Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Media and Analyst Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Moira, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Web viewers may submit their questions in writing via the relative field. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Bernhard Jucker, Chairman of the Board of Directors. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining our conference call. As you could see from our announcement this morning, today we are not only informing about Rieter sales and orders last year, but also about an upcoming change in the company's management. For this reason, I am attending this conference call today together with our CEO as an exception. Our agenda today starts with the presentation by Norbert Klapper, the CEO, and Kurt Ledermann, the CFO, on Rieter's publication of sales in 2022, followed by a Q&A part. I inform you then about the change in Rieter's management. Having said this, over to you, Norbert, please. Thank you very much, Bernhard. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks a lot for having dialed in. I will lead you through the presentation now, and as Bernhard said, followed by a Q&A session which relates to the publication of sales and orders. I jump to page two of the presentation, where we have summarized the key messages. Sales of CHF 1.5 billion in the financial year 2022, and almost CHF 900 million in the second half of the year. By these numbers, we exceeded our forecast, which we had communicated in October. The reason why we were able to exceed the forecast was that we made progress on material supply, de-bottlenecking, and that helped us to generate sales from the backlog. My second statement here is EBIT around 2% expected for the full year. This is not great looking at this, at the volume that we turned into sales. However, we have to see that in the first half year we had reported a loss of 1.6 percentage points negative EBIT margin. We were able to compensate that and generate a profit. My third statement here is order intake of CHF 1.157 billion and an order backlog of CHF 1.540 billion. The order intake of CHF 1.157 billion means that we have not generated a lot of order intake in the fourth quarter. When you do the math and you look at what we have published in October, you see that our order intake in the fourth quarter was slightly below CHF 60 million, which is of course, very low. The reason why the order intake was so low is twofold. Number one is new orders, which coming in are at low levels at the moment, based on the geopolitical uncertainties that you're all aware of. Financing costs have increased for our customers, That makes investment cases less attractive. Of course, we have lower textile consumption around the world, That also has a negative impact on the investment sentiment. In addition, we had cancellations, A significant amount of those cancellations had been triggered by Rieter. They were part of the what we call backlog improvement. Yeah, backlog margin improvements. We approached customers who had contracts with us with a very low margin, and we negotiated with them to cancel these orders. My fourth statement is here, ITMA 2023. You know that ITMA 2023 is coming up. It's very important for Rieter, and we have prepared a set of good innovations that we will show there. Our preparations are on schedule. Number five here is implementation of the action plan to increase sales and profitability. We will continue with that because it's not over yet, yeah. It has improved. The situation has improved, but it's not over yet. You hear this from many other companies, and so we will continue to work on it, and I will come to that point later in the presentation. Last but not least, we have an update here on the site, the Rieter site, that we are in the process of selling. The process is making good progress, the update will be part of the presentation. All right, the key messages. Jumping from the key messages to page number three, sales by business group, comparison year-over-year. You see the big jump that we made compared to 2021 in terms of sales. In 2021, we had missed the CHF 1 billion mark, and in 2022 we exceeded the CHF 1.5 billion mark. As I said already, we exceeded our forecasts. The reason is that we made progress on the material supply de-bottlenecking. What I would like to mention here is that in the fourth quarter, we generated sales of more than CHF 520 million. This is a great performance of the Rieter team. It was a huge effort. That was required to achieve that in the current situation. The Rieter team did an outstanding job in turning backlog into sales in the fourth quarter. The next slide is slide number four, sales by region, comparison year-over-year. On this slide, we see that we had growth in all regions across the board, but we see differences here in the growth rates. The growth rates in Asian countries, in India and Turkey and in Americas, in the Americas are exceeding or have been exceeding 40%, which is of course, a lot. We also saw growth in China, but only at 25%, yeah. That tells us that the growth has two dimensions, yeah. We see the regional shift of demand away from China in the high growth rates in the regions outside China, and at the same time, the investments of our customers in China to stay competitive. I can report to you that I was in China in November, unfortunately, before they dropped the quarantine rules, so I had to stay in quarantine for eight days. I attended a customer event at Rieter China, and it was pretty clear that many customers had joined this event because they are thinking about investing. They know if they wanna stay competitive in China, against yarn imports from other countries, they have to invest, and I guess we will see that going forward. Coming to page number five. Here we have a comparison between half year one and half year two in terms of sales. Already mentioned that we had almost CHF 900 million in the second half of the year. I told you already about the challenges that we were facing. The order backlog had to be executed at a much higher cost. The shortages in material supply caused extra cost as well, and we had expenses in connection with the acquired businesses. You know that we closed the transaction, the last part of the transaction, with Saurer in by the end of March this year. The countermeasures, we already talked about that as well. Price increases. We had started with price increases in 2021 in the first half year, and we see the impact now in what we generated in terms of sales in the second half of last year. Improvement of backlog margins. I talked about the cancellations already, but we also renegotiated contracts with customers to get additional money. Alternative technical solutions were important to be able to ship, to be able to make the installations in the field, but they cost, of course, additional R&D for efforts, a significant additional R&D efforts. We did cost reductions wherever possible, yeah. We of course tried to find every option here to reduce our costs in order to make money on the sales. The result of what we did is EBIT margin in the first half year, -1.6%. We turned it around, and we were able to generate an EBIT margin for the full year. We expect it to be around 2%. Coming to page number six, order intake by business group year-over-year. You all know that we had a record year in terms of order intake in 2021. However, what we see this year, last year, 2022, is in the investment sentiment, which is impacted by the geopolitical uncertainties, by higher financing costs, and by low consumer spendings in important markets. One point is important here, and I guess you are waiting for this information, the capacity utilization of the spinning mills globally. Based on our monitoring, we can say that we are below normal levels at the moment. From a global point of view, the average capacity utilization of spinning mills is 80%. At the moment, we are at 65%. There are 15% missing. Of course we see that in the order intake in our Machines & Systems business, but also in the business in new components and for of components and also of after -sales. There are no exceptions. The 65% that 15% are missing is a reality across the globe. It is the fact in China. It's also the fact outside China. We might see a recovery in China after Chinese New Year. You are all aware of this discussion, yeah. COVID coming to an end after Chinese New Year, about after an additional infection wave, which will hit the country. We will see how what the development is gonna be, but it might well be that the Chinese domestic market will recover after Chinese New Year. Order backlog at year-end, page number seven. You see here the comparison between 2020, 2021, and 2022. 2020 was at rather low levels, yeah, CHF 560 million, and it jumped up. The order backlog jumped up by the end of 2021, we had CHF 1.8 billion, and now by the end of 2022, CHF 1.5 billion. Order cancellations are below 10%. We talked about the fourth quarter already. Backlog margins have been improved. The price-cost ratio is better now, and the implementation of the action plan that we have launched to increase profitability will continue. The close collaboration with suppliers to get as much of the bottleneck material as possible, develop alternative technical options to compensate the bottleneck, to substitute the bottleneck material, price increases, improvement in the backlog margin, we talked about that already. Slide number eight, which gives us an indication about cost development in, for our business. We see two comparisons here that we have already looked at in 2022. The Container Freight Index Shanghai to Rotterdam and the aluminum price. Just indicators on how costs are developing for Rieter. You see this unbelievable development in the Container Freight Index. We were coming in January 2020 from $2,000 per container. We went up in 2022, in January, to almost $14,000, and now we're back to $2,000. This is important for Rieter. It sounds like a minor issue, yeah, containers. When I was in China, I was also looking at our distribution center and we talked about, that in strong months, Rieter is shipping 500 containers from China to the world, per month, yeah. If you do the math and you calculate that you pay $2,000 more per container, that means that you have extra cost of $1 million in one month, only for containers. It is important for Rieter. It has an impact. The second comparison that we hear is aluminum. Unfortunately, we're not back to normal yet with aluminum. The good part of the message is that it doesn't increase anymore. Yeah. It's going rather down. I looked into the numbers yesterday. At the moment, we are at $2,635 per ton. This is not the level we had in 2020 and 2021. However, it doesn't increase anymore. The risk on backlog margins seems to be manageable from this point of view. Let's look into the presentation on slide nine. Here we have an update on ITMA. As you expect, we will continue to present innovations that we have been working on over the last couple of years. Focus as always, cost per kilo yarn, raw material consumption, energy consumption, automation, system integration through digitization will be important, and recycling. We had a very good trade show in India before Christmas, where we presented our capabilities in terms of handling recycled fibers. Relindis, you were there, right? The feedback was overwhelming, yeah. Our customers were coming to see what we can do. This is a big thing and we are very happy that we have been able to make good progress on that. On my last slide, on slide 10, we have an update on the site, on the Rieter site, that we are in the process of selling. You know, that we have started the process. We do it professionally as always. We have done this before in Ingolstadt, where it really went well. It takes some time to go through such a process, but we are very happy with what we have on the table now, and negotiations have started. We expect to close this transaction in 2023. We don't know yet by when, but we are confident that we can make this work in 2023. All right, so far the presentation. Do you have questions? We will now begin the Q&A session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch tone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you've entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to use only handsets. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing via the relative field. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from Walter Baumgartner from Zürcher Kantonalbank. Please go ahead. Good morning, everybody. May I ask you for eight figures which help me to do my analyst work, which would be the growth rates for orders and sales, adjusted for currency and add acquisition effect for the group overall and for the three business group, please? Yes. I can provide you these numbers, but, I will call you back after the call. It's too detailed now. Okay. Thank you very much. Question probably for the CEO. You have now the Autoconer in your offering, and you also highlight that the system approach is very important. How is it selling the Autoconer? Is it as part of complete systems or is it rather that it's a standalone add-on to existing installations at your client site? What is the percentage of system sales of Autoconer relative to standalone sales? Well, we are in the process of ramping up our system offering, yeah. We have generated the first system orders in connection, in particular with the newcomers who are entering this business. They are very interested in buying a complete system, yeah. So far, we, the number of single machine business still exceeds the system business. I expect this to change over time. Would you dare to make a guess where we stand? No. The sales? No. Do your clients like the Autoconer being offered by Rieter? Yes, they do. We are very happy with the order intake for this business, in this business. It's going in the right direction, but as I said, at the moment, we still have a higher proportion of single machines compared to the number of machines that we sell into systems. This is sensitive information, I cannot share it with you. Thank you very much. The next question is from Christian Arnold from Stifel Schweiz. Please go ahead. Yes. Good morning, gentlemen. First question would be on the order cancellations. You were talking that these have a level of around 5% back in October, I think, when we talked last time, and now we are talking below 10%. First question would be, are we talking here only about third-party order cancellations, or does this include cancellations triggered by Rieter? I said, there is a significant amount of cancellations that we have triggered. It was part of the, or is still part of our effort to clean up our order backlog. We have approached customers who had contracts with us with low margins, and we try to either negotiate higher prices or cancel the contract in accordance with the customer. That is what we did. This is part of the numbers. It's included in the numbers that you see in the communication today. it's part of the below 10%? Yeah. It's Last time, somebody called it the wash-out. Exactly. It's part of the wash-out, yeah. Was that you, Christian? The wash-out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The wash-out. That would be my next question, the wash-out. Thinking about the order backlog of this CHF 1.5 billion, how much wash-out do you still have to do? Will that be finished in the first half? Or asking differently, how much of the CHF 1.5 billion order backlog has not satisfying margins? I mean, that depends on cost development, yeah. If aluminum, for example, goes the same way that logistics costs go, we will be ready very quickly, yeah. If that doesn't happen, it will take longer, but I'm confident that we will be able to manage this and to accomplish the wash-out during the course of the year. During the year or during the half year? During the year. All right. Maybe my last question would be on the EBIT margin development. I mean, it goes hand in hand with this question before. Nevertheless, if I calculated correctly, the H2 EBIT margin was around 4.5%. We had negative EBIT margin in the first half. Was this a linear progression in the second half? Could you tell us about the exit rate when it comes to EBIT margin? Where did you stand at the end of the year? I mean, all I can say about that, Christian, is there are, of course, two dimensions here, in terms of EBIT margin improvements in the second half of the year. Number one is obvious, it's the volume, right? Not a surprise, yeah. Number two, I can confirm that we were able to increase gross profit in the second half of the year. It was a significant improvement. There is two dimensions, and they both contributed to the improvement. Thank you very much. The next question is from Christian Ferenbach from AWP. Please go ahead. Good morning, gentlemen. A question maybe to Bernhard Jucker or Norbert Klapper, maybe. Do you allow the assumption that the dismissal of Mr. Klapper is to be seen in context with the weak order intake? Could you maybe give a short comment on that? My second question would be, could you maybe give kind of an outlook onto the development on 2023, maybe not in figures, but in a qualitative way. Thank you very much. Thank you. I can assure you that my departure has nothing to do with the order intake. I've seen in Rieter high order intakes, and I've seen low order intakes, yeah. That doesn't make a difference to me, yeah. No, I'm with this company now for nine years. It's time for a change, yeah. It's time for a change for me. It's also time for a change for the company. I guess it's the right decision, and the order intake has nothing to do with it. Outlook 2023. Yes, it's predictable that you would ask this question. You know that we will give an outlook in March, yeah. What I can say about 2023 is the following. Number one, we will continue with our program to increase gross profits, yeah, and to be able to shift the backlog and turn it into sales. You saw that we were successful with that in the second half of last year. I have no reason to believe that this will not work in 2023. The second thing I already mentioned, this is the Chinese market. The Chinese market is depressed at the moment by the COVID pandemic in terms of consumption. I had the chance, as I told you, to get firsthand information and look into this myself, and I can tell you that Chinese consumption is heavily impacted by COVID, yeah. Then there is a couple of things that will happen in 23 which might be positive. Number one is the election in Turkey has been pulled ahead. We will have the election in May, and of the election in Turkey is always a reason for customers to wait before they take decisions, yeah. ITMA will happen in June. This is also a reason why customers hesitate to place new orders. They wait for the new machines that will be presented at ITMA. This is all gonna happen in the first half of 2023. We will talk about that when we make our outlook statement in March. Thank you, Mr. Klapper. Thanks. The next question is from Sebastian Vogel from UBS. Please go ahead. Hello, I've got three questions. I will ask them one by one. The first one, coming back to the order intake weakness in systems. You mentioned a couple of reasons like cancellations, financing, consumption-driven. Can you sort of give us a rough ballpark of what of these factors was the main driver, or have all of them sort of equally contributed to this, or is what are you expecting-- expectations going forward in that regard? The three issues I mentioned were financing costs. It was consumption, and I told you that consumption is an issue at the moment. We see it at the when we look at the capacity utilization and the uncertainties, well, this is a broad thing. When I look at yesterday evening's news on the war in Ukraine. I mean, it's not helping. For sure, it is not helping. I had the chance in China to meet with a Chinese customer, and he told me why people are not consuming. He had a very, very easy way of looking at it. He said, "Chinese are not consuming because of COVID. The U.S. is not consuming because their warehouses are full, and they have a stock level which needs to be sold off first, and the Europeans are not consuming because of inflation. That was his pattern, I guess he might not be that wrong with that. Yeah? I guess the uncertainties and the consumption and the weakness in consumption, they are really important at the moment. Financing costs of customers make investments less attractive, unless you can you can pass on the additional costs to your customers. That is what our customers will do and will try to do. As soon as they see that this is gonna work, they will this reason will go away. Got it. Many thanks. The second question would be on these re-negotiations and the resulting cancellations. Did they came with some extra costs? The cancellations? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In some cases, we had to tell the customer, "Okay, we pay you a small amount of money, if you agree to the cancellation." Yeah, it was not significant. We're not talking about big numbers here. Okay, got it. The last one, in the press release also with regard to the management change, you mentioned also that Mr. Oetterli needs to be in the Board of Directors, but of course I assume there will be some concerns on the governance side of that one. How would you, yeah, how would you think about these concerns? I would like to ask you to wait for Bernhard Jucker's statement on that, and he will address this issue. Thanks. That were all my questions. Thank you. The next question is from Yvonne Debrunner from Finanz und Wirtschaft. Please go ahead. Yes. Good morning, gentlemen. I'm not sure now if I got it wrong. Is Bernhard Jucker, after this discussion, telling something about the new CEO? Yeah. Already something on this? No, no, please wait. Bernhard will make a statement and then we can talk about it. Okay. I'll ask later on. Thank you. We have a follow-up question from Walter Baumgartner from Zürcher Kantonalbank. Please go ahead. Yes, I have several questions, if time allows. When you mentioned that you paid a small amount to clients in the case of cancellation, this means the entire down payment has been returned and the stuff you already purchased and already built for the client, that stays on your balance sheet. Is that correct? No. I mean, we're not stupid, yeah. Okay. I mean, In cases where we had already started to pre-use machines and the customer approached us to cancel, and with a request to cancel, of course, he has to bear the cost. Okay. Yeah. Could you. The second question is regarding the component business, which is very interesting, which as it is more stable than the new machine business, but also shows some order decline in the fourth quarter. What's driving the components business currently? There is a new machine, effect related to components, there is probably de-stocking and restocking effects in there. You'd supply also some components to your competition, I think. Can you use the time to explain us a little bit more what is currently driving the components business and the orders there? This is pretty straightforward. What is driving the order intake in RCO at the moment in the components business is the relatively low capacity utilization of the spinning mills. Our components business is about wear and tear parts for spinning mills. Wear and tear parts are parts which are in contact with the fiber. The fiber in spinning looks so harmless, but in fact it is not. It's pretty abrasive. No matter whether you talk about polyester or viscose or cotton. There is a wear and tear in the spinning mill, which is important, and the components business addresses this business. We are supplying components to the mills which are exposed to wear and tear. If the consumption of... If the capacity utilization of spinning mills goes down, the need for replacements of wear and tear parts goes down as well. This is the rationale. Do you think that spinning mills do not carry significant stock in components which has perhaps been reduced recently? Yeah, that is something we try to find out because we like to better understand what the reality is in the mills and what the reality is in their warehouses. It's very hard to find that out. This is a structure, a distribution channel where different partners are active. Many of them have warehouses and inventory, so it's hard to find that out. From our perspective, there might be some more inventory. There might have been some more inventory in their warehouses, when they started to go down with capacity utilization. Some of them might eat that up now instead of ordering new ones, but it's very hard to assess this effect, yeah. We cannot. We don't have a clear picture on that. Could you remind me what's about the percentage of components that goes to your competition? It's small. Small. Okay. I come to the third question. I wanna give you the opportunity to give us some reassuring statements about your compliance procedures, as we had recently those rumors regarding Uzbekistan. What is the question? You're doing business in some countries which from time to time raise some question mark. We see some headlines in the newspaper. Is there anything reassuring you can tell us about how you behave in those countries? I mean, compliance is a key issue for Rieter, yeah. Very, very important. We have put it in our code of conduct very prominently, and we have made sure that our people know and behave accordingly, yeah. We also made sure that our partners in business comply with it, yeah. What you are relating to is the situation with the examination in Uzbekistan. What has happened is very straightforward, yeah. There was an investigation at Rieter in 2022. We are... How do you call that in English? der Mittel wegen unbekannt. You know that somewhere? Against unknown. Unknown. Unknown. Against unknown, yeah. It was not against Rieter. Apparently, the Bundesanwaltschaft was thinking that Rieter had documents which would be important for their investigation. That is what they did in 2020. What we see now is that the Bundesgericht has decided that the previous court, who has decided that the Bundesanwaltschaft is not supposed to make use of these documents, yeah. This previous court has to reassess the decision that they made, yeah. This is what happened. We have no change in the facts that are around this issue, yeah. It is important to note that the Bundesanwaltschaft is not running an investigation against Rieter. Perfect. Thank you very much for this clarification. The next question is a follow-up question from Sebastian Vogel from UBS. Please go ahead. Perfect. Just a quick one. With regard to the margin outlook going forward over the next one to two years, so to say. There's also many, so many moving parts on your side. When do you think that will be sort of being back at a sort of normal run rate level? What I expect... I mean, I told you already that from my point of view, the underlying change in the textile industry will continue. It might take a break now, yeah, based on the war and the consumption and everything, yeah. What we saw before the breakout of the war will continue, yeah. The industry will leave China. The ones who will stay, who have the idea to stay in China, they have to invest, yeah. There is investments in two ways. There is investments outside China, because the capacity that you would need to substitute the Chinese spinning industry doesn't exist, yeah. There's additional investments required, and at the same time, our Chinese customers will continue to invest because they will be in competition with new equipment, yeah, standing outside China with very attractive cost per kilo yarn. Of course, they have to defend their business against yarn imports, yeah. When I was in China, the discussion with the customers confirmed that this is what is on their mind, yeah. They know that a new Rieter spinning mill in Vietnam or Bangladesh, yeah, will kill their business, yeah, when out of this mill, customers start to export yarns into China. In China, you compare the cost per kilo yarn with coming from a mill, a 20-year-old mill. This is not going to work, yeah. Based on the equipment that many of our Chinese customers have today, they will not be competitive, and they know that. Got it. Many thanks. We have a written question coming from the webcast of Delia Bachmann from Der Landbote asking, "Could you tell more about Rieter's recycling plans? Recycling is in our industry, it's a big thing. We are working on two different tracks. It has to do with the way you recycle fibers. You can do it either mechanically or you can do it chemically. When you do the recycling mechanically, that means that you have a piece of cloth, a piece of garment or whatever it might be, and you put it in a tearing line, and the tearing line tears it apart. Tears the garment apart up until the point that you have single fibers that you can spin again. This sounds very easy. In fact, it is not so easy because what you have as a result of the tearing process is short fibers. You have a high content of short fibers, and short fibers are not good for the spinning process. We could say that the whole industry has dedicated many, many years of engineering and other efforts to get the short fibers out, in particular in cotton. Now we come with a point where we say, "Okay, now we need to be able to process more short fibers in the spinning mill." This is a change of paradigm we can say. It is important and we are working on it. We're trying. What the big thing is now to spin a good yarn, a high-quality yarn with a raw material that has a very high short fiber content. That's the big deal. Yeah. We are working on that, and the demand is very high. There is another way of recycling fibers. This is chemically. What you do is you put the garments or whatever you have as a material, you put it into a chemical process where you dissolve the fibers. Yeah. You at the end of the day, you have a kind of slurry, yeah, where the fibers are being dissolved. You take this slurry, and what you do with it is that you spin a new fiber from it, yeah. Like viscose or polyester, yeah. Same idea. Here our what we're doing is we're cooperating with many customers who try to spin a yarn this way. Most prominent example is Worn Again. We have... Worn Again, you know, is a joint venture between Hennes & Mauritz and Sulzer and a couple of other partners. We have the pleasure to have been selected as the partner to build a pilot plant for Worn Again. This is gonna happen here in Winterthur. Yeah. We are working on both fields. On mechanical recycling, the challenge is the high short fiber content. Yeah. On the chemical recycling, and here the challenge is the spin ability of what comes out of this process. You might get fibers out of this process, but the question is whether you can really make a garment from it. A yarn and a garment. Our technologists, sometimes open bins with fibers that come from such a pilot plant, and they say, "Okay, this is a nice fiber, but it's never gonna work." Yeah. The fiber has to be optimized. The fiber has to be tuned in a way that you can spin it and that you can generate a good yarn from it, yeah. That is the challenge in the chemical recycling. We have another written question from Delia Bachmann asking, "Could you tell us more about the Rieter site sales process? How many offers are there on the table? Could you elaborate on why you are very happy with it? Are you selling the area as a whole? We cannot answer these questions. We will publish the results of this process as soon as the process has come to an end. There are no further questions at the moment. All right. Thank you very much for your questions. Thanks a lot. I'd like to hand over now to Bernhard for the second part of our call. Thank you, Norbert. I will make some comments on the management change, namely our CEO, Norbert Klapper, approached the board, informing us about his wish to step down after nine intensive years as CEO, in the year in which he turned 60. He wishes to take on new professional challenges. The board respects and understands Norbert Klapper's decision. With great commitment, Norbert has made lasting contribution to Rieter, the undisputed market leader, by strengthening our technology leadership, developing the components and the service business, and successfully completing the system offering. The board would like to thank Norbert for this contribution, and we wish him all the best for his professional and personal future. We consider ourselves fortunate to have been able to recruit a highly qualified new CEO of Rieter in Thomas Oetterli. He will assume his duties as CEO as of March 13th, ensuring a seamless transition of responsibility for the operational management of the group. Together with Norbert, he will be present at the annual results presentation of March 9th. Thomas Oetterli has all the prerequisites to lead Rieter as the innovative global market leader and to develop it further successfully for the long term. Over more than 20 years, including the last six years as CEO of the Schindler Group, he has made significant contributions to the successful development of the world-leading company. With his industrial and international experience in machine building, service, and project business, he is an ideal fit for Rieter. In view of the current economic and market challenges, which require close cooperation between the Board and the group Executive Committee, the Board of Directors considers a dual function of Thomas Oetterli as CEO and member of the Board to be advantageous and in the interest of all Rieter stakeholders. The Board will therefore propose Thomas Oetterli for election as a member of the Board at the upcoming annual general meeting. With this, we ensure Rieter's success as an innovative, profitable market leader in the long run. With this, I open for questions. We have a question from Emrah Basic from Baader Helvea. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi. Hello. Thank you for taking a question. I actually just have one question left, and I'm just gonna keep it short and open. What is your view on board independence? We have in Rieter, we have seven independent non-executive directors. We decided as the board that with Thomas Oetterli's expertise and leadership skills, the Asian market experience, he will be the right person to join the Board as CEO. Maybe just a quick follow-on. Don't you think that it's a bit questionable whether he will be able to independently judge management actions? As I mentioned, we have seven independent non-executive directors, who will make sure and control the executive committee accordingly. All right. Thank you very much. The next question is from Yvonne Debrunner from Finanz und Wirtschaft. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning again. My question, Thomas Oetterli, he is also Chairman of the SFS Group, another big company. Does he have enough time to do this job additionally, or will he step back as the Chairman of SFS? My second question is, you said there needs to be a close contact between the board and management, so that is the reason that he will also join the board. This seems a bit strange to me. How did you ensure this close contact until now? I mean, this is not something new that this is necessary. Maybe you could say something on this. Thank you. Thanks for your question. Thomas Oetterli has experience as CEO of an international group and that in parallel as a long-standing member of the Board of Directors in another listed company, which you just mentioned. He knows the specific workload, and we discussed this in great detail, and we concluded together that it is feasible for him to take or to continue with his engagements. The Board of Directors supports Thomas Oetterli's commitment in this regard. When it comes to the close cooperation, it is a fact that the board and the Executive Committee needs to cooperate closely as we did in the past. We have a change, therefore, we wanted to make sure that this continues or the close cooperation is even strengthened by the fact that Thomas Oetterli is also part of the board. That he is part of the board was also caused by the fact that we have or need his experience when it comes to the Global Industrial business, the Asian market experience, he complements the board perfectly well. Okay, thank you. The next question is from Sebastian Vogel from UBS. Please go ahead. Perfect. Yeah. Many thanks for the arguments in that regard. You mentioned of course the times are challenging and they will be challenging also in 2023. They have been also in 2022, and maybe a bit of a tricky question, why more so than Mr. Klapper not as part of the Board of Directors, but Mr. Oetterli needs to be on it? That would be great if you can shed some light on that one. Norbert Klapper informed us to leave, and that he wishes to leave the company, therefore going forward. This is of course an obsolete question from that perspective. Yeah, sure. With just a sort of hypothetical question, of course. I mean, the times have been challenging already for the last couple of years and, like two years ago, Mr. Klapper was therefore undefined for the time and still by the time the times were challenging, you were not considering or at least not, there was nothing official that you were considering to put him on the Board of Directors as well. I was just wondering what are the times making them so much more challenging now to sort of, warrant such a development, such a step? As a board, we just reassessed the situation and came to this conclusion going forward. The board is always making, of course, a succession plan for itself, but also for the CEO of the company. When we did that, we concluded that this is the right way for Rieter at this point in time. Got it. Many thanks. For any further questions, please press star and one on your telephone. There are no more questions at this time. Thank you very much for your questions. On behalf of the team here, I wish you a nice day. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.