Good afternoon, everyone, welcome to DKSH Capital Markets Day 2024. It's a pleasure to see so many of you here in person today being interested in DKSH. Today is a valuable opportunity for us, to look back at what we have achieved since the last couple Capital Markets Day, also to share with you our future strategic priorities. We will also present to you the updated business unit strategies. As you can see here on the slide, we have a very good lineup for that. Before we take a look at today's agenda, allow me to point out a few housekeeping items. First of all, there are presentations, printouts, as well as of the press release right here at the front door. At the same time, you can also download the materials from our webpage. By doing that, I also encourage you to take a look at the disclaimer regarding the forward-looking statements. You find them on the last page of the presentation. During today's session, there will also be breaks. As some of you might have seen, our Business Unit Performance Materials has a stand where you really can explore and test samples of products that we are providing for the food, for the personal care, and also for various industrial applications. Please have a look at our stand. We also like to inform you that the event will be recorded and that pictures will be taken. The recording of this presentation will be made available on our webpage in a few days' time. Let us now take a brief look at today's agenda. In a few moments, our Chairman, Marco Gadola, will begin with an opening address, followed by our Chief Executive Officer, Stefan, who will share more about the group's strategy. Afterwards, we will have presentations by our Chief Financial Officer, followed by presentations of each of our Business Unit heads. At the end of this afternoon, at around 5:15 P.M., we will have a joint Q&A session with the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, and all of the Business Unit heads, and there you can ask any specific questions. With that, I'd like to hand over to Marco Gadola, and I wish us all a wonderful afternoon. Thank you very much. Thank you, Till, a warm welcome also from my side. Thank you for having made the effort to come to London and to participate at our Capital Markets Day. Our Chief Executive Officer, Stefan Butz, and his team will share with you in detail over the next roughly five hours the progress DKSH has made on many topics since the last Capital Markets Day in 2020, why the board and the management are extremely positive about DKSH's future, and why an investment into DKSH is not only a very compelling idea but almost a must. As you all know, do we not only generate the vast majority of our business in the most attractive growth region in Asia Pacific, but we can also look back at unmatched 160 years of legacy in the region, counting on a unique network of clients, customers, infrastructure, relationships, and on the biggest asset we have, almost 30,000 highly motivated and talented employees. We have a well-defined plan as a company and at the different Business Unit levels to continue to grow organically and through accretive M&A, gain market share, and to sustainably improve the efficiency of our businesses and, in consequence, the underlying margins. Stefan Butz and his team will share with you this afternoon the details of how this will be achieved. Thank you again for being with us this afternoon. With this, I hand over to Stefan. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Thanks, all, for joining our Capital Market Day 2024 in London. I would also like to thank UBS very much for hosting us here today. I'm very excited to share with you our new midterm roadmap of accelerated growth, continuous margin improvement, as well as accelerated M&A. Before we go into the details of our midterm roadmap, let's look back quickly what we said and stated in our last year Capital Market Day. For those of you who remember, we made, you know, six promises, and I'm very happy and pleased to share with you promises made, promises kept, despite the fact that there was COVID in between, and I guess we have seen some macroeconomic challenges over especially the last, you know, 24 months. Our highly focused business unit growth strategies across all four business units with a very high strategic focus delivered in total in CER, and I'm going to talk about CER here for the rest of my presentation, a core EBIT uplift of 50%. We expanded our regional footprint organically as well as through 28 acquisitions since 2019. Our high-performance culture of trust, empowerment, and collaboration delivered an engagement score up year by year from 74% to most recently 78%. Our continuous focus on operational excellence, improving our processes and cost position did support us in bringing up the EBIT margin by 60 basis points since 2019. We did champion digitization across all interfaces with our client and customers, as well as internally, and our digital sales grow by the factor 3.5x. We are also working now on a couple of AI projects in our operations I'm going to talk about later. Last but not least, continuously since 2017, we are upgrading and digitizing our supply chain. Over 60% of the total volume is already running through modernized semi-automated supply chains across the region. We can confidently say that we did execute a solid transformation of DKSH over the last years. We are in much better shape and more efficient than we have been in 2020. Sometimes pictures talk louder than words. We have a very brief video to show you or give you a first impression about the new DKSH. For those of you who don't know us very well, please allow me a brief overview. We are the largest and leading market expansion service provider across Asia and beyond. This is not only due to the pure size of our operation of over CHF 11 billion of revenue and over 28,000 specialists, but also driven by many USPs, which make us unique and create a lot of value for our clients and customers. All of our employees are actually navigating a very agile and complex environment, especially in Southeast Asia. Complexity is our friend, and that creates really a value for our clients and our customers. We have a very deep experience in the region. Next year in Tokyo, we are celebrating 160 years of DKSH. In Japan, we are the oldest foreign-owned legal entity being continuously in business in Japan since 160 years. We are mentioning in the Tokyo National Museum. I think it gives you an understanding how deep and rich our heritage is. We offer one-stop solutions. That means sales, marketing, logistic, and value-added services solutions for over 4,000 clients or suppliers and are addressing over 400,000 customers in the whole region. Our portfolio is very diverse on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's dominated by products of daily usage. That, together with our footprint across almost or over 36 markets today, is giving us a significant resilience in our business, and I think especially our performance during and after COVID shows that, you know, very, very nicely. In the last years, we transformed our footprint significantly. For those of you knowing us longer might remember that by the end of 2016, we had approximately 75% of our revenue being driven by five countries only. We significantly diversified that over the last couple of years. You see here on the slide that the rest of Asia Pacific, so the young upcoming markets, in particular, the so-called VIP markets, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, are growing nicely and very fast. We also expanded strategically our footprint, as mentioned on the last Capital Market Day, into Australia and New Zealand, and I'm happy to report that Australia and New Zealand is now one of the top six EBIT contributors, you know, across the board and a testament how this successfully can be done. Last but not least, most important, we really developed on a strong footing our specialty performance business from a footprint in Asia only into Europe and into North America to really scale it up to one of the large global leading platforms in the world. Right now, as we are sitting here, we are also having a deeper look into India. You might know that with Performance Materials we are already present in India. With the other business units, especially Healthcare, we are not and there is some projects going on to explore the potential for us there to enter the market, obviously most likely with M&A. We are very confident on our midterm outlook because it's built on the solid transformation we have done over the last couple of years and a solid performance since 2019 in particular. Promises made, promises kept. If we look back, what did we achieve in, as CAGR over the last couple of years in net sales? It was GDP+ 'cause GDP was around 3.1%. We delivered 3.3% CAGR since 2019. To be very honest here, in terms of net sales growth, we also had higher expectation. Obviously, what you see nicely here on the slide is the headwind, which is material driven by the, by the exchange rates and the, especially the very strong Swiss franc, but also by some very weak local Asian currencies. We were very pleased by delivering a core EBIT CAGR since 2019 of double digit over 10% and enhancing the margin from 2.4% in 2019 up to 3% in 2023. Also, you see here that we delivered a very strong performance in terms of free cash flow CAGR over the years. I would also like to point out we are and have an asset-light business model. You see that the CapEx for net sales is very low despite the transformation we were driving over the last two years. Let's take a look at our midterm roadmap. Based on the, you know, solid transformation as an enabler to deliver a more ambitious midterm roadmap of accelerated growth, margin expansion and accelerated, you know, M&A with the enabling factors of sustainability, digital, as well as our culture or our people, we are very confident that this midterm roadmap is delivering some solid midterm higher EBIT numbers over the years to come. Over the next few minutes, I would like to go into more details of the three building pillars here of accelerated growth. One back, please. Sorry. Accelerated growth, margin expansion and accelerated M&A. Growth are two components: structural tailwinds of the region we operate in, strong organic execution of growth strategies. Margin expansion is driven by operational excellence as well as an ever-improving portfolio mix in terms of clients and SKUs we have in our warehouses. M&A we are using to expanding our regional footprint, but as well as to expand our offering, especially into higher margin business. Okay. Let's now first please talk about growth. What are the structural, you know, tailwinds we are enjoying for our business? First of all, Asia. If you look at the three large economic regions in the world, North America, Europe, as well as Asia is still the place where most of the growth is happening. If you listen to the IMF over the next years, they even forecast that the growth rates are moving back to 4%+, which is exciting. I guess you have also seen that our biggest market, Thailand, already make some good progress this year, and there is a significant step expected, especially for last year as well. What are the favorable demographic trends? First of all, we have an exploding middle class in Asia-Pacific, which is increasing consumption continuously. Especially for our healthcare business, Asia is also aging. Aged people need more medicine, more pharmaceutical product, so that is giving some good growth for our, you know, healthcare colleagues. The more our clients are being challenged by, you know, the cost base they are running by macroeconomic headwinds they're having, the more they are going to outsource. Why should they continue to run a high fixed cost base, in particular across Asia, when there is an opportunity with a leading multinational organization playing on the same eye-to-eye level, offering the opportunity to outsource sales, marketing and logistics? The other thing is the complexity in the world is continuously increasing. We have hundreds and hundreds of people being able to manage this ever-increasing regulatory environment, including obviously ESG. That's creating a clear value for our clients. More of the smaller distributors, they can no longer step up their game. They can't deliver, for example, on the ESG requirements. There will be an active consolidation of the amount of distributors. Also our clients, they would rather work globally with three, four, five distributors instead of having, you know, many in the different regions of the world, a clear opportunity for us as the largest player in the region. The second driver of growth will be the growth strategy of our business units. In Healthcare, we will continuously focus on delivering more full-service business, going deeper and expanding our footprint in own brands and continuously increasing value-added services as Bijay is going to present later on in more details. In Consumer Goods, we have done some solid homework. We are by far the largest player in Asia Pacific, and from this large and strong position in the market, we will continue to drive cross-profitable growth over the years to come. Performance Materials, as mentioned before, we are building a global platform, and we are very confident that midterm, you know, we will be able to become one of the leading global players in the world, in the market of specialty ingredients distribution. In the sector of Technology, Hanno is going to share with you later on more about our leading position in scientific solution, which we can further capitalize on in the years to come. Let's now briefly talk about the second building block of our midterm plan. That means margin expansion through operational excellence as well as an improved portfolio mix. We are significantly driving sales force excellence, you know, forward. That not only means increasing the efficiency and effectivity across the few thousand salespeople we have across the region, but it's also about making sure that we sell an improved product mix, which is ensuring higher growth and a higher profitability at the point of sale, as well as increasing our route to market continuously over the years to come. At the same time, especially with the help of our, you know, finance people and operational excellence teams, we are consistently improving our cost efficiency and improving processes as well as procedures within our organization to drive us into a better, you know, cost position across the board and drive simplification across the whole region. Portfolio mix. As mentioned before, we will continuously improve in shifting into higher margin and full service business across the four business lines, which is also delivering, you know, higher growth and higher margin for us to improve the bottom line. Own brands, you are all aware that we have a significant presence already, and it's grew significantly over the last couple of years in Healthcare. For the years to come, we will also accelerate our own brands business, not only in Consumer Goods, as we will learn later on from Chris, but also in Performance Materials. We are having already a few own brands in the portfolio, and there are some good growth opportunities by introducing them into new countries and expanding the, you know, portfolio overall. Then last but not least, I always call it, you know, winning with winners. Ongoingly, we will make sure that we have a strategically better mix of our clients with the right products for the right consumers in the right market to deliver the best possible growth rate. Last but not least, let's please have a look into the building block of accelerated M&A. Over the last years, since 2019, we delivered 28 acquisitions. 80% of those acquisitions were in the higher margin business of own brands, Performance Materials, as well as Technology. We used bolt-on acquisitions also, as mentioned before, to expand our regional footprint in so-called white spots we have to ensure that the business can grow across the board. For the future, we are definitely planning to have more M&A. I think we all have seen that, especially in the chemical market, most recently, the multiples came down. They're back to a reasonable level. The EBIT of some of the targets, obviously in those challenging days, are lower than they have been before for many of those smaller companies out there. I'm happy to share with you that we do have the strongest M&A pipeline we ever had, and we can be very optimistic that we can share a lot of that with you already in Q1 and Q2 of 2025. We also want to do some transformational deal or more impactful deals. Obviously, to make large deal happens, a lot of things have to come together at the right point of time in the right place. It's hard to promise, but we are very optimistic that we are also making progress there, especially in the area of Performance Materials. We feel very comfortable up to a 2x leverage on the balance sheet. Maybe if it's short term, even up to, you know, 2.5x. I'm very pleased, you know, to share with you that we have a new Head of M&A since November 1st. Michael Buckley has over 20 years of M&A experience, sorry, not with UBS, but with Rothschild, Danone, as well as CITIC in Asia. Very dynamic, impressive, you know, young gentleman, and we are very optimistic that that will help us to seriously accelerate our M&A pipeline looking forward. Let's come to sustainability. As you know, we are very purpose-driven organization, and sustainability is one of our core five values, and we focus on our sustainability agenda on four objectives, as you can see here, you know, on the slide. We strongly believe that the corporate world or business, you know, has a responsibility in really helping the world to build a resilient low emission economies. We believe it has to be science-based, and that is the reason why most recently we joined the Science Based Targets initiative. Our ratings over the last couple of years, you see here, significantly improved, and it's a nice recognition for the efforts we put in place here. ESG, for us, is also a source of differentiation. It's a USP. It's not only additional costs than maybe a few people believe. Many of our smaller competitors in the region, they don't really know what ESG stands for. They have no ESG agenda. The majority of our large multinational clients, they need strong partners helping them delivering data into their ESG agenda. It's also money well spent, not only for the environment, but also to deliver growth in Asia and beyond. Let's briefly talk about digitization. I mentioned already a couple of times, digitization, simplification of our processes, procedures, interfaces between clients and customers is a key enabler to accelerate our growth. I'm happy to share with you that over 60% of our Distribution Centers are digitized, are paperless, and were upgraded over the last couple of years, and more to come for the next two years, which is, by the way, driving some very good cost savings across the board. Not only helping us in digitizing things, but also helping us into in delivering margin enhancement. Today, 83% of our revenue is already running through digital payments. In the past, that was a completely different environment where cash collection was a majority of our business, you know, many, many years ago. In terms of digital sales and digital-enabled sales, I'm happy to report that since 2019, they grew by the factor 3.5x. We are also running, you know, many AI projects right now for two reasons: to make sure we can deliver efficiency gains, especially in the back office processes, but also we are sitting on a goldmine of data. Obviously, AI can help us to create the value out of the data, which will help us to deliver growth, as well as margin enhancement. Last but not least, the most important thing. We are a people business. People are our most important asset. Since we revisited our people strategy in 2019, we really advanced our purpose-driven high-performance culture of trust, empowerment, as well as collaboration and clear accountability and fully aligned incentive schemes. We have now all of our 120 leaders or will be in February on our Share Program, so we have a lot of alignment also with, you know, all of our shareholders. A few weeks ago, we were with the top 120 leaders together in Thailand. 2/3 of the people in the room were new comparing to 2017. That is a testament of the transformation we are driving within DKSH. We significantly upgraded the capability and the competence of our senior leaders across the group. It's also nice to see that. We have now 37% of our seniors are female leaders, which grew significantly from 2019, I think it was, you know, three years ago. I'm also very happy to share with you that our new general counsel, who will start next year and will be a member of the Executive Board, is also female with a very international background. For us, it's very important that we create a very motivating work environment. Over the last couple of years, we started upgrading all of our offices, as you have seen in the video before. That helped us to increase the employee engagement from 74%- 78%, as well as we did win many Great Place to Work, Best Workplace, and many other, you know, awards across the region. To sum it up, I'm very, very confident and committed, and so is the team here in the room to deliver accelerated growth, accelerated M&A, as well as continuous margin improvement to deliver a solid step up in higher EBIT over the next years to come. Thank you very much for your attention, there with I would hand over to my dear colleague, Ido, our Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. Thank you, Stefan. Thank you, Marco. Hello, everyone. Very excited to see you here. I couldn't mingle a lot because the technical team called me to wire me up before the presentation. I look forward to mingle and socialize and also answer questions in the breaks and afterwards in the evening, if you can join. I'm also very excited because while usually it's myself and Stefan, today we have my entire team, Bijay, Chris, Tale, Hanno, and Thomas. They are here today, and make no mistake about it, they are the real ones who write the DKSH story. Stefan and I only get to turn on the pages for them. Finally, if a little bit more personal, this is the city I why I'm excited to be here. This is the city I used to call home for a few years back in the 1990s, almost three decades ago, when I went to school here. Every time, every city, almost every city that I go here is walking down memory lane. I'm glad to see that we have not fixed the weather since those three decades. I'm gonna talk today about how we're gonna scale this business, our past and present and future. I'm gonna point in a few numbers, okay? I realize that they're not very visible from far, but you all have printed out and also on your computer. Please bear with me. Before scaling up, let's talk about the DKSH scale. Every day, DKSH connects between more than 4,000 suppliers with 400,000 customers or clients. Clients that otherwise they would probably not have a connection with because they are far, far away in the world for them. We help them for regulation. Stefan mentioned how it's becoming ever more increasingly difficult. We help them for regulation to get into the market. We help them to reformulate with 54 innovation centers. We ship their products, the fruit of their innovation, through 229 distribution center. In fact, the number is not here. Every year, we ship almost 1 billion individual units. Units that can be, like you saw there in the atrium, a bag of crisps for consumer goods. It can be a barrel of specialty material for performance material. It can be a precision assembly material, machinery, for technology, and it can even be individual stent that goes destined into a hospital where somebody is on operating theater. Very sophisticated and very different capabilities that we have to serve all these types of, of shipment, which we can help all our clients and suppliers. Now, we take orders for all these almost 1 billion units by, as you saw digitally, we take it on phones, we take it on computer, on emails, paper forms, and even faxes in some parts of the world where we operate. And then we invoice 18 million times per year. Okay? That's, that's, about 70, 80 million invoices per month. Okay? We have to handle the receivables, the credit management, and we collect digitally, we collect cash, we collect checks, all form of payments. This is a scale of the business that was built over the last almost 160 years. This is a scale that no one is likely to wake up one day and say, "I'm gonna start and building from scratch so I can try to overtake DKSH with their first mover advantage." It's a real advantage that is unlikely to be surpassed in the future. We do have some local competitors. They are smaller. None of them is as regional as us, and they can offer some interesting proposal for our suppliers. Even if they can get them for regulation and compliance, which is becoming increasingly difficult and not everyone abides by our Swiss-listed company standards, they will find out that they are unlikely to be able to serve them at the cost advantage that we have. Why do we have this cost advantage? Because we have one SAP platform across all our business. With a few M&As that are still not yet on the platform, 99% of our business is on one SAP platform and is managed through a shared service of IT and finance services in KL, which is unique. This gives us a tremendous cost advantage, but it gives us a lot more than that. First of all, as Chief Financial Officer, I'm mandated with control and governance. All the story that I told you about the shipping, the invoices, the credit control, the receivables, I have access to the entire company here. Okay? Next to my family pictures, I can see every e-invoice, every salesperson, what what order intake they took yesterday, which customers with a credit line, every and even the T&E of all our employees. They give us a tremendous control and governance to run this very complex business, but that's not even the biggest advantage of operating on one platform that we have. The biggest advantage is the information that then we have with this, with this, with this platform. The ability of our business units to come to their suppliers, to come to the customers and tell them, "Hey, you're running out of this inventory. Hey, in this part of the country, your demand is increasing. Here, this salesperson is not as active and productive as the others. That information is the one that our suppliers and customers look for when they come to do business with DKSH. That's about the scale, which is quite significant that we have in our business. What we also have is the diversity of our business. Stefan mentioned the split by country. I'm not gonna go deeper into that. I will mention, 'cause it will come back later, that if you look five years back, ANZ was not 5% of net sales of our business. I'll come to that later. We have almost perfect diversification of our business units because with tech, Consumer Goods, Healthcare, and Performance Materials, we pretty much cover all categories of the economy. Right? There is hardly any product or service out there that is not part of those business units. Perhaps not as much in net sales, which is on the left, but on EBIT, which is the right, you can see that we are fully diversified. Yes, not every BU has 25% of the EBIT, which will be the real fair share. Bijay in Healthcare and Thomas and Natale in Performance Materials that are above their fair share of 25%, they work every day very hard to ensure that they stay above the 25%. Even that, the smallest one being 9%. It used to be lower, it's a very nice diversification that gives us confidence from short-term impact of the business. We always knew that we have very resilient business. We always knew that we have multi-industry diversification, but this was really put to the test in the COVID black swan event. Okay. You saw that for COVID, in the years that Stefan has shown of continuous both net sales and EBIT movement, each one of those industry has gone through a certain cyclical event. At the beginning of COVID, CG was doing very well as everybody was stocking their pantry. Healthcare because hospitals were stocking their supplies. As those started to gradually wind down, it's when PM started to be very strong, as the entire world realized that they don't have enough materials for production. When COVID was completely over, that's when tech started to do very well because people realized that for two, three years, they didn't have any CapEx. It shows. In the meantime, healthcare started to reinvent itself as an industry, you can see that the last two years, the very high success that they are delivering. It shows you that there's always something which is working very well for DKSH in such diversification of business. Now, these were short-term events. Over the last four years, actually also fifth year, this year, as you can see at least by our half one results, each one of these four BUs have delivered tremendous and very respectable growth. Okay? Those events were short-term and not over the four years. You can see that performance materials and technology have gone very, very serious double digits, and healthcare and consumer goods slightly below, but almost there with the double digits EBIT growth. This is EBIT 2019 and EBIT 2023. Each one of the BUs increased their profit margin, their EBIT margin, quite substantially. The 60 basis points increase from 2019- 2023 of the entire company is broad-based across all BUs, or at least three out of the four. How is it that four BUs deliver together something very close to double digits and EBIT margin improvement at the same time? There's at least three strategies that we pursue together to deliver those. These are, first of all, and Stefan mentioned it, is focusing on high-margin business. That's high-margin clients, high-margin categories, high-price products where we can get more for the same. On the other hand, being very cost conscious of cutting costs, rationalizing clients that are not profitable, and M&A. M&A is coming up in a few slides. I would like to talk with you a bit more on the gross margin focus and the cost focus. This is very much illustrated, and I realize that the numbers may be a bit small from a distance. It's very much illustrated in the profit statement of the company if you compare 2023 and 2019. It will also work with H1 2024, which is out there on our website. What you see here is our cost structure. That's a 2.4x margin that we had in 2019, and the 3.0x margin that we closed 2023 with, and also H1 2024. What you can see that over these four years, our gross margin increased by 1.1%. That's almost 30 basis points per year. That's because we are focusing, exactly as we say, on high performance, high margin clients and categories, and less so on those that are less lucrative. We invest a big part of this increase in personnel cost. Stefan mentioned what talent means to us, but it also means that we are selling more and more services than products, right? Products will be in COGS and gross margin, and when we sell people's time, if it's Sales force or if it's merchandisers, there will be an increase in our personnel cost. This is an increase that we very well welcome. We manage it, but it's a sign that we are becoming stronger as the company. You see that on the way to the 60 basis points, we have increased amortization, that's the increased M&A. The major decrease came from operational expenses, otherwise known as overhead. Okay, 40 basis points came from this line. This is where everything that we say about automation, about control of cost, and digitalization of our business, this is where it comes to life, and 40 basis points over four years. That's 10 basis points per year. What you don't see in this number is this is where also where we put all our IT investment. Over this period, we have pretty much doubled our investment in IT to enable all these digitalizations of our business, of our platform, of our collection, and of our DCs. Within that decrease, there's also an increase of IT, which makes this achievement even bigger. One last thing, which is also not visible in this number, but inside is that if you're familiar with the operational model of distribution, we manage the credit risk and the inventory for our suppliers. That means that the more we have bad debt, the more it will impact our P&L, the more we have obsolescence and bad inventory, the more it will impact our P&L, right? Part of the decrease in cost that you see here is because we start to manage much, much better our working capital over the last four years. I think it's a story that you know, but this is where it translates into P&L achievement. I think the next slide shows exactly how and measures the impact of that working capital improvement. What you see on the left is working capital as a percent of our net sales. This is data that is available for you. In the four years from 2023, we have decreased by 170 basis points, something that we have continued to do in H1 2024 to 6.3% working capital as a percent of net sales. It's tremendous. 170 basis points on CHF 11 billion business, that's almost CHF 200 million of cash that we took out of the business and put back into, frankly, also into investors' hands, okay? That explains how we generated so much cash flow and conversion over the last few years, and why we will gradually slow down with this because we cannot drive working capital to zero, unfortunately. That has driven a very light and very fit balance sheet for DKSH, a balance sheet that we can now leverage on to accelerate our M&As. In that balance sheet is also the M&As that we have done in the past few years. I'm going to come to that in a short second. You have here a simplified balance sheet, and I think the one thing which is very, very visible is actually the smallest. It's that we are very asset-light business. We are very low plant, property and equipment, and we are very low commitments on leases, long term, okay? It's, together, the two are 2.5%, 3% of sales. That's very, very tiny. Most of our balance sheet is at working capital, so our ability and the fitness level that we built on managing a working capital, that's what makes us strong and give us a lot of capacity for the future. By the way, the dotted blue line that you see, that's what we measure under NOC, okay? When we talk with you about RONOC and our NOC, this is what comes into it. And you can see that part of it, of that NOC is goodwill. That's important because all our management are measured, including myself, are measured on RONOC, which is quite high, at 18.7%. That's respectable return on net operating capital and on NOC itself. Whenever we make an M&A, people are incentivized to make it a capital efficient. What you also see in this, in this balance sheet is that we have a respectable amount of cash in our bank balance. That's very, very critical in the business we're in. We are very receptive for any volatility in the market. We will always have an all-cash to be able to run the business. Our net debt situation is pretty much balanced. They pretty much balance each other out, CHF 6.5 million of net cash. We have a very healthy balance sheet, which offers the ample opportunity for us to accelerate the M&A now with our comfort level that Stefan mentioned of up to 2x or temporarily 2.5x of the balance sheet. Now that you see our capital structure, let's talk about our capital allocation. On the right-hand side is something which is very important for us, and that's the dividend payment. We have been increasing dividends since the IPO in 2012. You know, logically, when you talk about resilient business, it means that the dividend payment has to be resilient, right? Because whatever come what way, we will pay you a dividend. It was quite incredible if you think of it, at Q2 2020, we paid the dividend Q2, when the entire world was, you know, sticking to their holding, their cash holding, not sure what the future will hold. Stock markets was down. DKSH paid its dividend in May 2022 when the whole world was closing. That's why we hold liquidity, and that's why our business is resilient, and we are committed to progressively increase our dividend year over year. It took us 11 years, it will be 12 years in next year's dividend, to build this aristocracy of committing to increase in Swiss franc, so we'll absorb any FX challenge. We don't wanna miss one year, and then it will take 12 more years to build a new, the new history. There could always be black swan event, but we are very, very committed to progressive dividend increase year on year. After dividend comes the investment in M&A. As you saw, we don't have to invest in CapEx. We don't have to or significant CapEx. We don't have to invest in significant leases. We have plenty of availability for M&A. Up to 2019 this was not the focus area. There were about 16 deals in seven years with a CHF 100 million investment. I apologize for the advisor that we didn't give you a lot of work. We have done better between 2019 and 2024 because we have completed 28 deals and put to work as much as CHF 900 million. Okay? We're clearly step up on the M&A. It's a big part of the growth that you've seen in EBIT and net sales in year to date. It's a strategy that has worked for us. We continue to the future, also intend to accelerate, which is why we're trying to illustrate here. Somewhere in the medium term, we will do more and bigger M&As. M&A is a serious business and we have to operate with the discipline that we have built over the last five years. Okay? Sometimes there is pressure to do more deals, but we are very disciplined about the deals that we do. We only buy something which has a strategic fit to our business and a culture fit, which is as important as strategic fit. We only do deals for margin-accretive business and also when a deal itself is margin accretive. There's a very good illustration of that on the right-hand side of the chart, which is ANZ, which enjoyed 10 M&As of the last 28 M&As. Remember we talked at the beginning that ANZ is now 5% of our net sales? That's a number that you don't have in the H1 report because it's a nine months leading to in 2024. ANZ EBIT was 10% of the entire DKSH EBIT. It was 1% in 2019. Okay? Within five years, we made it 10%. If sales are 5% of the pie and EBIT is 10% of the pie, well, clearly it was accretive for our business and manage well. So we are very disciplined in risk management. We have very detailed due diligence. We have very clear integration plan after each acquisition. And we do very, very regular tracking or month after month that we are on track. We try to put the newly acquired company as soon as possible in SAP because that opens a world of opportunities that I talk in my first slide today. So, we will have the annual cash generation and more debt to facilitate and finance those future deals. How will you envision that this will look like going forward in the next few years? We try to illustrate here what has happened in the last four years. We've increased net sales by 3.3%, and we believe our commitment for GDP+ remains. We cannot control the GDP, although we touch pretty much every, with the four industries, every level of the GDP. We will grow ahead of GDP. That's our added value for the market. We expect a disproportional growth in net sales coming from bigger M&As. We don't know where exactly it's gonna happen. There's a lot of stars that have to align, but the pipe field here is busier than a year and two years ago. This is coming up, and over the next three to five years, we expect significantly more. In terms of EBIT margin, we've done quite some way with the 60 basis points. That's 15 basis points per year. Each year, that was ahead of our expectations because each year we target that 10 basis points. In three weeks' time, we will present the budget to our board for approval and the group as a whole and each BU have budgeted a 10 basis points increase into 2025. Whatever we choose for as a midterm is a three to five years. This is the range of EBIT increase that we are challenging ourselves to deliver. Coming up to my last slide, which sums it up and apologies, in a way repeats. If you're looking to invest in DKSH, I hope so, because what we are looking is to deliver accelerated net sales growth, expanding margin 10 basis points per year, continue to generate cash at least 90% of PAT each year, that's our conversion, and accelerate more meaningful, bigger M&A coupled with increased dividend each year for you. That was for me. We will have a short break right now of five to 10 minutes. Theo? Yeah. After that, we will talk with the BU, starting with healthcare and Bijay. My name is Bijay Singh. I'm the Global Head of Business Unit Healthcare. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. I'd like to share a little bit today why the growth engines that we have in DKSH Healthcare really will provide a promising future for DKSH. Our theme really is to expand our strong market position in healthcare and drive into higher value segments and services. Yeah. If you look at our healthcare business, we've really had proven capabilities and strong performance. We're a top healthcare distribution company in Asia Pacific. We're a leader in commercial outsourcing. What is commercial outsourcing? It's when clients look to DKSH to provide a whole suite of solutions, including sales and marketing. I'll touch a little bit how the business model of many of our clients is changing and how that drives opportunities for DKSH Healthcare. We have got tremendous coverage across Asia. We've got 8,000 staff in DKSH Healthcare. Almost half of them are in some form of sales and marketing. If you look at our three growth engines, they're distribution. That's third party and fourth party logistics. It's commercial outsourcing that I've talked about earlier. There's our own brands, which is essentially where we own the IP. Either we've taken the license and we've acquired that early, or we've gone out into the market and done M&A and bought a revenue stream. If you look at our sales by business line, you see that more than half of our business comes from pharma, significant portion from medical device, and then OTC. If you look at our sales by growth engine, almost 80% is coming from distribution. Touch on that in a bit. About 20% from commercial outsourcing, and 2%, but very, very significant high leverage in own brands. Back in 2020, I had the opportunity to present to you, I shared how we would deliver strong core EBIT growth and continued margin increase. I'm really proud to stand here today and share with you the great results that we've achieved over that period. We've essentially delivered on the promise that we made to you back in Capital Markets Day four years ago. Our core EBIT has increased more than 40% since 2019. It's really double-digit growth in constant exchange rates. We've also seen our EBIT margin grow significantly, over 60 basis points in that area. If you look at our coverage, we've got broad coverage. We've entered into Australia, New Zealand. You heard a little bit about that from Ido. We started in 2020 with our first acquisition there. We've added another one last year and bought a small own brands business. Earlier this year, we also bought a business in Brunei that's performing very well. We'll talk to you a little bit about the M&A footprint we have, and with that acquisition in Brunei, we're now in every ASEAN market. If you look at our overall performance, you see tremendous growth in terms of constant exchange rate. As was mentioned by Stefan, Asia offers great growth opportunities for healthcare, and that's really driven by a number of trends. We see affluent middle class increasing tremendously. You see some numbers up here that I won't read to you. Essentially, the second one is a huge growth in non-communicable diseases. Diseases like diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease, even others like cancer. Diseases that typically afflicted the developed world we see now affecting many parts of Asia-Pacific. With these being chronic medications different than the acute antibiotics, patients require them long term, definitely creates long-term possibilities for growth. Stefan mentioned aging population. If you look at where people consume the highest degree of healthcare, it's usually in the last years of their life. We see a tremendous increase in aging population across Asia. All of these add up to a tremendous jump in healthcare spend. You see a 70% rise in healthcare spending by 2030. There's another trend that I haven't mentioned here that I'd like to spend a minute on. That is really the change in the go-to-market model of many of our clients. There was a time when I was a general manager 25 years ago of a client, where the client would like to basically plant their flag in every country. That's changed as you look at their economic model. Their time to market is lower because patent expirations, loss of exclusivity is happening faster. It's hard to get new medicines. That means that they really have to look at their own risk profile and decide whether they're the best person or best group to commercialize those assets. They are very good at developing products, they're very good at developing brands, they may choose not to commercialize those products by themselves. This is causing resource reallocation, which we see happening in terms of either country prioritization or portfolio prioritization. That creates tremendous opportunities for us in Healthcare, and I'll touch on those in a moment with a couple of stories. We see growth across a variety of clusters for DKSH. The developed markets of Thailand and Malaysia continue to grow. Higher value reimbursed markets, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, we're growing very strongly there. There are three markets that clients often talk about. These fast-moving large markets, VIP markets called Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and we're growing very well in those. No matter what type of cluster, no matter what type of archetype, Healthcare is doing strongly. I've touched on the variety of business models that we have. Let me spend a bit more time on them. There's the third and fourth party logistics. We're distributing the product, physical distribution, warehousing, transportation, credit, and collection. As I said, that's almost 80% of our sales, 79%, but a relatively modest EBIT margin, about 1%-2%. I'll come back to why this is an important area in a moment. The second of commercial outsourcing, which is where we're seeing a tremendous growth and why we're delivering better margin to our shareholders, really is a mix of a few services. There's contract sales or contract sales and marketing, and then there is full agency, where we are the one-stop shop for the client. We basically buy the product, and then we're responsible for doing everything in the market for that, and we see that increasing significantly. That represents a margin somewhere between 5%-7%. The third very, very attractive segment that you obviously can see is our own brands. As I mentioned, that's where we have the intellectual property of the brand, and you see margins there of approximately 20%. Very significant, but probably you can see the sales earlier in that chart of about 2%. The fourth is not really what I call a growth engine because it's not material enough yet, but it's also very important. It's important in terms of margin, but it's also important in terms of providing additional services. It's very ancillary to the other services we provide, and this is what we call value-added services. Could be digital, analytics and insights, and a new area, patient solutions, which we developed internally five years ago and then bought a company in Australia, New Zealand called Partizan. That's really in patient solutions where we can provide access, affordability, and adherence services for clients. Very, very important as they go into specialty medicines. Again, these are the four strategic priorities to further accelerate top-line growth and margin expansion for DKSH. The first is to lead in commercial outsourcing. Again, here it's to expand focus to high-margin, multi-country deals, and I'll touch on one of them in a moment. This is sort of like what we've experienced in the last four or five years with a company called LEO Pharma that decided to pull out of Asia and choose DKSH as its partner across several markets. To succeed here, we need to drive top-line growth, we also need to invest in productivity to get the most leverage we can out of those 4,000 sales reps and get much more coverage for the clients. The second key area is to accelerate our own brands. Grow in our core categories, pain, women's health, therapeutic skincare, are the three areas we're particularly strong, and in the future, biosimilars. To drive growth here, we really need to focus on M&A. We do not have a research and development department. We need to buy it. We need to in-license it or buy it from someone else. The third key driver here for own brands is to accelerate what we call our tier 2 markets. That's where we have a lower market share than in our tier one, and we have a few markets there we're investing more and trying to accelerate growth. The third is to increase market share in distribution services. Key here is to focus on priority wins for business development. Most of the market here is covered. Either we win or our main competitor wins. As Stefan mentioned, there are still a few clients, particularly in medical devices, that are with smaller distributors. We also have to get more efficient here, emphasize digitization and automation. You saw the video earlier of one of our tremendous fully automated Distribution Centers in Taiwan. The last is to differentiate through new services. Entering new white space, white spot spaces. I've talked about patient solutions. Home care, what we learned during COVID, is becoming more and more an area of opportunity. Also patient monitoring. Our approach here is to scale the services under development. We pilot, we learn. When we see opportunities, then we decide we scale. We look to see opportunities and ideas from other markets, whether it's in the U.S., in Europe. We're watching the large distribution companies there, seeing what they're doing and seeing if we can replicate those in Asia. This helps us deliver the DKSH purpose of enriching people's lives, and our motto in healthcare is to help provide healthcare for all. Let me share an example from one of our clients. Roche, as a leading diagnostics company, always strive to serve our patients and people in Vietnam. While diagnostics, as a foundational element in healthcare, now requires uninterrupted supplies for timely decision-making by our clinicians. DKSH fulfills all these requirements nationwide responsibly. We have more than 20 years relationship and grew together for the purpose of quality service to our lab customers and clinicians. We look forward to our continued relationship in the future. Thank you, DKSH, for understanding and fulfilling all the requirements and contributing to the healthcare system in Vietnam. That was the story from Roche. Let me tell you another story. Japanese company called Kyowa Kirin. Maybe some of you in the room have never heard of them. They're a mid-sized Japanese company. They looked and made the realization that spending more money on growing in Asia-Pacific by themselves wasn't the best use of their resources. They needed funds to grow in other areas and invest in research and development. After extensive discussions with them, they decided to choose DKSH. We're now covering six markets for them in Asia. It's over CHF 100 million in net sales. This is the largest deal in DKSH history that we signed this year. It's provided us an opportunity to accelerate in the large market of Korea and also to grow in Taiwan. 72 of their employees joined DKSH, the capability came with us. Who is Kyowa Kirin? They're very strong in specialty medicines. They're very strong in rare disease and extremely strong in nephrology. They have medical doctors on staff. It's an area that I chose not to invest in significantly before, but with this acquisition, we're able to build this capability that can now be deployed to other clients. It's increased our competitiveness in medical affairs and helped shift the perception of DKSH in some of these markets from being a pharmacy player, an OTC player, to being a real strong player in specialized portfolio. It's one of the reasons why DKSH, Kyowa Kirin chose DKSH, is because they thought we were hungry, we were aggressive, and we really wanted to invest to grow. This is a typical outsourcing story that we see accelerating across Asia-Pacific. More and more clients are looking at this kind of model. I can tell you, as I moved around the markets, Japanese clients were quite shocked because it's unlike them to move and to outsource. This becomes a litmus test for others who are considering doing the same. You see that in Europe. You see that in the U.S. You typically don't see Japanese companies doing it. It creates more and more opportunities for us to grow. A second story I'd like to share with you is about own brands. Great success story of bringing in a product or two products from Eisai. Eisai, another Japanese company by coincidence. It wasn't just bringing them on board, but a fantastic integration of Eisai across nine markets. Now, Eisai is a client of DKSH. They have been in most of these markets, a 4PL client. We bought the products. You can imagine the data that we had about where the product was going and where the product was not going but should have been going because it was marketed by them. We knew by the analytics that Ido was talking about on his phone exactly which pharmacies, which doctors, which areas were under-sourced or under-resourced, and we knew how to accelerate that very, very quickly. We bought with this CHF 50 million in net sales. It's way ahead of business plan and above the initial EBIT target. Thanks to what I just described, we've been able to increase market share in key markets like Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The image shows you an example of another reason why we're able to grow. Myonal, key product for mobility, we repositioned that product for office syndrome, and through that, able to grow. We were able to understand and take the insights that we have as DKSH Healthcare and apply that to product and make it much more valuable. One that I haven't spent enough time on, growth engine, is distribution, 3PL, 4PL. As I said, some of you may wonder, I still get questions of why do we continue to invest in distribution. It provides our right to play and also is a turbocharger for commercial outsourcing. Just as a standalone, it's a tremendous contribution of EBIT to the Healthcare business. Over 30% of our EBIT comes from distribution services. We can leverage it just as a standalone service. It's very important to build critical mass. This is a business about scale, and it's how we meet client needs, such as what you heard from Roche Diagnostics. It's also a tremendous entry point for client relationships. Told you the story of Eisai. Eisai was our 3PL, 4PL client. We've gained the own brand. Other, we're 3PL, 4PL client for LEO Pharma was our client. They chose us to be the commercial outsourcing partner. It becomes a tremendous entry point through which to grow. It's also an opportunity for a high return on investment. Ido shared earlier the RONOC for DKSH. I can tell you that the RONOC for healthcare is tremendously higher, more than 3x higher than the average for DKSH. A big part of it is because of distribution. Low capital requirements, sometimes consignment, and in many cases, we do not take distribution unless it's not neutral. While it may be a low margin business, it's a tremendous platform for growth and provides us an opportunity to turbocharge into other businesses of commercial outsourcing and own brands. Finally, let me talk to you a little bit about M&A. You've seen a growth in M&A through DKSH, and you also see a growth in healthcare, and we will continue this very disciplined bolt-on acquisition. We are always focused on high margin segments and services when we look to add new M&A. Here you can see the seven bolt-on acquisitions that we've done since 2021. They're color-coded according to whether they're commercial outsourcing, own brands, value-added services or distribution, and we've had a mix of all of them in the last four years. What's our priorities? Our priority here in M&A is own brands, looking at the right type of commercial outsourcing, key value-added services like Partizan in Australia, and where it makes sense, distribution. For example, in Brunei. The Brunei business we bought was a mix of distribution and commercial outsourcing. We bought it this year, and it's performing significantly higher than expectation. We're also looking in terms of geography for white spot. As I said, we entered Brunei through a white spot. We entered Australia, New Zealand through a white spot. We are looking in India, specifically in medical devices, and it has to be the right business. India is at a great inflection point. We all know the story about India in terms of population. The other story that you might not hear is many of these clients are also clients of DKSH in Asia, other parts of Asia, and they come to us and say, "Please, why are you not in India? We would like the service that you have, that we get in medical devices for you in India." Things such as consignment inventory management, urgent deliveries, things that we do in Asia that they would like to see us do in India. We are looking to use M&A, but it has to be for the right business. It has to be a compliant business, well-run business, and we're looking for the right platform. In terms of categories, it's the same categories that we have in the rest of our business, pharma, OTC, medical devices, and in terms of value-added services, we're looking for business that will help us in data and digital as well as in services. We're also looking in own brands beyond Asia-Pacific in Switzerland. We have a nice Medinova, a nice business in Switzerland called Medinova, and it allows us to look not only in Switzerland but also in the DACH region, Germany, Austria, Switzerland. We're very well-purchased. Did a small acquisition in 2021, and we're looking for more here in Switzerland. With that, I hope I've shared with you exactly the growth engines and why DKSH Healthcare has such a promising future. With that, let me turn it over to my colleague. Welcome to the Business Unit Technology. My name is Hanno. I've been working with DKSH for 10 years. I've been working and living in Asia for more than 20 years, and currently I'm living in Singapore. Today, I would like to take the opportunity to share with you why and how we are solidifying our position as the leading scientific solution provider in Asia Pacific. We are operating across 60 markets in Asia Pacific, with roughly 2,000 specialists, and we only do full agency. Means, the clients, the suppliers that we represent in Asia Pacific, we do the market entry strategy, we do the technical sales, the service, the application engineering, and obviously also the marketing. We do that across the entire life cycle of the products that we are selling and servicing. Over the last few years, we have very much streamlined our portfolio. We have exited a lot of non-strategic and low or no profit businesses. Through that, we were able to focus on scale our Scientific Solutions business, which is now already making up 34% of our BU. In the Scientific Solutions space, we are providing entire workflow solutions to laboratories. That can be industrial labs like food, pharma, oil and gas. That can be commercial labs like SGS or Intertek. That can be also academia or medical labs. In that business, a lot is contributed by consumables, which is then a high margin and repetitive business that we are driving aggressively. We are across the region represented with 19 demo labs and are effectively the largest Scientific Solutions provider in Asia-Pacific. Additionally, we have been growing the business for High-Tech Industries, which consists of precision machinery and semiconductor and electronics equipment. Here we are operating in very selected markets with highly High-Tech competitive solutions for specific applications. This is also a very profitable business that we are continuing to grow. This focus on scientific solutions and the business in High-Tech Industries has enabled us to over-deliver on our promises that we made during the last capital market day. We have been able to grow our top line and bottom line double-digit CAGR and have grown our top line and bottom line by over 40% from 2019- 2023. Also what's very important is that we have further improved our EBIT margin by 60 basis points, and we will continue to improve our EBIT margin moving forward. Why focusing so much on scientific solutions? Because it is relevant for industries with high growth potential, like food and beverage, like pharma, like life science or like material science. All these industries are supported by certain trends which are fueling their growth, including the growing middle class. Bijay mentioned the aging society, rising health needs, but also more focus on food safety in the food industry and rise of high-tech industries, for example, in the semiconductor industry. All these trends drive the consumption, the need for scientific solutions, analytical instruments and the related consumables and services. We are in the position to provide those solutions and also related services. What you can see here, just to give a very concrete example. If you are a lab and you are doing DNA sequencing because you are doing research for diseases, for example, you would come to DKSH, and we will provide you the consumables for the sample collection. You would need to extract the DNA, so you would isolate it from the rest. For that, again, you would use some chemicals, consumables that we are providing. You will use the PCR, in which you are then duplicating the DNA because you need many of them. This again would be consumables plus an equipment. You will put it into the actual sequencing machine. Next-generation sequencing, which is then the, you know, sometimes CHF 1 million equipment that you would purchase also from us. A concrete example is here that we have partnered up with one of the leading sequencing technology providers, which is called Pacific Bio or PacBio, Pacific Biosciences. There is in the genomic research community in Asia-Pacific, there's more and more in need of the sequencing technology. This is why we have partnered up with PacBio because we wanted to give that community access to the sequencing technology, but also have a reliable partner when it comes to service support, application support. This kind of equipment, for example, is then also standing in our demo labs, where we can provide training, feasibility studies, and testing. They have really chosen DKSH because of our profound knowledge of the local regulation, of our existing market access, of our service and application-centric approach, and also because of our very systematic market development. We believe that with this business, we will generate around EUR 30 million in sales over the next three to five years, or CHF in this case. This is what we currently do. Moving forward, we will continue to execute our strategy, so we will focus to solidify our leading position in the scientific solutions industry in Asia-Pacific. We will also continue to grow the business in these very, you know, focused niche segments with our precision machinery and our semiconductor and electronics equipment. We will continue to grow the consumables and the service business. I will tell you later on a little bit why we are doing this. Digital transformation has always been an important part of our business growth, and we will continue to establish an integrated platform, you know, for operational excellence and for driving productivity and drive our e-commerce business through our online shop, LabShop. We will also continue to further consolidate a very fragmented market in order to fuel growth. Now, what does that mean in detail? For scientific solutions, we have not only been able to grow the business over the years significantly, but we have also enhanced it by increasing the share of our consumables business, which is repetitive, more high margin, and due to the frequent transaction with the end user, is increasing the stickiness with our customers. We have onboarded a lot of talent and leadership through three acquisitions that we have done in Thailand, in Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. With this, we are really in a great position, you know, to further establish partnerships with companies like PacBio, and we talk about regional partnerships to further grow the consumables and the service share, and also to further do acquisitions moving forward. Now, in the high-tech industry, we have been very much fostering this high-tech niche strategy, and we will continue to do that. In Northeast Asia, there's more focus on precision machinery due to the highly developed industry. In Southeast Asia, you know, there's a lot of investment, like in Malaysia and the Philippines or in Vietnam and Thailand in the semiconductor industry, which we can capitalize on. For the consumables and service business, obviously that is important for all business lines, not only the scientific solutions. We have grown that business now to contribute 27% to our net sales, and again, it's the stickiness, it's the high margin, it's the repetition of the business which makes it so attractive. Besides the consumables, we have implemented a state-of-the-art service management tool called ServiceMax in order to more systematically maximize the revenue we get out of the installed base. Right? We will continue, increase the installed base, cover the installed base. We will also grow our own brands, consumables, so which are called LabPRO, and we will also further drive the consumables business to our e-commerce platform, LabShop. Over the years, we have established a truly integrated digital platform to drive productivity, but also to improve customer satisfaction and also to fuel growth. All of our sales and service people, they're all operating on an integrated CRM and a service management tool, and obviously we are driving productivity performance through activity levels, but also through utilization rates, for example, in the service. We are also improving customer satisfaction, so we are measuring mean time to respond, mean time to repair, to ensure that we are, you know, very quickly and reducing the downtime of any of the equipment and machinery of our end users. At the same time, we use this platform to generate growth, and the best example is really our LabShop, our new e-commerce platform. It's the only and largest online platform for laboratory equipment and consumables. Please check it out. Now, of course, one of the integral strategic pillars of our growth strategy is M&A. Here you can see we have purchased and integrated four companies over the last four years, so bolt-on acquisitions. The opportunity is really that there are hundreds of smaller family-owned distributors which over time hopefully will come to market either through, you know, succession planning, but also obviously through us proactively engaging with these companies and trying to get them over the line. These are highly specialized distributors, and we have a strong pipeline, and I hope, you know, at the end of this year or beginning of next year, we can announce some good news. We will continue to really actively engage in M&A and consolidate that market to really become, we are, but become even a stronger player in Asia-Pacific. With this, I would like to summarize. Our mission is really to solidify our position as the leading scientific solution provider in Asia-Pacific. Also, we will further grow our consumables and our service business, and at the same time, we will actively engage in M&A to accelerate growth also for the Business Unit Technology at DKSH. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. My name is Chris Ritchie. I am the Head of Business Unit Consumer Goods. I've had the pleasure of doing the rounds at lunch and earlier during the breaks and meeting some of you, but as this is my first CMD with DKSH, it's a pleasure to meet all of you, and hopefully over the next couple of hours and later this evening, we have the opportunity. Before I dig into the DKSH story, I'll tell a little bit about me. Originally from Toronto, Canada, I've been in the FMCG industry for what is soon to be 30 years, half of which has been in what I like to call the traditional FMCG side of things at Procter & Gamble and at Reckitt Benckiser, as well as a significant amount of time in the beverage industry with SAB Miller. Geographically, I've had the pleasure of working in a very broad number of markets. Originally from Canada, I spent 13 years living in Switzerland covering various parts of Europe and the world. I've done a stint in Vietnam and the Philippines as general manager, as well as Panama, looking after Central America. I've been all over, and it's been a real pleasure, from a personal and professional perspective to be back in Asia, living in Singapore now with DKSH. I joined the business 1 year ago August, and have had a really great time learning about the people, the markets that we're in, the clients, and certainly the customers. Today, excited to take you through some of the programs that we've been working and talking to you about how we're leveraging our leadership position to drive further profitable growth in Asia Pacific. Before I dig into some of the numbers and slides and all the rest, people frequently ask me, "Please tell me, like I'm one of your grandparents, what exactly do you do? What is this market expansion thing that we talk about?" Very simplified, we offer turnkey solutions for companies that are looking to enter Asia in high-growth, attractive markets. Those markets are incredibly complex, and so it takes local knowledge of how to operate in them. As well, depending on your business model, they can be resource intensive because of the spread, certainly in FMCG, of the number of outlets that have to be covered. Organizations turn to us to say, "I don't know how to get into Asia. You have a very strong reputation. You have a proven experience of growing other businesses. Let's work with you to get in." Equally, for even businesses that are in Asia to say we're a far more efficient and effective way to run the Asia business with our sales, marketing, trade marketing, and the logistics and distribution. That's kind of what we do. All of that sits on a base of very capable leaders, majority coming from proven backgrounds of long FMCG experience, deep local understanding of how to win in the markets that they're in. That's a very big boost from a confidence perspective when we talk to clients and equally when we talk to customers. All of that sits while we work in a complex and sometimes difficult operating environment on the stability of a Swiss-listed company that really has all of the regulatory requirements, the compliance requirements. When European, Japanese, Korean, North American companies look at operating in some of these more difficult areas, they know that we're gonna be treating their brands with the respect and the right way of doing things. That's kind of what we do in a, in a nutshell, and I'll unpack that a bit more as we go through. Who are we when we look at consumer goods across APAC? We're in 20 markets as a leading player. We have unparalleled coverage of APAC, and I'll talk a little bit about that. Just over 11,000 FTEs helping build the business. We represent over 925 clients. When you look at our business at this top two circles, we're a highly resilient and diversified business, which really is a great way to look at it. If you walk into a grocery store, convenience store, traditional trade store in some of these markets, basically anything that's on the shelf except fresh veg and meat is something that we have the possibility to provide into that market. We're very diversified, when you look at coming across dairy, beverage, snacks, dry grocery, which includes things like sponges to garbage bags, beauty and personal care, home care, and baby and child. Equally, when you look at the channel, the consumer goods business in Asia is very similar to other developing markets where, yes, we have the modern trade, and just under 50% of the business, about 45%, is modern trade. That's when you think about the Carrefours, Tescos, Sainsbury's-type equivalent, where it is head office to head office, very, I shouldn't say simple, because it's very complex, but more on 1:1 buying. That's just under half of the business. The real competitive advantage and the reason that clients look to come to us is the unparalleled coverage that we have in the general trade. The general trade is very simplified, the mom-and-pop shops. If you've been to South Asia, basically the stores that are in the wet markets, stores that are on the streets that basically look sometimes like garages but are packed to the gills, that's what we cover. Across South Asia, there are literally millions of those outlets, and getting into them and the capillary networks that are there is really the advantage that we provide. That's what 47% of our business sits on. The last two parts, food service and e-commerce, contribute just under 10%. When you look at our business model, the light blue represents about 25% of our revenue and less on the EBIT side. That is the basic 3PL, 4PL model. Shipping in, providing the logistics, providing the credentials and the financials and the credit programs. The vast majority of our business, just under 75%, is full service. What that is about is we provide the sales in trade marketing and the 3PL, 4PL. We really become the sales force and the market presence for our clients. That's basically how it breaks out. Digging into how does it operate, and again, talking about what do you get from DKSH if you're a client. On the left, what you see is there's basically three scenarios that clients look at. The first is, "I want to enter Asia. Don't know how to do it. I'll come to you guys." We can come in and enter very specific markets if they want and very easily support that. That can be from big companies like Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mars, to smaller entrants, Oatside, Oatly, the oat milks coming into Asia. We're very happy to have some of those high growth opportunities that are there. The second layer of growth, of course, sits on how do we expand geographic coverage for any one specific client. The third is how do you actually scale the whole thing up to give very significant presence across all of Asia? Those are kind of the three stages that we really work through with our clients. You can enter and stay in any one of them at any point. What are the client's needs? Why do they wanna come to us? The first is Pan-Asian exposure, the capabilities that we've got. The second is the scale and access to those channels. As I said, the general trade, those mom-and-pop shops are very complex. There are millions of them, and it is very resource-intensive to get to them, and you have to know which ones to get to get any sort of return, and you need to know where they are. That's the services that we fundamentally provide in addition to the modern trade. Underpinning with a very consistent go-to-market approach, core FMCG selling skills, core supply chain skills, logistics, excellence and capability that we're putting into the markets. Lastly, and very importantly, and we've talked a little bit about data before, all of this sits on a performance management system of understanding the data of where we're going, how we're performing in those outlets, and then providing ourselves with the direction and feedback on what we can do better and feeding that back with clients and customers as well. When you break that down into the services, I'm sure you've read through this already, but briefly, if you look at it, 3PL, 4PL at the lower end of the margin tree, the vast majority of our business, three-quarters sitting in full service route to market, which is sales, marketing, activation, local supply chain requirements and everything underneath. Lastly, the higher margin items that we look to capture with our clients and trade them up into and create more of a sticky relationship with them is in the value-added services as well. Field activation, merchandising. What does that mean? It means when you stock a shelf, that's merchandising. Field activation, that's when we put together physical displays and put them in store. Equally, promoters, if you're doing sampling, if you're doing tastings, if you're doing trials, we offer those capabilities as well. Certainly repacking. There's some companies that use us to repack and then send out with new packaging or different packaging that's specifically required in any given country. That's the rundown, basically Oops. Geez. Sorry. Of what we do. hit the button too soon. This is a brief video coming out of Malaysia with some of our clients talking about their experience with DKSH and certainly pleased to be showing you this. Our partnership with DKSH started in 2021, and since then, our collaborations has led to a 19% increase in overall sales, which has been a key success for Nando's. One of the achievements was our expansions into East Malaysia, where DKSH helped us grow from no presence to contributing 4% of our total business. With the good collaboration between our team, who focus on the marketing side, and DKSH team focus on distribution side, we gradually improve our sales. The annual sales have been turning up to more than triple growth within three years. With improved distribution across Malaysia, we are able to achieve sustainable double-digit year-on-year growth working together moving forward. It's kind of a success learning journey together with DKSH Malaysia, and also we're looking forward to grow bigger in the future. That gives you a flavor of just some of the things that we do and the opinion of some of the clients that we deal with, as I said, specifically in Malaysia. Let's talk a little bit about what's happened since the last CMD. I wasn't here, but many of you were. First of all, on the bottom right, very pleased that across the last five years, we've delivered core EBIT and CER growth of just under 10%, at 9.7%, just about touching it. Equally impressive during the same period, a growth in EBIT margin of 60 basis points from 1.7x- 2.3x. That growth continued in the first half of 2024, as you'll have seen from the results announcement, hitting 2.5%, and we're very pleased with that. As with all great mountain climbing expeditions, as soon as you get to the top of the target, look across, and there's another couple of mountains that are out there. Certainly Marco is not shy on making sure that we know we have to hit those next mountains. Up we go from here, year on year, continued as Ido has already talked about some of the targets and expectations. During the last couple of years, we've gone through a lot of reorganizing. We're more efficient, we're leaner, we're more responsive and agile to the market, our client needs, and our customer opportunities. Very importantly, we've also optimized the portfolio. Some of you have talked to me and asked questions about, you know, at the last CMD and the history of the last couple of years in consumer goods has been about clearing out the base of our clients to make sure we're focused on higher profitable, higher margin clients. The consequence of that is what you see on both of these charts, where we have definitely delivered on cleaning up and raising the margin, raising the EBIT on the, on the profit side. The net sales has been a little bit more subdued, and now that particularly as we look at the 2025 budgets that Ido has talked about that we're running through at the moment, the focus is very much about how are we getting both top and bottom line moving and going towards that clear target of GDP plus growth. We've got new leadership, that would be me and a couple of other people. We've defined a clear strategy for the future, and we're very excited about that future for profitable growth. I'm gonna unpack very simply the three core strategies that we're looking at for growth. The first, and to start with, is really what is the North Star for us? For our entire CG organization, it is very much about the vision, which is simply to say, DKSH is acknowledged as the best sales and distribution force of any player across APAC. Arguably, we are or are not there today. I'll let others be the judge of that, but that's the North Star of where we want to get to. The best way for us to build our business is to make sure that when clients have other clients ask them, "I wanna enter or I want to expand, who should I be using?" The answer is always DKSH. Equally important, clients always talk to customers. They'll talk to the Tesco, they'll talk to the Carrefour, they'll talk to the general trade, "Who's your best supplier?" That's the cadre that we wanna be in to say, when the name and the question comes up, it's DKSH. That's our North Star for where we're gonna go, and that's what's gonna pull up both the revenue and the profitability. How are we gonna get there? Three very simple strategies. The first is grow sales and market share for our existing client base, period. That's job number one. Best way to get the endorsement, best way to get that top line growth and the profitability within that. Core sales force excellence and effectiveness is what underpins that as something that's key. Equally, our understanding of the route to market. What are the right outlets and the right SKUs and the right brands to put in those outlets, particularly in those millions of outlets in the general trade that you can access, but maybe you shouldn't be accessing all of them. That's where the magic sits. Second, this is more of the mid to long-term growth engine, is how are we continually refilling that pipeline of clients? We've always got a base of growing clients in addition to the just the core organic growth, and that's really key. We've focused on clear priorities, clients that we're after, segments that we're after, and I'll unpack that a little bit. The third is very much how do we take incremental opportunities to expand our margin and scale with secondary growth engines? This includes own brands, food service, for example, e-commerce, field activation, and of course, M&A. We'll unpack each one of those. Salesforce effectiveness is the foundation of how we look to organically grow. Take your current clients, grow the share of shelf that they're building at shelf, and grow their sales. It really comes down to four really basic things. First of all, do we have the right plans? What that means is each client, each brand has their plan for the year, for the month, for the quarter on what they want to do in the market. We then need to translate and understand those plans and create partners and the best plans we can with the trade. You take a Beiersdorf and you take, for example, here in London, a Tesco, there's a joint plan that gets created by them of what's going to happen in trade. That's what we have to bring to the table, along with what's the best way to activate brands in the general trade, those traditional and mom-and-pop shops. Right plans is very key. Second thing, as I've previously talked about, is identifying the right outlets. You can spend a lot of time going to a lot of outlets in a lot of places, but if they're not delivering enough of a turn, you're not gonna get the return. Making sure we understand which outlets, which SKUs should be put in there is key. Third, right selling skills, practices, and incentives. This is very important to us. How are we building that best sales force? Continual capability development. Lastly, underpinning the entire thing with a performance management system is very key. Do we have that feedback loop on what we said we would do? What happened? What have we learned from it? Very importantly, how have we incentivized our sales force and the organization through that? Those are the four basics that we're pushing and working through on sales force effectiveness and that core of organic growth. Unpacking this a little bit with an example of what we've done in Thailand, and very specifically focused on the general trade in Thailand, which represents broadly 250,000 outlets, so it's a very large number. We've unpacked cost to serve, sales force effectiveness, route to market, and marketing. In its most basic, worked through to make it far more efficient, getting the right number of sales reps on the right number of outlets. More comprehensive, so we've aligned the metrics, we've aligned the tools that they're using, and we've simplified. You'll see going from 11 sales teams down to six sales teams. While we're serving many clients, because the reason we have six teams is that we'll have shared teams and exclusive teams where clients want only their own salesforce, and that's what we provide. We've taken the opportunity on how do we streamline it and simplify it and maximize sales per outlet. Then lastly, from a marketing perspective, taken more of a channel and outlet perspective on it. The results have been impressive. In Thailand, general trade sales are up 11% across the core clients that we've got. Specifically, our largest client in Thailand, called Ichitan Group. Basically if you think about iced teas, waters, colas, all that's who these guys are. They're a leading player in Thailand. They've seen a 15% increase in net sales, specifically in general trade, 25%, that's resulted in a 3-point increase in market share for them. The business is continuing to accelerate for them and for us behind these efforts. Let's talk about the second strategy now, going into business development, that importance of how are we maintaining and building the pipeline for near and longer term. Essentially, there's four buckets that we go out and hunt and work with clients to bring them in and to service them. The first is clients who provide us with scale and efficiency. Part of our reason for being is accessing the huge number of outlets that are in the general trade. To do that profitably, you have to make sure that your salesman is selling the maximum that they can in those outlets and that our trucks and delivery vehicles are making the maximum drops they can to each one of those outlets. That's the advantage that we have. Instead of Beiersdorf selling one tube of facial moisturizer to an outlet that's two hours outside of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, we offer a SKU list of 1,500 SKUs that a retailer or a mom-and-pop shop can buy from, and then it's worth financially the loading up. Scale is a very important part of our business to deliver on that promise that we've got with our clients, and it builds the efficiency. The second is one that we'll talk on the next slide as well, but this is really important of how are we building margin? While we've got scale, we also need those business class equivalent seats, which are the ones that top up the revenues at the end of the day. That's about how are we focusing on segments that have higher margin baked into them and also have higher underlying growth, and I'll talk about those in the next slide. It's obviously easier to grow our business when the underlying category is growing higher. The third area is strategic clients and segments that represent something that's important for us from a long-term capability perspective. You know, it's something that is of interest longer term. We're not massive in it, but it's something that we're interested in. Pet care, for example, which we have a business that we're representing with Mars in Malaysia, another area, high growth. You say, "How do we get into that in a more meaningful way?" The last set of clients that we go out and look for is the reputation builder. It's always easiest to get new clients when you've got a roster of clients that are the big names. Do you have the Beiersdorf? Do you have the P&Gs? Do you have the Unilevers, the Mars, and the Coca-Cola? Those are very attractive to other clients to say, "Okay, these guys obviously know what they're doing. Let's go shop with them." Unpacking some of those growth opportunities and looking at it of where are some of those higher margin, higher underlying growth opportunities, this is an example of 5 that we're interested in. Chilled and frozen, which works very well with our own brand. We have some own brands that are in the butter and dairy space, building on that helps. Dairy is a key growth opportunity across APAC, and we have a unique opportunity to win with that, and it's synergistic with chilled and frozen. Consumer health is quite an interesting area and somewhere that, from a DKSH perspective, I believe, and Bijay believes, we have a unique ability to win. Consumer health, if you look at the Sanofis, if you look at the Haleon, if you look at the Reckitt, their business model spans from medical facilities, doctors, pharmacies, all the way through to general trade. There's very few providers such as ourselves who span that network as broad as we do, and therefore, this is an area that we think can be very fruitful for us in the future. Certainly premium beauty care, always an attractive segment across APAC. Lastly, pet care. Through COVID, some people started reducing the number of babies and instead started getting dogs and cats and everything else. Pet care has seen a very strong growth across APAC, and it continues to be such. It has part of that underlying growth potential. Last strategy is about accelerating with our secondary growth engine. This is a particularly exciting and energizing area for me and for all of DKSH. The first is our own brands. We are not particularly well known for our own brands, but a brand like SCS Butter, for those of you who have been to Singapore, it is butter in Singapore. Similarly in Malaysia. Buttercup, SCS Butter, that's where two of our bigger ones. They provide very strong margins. If you look at it at over 15%, every CHF of net sales in there is a meaningful contribution, and there's a lot that we can do with the brands, a number of them. The second is field activation. This is a relatively small part of the business, but it creates quite a bit of stickiness with our clients. If we say, "Not only are we doing logistics, your sales, we're gonna actually bring your brands to life as a one-stop shop," there's a fantastic opportunity to bolt on with that. Food services, just over CHF 100 million in net sales, again, if you look at the portfolio that we've got, the coverage that we've got, there's a lot of opportunity for us to branch out into hotels, restaurants, bars, et cetera, and move in that direction. E-commerce, of course, is always a priority for growth. Lastly, what's on here, the little green buttons, plus M&A. When I think about my growth strategy, we go through how are we planning to grow in 2025, it really is on that base of here's the core organic growth, here's the BD that we've got and we're bringing in, and here's what the growth accelerators are gonna put on top. The cherry on top is the M&A, That's where I'm very excited at the opportunity to dramatically accelerate. I guess I need to be careful with you guys. Dramatically might be an over-dramatic word, but to accelerate our net sales and profit profile through M&A, be it bolt-on distribution, be it food services, be it interest in own brands that might be a bit more niche, but something that fits well with what we've got. Across all three of these areas, that's what we're looking at to say, "How do we get M&A to help turbocharge?" I'm very pleased to say we have the most robust M&A pipeline in progress today than we've had for years. There's a lot of good prospects that we're working very actively. Lastly, I think I'm coming up to out of time, if not over time. Last slide summarizing the highlights for Business Unit Consumer Goods. 160 years of experience in Asia. You guys have heard that a couple of times. In the FMCG world, which is incredibly complex in all of those traditional mom-and-pop shops, knowing what you're doing in Laos, knowing what you're doing in northern Thailand and in southern Cambodia, it's a totally different universe. That experience is really important, and that's what we provide. We're the only player with the comprehensive and unparalleled network that we've got across APAC and all the way up into Japan, down to New Zealand, so it's not just about South Asia. We've got the exposure in Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It's a very resilient business model, geographically diverse. Somebody's always going up, somebody's always coming down. From a segments and category, same thing. When you think about everything that's in a grocery store, everything that's in a convenience store, you're going to have some really strong winning propositions and some that aren't going to grow so much. We are very shockproof in that perspective to say steady, consistent growth is a very big and clear opportunity. Certainly, hopefully, you guys have seen over the last 30 minutes what I think is a relatively clear strategy in moving DKSH Business Unit Consumer Goods towards more consistent top line and bottom line growth. With that, I think I now hand over. We are leading this business unit together. My name is Thomas Sul. I've been with the company last week for 28 years, and during those 28 years, I took different responsibilities. Started in sales, like most people in our industry, became the MD of Germany, then took over a regional role, and finally led also the business line food and beverage globally. Since 11 years, I have the pleasure to work together with my friend, Natale Capri, and lead this business unit. I'm Natale Capri, the co-head of the Business Unit Performance Materials with DKSH only 26 years. I have had several positions in DKSH. I started as a sales manager, then I became the country head of Italy, then was responsible for the industrial business, first regionally for Europe and then U.S., then also at the end globally. Afterwards, I was also responsible for the India subcontinent, our business in India, since 11 years, I have also the pleasure to work together with Thomas, and we share the position of co-head of Performance Materials. It has been a very good, successful ride, and we want to bring it to the next level. We'll show you here how we continue to build a leading chemicals and ingredients distribution business globally. Let me start with some of the facts of our business. We are active in 33 markets today. In these 33 markets, we operate at 120 business locations. Across these markets, we distribute chemicals and ingredients, specialty chemicals and ingredients, for four distinct business lines: personal care, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, as well as industrial applications. We don't only sell and distribute these products, but we also develop formulations together with our clients and customers in our 54 innovation centers, where we employ about 80 people. I kindly invite you, those of you who have not seen it yet, to visit the stand in the foyer, where we are presenting some of the formulations we've developed for our customers and together with our clients. We are really making a difference in those markets and bringing new products into the, into the industry. On top of that, we also employ 80 people in regulatory, a small army of experts that make sure that whatever we sell and present to our customers is according to local laws and regulations. This is a service which is not only important for our customers, but also for our clients, who in many of those environments in Southeast Asia have difficulties to meet all of these different standards. We have 1,600 people in total, and out of those, 600 are technical sales specialists. Some of you visited us before. They really understand how to make those products. They come from the industry. Most of them have a technical degree, chemistry, biochemistry, food technology, and they know how to formulate those products. This is how we sell. On top of that, they take care of our customers. Currently, we're selling to 20,000 customers in this world. Our role is to give access to the local companies, the local heroes, that our clients and our suppliers cannot get to themselves. We are doing this with proven capabilities, deep technical know-how, and, you know, based on the local markets with local language and local culture understanding. It is a large space, chemical distribution. Where are we today on a global scale? We believe we are 1 of the top leading companies in the space we are operating in. In Asia-Pacific today, we are number four. Looking at pure-play specialties. In Europe, we're top 10. In North America, we are a challenger, probably at the eleventh position right now, which we will continue to work on and improve and strengthen in the coming years. Since the last Capital Markets Day, we've delivered on our growth promise. Strong organic growth, combined with about 12 acquisitions over the last five years, delivers a CAGR of 14.1% at constant exchange rates. Our EBIT, EBITDA ratio has gone up again to 8.7%. Some of the highlights are listed on the right-hand side. Our global expansion is on track. We'll see some more details later on. Alone, the acquisition in North America made this business for us 6x bigger than it was five years ago. Some more details on the other regions are coming later on. Overall, 1.7x increase of sales. Not only have we increased the size, but also have made this business more resilient and more diversified by adding some of the value-added manufacturing that we will show you in one of the later slides. On top of that, digital, where we have a separate topic to be covered a few pages further on, has grown very fast, 50x bigger than it was five years ago. We would like now to show you a short video, give you a better feeling about our business. Now that you better understand our business, I would like to explain you our strategy to build a leading position in the very attractive specialty chemical distribution market. Our strategy builds on five pillars. The first part is to globalize our core business. To give you an example, today we have a very good presence, a lot of success stories in personal care and coatings in several countries. Here we have a very good winning formula, and we want to expand it. What we do, we leverage on our global coverage by transferring these success stories one by one in all the market we serve. The second one is to boost our future stars. These are areas that are growing faster than GDP. For example, we have a very good presence already in biopharma, in nutraceuticals, in food services. What are we doing here? We invest in fully dedicated resources, which are focused to give an accelerated growth and to establish ourselves to be the future leader and the trendsetter by growing this market. By doing what? By continuously scouting for new products and for new applications. We have a third pillar that is about operational excellence. Here, Thomas will explain you later how we drive the profitability and efficiency across the full organization. We are going to explain you our fourth and fifth pillars, which are our value-added services and value-added manufacturing, as well as we accelerate our M&A with meaningful acquisitions. What is meaningful? This means more bolt-on acquisitions in all the regions, and also expansions in key regions which are very important for us for the future: America, India, China. Enabling factors for doing this strategy are clearly our capabilities in the broad network of lab that we have, regulatory setup, business development teams that we have, digitalization, and sustainability. All is supported by a strong focus on people, culture, and teams in order to make our organization even stronger and develop towards a high performance culture. We are going to give you more on these five areas in the following slides. As Thomas was mentioning you before, since the last Capital Market Day, we have scaled up in all these three regions. In Europe, we have complemented our network with a focus on food and pharma industries. In Asia Pacific, we have expanded well in Australia and New Zealand with a focus on agri- solution and value-added blending. In North America, we have established a coast-to-coast distribution platform, including a strong presence in Canada. In all these three regions, we see good opportunity to fill the wide geographic spot that we have, and also to grow our business lines. In a few words, in the last five years, our business has very much diversified compared to five years ago, and now enables us to better leverage on our existing already customer and client portfolio. Now that we have talked about the regional strategy, we can go deeper and look on how we will grow all the business lines. As you can see, we have a very well-balanced portfolio between the industrial business and the life science. Here we can see the life science is growing on a faster pace. In Food, we are working providing ingredients and innovative solutions for the well-being and the healthy food area, which is the major growing trend nowadays. Similarly, in Personal Care, our strong focus is sustainability, with environmental-friendly ingredients which are high in demand by consumers and end users. In Pharma, we are working in globalizing the successful active pharmaceutical ingredients platform that we have, and we are developing sustainable raw material to develop the standards ones. These are the business line initiatives, also we are working on boosting the future stars. What are the future stars? These are area in our business unit that are still small in size, we see a strong growth potential. Biopharma, which is the next big thing for the Pharma industry. Nutraceuticals, with food supplements and vitamins, which are both industry which are providing us very high margins. We are also very good position in high-end engineering plastics, especially in Korea, which is a very dynamic market, and we are extending this business all across Asian markets. Food services is also an area where we are nicely growing, and we are providing blends for food premixes. Here we are a key players in the Philippines, and our goal is to roll it out in all the other markets. For example, we have successfully invested in Germany for food blending capability and capacity with the recent acquisition of JW Food. As Natale mentioned, operational excellence is one part where we have put a stronger focus on. Key thing is for us to expand the margins, and following the supply chain disruptions, we took a opportunity to reset the processes and make sure we have a much better way of looking at how we do our business. We have implemented a standardized pricing process across the whole organization, which makes it very easy to find businesses which have a less favorable gross margin. In addition, we have set margin increase targets by market, by industry, and we are tracking this on a monthly basis. If a margin is below a certain level, it will send an alert to the management. Also, we have put incentives on gross margin, both in absolute and in percentage-wise. This is rolled out across all the countries. Our sales managers have been trained on value-added selling and are incentivized on gross margin and not on net sales. All of this has led to an increase, as you can see here, by 230 basis points over the last two years. It will continue to be a focus for us to make sure that our profitability stays high and we get the most value out of what we're selling. We also prioritize higher growth business if we have to allocate resources, right? Life science tends to be much higher in gross margin than some of the other businesses. In addition, we have started to standardize our processes in the back office. We have developed a blueprint which is being rolled out, which is looking at inbound, outbound, and customer service in a very similar way. Why? This will allow us to compare markets in terms of productivity and efficiency, and we can start to cluster some of these tasks in some markets. On top of that, with AI coming up and process automation, this will help us in the future to reduce the cost of operations. Last but not least, inventory planning. You all know the supply chain disruptions and the stocks that were going out of control. We've looked at this. Again, we have better controls, we have better visibility, and we are continuing to optimize the inventory levels across our organization. Next driver for our growth is our digital ecosystem. You've seen this in the other BUs as well. In this case, we are particularly proud of what we have developed over the last 11 years. We started very early with this journey. All of our salespeople are on Salesforce.com. We are tracking the opportunities, the visits, the productivity, the gross margin they're generating. We have the visibility of the pipeline that goes out. Our business globally is on one ERP. Wolf was asking me before in one of the breaks, you know, "Are you guys working on one ERP?" Yes, we are. Every country is on the same system. We've connected SAP with Salesforce.com through a Power BI. On a push of a button, we can drill down to every sales manager in organization, be it in China, Cambodia, or Myanmar, and see what is the pipeline that they're working on, how many customers did they visit, what's the gross margin they're generating. The same thing we can use for producing reports to our clients and our suppliers, all on a push of a button. When we visit our markets, when we do a business review in a country, nobody prepares PowerPoints anymore or Excel sheets. Everything is done in the same standardized way across all the markets, and we set the KPIs that we want to see. On top, digital marketing. I think we've been very successful over the last couple of years marketing the price increase we have on digital way. We have created DKSH Discover, which is an AI-powered digital catalog with over 40,000 ingredients at this point. We are the number one distributor on very famous platforms like SpecialChem and UL Prospector at this point in time. Our customers can reorder with a click of a button. Our clients have access to the supplier data they can manage themselves. They also get automatic reports out of our system. What have we achieved with all of this? Just in the lower part, you see a few of the numbers. We generated 13,000 leads last year. These are leads coming from digital initiatives that will then be verified by our salespeople and will create opportunities. 2.4 million visits on our own platform. Digital business has increased 64%. 35% of all projects today, all opportunities, are digitally initiated, means that somehow digital was involved. We can actually track when we do a LinkedIn campaign and a customer clicks on a campaign request for a sample. We can track if this business at some point becomes commercial. There's a time span of two to three years in between, right? We can actually really see how is digital increasing. 860 new customers that we wouldn't have had if we didn't have this digital platform. This is not only important for us going forward as this industry is becoming more digital and many young people today, young researchers in the labs, you know, instead of calling us or sending us an email, they just go on UL Prospector and ask for a sample, even though you visited them the day before, but it's simpler for them. We have to be there. We have to be present. We have to get use of this. Also our clients, our suppliers. Whenever we pitch for a new business, whenever we look for consolidating more business over a region, when we put up our digital capabilities, they say, "Wow, you guys are really leading in this respect." Right? What we have built there internally is really a great machine. Coming from this digital path, let's have a look also of what are other drivers for our gross margin expansions. Again, exclusive distribution is the backbone of our business, and we are going to further growing it. We also are going to expand our value-added services in order to focus mainly on the one that are generating higher gross margins. One is sourcing. With our 17 sourcing offices that we have across the globe, we identify and source hard-to-find ingredients which are essential for our customers. Sourcing is an additional service that we provide for customer when they are in need of product that are either in shortages or under big cost pressure. What we do then, we scout, we locate, and we commercialize this material, and we provide cost-effective solutions. We sell a lot of this product under our own brands, and customers highly appreciate the fact that we are taking full responsibility and ownership of the required quality standards. Oh, another important point for growing the profitability and the margin is tailor-made molecules for customers. Here, together with our clients, we developed customized ingredients. This is a project-based business where we develop bespoke products from confidential demands of our customers, the ones who are developing some breakthrough innovation, and they rely on us for finding some new molecules that fit their purpose. This requires a more scientific approach than commercial approach, and there we have developed in-house talents with such skills, especially for pharma and electronics in Japan and in Europe. For this type of business, usually it takes several years to develop the commercial status. Once it reach the market commercialization, it lasts longer, and with higher customer stickiness and the highest profitability. Last but not least, another driver is value-added manufacturing. What we do here, based on customer request, we develop formulation by blending ingredients, and then we upscale and produce this formulation for our customers. Here we concentrate on the food and the agri-solution industry. This is a differentiating service that is also very much appreciated by our customers because when we provide premixes, we are saving them a lot of production time, and time for them means money. The great point for us is that when they start using our own blends, we get high stickiness because for them becomes much more difficult to switch from a formulated product than a single ingredient. Also here, we generate a very high profitability. When we sum all it up, as you have seen, the base of our business is still the exclusive distribution of specialty chemicals. We have several drivers, such sourcing, tailor-made project business, and value-added manufacturing, which are going to drive up our gross margin farther into the future. Let's have a look now at the market environment where we are playing. We are present in the attractive specialty chemical market, and we focus on the specialty chemical distribution, the one which is in the light blue in the charts. As you can see, it's a very large market which is with the size of about EUR 220 billion. The global specialty chemical distribution market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 3.9% from 2024- 2027, ahead of the global GDP. Asia-Pacific is the key driver for this positive outlook, and we are well-placed here because Asia-Pacific is our most important market. According to the latest McKinsey study, we see that 70% of the global chemical growth is, until 2025, is going to come from Asia. This growing trend is also accelerated by the fact that supplier principals are concentrating on their core capabilities, which are production, R&D, key account management, and they outsourcing what is more complex and time-consuming for them, which is technical assistance and sales channel to the market. They are outsourcing to good professional regional or global distributor, people like us, who are also a very reliable partner for the compliance point of view. Here, we are taking a lot of market share from the local distributors who do not have the critical mass to provide all these additional services that are very much in demand from our suppliers. As Natale explained, it's a very large market, EUR 220 billion. If you trust the statistics, there is more than 20,000 companies out there that cut this pie up. Many small companies, some regional, but many small players. That means there's a lot of opportunities for M&A in this market. The top seven distributors only account for about 15% of the total pie. Means 85% goes to the other 20,000. In addition, global chemical producers, suppliers are trying to consolidate numbers of distributors they work with, giving more business to regional and global players. Why? As Natale explained already, we can offer more scale, there's less contacts, and they can focus on the things that they're good at, is production, marketing, and brand. How are we participating in this? Well, I have one example. There's a very famous U.K. company which started as a sugar company. Over the years, they did several acquisitions and are now one of the top ingredients producers for the global food industry. We worked with them in India. Over time, they realized that they cannot continue to work with all these different distributors, and every time they did acquisition, more distributors joined. They have been consolidating this. From India, we moved the business into Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and we're very sure this will continue. This is just one example of many companies which are now realizing that managing hundreds of distributors is very complicated. Also, as we showed before, the amount of data we can feed back to them in terms of projects and pipeline, this is what they really value. 'Cause they need to know what's happening in all these markets without having their own people present. As Natale said, our major business is in Asia. Most of our competition has 80% of their business in Europe and North America. We were actually founded in Asia, and the largest part of our business is there. We can benefit from the growth that's coming in. Now, for our acquisitions have four different reasons. First of all is geographic expansion. The acquisitions we did in ANZ and North America are good examples for this. Before we did those, we had a flag in the market, but these were tiny operations. We were not really visible, you know? After the acquisition of Axieo and subsequently SACOA in ANZ and the acquisition in North America, Terra Firma, we are now a top player in the industries we serve. This is important if you want to be a global distributor to be in all of the industrial important areas. Secondly, filling the business line white spots. In Germany, our food ingredients business was very small, and we could hardly compete because we never were there in this business before. We acquired GBFi, which gave us a very nice portfolio of proteins and fibers, supplying all of the German food companies. In Malaysia, we did a similar thing where we did not have any nutraceutical business, and this year acquired Elite Organic. Number three is solidify existing business lines. Sometimes we are active in a business line, but we're not strong enough, right? When we look at Italy, where our food ingredients business was okay, but adding Victa, adding proteins and fibers as well, this expanded a lot. The same in China with Rightbase, where we added a lot of additional customers and portfolio by acquiring another distributor in the same space. Last but not least, number four is adding value-added services. As we saw before, the margins in value-added services are high, higher than the, in the traditional distribution business. After we acquired Axieo in Asia, in ANZ, who had a blending facility for agrochemicals supplying into farms, we did a second acquisition called SACOA, which is complementary. We can serve the same customers with a larger portfolio and of course add more margin to our business. As you can see, we have a track record of successful M&A. We added CHF 500 million in net sales over the last couple of years. We are very well set with a strong balance sheet to continue to drive the consolidation of this industry. Thank you, Thomas, for sharing our M&A rationale. I think with this last slide, we nicely sum all it up. As you can see, we complemented our organic growth with M&A. Since 2012, we have doubled our business, and depending on the region, was either organic, like Asia-Pacific, or M&A driven, like Americas, or a combination of both, like in Europe. A good example of a successful M&A, as we were saying before, is Australia and New Zealand. We bought in 2020 Axieo. That was a declining business that was mismanaged by private equity, and we turn it around. In 2021, we added SACOA, which is a blender of agro adjuvants. What we did here, unfortunately, this all happened during COVID and lockdown. What we used this difficult time to motivate the people and to reignite the team. We had also to restructure and rightsize the team. We improved the leadership, we improved the organizations. In 2022, we with already well-defined growth paths for each industry, we focus on implementation. We generate a lot of synergies, especially with our long-term suppliers that we have in the regions. We moved several of our partners from Southeast Asia to Australia, New Zealand, and we started some new strategic relationship for industrial, food, personal care, and farm applications. As we were saying before, we also created portfolio and organizational synergies with the agro business that we had in Axieo and then in SACOA. What we did, we created one single agri-solution platform. As you can see, this resulted in a beautiful turnaround of our business in Australia and New Zealand. Currently, our EBIT in Australia and New Zealand is 8.8%, which is a great success if we compared for the starting point that was 0.2% back in 2020. Summing up everything, we see a very good opportunity to grow and expand our core business. Also we see that we are going to grow our future stars, backed up our strong capability that we mentioned you before. We are going to continue to expand our value-added services, especially our digital capabilities. At the end, to sum it up, we are very well positioned to drive consolidation to build a global leading specialty chemical platform. Thank you very much to all, and I'm happy to hand over to Till now. Thank you. Welcome back. We are now entering the Q&A session. We will kindly ask you just to flag with your hand if there's any question that you'd have. As a reminder, today is really the opportunity not only to ask the questions to Stefan and Ido, as you do usually on the roadshows or in the one-to-one meetings, but we have a lot of our experts sitting here. Please also give the questions to the BU heads. Who wants to break the ice with the first question? Gian Marco, maybe the first ones. Thank you for the opportunity. Gian Marco Werro, Zürcher Kantonalbank. Two questions to start. First one is on the EBIT splits that you provided and the margin splits in healthcare business. I think that's really interesting, and especially if we consider the size of revenues and EBIT for DKSH. You showed also that 79% of the business is still in a low margin category. I would really wonder how big the opportunity in your eyes is to pitch the high margin services to existing and to new clients. How big is the appetite of your customers for the higher margin services that you offer? That's the first one. If you go to commercial outsourcing full agency, there's a high appetite. As I was mentioning, a big part of the growth is driven by the change in client business model. More and more clients are looking at full agency outsourcing. I'll give you one example. Sanofi vaccines we recently signed never ever had vaccines full agency anywhere in DKSH. They've given us the business in. In Thailand. I could never have dreamed nine years ago that Sanofi would have outsourced the vaccine business. Why are they doing that? Again, looking at opportunities, do they want to spend their money on sales and marketing, or would they rather spend it somewhere else? I see that. I see value-added services such as patient solutions, data, digital. When it comes to own brands, then it's really us acquiring that brand from them if they choose. For example, it's a, it's a legacy brand for them. They want to monetize that legacy, that asset by selling it, then that becomes an opportunity. Once we do that, unless we're giving them a royalty payment, then essentially the value is what we buy for it. Those would be the opportunities, but I definitely see full agency commercial outsourcing rising considerably. If you look 2019, 15% of our business in EBIT was coming from full agency commercial. Now it's almost 19%-20%. Each year, an incremental 1% has come from full agency. Thanks. A second question is on your M&A pipeline. You mentioned that it is stronger than ever. Now on Performance Materials, my specific question, there do you also see bolt-on acquisitions for Terra Firma in the U.S.? That would be interesting to hear. Do you specifically also only target on the life science acquisitions, as you mentioned in food and personal care, or is industrial chemical ingredients also a topic? Are you asking for health care or? I can take that one. You're looking at me. Thank you for that question. Yes, what we bought with Terra Firma is basically a platform across North America, U.S. and Canada, for industrial chemicals, and very strong in the casing and construction industry. We want to expand on the life science, so personal care, food and beverage, pharma. If there's an opportunity with a nice bolt-on that fits into our business for industrial chemicals, we will take a look at it. 'Cause we do believe that we have to have a larger scale, larger business in North America. Conflicts is the only issue in our industry. As you know, we work on exclusive basis, there's still many applications in our industry we can cover also on the industrial side. Gian Marco, maybe I can add here. We also do believe that in the near-term future, a few consolidators will come to the market. They are not only bolt-on acquisition opportunities in the U.S. There might be also the opportunity for something more material in North America. Thank you. Very helpful. Thank you very much, Gian Marco. I think Andy had a couple of more questions here. Hi, Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas Exane. Three questions, if I may. First two questions for Chris. From the consumer side, there were lots of initiatives that you talked about in what has been quite a tricky market for. Mm. for a while. Is there enough you can do yourself to drive the growth back to 3%, 4% or whatever the right number is? Or are you still somewhat reliant on confidence coming back to the market? Would be the first one. The second one, just sticking with consumer, the full service revenue portion of the business seems to have come down as a percentage of the group. It was 78% last time we had a CMD, it's now 72%. Mm. I know not that big a change, but that's a focus area. Why has that come down? Yeah. Great questions. Thank you very much. I'll address the second one first, which the simplified answer is over the last couple of years, we have, as I talked through, adjusted some parts of the portfolios which resulted in some clients' net sales reducing, but the profitability of the portfolio improving. That's part of that shift that you see is a strengthening of the overall EBIT profile that has had an impact on subduing some of those net sales. We're now in a position where we're starting to see that change. Which brings to your second question of where are we looking to grow and how are we? I look at it and say, you know, those three strategies, if you look at the core underlying business of can we grow in the low single digits based on base client growth? That is a reasonable expectation from clients, and from ourselves, particularly with reference to some of the categories that are growing faster versus the ones that are growing slower. It also depends on the category where you say market share is always the number 1 metric for any client. If the market's declining, are we outperforming that market? That needs to be something that we look at as well. Secondly, continued opportunities for top line from BD, from the business development, bringing in new clients. Thirdly, those growth accelerators are the additional opportunities. I see, yeah, the expectation and the opportunity to get into that GDP+ capability and requirement with what we've got on the table. We've got a good team, we're continuing to drive towards that. Okay, thank you. Just one extra one if I may, on a broader basis. You talked a lot about M&A, and potential to get up to 2x net debt to EBITDA. I guess 2x on that as well. What is the I don't want a precise number to this, but what is kind of the timeframe to getting to that 2x? Is it by the end of next year, or is it in the medium term? Also, what kind of multiples is the market looking for at this stage? Look, I mean, M&A is hard to predict. As we mentioned before, we have the strongest pipeline we ever had. It's hard to forecast what exact deal is happening at what point of time. If more material opportunities are coming up, which I just mentioned, for example, in PM and North America, I mean, that leverage could be reached sooner as if this year or for the next 12 months, I have to say we rather focus on bolt-on transactions. In terms of the multiples, for smaller deals, we normally are somewhere between 7x and 8x. More sizable deals can go to low double-digit. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Andy. Who wants to go with the next question? You have the target. Michael, please. Yeah. Thank you. Michael Foeth, Vontobel. Two questions. Just one follow-up in terms of the Consumer Goods. Do you have any flavor on the underlying organic growth that you generated, excluding the businesses that you abandoned over the past few years in terms of portfolio cleanup? That would be interesting. What I can tell you, and it was in the presentation, from a data point, is that if you look at our top 10 clients year to date growing 8.5%, on a CER basis. That can give you an indication of those top 10 most important that we're really looking to drive. That's the growth that they're delivering. As far as the actual historic, no, I don't have that off the top of my head. In terms of the portfolio cleanup, as you say, you're more or less through the process? You're done? Yeah. At this point, you know, there's always an opportunity to strengthen the base of clients that we've got, and I would say it's more in the business as usual phase. That's where looking forward, certainly into 2025, starting to see both the top line and bottom line moving in a, in a common direction is what I'm hoping to get to. Yeah, we're pretty much closing that chapter. Okay. Thank you. Then maybe just a last one. In the presentations, you talked a lot about growth and EBIT margin improvement, and you very briefly touched on RONOC metrics. Just was interested in how the incentive structures look like. Are people incentivized on EBIT rather than RONOC? Where do you see most, sort of value generation uplift in the company? Thank you. No, I'm happy to take that question. RONOC is EBIT divided by NOC. EBIT will have double effect, whether it's directly people are directly incentivized for EBIT or RONOC. In our case of the gentleman on here, they have equal share of the EBIT and RONOC. Obviously that means that working on EBIT will help both. But of course, we cannot let those people were incentivized to ensure that the RONOC increases year on year as well. Thank you. Yeah. The next question from Nicole. Hi. Thanks. Nicole Manion from UBS. I just wanted to ask on PM, because I think the slides today showed that you have the number four business now there in APAC, whereas in 2020 you were number one. Appreciate there's probably still not a lot in it, and obviously the peers have had to do more M&A in APAC because of the position that they started from relative to you. I still wanted to get sort of your take on that, you know, not being the number one, whether you do need therefore to do more M&A in APAC, and what your view on what's happened is. You know, have you maybe not been as competitive in some of those M&A processes as you would have liked, or is it your view that maybe the peers have overpaid, or is there another element in this where you just haven't seen that same margin uplift through the pandemic as they did? Just a, yeah, a general view on kind of what's happened there and what your view on it is going forward. Thanks. Thank you. Maybe I take this one. Yes, we were number one, and now we are not number one anymore in Asia Pacific. What we can tell you, we have been still growing the highest in organic growth, the other basically have taken us thanks to M&A. We were also looking at some of these M&A transactions that happened in Asia Pacific. It was very clear that in a lot of these transactions, we had portfolio conflicts, you know, because we were already present in the countries, and we were already present in this industry. When we would have bought some of the companies that have been acquired in the past years, we would have had the synergies, and that would have not have been good. Even if this happened, we did some acquisition in Asia Pacific. We bought in China, we bought now in Malaysia. We bought in Australia and New Zealand, a very sizable one. We had several transaction, and we have a very good M&A pipeline also in Asia Pacific, going from India down to China, down to Australia, New Zealand. There are several project. As Stefan was saying, we cannot Tell you when and if this materialize, but we are confident that we are going to deliver some bolt-on acquisition in the forthcoming months. Nicole, there's one more component in there. If you look at the acquisition of some of our competitors, there is sometimes a very high concentration into one or two countries. If you really look into the spread and the depths of the business across Asia in particular, we are far more up in the ranking than probably the pure view on total sales is the kind of picture it's giving to you. Thank you, Nicole. Who wants to go ahead with the next question? All clear. No. Hi, it's Alice here from GuardCap Asset Management. Just wanted to ask how the different business units work together, and how do you think about the synergies between the different business units, and especially kind of Performance Materials with the other, Consumer or Healthcare side? Thank you. I'll start. Yeah. Well, I'll speak mostly on the cost synergies. I think mentioned before, I mean, all the work we've done on the supply chain, the one SAP platform, many of the tools that we use, these are common across all the four BUs. We continue to increase the usage of all of them. When you look at those reports, they are the same reports and the same infrastructure. That's where we gain those, this scale of the platform overall. Chris mentioned a few emerging themes of Consumer Health, where both Consumer Goods and Healthcare are working together to support this growing market segment. There is a very historical collaboration between Tech and PM because they both serve big clients with high fixed cost and reaching customers in Asia that otherwise would not be reached by those European and U.S. or Japanese manufacturers. Performance Materials and Technology, we would join marketing events together because we go into the same industries like food, pharma, life science, cosmetics, and they're also my customer. They have all the formulation labs, and we will provide the equipment and solutions for these labs. Okay. Thank you. What about with Consumer and Pharma? Sure. Let me say with Healthcare. Not much with PM. The main reason is while we're both serving the Healthcare sector, they're working at the front end, we're working at the commercial side. The decision makers are absolutely not the same. We haven't had an opportunity yet. We've talked a little bit about it. Much more with Consumer Goods, as Ido was mentioning. You know, you can name the large and even medium-sized companies. We have great channel coverage because they can cover modern trade, general trade. We can cover the pharmacy hospital sector, and that's a very valuable value proposition to clients to say there is no provider that can do all of it. It's how do we show up together is really the key. Okay. Thank you. Just another question on India, the India opportunity across the different business units. I mean, you've been present in APAC for a very, very, very long time, as you've mentioned today. Why haven't you gone into India earlier, and what's the plan now going into the future? Thanks. Look, historically, we had and we still have many growth opportunities in our core backyard, so to say, especially in Southeast Asia. We still have wide spots to some degree in Indonesia and the Philippines. We did mention that strategically we made the decision years ago to build a stronger business across the group in Australia and New Zealand. The view was that if we distract our teams too much instead of, you know, focusing on the opportunities where we are very strong, where we have a solid network first, we probably don't get the best performance out of the business. I think we reached a level in our backyard, so to say, across the core region, that we are ready and we strengthen the teams, as I mentioned before, across the group, especially our senior leadership team, that we feel we are ready, you know, to take on a huge market like India. Also obviously over the last couple of years, India is getting more mature. They are sizable and compliant players now in the market, which is giving us a good M&A or reasonable good M&A opportunity. Yeah. Let's see. It's still work in progress for Healthcare in particular. Maybe I can add. For Performance Materials, India is quite important, is very important, is one of the fast-growing market, is quite sizable, and we have been growing organically double-digit year after year. We are going also to look at M&A opportunities, and we have some projects. India is important, is one of the growth driver for Performance Materials in the forthcoming months and years to come. Thank you for those questions. Who likes to go next? Hey. One short one. Brentley Campbell from Man Group. For Chris. I was curious on the Salesforce kind of effectiveness component, and you mentioned incentives. Have you changed the incentive structures or how are the salespeople incentivized? Great question. We're going through actually, as we speak, a series of work to provide more of a standardized backbone across the group. We say it's gone from a fairly, you know, local version of what the incentive programs look like. The reality is that you can look at it and say, "Here's some common principles that we need to be working against that we feel are the best KPIs, the best drivers of the business," and we're looking to have a not a cookie-cutter approach, but the appropriate, more standardized approach. We've done a lot of work on that over the last six months, and we are rolling that out in markets over the next two months for sure. Thank you. Next question, please. Hi. A slightly broader one. It looks like tariffs are coming and global trade is potentially gonna get a bit more complicated through next year. Can you talk through what that means for DKSH and to what extent you can circumnavigate some of those potential issues because products are produced and sold in the same country? Thank you. First of all, as I was saying earlier today, complexity is our friend. The more complex things are getting, the more help our clients will need to navigate through them. I think the majority of tariffs and whatever is coming there is related to China. What does that lead to? That more investments, what we see already currently from the tensions, the geopolitical tensions with China, that more investments will go into Southeast Asia, and also then in the future, more exports, you know, will come out of Southeast Asia instead of China, and Southeast Asia is our backyard. We expect slight tailwinds from that versus headwinds. Just on that, in terms of the products, say, products from U.S. companies, to what extent are they produced in country rather than produced, say, in the U.S. and then shipped to Thailand or wherever it may be? I mean, it's really hard to give a general statement on that, and I probably don't have that number handy across all the different industries we serve. It's more about, I think, the investments going into Southeast Asia and then the factories which are being built there, where obviously no tariffs are going to hit, right, our clients. Thank you, Andy. Next questions, please. Another question to Bijay for healthcare. You talked about the capability of now offering also solutions for rare diseases with the acquisition of Kyowa Kirin. Sounds like a big opportunity. For how many of your customers so far this might be an interesting channel to serve? Second question is also on patient care. I think that's a very interesting field. Can you give us rough estimate about how big this business is already and the potential that you see within it? Sure. We didn't acquire Kyowa Kirin, just to clarify. We're running their business for Asia in a full agency contract for a number of years. What we see is rare disease is an opportunity in reimbursed markets, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and to a certain extent, Hong Kong and Singapore. Outside of those markets, unfortunately, there is not much of a payer market for this. There's a limit to how much patients can pay. You can imagine the cost for rare disease. Those are the markets that there is. In Taiwan, there is a very strong mechanism for reimbursement, and we already had a couple of clients in rare disease, we were already in the business in Taiwan. Just creates a platform for more. There is an area of competition as well, so we have to be very mindful when you go with rare disease, given how narrow the number of patients are. You probably in a non-compete situation for different types of indications. You have to be very choiceful, but Korea and Taiwan and Australia, New Zealand will be the biggest three opportunities. With Kyowa Kirin, Korea becomes a great base for us in rare disease. In terms of patient solutions, we had I'd say single-digit CHF million before the acquisition of Partizan. With Partizan, we're in double-digit CHF million of sales. It's still relatively small. It's not big enough to be yet a growth engine. What was one very good thing from acquiring Partizan is we acquired also their platform. Very, very good cloud-based platform that we are now using and rolling out across the rest of Asia. In the past, we've been using a third-party supplier, been paying a significant margin to them. Thanks to that acquisition, we now can use and leverage that and recoup some of the investment there. I think that's going to be exciting for us. How big can it be? Again, because in reimbursed markets you're going to be talking much more about adherence, patient is paid for, much bigger opportunity. In self-pay markets, it's a lot about access, affordability, buy X, get Y, more narrow opportunity there in terms of size. Big impact to the patient, but in terms of absolute size of the market, smaller than in the reimbursed markets. Thank you. Sorry, follow up. Any chance to bring this up to a triple-digit million amount in the next years? To give you an idea, I mean, Partizan was already one of two large providers in Australia. They were not triple digit. If I take Australia, Korea, probably the two bigger markets, I think you could get a good double-digit size. I think triple digit would be unlikely in patient solutions. The beauty with doing it is it becomes very complementary with commercial outsourcing. As you do it, we talk to our clients, they're very happy to have us have patient solutions as an in-house capability. Eli Lilly is our client. We've got a 10-year contract with them in a couple of markets. We're launching their products. As we do that, they're very happy. Can you imagine now patients on weight loss, we can track those patients through their lifetime. Same with oncology. It becomes a very nice complementary element to have. It's not just the service fee, it's also the ability then to provide a full service solution as you go to a full agency pitch. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gian Marco. Who likes to go next? Okay, Nicole. Thank you. Maybe just a follow-up on the margin guidance you put out there today. I know it's kind of a group level target. Should we think about that as what you feel like you can deliver sort of organically, if you like, within the existing business? Or have you sort of factored into that, you know, the mix shift that you could achieve through M&A? Or would that be kind of upside to that 10 basis points, if that makes sense? Yeah. I think the 10 basis points, if you refer to that part of the guidance, it's something that we have delivered over the last 4.5 Years, if you look at H1 as well. That we have done with the on organic business and accelerate by the M&A. We believe we can do on organically alone, but obviously M&A will add to the pie. Thank you. Yeah. Gian Marco, one more? Okay. I don't want to be impolite, but I just take the chance to ask two questions to Ido. On net working capital, the improvements have been impressive over the last years. You said the improvements will not be as strong in the future. How far can you go from those already efficient levels from net working capital perspective? Also from a CapEx perspective, do you think to keep the same levels versus revenues in the next years or any potential changes down the road? Yeah. I'll answer the second question first. The guidance that we have given is 0.4% of net sales. We don't expect to exceed that, especially if net sales continue now to go in a more accelerated way. That should remain our CapEx. There could be some time down the road a major CapEx, but major, I mean, CHF 5 million, CHF 10 million, I think major for us event, but that's not planned for the next two years. Remain at 0.4x. For net working capital, I think we're reaching the limit as, you know, cannot get below 9 seconds a 100 meters run. At 6.3%, 6.4% of net sales, we're really fit at this level. At some point, I think we'll stay at a range of 6.5%- 7.5% will be a good rate. I don't expect these levels of increases. Thank you. Can I ask about M&A decision-making? How does it work between kind of group level and between the business units? Thanks. Yes, I take this question with pleasure. Every acquisition or most of the acquisitions are normally being originated by the business units and supported by our M&A organization. I think in our business where the markets, you know, are very fragmented and we are active in almost 40 markets, there is a clear expectation that our leaders in the local market, that they do know the competition, that they build relationship with those, you know, business owners and have a sense when the point is coming where they're thinking about retirement or, you know, shifting their investments, et cetera. Then the business units normally work together with M&A and take a deeper look into this opportunity and create what we call a so-called, you know, early warning paper. Those early warning papers are coming then to, you know, Ido and myself, we review it together with the business unit head. In general, we give, you know, green light or some challenges and turn back down, right? Ido and myself, we can sign off acquisitions up to, you know, CHF 10 million. Between CHF 10 million and CHF 20 million of acquisition size, we go to an M&A Committee within our board, have a joint discussion with the so-called M&A Committee. Acquisitions over CHF 20 million, they need, you know, full board approval. At the end of the day, to be honest, it's a, it's a team sport, and once those acquisitions are really running, we also do involve the other corporate functions like IT, HR, because at the end of the day, I always say buying is almost the easy part. The real value for the group we deliver if we deliver a successful integration. That is even more team sports where all the functions, the business unit has to work together. Any more questions in the room? We answered too many already, I guess. Okay. If that's not the case, Stefan, maybe you just want to have a few closing remarks. Yeah. Thank you know, thank you very much. You know, it was a long, very, you know, interesting day. You know, thanks for your time. Thanks for your interest. Thanks for joining. I think, or I trust that you know, take away that DKSH... I think there's another slide coming up. What? Who is managing the slides? Sorry. No problem. Exactly. I hope you take away that, you know, DKSH is a very attractive, you know, investment opportunity, not only because we are operating in one of the most attractive growth market in the region. We are resilient, asset light and high cash generative, also because we are holding leading positions across, you know, the four business units being represented here. We have a very strong focus on our most important asset, you know, our people, as well as on digital and resilient. Most important, I hope that we as a team were able to bring across we have a joint vision, we have a dedicated, you know, strategy. We are execution as a team, you know, on a daily basis. We have, you know, very ambitious goals. With our, you know, midterm roadmap we have shared with you today, we will deliver a solid step up in EBIT midterm by accelerating growth, accelerating M&A, and improving the margin continuously. Thank you very much.