Amrize Ltd Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call

Hello, and welcome to the Amrize Q4 2025 Earnings Conference Call. This conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Aroon Amarnani, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Great. Thank you so much, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Amrize's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. We released our fourth quarter and full year financial results yesterday after the market closed. You can find both our earnings release and presentation for today's call in the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.amrize.com. On the call with me today are Jan Jenisch, our Chairman and CEO; and Ian Johnston, our CFO. Jan will open today's call with highlights from the full year and the fourth quarter as well as the growth investments we're making in our business. Ian will then review our financial performance for the quarter before turning the call back to Jan to discuss our outlook for 2026. We will then take your questions. Before we begin, during the call and in our slide presentation, we reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors. We include reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to U.S. GAAP in our earnings release and slide presentation. As a reminder, today's call is being webcast live and recorded. A transcript and recording of this conference call will be posted to our website. Any statements made about the future results and performance, plans and expectations and objectives are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those presented during the call to various factors, including, but not limited to, those discussed in our Form 10 filings and in other reports filed with the SEC. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jan.

Thank you, Aroon, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. 2025 was a very important year for Amrize as we successfully spun off and launched the company in June. I have focused my time on our operations and projects across North America to see our work in action, meet with customers, and hear from our people. What I see is the market-leading footprint and a performance-driven change. Together, we are delivering for our customers as the partner of choice for their most important building projects. For the full year 2025, we increased revenues by 0.9% to $11.8 billion, with $3 billion in adjusted EBITDA. We generated a strong cash flow of $1.5 billion, and our cash conversion rate was 49%. Overall, we completed the year with a net leverage ratio of 1.1x. Our strong cash conversion and balance sheet provide flexibility and firepower to fuel our growth and return cash to our shareholders. We increased our investments to $788 million during 2025 to expand production, improve efficiencies, and best serve our customers in the most attractive markets. Last month, we were excited to announce our agreement to acquire PB Materials, the aggregates leader in West Texas, significantly expanding our position in this high-growth region. Delivering shareholder return, the Board has approved a $1 billion share repurchase program and is proposing a special onetime dividend of $0.44 per share payable following the Annual General Meeting. The Board is also proposing an annual ordinary dividend of $0.44 per share to be paid in further installments. These dividends will be paid out of legal capital reserves from tax capital contributions and are not subject to Swiss withholding tax. The dividend and share program are subject to customary shareholder approvals at our AGM in April. Looking to the future, we are well positioned in our $200 billion addressable market, and we have set our 2026 guidance, reflecting accelerating customer demand and profitable growth. This includes 4% to 6% growth in revenues and 8% to 11% growth in adjusted EBITDA. Let us look at some of the highlights of the fourth quarter. We saw continued growth in Building Materials. The segment's revenues grew 3.9%, and more importantly, we expanded our adjusted EBITDA margins by 60 basis points. Both cement and aggregates volumes were up, and we have strong aggregates pricing growth in addition to production efficiency gains and first savings from our ASPIRE program. Within our Building Envelope business, our results were affected by soft residential roofing volumes, and we expect residential demand to gradually return this year. Our commercial roofing margins were up, driven by resilient repair and refurbishment. At the total company level, revenues were slightly lower, down 0.4% in the fourth quarter. Let us look at some of the market trends at Amrize. We see continued infrastructure demand and an improving commercial landscape. In the commercial market, which makes up half of our business, demand is improving, led by new data centers. Data construction has been and continues to be a significant bright spot as hyperscalers rapidly build out the infrastructure that will power the AI economy. This is the largest infrastructure expansion in recent history, and the United States is at the center. In fact, over 40% of global data center infrastructure investment is expected to be spent in the United States through 2030. Speed, efficiency, innovation, and reliability are key in this market, making it a space where Amrize's building solutions and unparalleled footprint offer strong competitive advantages. In 2025 alone, we supported and supplied more than 30 data center projects, and we will see that work accelerating into this year. For us, you have just as much opportunity to supply the data centers as we do to support the infrastructure surrounding them. In 2026, we expect the commercial market to pick up as interest rates continue to move lower, and as customers accelerate their investments in advanced manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics. In infrastructure, demand continues to be steady, with federal, state, and local authorities privatizing modernization projects. We see increasingly domestic-focused agendas from our customers in both the United States and Canada. Each country is prioritizing national investments to build strong futures. Within residential, new construction remains soft. We expect demand to gradually return later this year as the U.S. continues to have a significant housing shortage that will drive longer-term growth. As interest rates continue to decline, we expect pent-up demand to unwind and construction activity to accelerate across all sectors. If we turn to Slide 7, you can see our strong pipeline of key projects into 2026, which are directly aligned to these growth trends. We are supplying advanced building materials to new data center campuses like in Louisiana, we're supplying water infrastructure projects like in Dallas, airport modernizations like Colorado, and a new Amazon distribution facility in New York City. We are seeing increasing demand for our high-performance Elevate MAX PVC roofing systems and are supporting a new industrial warehouse in Ontario and a significant data center project in North Dakota. We see increasing data center demand for the MAX PVC roofing system going forward. These are just a few of our project highlights, and they reflect the megatrends underpinning long-term growth in the North American market. As we move into 2026, we have a big pipeline of projects, and new ones are kicking off every month. We move to Slide 8. You can see some of our important expansion projects. We completed our Ste. Gen plant expansion to support growing demand and increase our efficiency. In December, we commissioned the production expansion of our flagship cement plant in Missouri, adding 660,000 tons of production capacity per year and increasing the plant's total capacity to 5.5 million tons annually. Our Ste. Gen plant is North America's largest market-leading plant, setting the standard for high performance. If you turn to Slide 9, you can see that we are on track with key organic growth projects for this year and beyond. We're building on the success of our Ste. Gen plant expansion, and we are on track with key growth projects for 2026 and beyond. To serve the booming Texas region, we are investing in our Midlothian cement plant to expand production capacity by 100,000 tons, modernize logistics, and increase operational efficiency at the same time. In Alberta, Canada, we are investing in our Exshaw cement plant to add 50,000 tons of cement production capacity, supporting the growing Calgary market. In Quebec, we are investing to expand our St. Constant cement plant by 300,000 tons, further strengthening our position in Canada and increasing the efficiency of these specialties. If we turn to Slide 10 now, we see more growth projects. In Virginia, we are progressing with our new Fly Ash facility to enable the use of recycled landfill as a high-quality supplementary material. We are progressing our Greenfield Aggregates quarry in Oklahoma, adding about 200 million tons of reserves to serve the fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth market. On the Building Envelope side, we are progressing with our new state-of-the-art Malarkey Shingles plant to expand our market share to the attractive Midwest and Eastern markets. We expect this plant to be commissioned at the end of 2026, putting us in a strong position to deliver more volumes when residential demand picks up. If you move to Slide 11, let me talk about our latest acquisition, PB Materials, which strengthens our aggregates footprint in West Texas. We announced the acquisition earlier this year. This will strengthen our aggregates business with over $180 million in annual revenue, adding 50 years of aggregates reserves and 26 operational sites in West Texas to serve long-term demand as infrastructure, data centers, and commercial investments drive construction growth. This acquisition will be EPS and cash accretive already this year. We just received antitrust clearance from the Federal Trade Commission, and now expect this acquisition to close in the first quarter of 2026. Looking beyond PB Materials, we have a strong M&A pipeline and plan to continue making smart deals to accelerate our profitable growth. Now let's move to Slide 12, our ASPIRE program, which is on track to drive value through scale and focus. We made good progress here in the fourth quarter. We have now onboarded over 450 new logistics and service providers to optimize third-party spend, and we launched more than 400 projects to leverage our scale and drive synergies across raw materials, services, logistics, and equipment. We started realizing savings in the fourth quarter last year, and we are now targeting a 70 basis point margin expansion in 2026 and $250 million in full synergies by 2028. Let us talk about allocating capital. On Slide 13, you see our priorities, increasing investments and returning cash to shareholders. We are committed to a capital allocation strategy that invests for growth and delivers value to our shareholders. We raised our CapEx investments last year by 23%. And this year, we plan to increase our investments further to $900 million. We are on track with our M&A strategy, and we have a strong pipeline of targets, led by aggregates and with additional opportunities in various sectors. Our strong cash conversion and balance sheet allow us to also return cash to our shareholders. The Board has just approved a $1 billion share repurchase and is proposing a special onetime dividend of $0.44 per share, payable following the AGM in April. The Board is also proposing an annual ordinary dividend of $0.44 per share to be paid in quarterly installments. Both dividends will be paid out of legal capital reserves and are not subject to Swiss withholding tax. I'm very pleased to have established a strong balance sheet and platform for growth that enables us to return value to our shareholders while further increasing our growth investments through CapEx and M&A. Before discussing our guidance for this year in more detail, I turn it over to Ian, who gives us more details on our financial results.

Thank you, Jan. I'll begin on Slide 15 with our results by segment, starting with Building Materials. For strong volume and revenue performance in Q3, we saw continued momentum and margin expansion in our Building Materials segment during the fourth quarter as new infrastructure and data centers drove commercial projects. Revenues were approximately $2.2 billion in the quarter, an increase of 3.9%, driven primarily by higher volumes across both our cement and aggregates businesses, alongside continued aggregates pricing growth. Cement volumes increased 3.6% and aggregates grew 3%. We continue to see steady support from federal, state, and local infrastructure spending as well as growth in select commercial markets, particularly in data centers and warehousing and logistics, which we expect to continue in 2026. Net pricing for the quarter was down 0.8%, while full year 2025 was up 30 basis points on a constant currency basis. As we mentioned last quarter, we have announced price increases in 2026 across our markets, driven by the positive volume trend we have seen across our cement business over the last two quarters and into the new year. Pricing has been phasing in since the start of the year, with the full run rate in place assumed by April 1. As a reminder, our markets are driven by local demand, which varies by geographic region. That said, we continue to see favorable pricing dynamics across our network, supported by our inland positions and higher growth in proactive markets. Meanwhile, aggregates pricing on a freight-adjusted constant currency basis increased 3.8% in the quarter. Including freight, pricing was up 7.3%. We continue to see strong fundamentals for aggregates pricing, supported by local market fundamentals and ongoing infrastructure demand. Building Materials adjusted EBITDA was $705 million in the fourth quarter, up 4.9% compared to the prior year, while adjusted EBITDA margin was 32.6%, an increase of 60 basis points. The increase in adjusted EBITDA was primarily due to volume growth, aggregates pricing, production efficiency, and early ASPIRE savings. Moving forward, we expect cement pricing to increase by low single digits and aggregates pricing to increase by mid-single digits on a freight-adjusted basis in 2026. Given the positive customer demand we see across these businesses, we expect volumes for both cement and aggregates to be positive this year. Before we move to Building Envelope results, it's worth noting that the first quarter is typically a seasonally slower quarter for Building Materials as we perform annual maintenance and build inventory ahead of the peak selling season. Moving to Slide 16, we turn to the Building Envelope. Fourth quarter results were $678 million, a decrease of 11.8% compared to the prior year. The decline was largely driven by softer residential roofing demand. That said, when we look across our business, commercial roofing activity remained strong with revenues up during the quarter, as this type of spending is often nondiscretionary for our customers. In commercial new construction, we continue to see robust data center demand. As Jan mentioned earlier, our MAX PVC product line and Elevate are addressing the higher performance specifications that many of our data center customers require. So far, we've been pleased with the traction, and we expect this product will continue to drive growth for us in the future. Meanwhile, we have also started to see a recovery in warehousing, distribution, and logistics end markets. As interest rates and the cost of capital decrease, we expect further improvements from commercial new construction. Building Envelope adjusted EBITDA was down year-over-year, largely due to softer residential roofing demand and an $8 million increase in warranty provisions to reflect claims activity in our residential roofing business. We continue to feel pressure on residential demand from higher interest rates and affordability concerns. These headwinds were partially offset by an increase in commercial roofing margins driven by resilient repair and refurbishment demand. Moving into 2026, we are focused on what we can control. We launched ASPIRE to improve our third-party cost base, a significant progress, and expect additional savings to materialize in 2026. While residential demand remains soft, we expect strong demand in commercial repairs and refurbishment to continue and lower interest rates to support a broader recovery across new commercial roofing markets. As a result, we expect low single-digit volume growth in commercial roofing. In residential, we expect flat volumes for the year, with the second half being better than the first half. So far, Q1 customer demand has improved compared to Q4. Looking out further, we continue to see a long tailwind of growth in commercial repair and refurbishment activity, driven by an aging commercial roofing stock that needs to be replaced. We are also encouraged by recent policy developments that aim to address affordability, which can support new construction and help bridge the housing gap. As I mentioned earlier, our focus is on operations and efficiently running the business through different economic environments. We continue to see a path toward best-in-class EBITDA margins. Moving to Slide 17, we had a strong cash flow performance during the year. We generated approximately $1.5 billion, representing a 49% cash conversion rate on adjusted EBITDA. This is in line with our historical average cash conversion of approximately 50%. Our 2025 free cash flow was lower due to net income and increased organic CapEx growth. Cash flow is a key performance indicator for all of the P&L leaders across our business. Our free cash flow performance in 2025 demonstrates the strength of our working capital management and the resilient underlying cash generation of our business. Turning to Slide 18, we are very pleased with the progress we made post-spin to further strengthen our financial position during our first year as Amrize. At the end of the year, our net leverage ratio was 1.1x, delivering on our commitment of less than 1.5x per year. Net debt at the end of the year was approximately $3.3 billion, down over $1.5 billion from the end of the third quarter as we generated strong cash flow at the end of the year. Turning to Slide 19, in 2025, we established a solid foundation to deliver growth and return capital to shareholders in 2026. As of December 31, we had $5.3 billion in senior notes, nearly $6 billion of available liquidity, and a low leverage ratio, providing us with ample firepower to accelerate growth this year. We are also effectively managing our interest expense and expect the run rate to decrease in 2026 compared to 2025 as we continue to optimize our capital structure. We expect our effective tax rate to stabilize in the range of 21% to 23% in 2026. Corporate costs are expected to be approximately $200 million this year, a modest step down from 2025. This sufficient capital structure and operating model allow us to continue generating significant cash in 2026 and drive profitability. This model also lays the foundation for our capital allocation strategy, putting us in an excellent position to announce our shareholder return plan while continuing to invest in organic growth projects and pursuing value-accretive M&A. This speaks to our financial power, firepower, and the flexibility of our balance sheet. With that said, I will pass it back to Jan to cover our 2026 outlook.

Thank you, Ian. When we look at the guidance for 2026, I'm confident that this will be the year of accelerating demand from our customers. The commercial market will continue its improving trends as lower interest rates support new projects, adding to already strong demand for data centers, but also for other projects in logistics and manufacturing facilities where we have a lot of sideline projects. We have good demand here, which will unfold throughout this year. In infrastructure, the demand will continue to be strong as governments prioritize modernization. Only in the residential market will we remain soft, with improvements likely towards the end of the year. We expect pricing and volumes in Building Materials to be key growth contributors in 2026. Cement pricing is expected to increase in the low single-digit percentage range, while aggregates pricing is expected to increase in the mid-single-digit percentage range. The market trends and increasing customer demand will drive volume growth for both cement and aggregates. For Building Envelope, we expect low single-digit growth in commercial roofing volumes, while we see flat volumes in residential roofing, with demand improving in the second half of the year. Very importantly for us, the ASPIRE program is a key priority and will deliver significant results in 2026. We are now targeting a margin expansion of 70 basis points and are on track with our goal of $250 million in synergies through 2028. Based on this momentum from our customers and all the programs under our control, we have set our 2026 guidance with 4% to 6% revenue growth and 8% to 11% EBITDA growth. Both numbers include the contribution from our recent PB Materials acquisition. With that, I'll now pass it back to Aroon to open up our question-and-answer session.

Thank you, Jan. Operator, we're now ready to begin the question-and-answer session.

Our first question is from Adrian Huerta from JPMorgan.

Can you hear me?

We can hear you.

Ian, Jan, and Aroon, congrats on the results. My question has to do with the cement prices. I want to understand a little bit better why there is confidence about getting a low single-digit price increase for the year? From comments from other companies, it seems like traction on price increases at the beginning of the year is not going as expected. What are you seeing in your own markets and where do you see better pricing traction? Where do you think it might be a bit more difficult to get the increases that you're looking for?

Look, we are confident that we're going to see a price increase for our Amrize products this year. I think we made good progress in this. And I have nothing negative really to report here.

And if I may ask just a follow-up question. On the ASPIRE program, good to see a larger target on savings this year than the run rate of 50 basis points, now with a target of 70 basis points. Any more color on where these savings should come from, which should be around $100 million between SG&A or by segment within Envelope or Materials? Where are most of the savings coming?

No. Great. Good question. Look, I mean, I'm very excited. As you know, we have over $7 billion of costs to third-party sources, and we haven't really realized the synergies. So we have doubled the company just in the past few years from $6 billion to $12 billion, and we have not really run that synergy program. So I'm very excited to see savings. Of course, we have it in logistics, we have it in raw materials, and we have a lot of services which are provided to us for maintenance, for equipment, and other things. So we made great progress. You can see already in the fourth quarter results in Building Materials that we had quite a significant impact from the ASPIRE program. This is just the start. So we are very confident to see a significant contribution this year from ASPIRE, and that's why I also guide this to be fully margin accretive.

Our next question is from Anthony Pettinari from Citigroup.

This is Asher Stone speaking on behalf of Anthony. Regarding the comparison of your perspective on 2026 to what you thought three months ago, what insights do you have regarding project backlog and cancellations? Additionally, regarding your optimistic volume growth outlook for 2026, how is that divided among your various end markets, specifically commercial, infrastructure, and residential?

I'm very pleased with the acceleration we're seeing with all our customers. The strongest market segment last year was infrastructure, where we had numerous programs running, and we are delighted to support many of those projects. At Amrize, 50% of our sales come from commercial customers, and that market has really gained momentum since mid-last year. The increasing number of ongoing projects reflects this trend, and we can clearly see it with our customers. They have a backlog of projects not only for data centers, but also for logistics, infrastructure, and logistics centers for manufacturing facilities, and this will develop further. We have had no project cancellations, only a few that have experienced slowdowns. The two interest rate cuts have been very beneficial. It’s important to note that while many focus on mortgage rates, the interest rate is more crucial for our commercial customers. This enthusiasm makes me optimistic for this year, and we expect an increase in demand and a growing number of projects from our commercial clients.

Our next question is from Trey Grooms from Stephens.

Got it. Can you hear me now?

Please go ahead.

Okay. Sorry for that. Just on the acquisition, maybe if we could touch on that. PB Materials, aggregates-led business with some ready mix. I believe it's included in the full year guide. It's doing $180 million in annual revenue. Any other details you could give us around PB? I understand it's in West Texas and geographically where it stands. But anything around the production or tonnage or how much it's adding to the overall volume being positive this year in aggregate? Any other details that you could provide?

No, no, thank you. Great question. What's key here for me is, first of all, the size of the acquisition, over $180 million. We're going to close that very soon now in Q1. So very excited that when the season really starts, we have this business with us. It's already a well-margin product business which has significant synergies. I like that we bought a little map showing how well that fits with our footprint in Texas, especially also our cement terminals and our infrastructure to service all those sites. We have about 26 operational sites—13 quarries and another 13 ready-mix sites. So it's a well-balanced business, and they are the market leader with around 30% market share. I'm delighted that we can onboard this business with our successful Texas operations.

Our next question is from Bryan Blair from Oppenheimer.

Ian, you offered pretty good color on the visibility in the commercial and infrastructure project outlook. I was hoping we could drill down a little bit on the residential side. We know that there's weakness anticipated. So over the near term, looking to the back half, there's some degree of recovery against relatively weak comps. If we consider the low versus high end of your guidance, are you willing to quantify what is baked in specific to residential market activity through the back half?

I wish I could share specific numbers, but I think what's exciting about residential, while it's only around 20% of our business, 50% of that is repair and refurbishment. This gives us this resilient demand from residential customers. We experienced much less storm impacts compared to previous years, which slowed us down, especially in Q4, but we believe this will normalize this year again. To your question, I'm quite confident that within refurbishment, we will see significant growth in 2026. As for new residential, that needs to be observed if there’s a recovery later in the year. In our numbers, we are not planning for any growth in new construction residential but are very confident about repair and refurbishment.

Our next question comes from Pujarini Ghosh from Bernstein.

One follow-up on the guidance. Can you confirm that you have not included any future potential acquisitions in the revenue and EBITDA growth guidance for 2026? Also, could you provide some color around the CapEx spend that you are going to do in 2026? How much new capacity addition in terms of the overall portfolio will these new projects bring in?

Thank you for the question. The guidance of 4% to 6% revenue growth and 8% to 11% EBITDA growth is organic, including the PB Materials acquisition. We are very confident about these numbers. We have accelerating demand from our customers and our order books, which are on a good level. We also have a lot of self-help. We see pricing this year, the ASPIRE program, and the impact from our new growth CapEx programs. At this point, we don't break down what is maintenance CapEx and what is growth CapEx, but you can see, as we increase from below $600 million to $900 million this year, we are more than doubling our growth CapEx. We have many low-hanging fruit opportunities to debottleneck and expand into new markets. We are also excited to optimize some of our best-performing cement plants to increase volumes, as well as improve efficiencies.

Our next question is from Keith Hughes from Truist.

Can you hear me now?

We've got you.

A question on pricing in the roofing markets. Can you talk about what pricing was like in residential and commercial in the fourth quarter and what you're expecting in your guidance for calendar '26 on pricing?

For us in roofing, it relates closely to aggregates and cement, but we prefer talking about the price versus cost. In roofing, it’s somewhat different. We prefer discussing price over cost, but we were very satisfied with the commercial roofing margins and their increase. We experienced disruptions in the residential market, but we anticipate stability as soon as the first month of this year. While disruptions were evident in the fourth quarter, we expect pricing to recover quickly this year. Overall, we target positive pricing growth over costs in the Building Envelope segment.

We have no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Aroon Amarnani for closing remarks. Thank you, operator. Thank you all for joining us for our fourth quarter and full year '25 earnings call. We look forward to speaking with you after we report our first quarter '26 results in the coming months. Thanks, everybody.

This concludes the Amrize Q4 2025 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect.