Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and thank you for joining the Wienerberger's Conference Call on the Q1 2023 Results. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, you may click the Q&A button on the left side of your screen and then raise your hand. If you're connected via phone, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Daniel Merl, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're all well. A warm welcome to the earnings call on our Q1 2023 results. Our board representatives today are our CEO, Heimo Scheuch, and our CFO, Gerhard Hanke. They will walk you through our presentation. We'll discuss our strong performance in a challenging market environment. After the presentation, as always, we are ready to take your questions. I will now hand over to Heimo Scheuch for the presentation. Thank you, Daniel. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning also from my side, and welcome to our first quarter call for 2023. Let's just jump right into it. The first quarter of 2023, from a perspective of macro-economical situation, is obviously characterized by also increasing and still increasing interest rates, on both sides of the Atlantic, North America and Europe. Increasing rates and especially for the mortgages of strong importance. We'll come to this in a minute. With respect to cost inflation, obviously, we still some strong inflation numbers coming in from the European side, lesser so in the U.S. From our perspective, if you may say, the first quarter is not always the most representative one, as you all are aware of in the building material and in the building industry as such, but still it gives an indication where we're going to. What we have seen so far is obviously due to this continuing high cost inflation environment, the mortgage rate highs, we have seen in the end markets of Wienerberger a downward trend since Q2 2022 that has continued and has been very pronounced already last year, as we reported several times in Eastern Europe and continues to be so. This is certainly the region that is most hit by this high interest rates. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking here interest rates in the high one single digit or more or less also in some countries in the low two digit interest rates. A strong sort of interest rates environment for these countries, which affects not only the overall industry, but also particular also the new build sector. Renovation, also a little weaker. In Western Europe, still good demand, but weaker in Eastern Europe and infrastructure, Eastern Europe and North America, a little bit down. From our perspective, as you know, us for pretty much for a long period of time, we act proactively and very quickly. From our perspective, strict cost management in such softening market was the top priority. We focused on these areas. We'll come to this, Gerhard and myself, what measures we've implemented, but obviously we have already put a lot of actions into place in these affected regions very quickly in order to manage working capital cost structure and keep us obviously in a good performance with respect to cost structure. On the purchasing side, our sustainable purchasing policy that we've put in place years back is helping us in this inflationary cost environment. Here we see obviously good trends coming through from our purchasing policy. Also on the operational excellence front, again, strong work from the operations in all aspects and incoming contribution from about EUR 11 million already in the first quarter of this year. All in all, a very satisfying and strong set of numbers when we look at Wienerberger's overall revenue perspective, only down 9%. When we take the market environment, especially in new build, it's down double digit. I think here we have made again a clear sign that we outperform our underlying market, the EBITDA above EUR 200 million, EUR 209 million. Again, also from an EBITDA perspective, margins perspective, strong result, and also the net result coming in above EUR 100 million in the first quarter. If you look at the overall market performance in the first quarter, we have tried to put this on a chart so that you have an idea. The new build market overall in the group, 28% down, and this includes all markets, by the way. You can assume that certain markets have been down sharper than this. We talk here especially about Eastern Europe new build. Renovation about 11%, and infrastructure in the first quarter to 20%. Keep in mind two things. We obviously compare this, and all of us tend to compare to other months and other periods. This first quarter has been also particularly wet in a lot of areas. From a building perspective, it was not that favorable from a weather one as well. This doesn't come as excuse. I think the underlying trends are such that we are living in a phase with softening markets. Proactive cost management, as I said earlier, was top of the agenda. we obviously were able to cut obviously from a perspective of output already our production output in Eastern Europe by reducing shift patterns, by obviously, also consuming our over hour performance from last year, so extended standstills, maintenance in the first quarter that we have planned. Remember, we told you that depending on the market demand, we will bring up the plans to stream as we see the demand level coming in. Here, again, I think we have made all the necessary efforts in the first quarter to be in, aligned to this situation. From a procurement strategy, when you look at the cost inflation for Wienerberger in the first quarter, it's about 9%+ coming especially from the European side of the business. It's a little weaker in the U.S., the inflation. Here, obviously, salaries, wages play an important role still, and some other aspects, less on the plastic granular side and less also compared to last year, especially on the energy side. As I said, the overall inflation is probably the environment is higher than the Wienerberger one, again, because we have our sustainable purchasing policy in place. When we look at the self-help program, again, through innovations, through manufacturing excellence, we have been able to have an additional contribution of EUR 11 million already in the first quarter of this year. Strong performance in this aspect of the business. We will therefore deliver the full set of contributions coming in. You remember our three-year program with about EUR 135 million over the last three years, including this one. We are confident to perform accordingly. With this, I hand over to Gerhard, who will go in detail through the financials of this year. Thank you, Heimo. good morning. Before we move to the financials of the first quarter, let me explain you the new operational structure. As you have most probably already seen, we have changed with the beginning of this year, the operational and the organizational structure. We decided already during 2022 to change the operational and the organizational structure from a product-centric to a regional structure. You still have in mind that last year we reported basically three business units, meaning the Wienerberger Building Solutions, the Wienerberger Piping Solutions, and North America. Basically already the years before North America was already a kind of a regional structure where we combined all our solutions, meaning for the entire building envelope and also for the water and for the energy management under basically one steering and under one organizational structure. With 1st of January this year, we also changed the organizational structure, the reporting structure, and the operational structure into basically three regions. The new regions are Europe East, which is round about 30% of our revenues. Europe West, which is the largest region, is round about 50% of our revenue. North America, which is round about 20% of our revenues. Below these regions or within these regions, basically, we combine all our basically products, system solutions, which are serving for the building envelope, but also for the water and energy management within this region. We believe basically with this new structure that we will promote our synergies, but also basically our transformation to a system and a solution provider. Let us move further to the numbers. As Heimo just mentioned, a strong set of financials in the first quarter. When we look more in detail into the regions, we see that the Eastern European market started weaker, with a weaker demand than what we have seen in Western Europe, but also in North America. You also see here that EBITDA-wise, that we miss in Eastern Europe, a 30% in EBITDA. Western Europe and North America are above prior year. And I will explain later on what is driving revenues and profitability in the first quarter in these regions. Let me start with the Europe East or the Eastern European region. We heard it in the beginning, it was the markets basically was where we have seen in the new build sector, the strongest decline in the end market. Also what we have seen that renovation compared to Western Europe was weaker in Eastern than in the Western Europe region. Infrastructure markets was also below expectations, mainly driven by higher financing costs. We see that also municipalities are more reluctant and more in a waiting position in starting up new projects. Therefore, we see, and this is also partly driven, as Heimo mentioned, due to the high interest policies. The central banks of the non-Euro countries, especially Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, are quite consequent or was quite consequent in increasing interest rates last year. This is also where we see a kind of a wait and see position in some of these fields in the first quarter. This was definitely one of the reasons why EBITDA is here basically affected the most with minus 30%. The second effect here is also that most of the standstill what we had. We had some standstills in the first quarter and more focused basically in the Eastern European countries, in the clay block markets. On the one hand, depending also on market development. On the other side, as we mentioned last year, we had no maintenance standstills during 2022. It was a combination of doing some maintenance work, but also Monitoring how markets are developing, and therefore we have also seen some standstill costs in the first quarter in the Eastern European markets. Still, we kept profitability close to a 20% EBITDA margin. We worked hard on our cost management. We worked hard to make the standstills as cost efficient as possible. We cut the costs where feasible and tried to keep the operational leverage in Eastern Europe as high as possible. Meaning a 20% EBITDA margin in the first quarter and a EUR 60 million on EBITDA for the first quarter of Eastern Europe. When we move further to Western Europe, Western Europe had a strong start into the year. We see that revenues are behind with -7%. EBITDA even above, slightly above, prior year profitability is high. We see demand-wise that the markets, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, had a very strong and stable development in the first three months. Where we have seen a more weaker demand is Germany and the UK. In the new build activities, renovation, is also remaining on a stable level across the region, and the infrastructure activities is also supported by the in-house activity. What we see is that the in-house activity, which has also a big share of renovation, activity in it, is much more stable and is supporting also the infrastructure business, basically the piping business in Western Europe in the first three months. Profitability on a very high level. Also here, The profitability is supported on the one side that we have a strong pricing and a very attractive cost structure. Also here in the first three months, supported by the initiatives which we initiated already last year on the cost management side, and also by the self-help measures, which finally brought us to an EBITDA margin of round about 18.5% in the first quarter. Moving to North America. North America, basically, we see in the U.S., when it's about the new build activity, that the demand is basically on a low level, but still on a stabilizing level. We see that, yes, demand is weaker, but also in new build, we have seen already last year in the second half that the demand developed or were slowing down basically in new build. We see this is more stabilizing. The same basically also for Canada, that we see also some stabilizing demand there. When it's about infrastructure, we see that, especially in the first three months, infrastructure were slightly behind expectations. Still, when it's about profitability, and you see that profitability is with more than 4% above prior year, which is strongly driven basically by two effects. The one is the synergies of Meridian, which is also exceeding our expectations. It is above expectations, the synergies which we see. The second impact is the profitability of the piping business, which remains so far still on a high level. This brings us to our group revenue bridge. We have for the first quarter comparing, I think we have seen it in the beginning on the slide where we show how end markets were developing and how we started up. We see that we are having a 9% organic decline, basically after the first three months, which is driven with round about 20% on volume, which we are missing, with round about 15% plus on pricing. Also on the pricing, you know that there is also on a year-on-year comparison, carryover from the quarters, quarter two up to quarter four in 2022. We have some impact from the currencies, mainly from the British pound, from the Turkish lira, but also the Nordic currencies are slightly weaker than last year. We have some impact out of the M&A activities, mainly from the activities in Croatia last year, Vargon, but also the Danish activities, the Norwegian activities, and also in Germany. What we bought, it was Mayr Dachkeramik and Bergmann, rather small M&As, and they are adding up here basically to a contribution of EUR 10 million in revenues. EBITDA-wise, we were able, with all our initiatives and measures which we took to limit basically EBITDA development only to -7%, which is strong compared to a market development. We are moving from EUR 225 EBITDA to EUR 209. In this organic decline of 7%, we have self-help initiatives in it and also cost management in it. Together, these two positions around about EUR 20 million, which are supporting the operational leverage or basically the development of the first quarter. Of this year. All in all, a very satisfying performance despite these declining and challenging market environment where we are in. Which resulted in a very positive and strong EBITDA of the first quarter. With that, Heimo, I would like to hand over back to you for the rest of the year, or the outlook for the rest of the year. Thank you, Gerhard. Ladies and gentlemen, obviously, as you have heard from our explanations, we stick to our scenario that we have developed at the beginning of the year, where we have given you an outlook as far as we see the market developments in our underlying markets, new build, renovate, infrastructure in Europe and North America. It goes without saying, and I think this has been the sort of summary of this call, that the quarter one performance of this year of our end markets is weaker than expected, and weaker as the indication that we have given you at the beginning of this year. Obviously, when we talk about this scenario, the underlying markets need to pick up in the following months in order to get to such sort of rates that we have originally anticipated. If they do so, we don't know yet, it's too early to tell. Obviously, the next months, especially May, June, will tell if we are moving in this direction or not. On the general note, we obviously stick to our scenario that we have given to you, which leads obviously due to the fact that we manage inflation well, as Gerhard has put it in his notes on the cost side, especially when we talk on the purchasing side, and obviously, we calculate with the 9% for the overall group coming stronger from Europe than from North America, as we said. When we look at the energy situation, obviously it has eased considerably, but we are locked in for this year above 90% already, and for next year above 80%. Here we are in safe territory, and have managed this, I think, this energy situation rather well compared to our competitors. On the other hand, if we look at the market as such, and this is what we have been giving you as the scenario, you have seen how quickly and how strongly we were able to manage the decline last year with respect to the building or underlying markets, especially in the new build segment, and how we are doing this year. We have anticipated that the market goes down compared to last year, again, significantly, and we will see how this turns out to be in the later part of this year. As I said, we have taken already all necessary measures to manage this scenario. I think it shows also that the group as such is more resilient to man-manage these situations, especially due to the fact that we have taken stronger position in renovation and do so. The ongoing acquisition of Terreal, and we are moving nicely and quickly ahead with this, and I really assume that the closing will be either at the end of half year in the third quarter, but that depends on the antitrust authorities, as I said. I'll think here we are in good terrain and moving steadily, and this shows again that the underlying business will be stronger because roofing is, to a big extent, 60%-70% of turnover goes into renovation. This is a strong move again for Wienerberger into a more resilient business model. The market out-performance, I think we have shown you that we were able in this challenging market environment at the beginning of this year to again outperform our end markets, and we will continue to do so for the rest of the year. You have seen also from the explanations you got from Gerhard and myself that the gross margin has been strong and has been holding up nicely. Pricing is strong throughout our markets, and obviously this is also due to the fact that we improve our product range to more solution-based activity away from only product. M&A, as I said, it is very important that we move ahead in this, and we have done successfully last year and this year obviously with Terreal. No results from Terreal are included yet in our scenario. Just to remind you, the revenues of this group that we will take over is about EUR 740, and about EUR 100 on the ongoing basis. You are well aware that we have predicted about EUR 50 million synergies out of this deal will come in the three years after the integration. This is it from my side. I think we have addressed so far the first quarter and are taking your questions with great pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin the Q&A session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may click the Q&A button on the left side of your screen and then raise your hand. If you're connected via phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star two, or please press the lower your hand button. Anyone who has a question may click the Q&A and raise your hand button or press star one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question is coming from Tobias Werner from Stifel Europe. Please go ahead. Yes, thanks for taking my questions and congrats on this, you know, really good performance in Q1. Three questions from my side very quickly. The first one is with regard to the current market developments, end market developments which you show in the chart. Unfortunately, I'm traveling at the moment, so I can't see which slide it is on, and you're -9% against it. Just confirm to us that we're comparing like for like here, i.e., are we looking at sales or are we looking at volumes versus sales? That's the first question. Secondly, we've seen Aliaxis move in not such a friendly manner onto Uponor. Would you consider Uponor as well in that scenario? You obviously have lots of synergies with your own business, and/or potentially could invite the Uponor shareholders to become your shareholders. Lastly, secondly, if you don't, your pipe business, in my opinion at least, seems to be somewhat under pressure in that sort of repositioning of the markets at the moment. Thank you very much. Thank you for your two questions, Tobias. The first one is to be answered very quickly, is volume versus sales. That's the answer to your question. Thank you. The second one is, yes, we have obviously, as all of you, monitored the situation with respect to Aliaxis Uponor. You know, this was a situation, a hostile one, which has now gone a little bit away because apparently everybody is not happy with this situation. There's one thing from a cultural perspective. Wienerberger is not a company that goes hostile. You've seen us in a lot of acquisitions, and we have done 40 acquisitions or more than 40 acquisitions in the last decade, and none of them was hostile. It was always in very good spirit with the sellers, with the people and employees. That's why, and you see it especially on the Meridian front, how quickly, how fast, and how beneficial this is for you all. Hostile situations are not very helpful for anybody. That's one remark that I have. I think from our side, obviously we are open to develop our business. We've always said we want to be a leading player in the infrastructure business for water management and for energy management, that's what we are continuing to be. We are actually, from a size perspective, if you put the business of Wienerberger together, the piping business bigger than Uponor. This is to say at least. Our profitability is quite as a couple of percentage points better as well. Tobias, to answer your question, we don't feel under pressure. I think under pressure others, not us. we are continuing to grow our business in all the different geographies that we are in and have clear targets already defined. Uponor has certainly in certain areas, very interesting businesses like in North America or the building side, which is what Gerhard explained on the in-house, where we are less active in certain areas of Europe. The infrastructure business is not such an appealing business to us, if I may say so. You have the whole set strategically. You know, Wienerberger is a company that is open to a lot of things if they make sense for the shareholders and for the development of the company. I think from our perspective, we are monitoring all sorts of situations, but we certainly, with respect to our piping business, feel more confirmed with our strategy than under pressure. Okay. I mean, the potential of if it was friendly for them to be invited into your shareholder base, is an option in a way. You know, you are not negotiating for Uponor, nor am I for Wienerberger. There are hundreds of options. I would say from our perspective, we will certainly look closely to all the options that are available. Okay. Thank you so much. Again, well done on. Thank you, Tobias. The full-fare. Thank you, Tobias. The next question is coming from Gregor Kuglitsch from UBS. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a few questions. Maybe firstly, just sort of some numbers. If you could just maybe quickly run through the sort of volume price evolution in the new three segments, that would be helpful. Secondly, I don't know if I may have missed it. I thought I caught something. Did you actually quantify much fixed costs you took out during the quarter? Over and above the EUR 11 million Fast Forward program, is there sort of any fixed cost reduction that actually occurred in the, in the quarter? A third question is on the pricing. You had 15%. Can you give us a sense how much of that was sort of carryover from last year and how much was new price increases and therefore kind of what we can be thinking about for the year, assuming pricing holds from here? Maybe fourth question, which is sort of on the re-segmentation and the new organizational setup. What's changed? Is it now that you have a basically a CEO for Europe East, Europe West, and he has to sort of manage all the different product categories? Just give us a little bit more sense of what you've actually done on the management side, the organizational sides, and the benefits that you expect from that. Thank you. Gregor, as always, thank you very much for your very precise and to the point questions. Let me start with your last one on the organization front. Yes, you're absolutely spot on. For us, it's very important that in the regions East, West Europe and North America, where we have it already, there's one CEO in charge of these businesses. They run the business in a way that all different products are included. We get the most synergies out of these operations. You remember also we have explained to you from a back office side, we have completely or we are completely integrating the businesses as well. This makes a lot of sense for us to manage route to market sales operations and also the overall human resource aspect from one person or when you break it then down for the different regions under him and then the management. You have obviously an integrated management per country, per region, where we regroup, for example, a region like the Benelux together with France. Makes a lot of sense with the new acquisition of Terreal, with renovation, with infrastructure and with wall. There are obviously the whole back office with the digitalization. The data management is done centrally for such a region in the different countries. Then obviously from an overall strategic perspective, managing the clients, the customers, the route to market, as I said, is an important target for us. Therefore, this makes our performance more efficient in these regions, and therefore we think also from a solution perspective to put these together, like the whole wall management, the facade and the roof management is then done over a region by the appropriate management. We keep overall on the group side certain aspects like categories we call them. That means, roof and piping, for example, where we obviously manage technology, innovation on a group's perspective in order to ensure here maximum of synergies over the different regions. I hope I've addressed your four question. Gerhard, do you wanna jump in on one of the three others? Right. Maybe speaking about the carryover, what you mentioned, Gregor, it is as we said, it's a 15% plus of pricing, and carryover is around about 11 from last year between Q2 and Q4 of 2022. You mentioned, as far as I remember, also the topic cost management. We benefited from self-help with 11 and with taking out fixed costs in the first quarter, it was EUR 9 million. These are the 20 what I mentioned, which was supporting for first quarter results. I guess it was the first one. It was about volume and price. Maybe to make that short, as we said, yeah, it is a -20% volume and +15% of pricing, which is basically influenced by the carryover also strongly. What we see is this price volume split is represented basically also for Western Europe, so that fits quite well. We see that North America is volume-wise better than what we have seen across the group. On the other side, Eastern Europe are slightly weaker. On the other side, pricing is in Eastern Europe, let's say, slightly above the 15% of the group and North America slightly below. This is, I think, how it should help you a kind of an orientation, how we have split it, volume and price across Q1. Thank you. Thank you, Gregor. The next question is coming from Patrick Steiner from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Hello, it's Patrick Steiner. Congratulations on these quite good results despite such a difficult market environment. Three quick questions from my side. First one would be, why was the new build activity so weak in Germany and UK but much stronger in France, Belgium and Netherlands? Is there any specific reason for this? Second question would be, why are the operating margins much higher in Europe East than Europe West? Is this due to a higher piping share in the West, or are there other factors as well? The last question would be, during the presentation you talked about an attractive cost structure in Western Europe. Can you give us some more color on that, and especially compared to East Europe? Thanks. Thank you very much, Patrick. The situation, I mean, when you look at Germany, we were surprised as well, but I don't want to blame anybody so that you don't get me wrong, but politically, Germany is in a turmoil. I think you have followed also the different approaches that the government takes. On one side, the responsible minister, the federal one, says she wants that 400,000 houses are built and the others say they don't know how they want to build it and what sort of structure they find for it. You have heard also some declarations by home builders in Germany that they stop completely due to this mess, legally speaking, and regulations-wise. There's a lot of turmoil right now. This needs reorientation. This needs stability. You know that it is very bad for a country if there's instability, legally speaking, and with the whole legal framework with respect to new build. Obviously, also the interest rates have played a role, and you understand also culturally, our German friends are always very reluctant to build if they have not a clear vision what the future brings. This is something which is very particular to Germany and unfortunately hits Germany hard. This is unfortunate for all of us, but especially for Germany. UK, a little different story because obviously here again, politically there has been some turmoil, and obviously when interest rates play in, then we had some sort of weakening and softening of the markets in quarter four of last year already and now into quarter one. We see a little bit of positive trend coming out of the UK. I can say so far because we monitor very closely our competitors' numbers. We are pretty much ahead of those compared to the other players in the industry with respect to our sales volume. Oh, sorry. We have one more, Mar. It's the margins. Yeah. Right. Maybe if I may start with the last one. I think you asked for the cost structure between Western Europe and Eastern Europe also, how this is impacting your profitability. I think what you have to keep in mind, yes, we had in both regions, we had standstills. We had in the Eastern part, as I tried to explain, a little bit more extended standstill than in Western Europe. As we mentioned last year, there was no maintenance work done, no major maintenance work during 2022, so we also shifted some of them into the first quarter, so we did them also in the first quarter of 2022. In Eastern Europe, therefore also the margin suffered a little bit more than what you have seen in Western Europe. You see simply also the impact of the standstill costs, of the more extended standstill costs, and therefore, the profitability in Q1 is in Eastern Europe lower than in Western Europe. This is why we see basically the drop of the profitability in Eastern Europe stronger than in Western Europe. The other questions, Patrick, was about operating margin, I guess. Just help me once more about your second question. Yes, thanks for answering the first two questions. The third one was basically why are the operating margins much higher in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, if this is due to higher piping share or if there are other factors. No, it is basically historically still cost structures in Eastern Europe are still more attractive when it's about fixed cost structures. This is still the major driver why margins are originally higher than in Western Europe. What we mentioned before is that we had basically the first quarter, this topic of more standstill, and therefore this somehow shifted. Yeah. Basically, the profitability and the fixed cost or the share of the fixed costs is in Eastern Europe still more attractive than in Western. Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much, Scheuch. Thank you, Patrick. The next question is coming from Manfredi Bizzarri from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hi, all. Just two questions from me. In terms of margins for the U.S. business, we basically saw a big improvement over the two years. Obviously, there is Meridian inside the equation there. I was just wondering how should we think about medium to long-term margin for the U.S. business. Is 24% sort of sustainable new number we should be thinking about? My second question is on price cost, particularly in Europe. You clearly had a strong benefit on realized cost versus spot prices. How do we think about the gap narrowing going forward? Thank you very much. Thank you for your two questions. I will be very outspoken for the first one. I think when you are spot on when you say 2024, is it sustainable? We have explained last year that especially on the piping front, we are on a very high level of profitability and margin-wise. This will gradually come down. From my perspective, if I were to say a long-term sustainable margin in North America is around 20%. Okay? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. On the price cost? And then- Yeah. Thank you. The price cost side. The price cost, I think you mentioned the benefits out of the forward buying of the energy contracts. Yes, we still are benefiting out of that. We will also benefit, not only this year based on the forwards, what we see also for 2024 and 2025, we still feel comfortable with our fixings, what we have done. It is difficult to say or to forespend how long we will basically benefit out of that, but we will, from today's perspective, and depending also by energy prices, will be moving to in the next two to three years. We still feel comfortable that we have a kind of a benefit out of that. Thank you very much. By the way, I mean, we are significantly below spot obviously today, yeah, with our fixed ones, so that you are aware of that. Yeah. Perfect. Thanks. Thank you. The next question is coming from Yassine Touahri from Stifel. Please go ahead. Hello. Yassine Touahri from Stifel. Thank you for taking my question. I just have one, if I may, which is on the competitive environment. Last year, you mentioned that some competitors had to close some plants due to energy prices in Europe, and I believe they started reopening them at the end of last year. Could you please elaborate on the competitive environment at the moment and also on the evolution of your market share? That would be especially in context of your piping business in Eastern Europe, where you cut capacity this quarter, apparently. Thank you. Yeah, obviously you're right that some. When we talk now about Europe only, some of the competitors have come back over the last four or five months, gradually. I must say. Not all of them, by the way, and not in full force because I think the difference between this scenario that we are living through and the past ones is that everybody understands that the market is going down. We have a lower demand level, and it's no use to fully produce and just try to sit on your products and wait what's happening. Everybody's concerned about this. Everybody is also concerned about the fact that energy prices might go in the, in the again, in the other direction. By the way, the spot prices are not that cheap either. Keep in mind that on the inflation side, wages and others have been up as well, so the cost price or the cost structure for the small and medium-sized competitors is huge. Logistics is also not that easy. From this perspective, I think all of them have behaved rather well, if I may say so, and we have not seen big sort of price erosions or whatsoever. I mean, on certain projects you have probably then a little bit of competition. On the other hand, I think overall speaking, everybody is doing his job in the sense of managing the cost structure as well as the production output. Also in the U.S., we have seen that people, from a perspective of new market structure, have hold back on volumes because obviously volumes are not there. If you, especially in the facing brick business, roofing business, et cetera, out of the market, it's very difficult to make your way into the market again because projects are there and you can't sort of sell into ongoing projects, for example. This is, I think, different from the scenarios before. It's a long answer to your question, but from my perspective, this will stay rather stable throughout the year. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. If I may just follow up on that. If you could remind me, you gained market share last year thanks to competitors closing plants. Is that right? We've been- Yeah. We had, when we explained to you the exceptionally good results last year, the EBITDA of above EUR 1 billion, we told you that, first of all, we had certain market share gains due to the fact that we produced right through the year and had available products. This was one aspect. We have not so far seen major erosions of this as we speak. In some areas, obviously you give way to some low commodity producers or low-end producers that come into the market, but it's not of a significant size at this stage after the first quarter. All right. Thank you very much, and congratulations on the results. Thank you very much indeed. As a reminder, if you have questions, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad, or press the Q&A button on the left side of your screen and raise your hand. One moment for the next questions. There are no further questions at this time. I hand back to Daniel Merl. Thank you, operator. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all very much for taking the time and dialing in today. Our next conference call, as a little reminder, will be held on the 10th of August when we release our results for the first half of 2023. For today, I wish you a nice remaining afternoon. Stay safe and goodbye. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded and you may disconnect. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day.