only from 21.6 million last year in the first three months to Q1 2026, EUR 18.4 million . This year, which is minus 14.8% or -EUR 3 million .
The negative impact comes from the decline in the high-margin silicon carbide product, which hit then the bottom line over proportionally. We try to, yeah, do our best in order to keep our cost in the right way. I think, if you see the decline in the margin only from 18.5% last year to 17.3%, I think this is a remarkable achievement when you see that your super high margin business goes down in a way as it does in Graphite Solutions. Coming to Process Tech, as I said, for the first time, since many years, we have to report a major decline in sales and also EBITDA for this business unit. Where does it come from?
We see a postponement and a lot of uncertainty in the meantime in the chemical industry. Even a lot of maintenance projects and also some overhauls and parts and service business is really declining significantly for us. Other investment projects where somebody builds up a new synthesis plant or a heat exchanger really came to a standstill and everybody's waiting that the bottleneck gets solved, and we have a little bit more visibility and clarity whether or not these investments are really viable. Our order intake also in the first three months stays below our sales. This is also for the next months, we don't expect a real recovery.
When you look at our overall performance in the first three months of the year, then we are coming down from EUR 36.5 million to EUR 25.5 million, which is a EUR 30 million decline, 30% decline, sorry for that, or - EUR 11 million in our top line. This is really remarkable, how hard it hit us in Q1. This, of course, also hits our bottom line as this is a project business, and we only are left with some fixed costs. Our profitability declines by 62%, coming from EUR 11 million to now EUR 4 million. The absolute impact with - EUR 7 is not that much, given the impact on the group.
Relatively, of course, for Process Technology, this is a big decline that we're trying to fight against in the upcoming months. The margin is now 16.1, which is not bad at all, given the historic averages that we've seen. Of course, in the past, in the last 2, 3 years, we had a very special economic situation for us, where we had margins above 25% and beyond. We always said that 18 is a very good margin, and I think we came close to that, and maybe we can recover a little bit in the course of the year. Now, for the first time, I can introduce our business unit, Fiber Composites.
As you probably can remember, we merged our remaining carbon fiber activities with a Composite Solutions business unit starting from January 1st. With the start of the new year, 2026, we only have Fiber Composites. In the end, you can just add those two business units together. There's hardly inter-business unit consolidation effect. In the end, you just can add the two together. This is more or less the right figure. There we see also the impact from the discontinued business, which I started my presentation with. We are coming from EUR 76.6 million, first three months last year, now to EUR 47.7 million. This is a decline by EUR 29 million. I said EUR 28 million is the decline of the discontinued businesses of the carbon fiber.
More or less, this is now the new normal that they roughly have EUR 50 million in a normalized and like-for-like activity. This is a decline by EUR 37.7 million. As I said, the big chunk of it comes from the discontinuation of the unprofitable businesses of carbon fiber. The profitability, however, increased significantly. There are many factors in that. On the one hand side, we are only left with the profitable remains of the carbon fiber business. We have a steady and healthy Composite Solutions business, which also pays in for that. Also our BSCCB JV, which is consolidated at equity, contributed EUR 4 million to that. If you exclude the EUR 4 million, then our new business unit has a operative result of EUR 5 million.
This is roughly a 10% operative margin. If you include BSCCB, then it's 18.9%. I think it's a super healthy recovery that we've seen, and I think it was a very stringent and consequent restructuring that we did last year. I think the result of that can be seen now where we are only left with profitable businesses there. Maybe a quick look on the bottom line of the P&L, the cash flow, and maybe also some balance sheet figures. Our net result turned positive last year. In the first three months of the year, we were left with -[ EUR 6 million, which was thanks to the fact that we had EUR 60.6 million restructuring and one-off cost in the Q1. There are also some purchase price allocation depreciation there.
When you look at in our quarterly report, you see EUR 17.7, if I'm not mistaken. Now we see EUR 5.9 million. It's a big turnaround by EUR 12 million, from - 6 to + 6. I think this is the other strong message. We only are left with EUR 1.4 million restructuring and one-off cost in Q1. This is exactly what we told you three weeks ago when we presented our full year figures for 2025. The restructuring is over to a large extent. We only have some couple of smaller remains which we digest in the course of the year. When you see that the Q1 is only affected by EUR 1.4 million, I think this clearly underlines what we said three weeks ago.
Our free cash flow is again positive and increasing from EUR 5.1 million to EUR 6.4 million like for like, despite the fact that last year we also had some cash-wise restructuring costs. But we expect the free cash flow to be on the level of last year also for the, for your full year figures, so we are on a good way to achieve that. Last but not least, thanks to the good free cash flow, our net financial debt declines a little bit again. We have a very healthy leverage ratio of 0.7. Our equity ratio is getting closer to 40%.
Again, we are at 39.5, and the ROCE is roughly 10%. I think these are very steady and solid figures that we can report there. For the outlook and the guidance, I hand over to Andreas, who will lead through that chapter.
Thank you very much, Thomas, and also a warm welcome from my side. You know the guidance just a couple of weeks ago, in the next slide. You even know that slide is EUR 720 million to EUR 770 million sales level we guided, leading to an EBITDA pre of EUR 110 million-EUR 130 million. However, I would like to highlight two topics in the assumptions part of that slide because they have been particularly reconfirmed in the last couple of weeks. It's number one, the assumption of an overall weak economic development and uncertain geopolitical environment. Of course, we all know that this has been underlined by the ongoing Middle East conflict, the Strait of Hormuz developments and also recently the further tariff activities.
Overall, all paying into ongoing uncertainty and of course, for many of our industries, for many of our customers, that's a negative development because it doesn't enable our customers to take the decisions needed. The second thing I would like to highlight is that we do not foresee a recovery in the semiconductor and automotive sector for 2026 yet. This has been confirmed by the development in Q1, and further customer discussions and of course, also the uncertainty and the tariff developments paying into the automotive sector doesn't help the downstream demand for these applications. Digging a little bit deeper, in the next slide, I would like to give you some more details on the current sentiment and how we see it.
As already mentioned, we see ongoing high uncertainty, especially in automotive and chemicals, impacting basically all our three business units, as already commented for the Q1 performance by Thomas. We see availability and prices of raw materials and energy negatively impacting key markets. That's adding to the uncertainty and the weak economic development we were already seeing. Of course, that's a lot driven by the developments in the Middle East. However, we are quite relaxed on the cost side in the short term, because a rather nice hedging rate for the year 2026 and also constructive discussions with customers to forward these cost impacts in the chain should be able to limit the effects from the cost side as much as possible.
In the area of defense, that's the third point, commenting on the current sentiment. We see the budgets feeding slowly through the chains. E specially in the, in the Western government hemisphere, all these big funds are arriving at the primes in the defense industry. They're feeding through the tier 1 and tier 2 steps. This is what we need to create the certainty and the commitment for us to finally ramp up that business in the area of defense and generate contribution from that business as anticipated in our strategy 2030 plan. What do we focus on at the moment in light of these developments? We mentioned one example already from the semiconductor side that impacted already Q1.
We are in negotiations with our silicon carbide customers, with the CDP customers, to bridge the situation we are currently in together with still high inventories in the chain, although we see them continuously decreasing. Bridging from that situation in a sustainable long-term cooperation and the growth future we foresee for silicon carbide as an important demand driver for SGL. The second thing is we are expanding project development in the defense sector. A lot of network cooperation activity in the highlighted applications fields in defense from our strategy work. These discussions, that networking, that intensification leads now to piloting steps and a step-by-step ramp up of that business, hopefully, having the potential to impact 2027.
As you know, for this year, we didn't take into account any more significant contributions from defense yet. Last but not least, this is for sure the, yeah, the most present activity, with a rather short-term impact. You know that from the publication, from the announcement we did in January. We are working intensely on ramping up the full value chain. It's quite a long value chain in our network for the X-energy projects, and the orders we had received. We are operationally well on track in that regard, and this is why we can also here reconfirm the impact of the $100 million over the next three years from these orders.
The three focus areas, to the right side of this slide, they are all paying into SGL Growth 2030. We can clearly confirm we are intensifying the implementation activities for the long-term strategy. We consider ourselves to be well on track to leverage the potential as soon that is possible in the respective markets. Many thanks for your interest, we are looking forward to your questions now.
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At the moment, I don't see any questions. It seems that our press release and quarterly statements are very clear in our messages. I think we give you an additional minute or so to write your questions. I think it's everything really clear. Maybe you have an upcoming question in the next hours or days. Give me a call that we can answer you or your information needs. Thanks a lot for your time. I know it's a busy day today of announcement of quarterly statements of other companies. Thanks a lot for your participation, and have a nice afternoon. Goodbye.
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