Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Sonova's 10th Annual Investor and Analyst Day. My name is Thomas Bernhardsgrütter, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at Sonova. For the second year in a row, we were forced to hold this event in a virtual format only, and we would have loved to welcome you here in Stäfa in person. We are delighted that we have over 170 people signed up to join the live webcast today. A lot has happened in the last year here at Sonova. We've launched innovative solutions in our hearing instruments and cochlear implants business, advanced our omni-channel strategy in audiological care, and entered the consumer hearing space with the planned acquisition of the Sennheiser Consumer Division. We will talk about all of this in today's presentation. We will cover the strategic progress of the Sonova Group, the midterm prospects, as well as our commitments and achievements in the space of ESG. I'm convinced that we'll have an exciting afternoon ahead of us. Before we start, let me quickly run you through the disclaimer of today's presentations. In short, today's presentations are for marketing purposes only, they do not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any securities. Another housekeeping item, we will have a live Q&A session following the presentations today. For those of you who would like to ask questions here in the room, we would ask you to pre-register either in the Q&A tab of the live webcast or in the presentation section of the Sonova webpage. With this, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you Arnd Kaldowski, CEO of Sonova, who will take you through the agenda of the day. Arnd, the stage is yours. Thomas, thank you very much for the quick introduction and getting us started here, as well as the summary of the logistics, particularly on the Q&A side. Please allow me also to extend a warm welcome to all of you, and thanks for joining in in such a large number of interested people. Despite it being virtual, we'll do our best to make it worthwhile your time. I want to run first through the lineup of the presenters who are joining me today on the stage here. I'm going to go kick off with the market and strategy update, and then Tom Lang will be on stage. He is the VP of Portfolio and Product Management for the hearing instruments business, and he will cover the progress with Paradise over the first year after its initial launch, and now the new exciting features we're bringing out in the Paradise 2.0. Vicky Carr-Brendel will join us, who's leading our Cochlear Implants business, and will give you a brief update on where we stand with regard to the CI business during and coming out of the COVID pandemic, but also an exciting update on the product side with regard to the Naída Marvel, which we launched around the beginning of the calendar year. Christophe Fond will join us, who's leading our Audiological Care business. He was with us last year, I think he will give a strong update on the progress we're making in this important business for us. Martin Grieder will be on stage. You may remember him as the head of the HI marketing, but since two weeks, he's officially in the new role of leading our Consumer Hearing business. As Thomas has pointed out, we entered this market inorganically with the acquisition of the Sennheiser Consumer Division. In reality, I think he will guide us deeper, we did work already over the last years on our entry into this market. We started organic and then followed up with an inorganic move. At the end, I have the pleasure to have with me on stage Ludger Althoff, who's leading our global operations, in order to dive deep on something we haven't shared yet, at least not in this forum, our priorities, our commitments, but also our journey on the ESG side. A quick look on the timing here. We've set aside the first 1.5 hours for the first three blocks of topic we want to cover, then a quick break, which I hope is appreciated. We'll take the next two topics, and then we have about a half an hour for Q&A, and we want to be done at around 4:30 PM with the event. Let me dive into the strategy and market update. I want to cover three topics here. A, especially in the COVID time, I assume it is quite relevant to know how is this market going. I'll go deeper there. The second one, how are we progressing on our strategic priorities? Thirdly, I want to go into the outlook. We call them the midterm targets for the group, which we envision to be valid for the next couple of years. If you look at the title of the section, Entering a New Phase from a Position of Strength, I think you've seen us over the last years working hard on two things. A, getting to a place where we grow consistently above market organically. Secondarily, improve our operations. I don't just mean the manufacturing side, all of the processes we have in order to drive efficiency, gain investment capacity, and split some of that going to the bottom line, some of that going into the growth investments. To some degree, we have concluded that phase. That doesn't mean there's not more potential from a process and a productivity perspective, but I think we're now in a good position where we are, I think, fairly saying we're running well, and we have the opportunity to accelerate growth organically and inorganically. Quick recap on why we think it is a good idea to either invest into us or to stay invested. Clearly an attractive market in which we operate. Very resilient against crisis economically, now proven over the last 18 months, even against the pandemic. Also, significant runway to improve the value we add for the consumer by driving innovation. Better hearing is the basic functionality of what we provide, moving upwards in the value we provide to consumers to something we call the Healthy Living Companion. More consumer value, also more medical value. The second one, we are in a leading market position. The segments we serve, also an advanced vertically integrated business model, which we do use in order to share technology and market access between the different groups with quite some benefit to the individual P&Ls. The broadest and most advanced product offering. Ultimately, all that results into a strong financial position with attractive margins, which you've seen us lift quite significantly, where we see further upside. At the same time, we have the capacity to invest into growth organically and inorganically where this is appropriate. Let me get to my first point, the market update. First caveat, I'm going to talk about unit volume because the data does come from the information all manufacturers share in the individual countries in a compliant format. Let me quickly explain the graph here, and I'll take the upper left one, the U.S. commercial market. You see the time period from April 2019 until August this year. The dashed line is 2019, beginning 2020, and then the blue solid line is 2020 until now. If you look at the numbers we have on all the graphs, the first number on the left side shows the growth or the decline last year from April to March, which is our fiscal year, but I would also say the first year of COVID. The second, the blue box, represents the two-year CAGR, meaning how much did we grow versus two years ago on an annual basis as a market, and really shows the vitality of the respective market. In the sum across the different markets, I think we're doing reasonably well in the recovery. Some markets are higher than you would expect as a normal underlying growth rate over the last five months, as you can see from the U.S. example. Other ones are lower. In the sum, I think we're seeing good progress on a global level. Let's dive deeper. The U.S. last year, depressed pretty constantly. Now since March, really on a higher level, very constant, and you can see a 9% two-year CAGR. Clearly above the historic run rate. From our point of view, a little bit of a pent-up demand on a pretty stable consumer purchase interest. If you go to the right, you see VA, very different, significantly down last year. Now getting to the 2019 level, also pretty stable, but you can clearly see the different opening scenario of the VA. Keep in mind they're more medicalized. In some places, they're co-located in hospitals. Germany has quite a different picture to the U.S. Last year, almost flat year-over-year, one of the best markets, but being stuck there with just 1% CAGR and quite some bumps on the road. I think when we look at the way the German government is handling the pandemic and how they're limiting the movement of the population, you can see they haven't really gotten out from a consumer confidence perspective. Certainly, more to come. Helpful last year, but this year, holding us a little bit back. Let me move to two more important markets, the U.K. as well as France. The U.K., here we only have quarterly data. Last year, quite compressed in the private market. Very nice pick up in the last quarter with 11% two-year CAGR. U.K. NHS, again, very similar to the VA picture, I think for the same reasons. Then the big outlier with the French market, not so much driven by COVID, by the reimbursement change. You can see enormous growth last year in unit volume, and even more so in the last quarter. Keep in mind, this is unit volume. On value, this would be lower because the main volume comes on the lower price range. Overall, as I said at the beginning, if you put them all together, probably slightly lower than you would expect from a two-year CAGR, but clearly at the place we expected the market to be. I think good signs that recovery is coming in many places has happened and is stabilizing. Moving on to strategy, allow me to start with the market trends first. That's a very high-level picture, but we wanted to depict the most important elements you should keep in mind when you think about our marketplace. On the one hand, we and our competition is driving continuous innovation. On the other hand, the consumer expectations are evolving. They're evolving because they know what we can do. They're also evolving because they see other similar devices bringing new features, functionality, connectivity forward, and they're hoping for the same in a hearing aid. From a technological perspective, we moved into connectivity, which then enabled starting the application side. Keep in mind, we're still the only player on the market who has MFA made for all phone, so we have a significant advantage on the Phonak product range and on the Unitron product range, and now even on the AB product range with regard to the MFA. There's a very fundamental, still technological megatrend going on in our industry, the continued miniaturization of components and sensors. Here we just follow Moore's law. The microelectronics technology offers us more opportunity to make our devices faster, smarter, better. Keep in mind, you need small batteries and long- life cycle for those batteries until you need to recharge. Lots of runway enabling more and more digitization and big data over time. Getting to the consumer benefits, I think the first statement, it continues to be the number one priority for everybody with a hearing loss that the device enables even better hearing. You may be surprised, at the end, nobody is at the place where they want to be, despite all the good progress we made. This is a high priority for us. To the connectivity and the applications, people are trying and testing how can they anytime, anywhere interact with the manufacturer or with a hearing care professional. Today, that's pretty important in the pre-sales phase. You'll hear Christophe talk later about the lead generation side. It's less so used in the post-sales phase with regard to remote fitting and other elements. We believe it will come over time. We believe that for the predominant part of our customers, the hearing care professional is the gold standard. We have to enable that consumer journey and offer choice. The last one, particularly in the time of the baby boomers coming to our category, the Healthy Living Companion becomes more important as a concept because they're looking for more functionality to help them in their fitness tracking down to more medically relevant things you can detect at the ear level and bring ultimately through the application forward. A couple of big megatrends on which we're sitting, which make us confident that we will continue to be able to leverage innovation to drive value and penetration. From a strategy, no big change. You may be surprised, although we said that in the last times we had a chance to talk to you, but even with COVID and even with scratching our head very strongly, we didn't see that we need to change direction. On the right-hand side, you see our four focus areas from an organic growth perspective, leading innovation, expanding our audiological care, engaging more and deeper with our customers on the B2B side, HI and CI, and moving more into the high-growth developing markets because they offer the long-term large growth potential here. One big enabler for us has been and will be the continuous process improvement in the structural optimizations. I'm sure you took note that our profitability went up significantly as a margin of revenue and clearly in line with what we have shared, that we're going to start an engine of continuous improvement, which will run longer, but that we have a significant number of structural optimization opportunities. A significant part of the latter we've worked through. There's still some outstanding. We will not spend a lot of time here during today because you see the results. Therefore, we trust you understand we will continue to march down this path. The last part, leveraging M&A to drive growth strategically. Let me tell you, I'm of the belief that you should only go deeper into M&A if you're running your core business well. Hence the argument with a new face to some degree. Because we used the last couple of years predominantly to get better from an agility, from an efficiency, and from the consistent delivery of our results towards our customers. We now have the right, we have the means, and as you see from the Sennheiser acquisition as well as our indication we gave at the full year results that we want to do more on the M&A side, bolt-on wise in AC, clearly going to start using more of that potential. I want to dive deeper into the growth initiatives, and you've seen some of them coming your way in the discussion so far. I want to give you a broader overview. Most of them will be covered in more detail of in the colleagues' presentations. We started the discussion some three years ago on believing we can generate more investment capacity. Where would you target it, use that? Where are the best spots where you can put that in order to drive improved value for the customer and with it drive more sustainable growth above market? We came up with those five vectors here. Advance, it's clearly innovation leadership in the field we're active in, hearing performance hearing aid. The second one on the innovation side was the topic of expand. How do we engage deeper with consumer hearing? How do we elevate the medical value of the solutions we provide? Number three was about broaden consumer access. A big topic in the audiological care, to some degree in the HI and the CI side. Number four, how do we deliver better to our customers? Then we get to sales and marketing excellence. We get to value-added services. Then number five, accelerate. How do we capitalize on the emerging high-growth markets? Those topics are in place since three years, at least within us as a consolidated few. How do you drive them, and what's behind those high-level terms? The simple way we use to drive them is we broke them down into individual initiatives where we had the leadership skills. We gave that leader a team and gave them the means to go invest and build. In other cases, where it may be new capabilities like digital marketing and a lead generation factory, we actually recruited from the outside and then had a new team starting and building more and more. If you go down the advanced innovation leadership, significant R&D investments, expanding the capabilities in a company to those new technologies. Also one element here on expand with the sensor technology. The other topic on expand was always the consumer hearing business, which Martin will go deeper on. That's the product side. On the broaden consumer access, pretty self-explanatory, and Christophe will go deeper. Omnichannel, lead generation factories, and expanding the network. We shared that two years ago, continue to invest on feet on the street where we can get to more customers in the B2B environment. Deliver. We will not share a lot about this here during today, but let me on a high level share. At the end, I think we have an enormous number of sales and marketing people because we have a large number of customers to cover, and we're helping them. Getting better in how we do this while we're adding new capability, especially on the digital marketing. At the same time, also building more muscle so that we can support our customers no matter if they're independent or if they are large retailers with the right resources on the ground while they're driving for the growth side as well as the productivity side. The last one, accelerating high growth markets. Christophe will give an example and continue the discussion on how we go about the China market. If you think about the size of those growth investments, I will not share an absolute number, but I want to ensure you that while we're working on this and while the initiatives become more relevant and we are beyond the startup phase of the initiatives, we obviously need to provide more investment so that we can reap the benefits at the end. Even in the last year, while our revenue was down 6%, we increased our growth investment in these initiatives by more than 40% year-over-year. Rest assured, this year we're doing another step up with regard to those investments because we see the potential. One I want to cover here, because there's not that much covered later on, is the innovation side and what we're doing there and where the money is going. Our innovation framework around the device you've seen before is starting at the top here with the hearing performance in line with what I said before, and there are still unmet needs on comfort and fit. We're reasonably new to connectivity and application, so a wide field of more opportunity, and then the additional functionalities, particular with the sensor technologies. Tom will guide us through, but you will see that in Paradise 1.0 and 2.0, we worked on all of those four dimensions, which I think is in line with what we said. Hearing performance needs to be continued to improve while other things are coming to add more value. That ultimately translates into you need to invest more because we can't step back on the continued expansion of the processing power. We want to have the best hearing device. We need to continue to invest into algorithms and increasingly into people on the payroll for artificial intelligence and all of that for the hearing performance. You're adding this new functionality, sensor technologies for the healthy living benefits, more investments into collaborations with medical institutions around comorbidities. The most important ones in our field are balance, dementia, and depression. The application side, no matter if it's more consumer-centric application and linking to existing ecosystems or building more applications which are relevant for the person who's using the hearing aid as a hearing aid. You've seen that in how we were investing over the last two years. Both years were double-digit increases in our R&D spend. Keep in mind while we were significantly improving our profitability. I want to come to the last part of my first presentation here, and that's how do we think about the midterm outlook and targets of us as a group? No change on the chart. This is exactly what we shared in May 18th. By the way, everything I'm going to say about targets is, A, without Sennheiser. We haven't closed yet, therefore we're a little early to giving you clear indications. Martin will give a little bit of a direction there. Everything I'm going to say still is the existing business as is. Secondary, always LC correct. It's really hard to predict the currency. We said 24%-28% on the top-line side, 34%-42% on the bottom line. Given the good work we've done on productivity, a good fall through here. Having said what I said on market and also feeling good about where we stand with regard to our competitive position first couple of months in, we feel good about this guidance for the year. No more updates on that if you want to call it a confirmation of the guidance. How do we think about the go forward? I think it's prudent to first go backwards because our midterm targets were in place since 2016. You would ask, how did you do? Simple chart, sales and EBITDA. The last one, 2021, 2022, we are depicting here at the midpoint of the guidance. The top line was a 5%-7%. This includes, in the way we think about our midterm targets, organic and bolt-ons, not major acquisitions. You can see 6.6%. I would call it at the upper end of the range. If you look in detail on the chart, you see that the last three years were above the 8%. That is a pickup of momentum I talked about. If you look on the EBITDA side, you can see clearly outperformed what we put out as a midterm target here with 14% as a kicker. I would say it is a little bit of a headwind. No, it is an LC. You also see an acceleration at the back end, and you see a 25.4% if you take midpoint of the guidance. Allow me to point out this is an EBITA, not an EBITDA. We've done pretty well against what we put out. Now in addition, don't want to go through all of the bullet points here, you can read them, but clearly good growth opportunities in all three businesses. You see innovation, commercial execution. You see expanding the presence from a feet on the street perspective, emerging new opportunities of technology and form factors for hearing instruments, audiological care. Don't want to recap them all. Christophe will go there. One additional one he will talk about is the increasing broadening of the product offering for in the store. Some of that is new product. Imagine the Sennheiser. Other ones are on medicalized services. Cochlear implants taking advantage out of the synergies on the R&D, as we do with the Naída Marvel, but also driving the same playbook on the commercial execution as on the B2B side. Clearly a strong starting point, good momentum out of the work of the last years, increasing investments into those growth drivers. It shouldn't be a big surprise that we are putting our midterm targets higher from the top-line side, spelling out a 6%- 9% here in LC, which gets you in the midpoint into the high single digits. On the EBITDA side, our expectation that despite us having achieved a significant high level for the industry and for ourselves, still the potential to continue to expand the margin by around 40 basis points per year while we do everything we have to do on the organic and the inorganic side to drive the growth opportunity. In the sum, entering a new phase from a position of strength. An attractive market with remaining intact fundamentals. Making good progress in the COVID-19. It's a little spotty, but I would say in the sum, the higher ones are picking up the slack of the currently lower ones, and I think we will get through. It's a little hard to predict in which month everybody will be at normal growth rates. In my eyes, a well-proven strategy. I think we continue to see traction with our customers, but also the financials will tell, and the ability to step up our growth investments in line with the strategy we laid out. A strong midterm sales prospect driven by further market share gains and bolt-on M&A. In addition, a further solid margin expansion potential on top of the strong progress we have achieved. With that, I want to move us to the next exciting topic, and Tom Lang is going to join us here to share about the exciting news on Paradise from the last year, but also this year. Tom, all yours. Yeah. Thank you, Arnd. When I joined this company and this industry 20 years ago, I was amazed by the amount of technology that is inside our tiny products. I was surprised to see and to learn how this technology can truly change people's lives. I was touched and still am today to see how grateful people are if they can live a life without limitations, thanks to our solutions. For almost 75 years, Sonova has been operating at the forefront of technology, and we have provided countless needs-driven and purposeful innovations to those that rely on our help. Our technology comes alive in our products. In my presentation, I'm going to show you how we are building on the success of the Paradise platform and how we are advancing our leadership thanks to the Paradise 2.0 portfolio that we are releasing now only 12 months after the launch of Paradise. As you probably know, we are launching new platforms typically every two years. We have learned and improved our life cycle management so that we are now able to provide meaningful innovations also one year after a platform launch. Quick reminder on what Paradise is. Under the umbrella message of Rediscover the Wonders of Sound, we have launched a broad portfolio of innovative solutions in summer 2020. Paradise hearing aids have unrivaled sound quality. This was possible due to our proprietary PRISM chip, who has twice the memory compared to its predecessor. We have added the motion sensor to our hearing aids, and this motion sensor can establish whether the hearing aid user is moving, and with this additional information, we can provide better hearing in such situations. Adaptive Phonak Digital or APD 2.0 was scientifically proven to reduce listening effort, especially in noisy environments. AutoSense OS 4.0 is the brain of our hearing aids, and this functionality was developed using state-of-the-art machine learning methodologies. AutoSense OS is constantly analyzing the environment in which the hearing aid user is in, and is orchestrating all the hearing performance options and digital signal processing functionalities in order to provide the best listening and hearing experience at any moment in time. The second innovation pillar of Paradise is personalized digital solutions. We have not only improved the functionality of the myPhonak app by adding, as an example, the possibility for the hearing care professional to remotely test the hearing of the consumer through the app and through the hearing instrument. We have also added two additional apps, the myPhonak Junior app and the myRogerMic app. I will talk more about apps later in my presentation. The third and last, but definitely not least innovation pillar of Paradise is universal connectivity. As you know, modern hearing aid can directly connect to smartphones. However, there is a significant difference on how this connectivity is implemented by the various manufacturers. As a matter of fact, we are the only manufacturer still that can provide universal direct connectivity to iOS, Android, and even to any Bluetooth-enabled device. This is possible because we chose to use the globally available standard classic Bluetooth protocol. We did not use a proprietary protocol from Apple or Android, which would have limited the compatibility basically to a handful of phones. We are also the only manufacturer who offers true hands-free phone. Paradise hearing aids literally turn into wireless Bluetooth headsets, and you can have a phone conversation without even touching your phone. Also unique is the possibility to have simultaneously two Bluetooth connections active. This means that as a user, you can, for example, watch a movie on your tablet, if now a phone call comes in on your smartphone, the hearing aid will automatically and seamlessly switch over to the smartphone where you can have the phone conversation. If the phone conversation is over, they will switch back to the tablet. The only thing that the user has to do is pick up the phone by double-tapping on the hearing aid. We have sold an amazing 1.7 million hearing aids with this technology. I think this is a clear proof of the appreciation and the acceptance of these solutions in the market. We are also constantly running clinical studies to find the evidence for our claims and the effectiveness of our solutions. We have already shared some of those results a year ago. Here, a small summary of some new results that you have not seen so far. We have now the evidence that the dynamic noise canceler can reduce listening effort. We know that with motion sensor hearing, people find it easier to understand while they are walking. We know that the majority of users prefer the speech enhancer on for speech intelligibility. We know that people prefer motion sensor hearing for speech understanding, environmental awareness, as well as sound quality. We know that the majority of people prefer tap control over more traditional methods to control the hearing aid. On top of the scientific evidence, which by the way is all published on our website, we also get amazing customer and consumer feedback. 90% of users of consumers would recommend Paradise to their family and friends. 92% of hearing care professionals would recommend Paradise to their peers. 93% of hearing care professionals agree that Paradise provides balance between audibility and comfort, and we will talk more about that balance in a moment. With Paradise, we have truly set the benchmark in our industry. As I like to say, innovation never stops, and there is always things we can do better in our solutions and products. We have run some additional research in order to find out what are the key selection criteria for hearing care professionals whenever they choose a specific brand or a specific product for a consumer. The top three criteria are, number one, speech understanding, number two, sound quality, and number three, reliability. Now, for an industry veteran like me, these results are not that surprising. Ultimately, what people want is to have meaningful conversations with their loved ones, their family, and friends, and for that, they need to be able to understand speech, especially in more difficult listening environments. With this knowledge in mind, we started developing and started working on our solutions, and I'm very happy to announce that we have now solutions that we can launch now that cover all these three dimensions. Phonak Audéo Life is the world's first waterproof rechargeable hearing aid. Whenever you talk to consumer about their concerns and their hassles with their hearing aids, you often get the following questions back. Why do I have to think about my hearing aids when I go and have a shower? Why do I have to take them off if I go for a swim? Why do I have to be concerned if it's raining or if I sweat a lot? We have already implemented significant improvements in terms of reliability in the past years, we wanted to go a clear step beyond that. With this product, the latest addition to the Paradise platform, we clearly cover all the concerns of users in the context of water and humidity. Audéo Life offers all the superior performance functionalities of the Paradise platform, like made-for-all connectivity, rechargeability, two Bluetooth connections, and so forth. How is it possible to develop such a product without it making it look bulky? I think this is an area where technology leadership comes into play. Our engineers have totally redesigned this hearing aid. We have added silicone sealings to all possible entry points for humidity and water. We have moved the microphone openings. We have now introduced a coating for all the components. We have redesigned the receiver connection, and we have changed the charging technology from a galvanic or contact charging to wireless charging. I think this is a great example of needs-driven innovation. What about the other two pillars? What about sound quality and speech understanding? How could we possibly improve those two dimensions in Paradise? Well, let's have a look. [Presentation] ActiveVent is the world's first intelligent hearing aid receiver. When we say receiver in our industry, we actually mean loudspeaker. So-called open fittings have become very popular in the recent years, and this is because they are super comfortable for the hearing aid user. The downside is that these users that were fit with an open vent cannot benefit from the full performance of the hearing aid. As a hearing care professional, you always have to decide where you put your focus on, more on listening comfort or more on speech intelligibility. It was always a compromise. Thanks to ActiveVent, people can now benefit from the best of both worlds, the comfort of an open fit as well as the hearing performance of a closed fit. Conceptually, this idea of opening and closing the vent is not new. We have been discussing this for many years. Only recently has the technology and the miniaturization become mature enough in order to make this technology and this solution viable for hearing aids. You see on the slide here how the microelectronics work. On the right side, you see how this valve within the receiver is opening and closing, and this is all happening automatically, steered by AutoSense OS. There is no need for the end user to do anything manually. There are three core use cases where this technology provides significant benefit. First of all, if the user enters a loud environment, like a restaurant, for example. There you want to close your ear because you want to block the noise from the outside. Second use case, if the user is listening to music streamed from a mobile device. Again, you want to close your ear because you want to avoid that the bass or the low frequencies is leaving the ear before you can hear it. The third use case is if you have a phone conversation. Again, you want to close the ear because you want to avoid noise coming in from the outside. We have run clinical studies to prove again the effectiveness of this solution. We have seen that the own voice perception is not degraded while hearing performance is optimized. We have clearly seen superior sound quality for streaming media, and most importantly, we see a 10 percentage points improvement in speech understanding in noise. We also always like to say, hearing is believing, and this is why I brought a little demonstration for you today. What you are going to hear in a moment is a recording made through a Paradise hearing aid with ActiveVent. The user of this hearing aid is in a loud environment like a restaurant, and he or she is listening to music that is streamed from a mobile device. Initially in the recording, the vent is closed, which is the optimum setting for this environment, and you will be able to enjoy the music. After roughly 15 seconds, we open the vent, and you will hear how now noise is conflicting with the music. Then after another 15 seconds, we close the vent again, which is again the optimum situation. Let's give it a try. All right. I'm sure you were able to hear a clear difference between the open and the closed vent, and I hope you understand now why we are so excited about this new solution. We are also striving to expand our offering and reach more consumers, and I'm happy to announce that with the new Phonak CROS P, we have a solution for people with unilateral hearing loss. This is a product that is designed for people that are deaf on one ear and have either normal hearing or an aidable hearing loss on the other ear. Now, you could argue, well, can the better ear not simply compensate for the deaf ear? That's unfortunately not the case. People with unilateral hearing loss struggle with understanding in noise. They struggle with localization, and often they cannot hear or understand if people talk to them on the deaf ear. Thanks to CROS P, all of these consumers can now benefit from the superior Paradise platform. Clinical studies have shown that they get improved speech understanding in noisy environments as well as they are able to follow conversation wherever that conversation or the speaker is coming from. CROS P is available in two form factors, a rechargeable model, as well as a model with disposable zinc air batteries. Let's have a look at our app portfolio. As I mentioned in the beginning, we have expanded our app portfolio by two additional apps, one of them being the myRogerMic app. This app is for users of our latest Roger microphone, the Roger On. With the app they can control the settings. They can, for example, override the automatic microphone selection whenever this is needed. They can do it in a discreet way without having to touch the Roger microphone as such. That Roger microphone may be lying on the table or may be on a lanyard around the neck of a presenter. The myPhonak Junior app is for both the loving parents that want to have the convenience and the flexibility of remote sessions with their child's hearing care professionals, as well as for the child that is now able to control their hearing aid under some controlled boundary conditions, of course. This app is truly designed for the needs and the requirements of the pediatric market. With Paradise 2.0, we are significantly improving the usability and functionality within the myPhonak app. We are adding three important features that were clearly asked for by the market. Specifically, these are the myPhonak Memory. We are adding sensitivity options for tap control, and we have significantly simplified the access to remote support. Let me summarize. We are building on the success of Paradise, and we are launching a package of purposeful, needs-driven innovation now with Paradise 2.0. This package consists of the world's first waterproof rechargeable hearing aid, the Audéo Life, which addresses the concerns of people with humidity, sweat, taking showers, and so forth. We are launching the world's first intelligent hearing aid receiver, ActiveVent. With this receiver, people have access to the best of both worlds, the comfort of an open fit, as well as the hearing performance of a closed fit. With CROS P, people with unilateral hearing loss can benefit from the superior Paradise technology. We are constantly working to improve our app portfolio. We are adding significant innovations in our latest myPhonak app. With that, I would like to thank you for your kind attention. That is what is new in terms of hearing instruments. With that, I would like to hand over to Victoria Carr-Brendel, our GVP of Advanced Bionics. Thank you, Tom. Well, it's really exciting to see the type of innovation that's going on in the hearing instrument side because we get it over on the cochlear implant side very quickly thereafter. I'm Vicky Carr-Brendel, and I am the GVP President of Advanced Bionics, the cochlear implant side of the business. I've had the privilege, and I am so proud to be the president, and I've done so for the last two and a half years. Today I'm going to talk about a quick business update and then really focus on our Marvel CI launch that has been so welcomed in the overall market and has really, I think, differentiated Advanced Bionics again. This slide is really giving you a market update. The market is up on the top and specific to Advanced Bionics down at the bottom. Really what I want to talk about here is that we're seeing the market recover from the pandemic basically to mid-single digits and really seeing that in Europe, North America, and for that matter, China. Maybe not so much in the U.K., but basically seeing those numbers kind of return to what it was in the calendar year 2019. We're also seeing ourselves have recovery associated with our competition. What I mean by that is that when we measure our competition market share gain, we're seeing ourselves recover in that respect as well. Really focusing on our continuous improvement that Arnd talked about has helped us improve our gross margin significantly. Specific to Advanced Bionics, we know that the Marvel launch has been transformative, and we see that many of our customers have returned to their ordering pattern that they had prior to the pandemic and the field action. We're really grateful for that. As I mentioned, our continuous improvement has improved our margins as well as our focus on commercial excellence. That's been really excellent to see because it's focusing on both the customer and on the consumer journey, and those initiatives have been very powerful. Let's talk a little bit about the Marvel CI launch. First of all, as with our Paradise product portfolio that Tom showed you, our Marvel CI has the first of many things as well, and one of which is a purpose-built cochlear implant system specifically for pediatrics. We get to leverage what's happening over on the Phonak side, which you know, they're specifically so great on kiddos. We get to do the same thing over on the cochlear implant side. Sky CI Marvel is the first purpose-built cochlear implant system for pediatrics. It's not only that. It's really amazing when I talk to patients who are putting our technology on for the first time, this Marvel CI product, they talk about immediately sensing the difference in their hearing performance and the quality of the hearing experience. That's been so excellent to see, and that, of course, is porting over the technology that we had on the Marvel hearing instrument side and putting it into the cochlear implant side. They also notice right away how easy it is to wear this device. It's smaller, it's lighter, and it has an ergonomic curve to it, as you can see from the pictures, that enable the patient to have it sort of hug the ear. It's really given them the ability to wear this product for much longer times than previous products. Remember, our cochlear implant patients are wearing these products from 18 hours- 20 hours a day, so it's really important that it's comfortable. The Made for All phone technology has really been a game changer as well. Historically, our recipients have to wear accessory devices around their neck in order for them to have virtual connectivity with Bluetooth connectivity. What we see here is that we have integrated that, so Made for All phones, and we can connect with virtually any Bluetooth-enabled device, and patients are really adoring that feature. Specifically, we have four different ways that we talk about the Marvel CI technology. There's the hardware, and I mentioned the processor itself, but we also have a whole slew of accessories that enable our patients to hear in different hearing environments, not to mention an ultra-thin headpiece, which fits comfortably under helmets, for example, for kiddos who are riding bikes. The AutoSense technology is what I think is having those patients, those recipients feel that they're having a different hearing experience. Thomas talked about what AutoSense does, but it basically takes the noise out of the environment and allows patients to hear what they really want to hear. I mentioned connectivity, the Made for All ability, virtually any Bluetooth-enabled device, as well as our ability to integrate to our best-in-class RogerDirect, and therefore, they don't have to have accessories pinned onto them or placed onto them. Having it integrated has been also a game changer. For the ability for our recipients to be able to change their hearing experience in a discreet fashion with our remote AB app. Taken all together, this platform is really a no-compromise platform. Let's hear what a patient had to say about this. [Presentation] Yeah, AutoSense, again, has been a real game changer. Well, with all of this technology, what we've been able to do is refocus our attention on growth. What we see with our customers is folks who have ordered our Marvel CI platform are reordering it at a rate of 95%. That's really exciting for us. Not only that, I feel like we're finally leveraging what is the potential of Sonova, and that is to say 30% of our supported recipients are being referred to us by our Sonova partners, whether it's audiological care or wholesale. That's in Germany, 30%. Something I'm particularly proud of is the focus that we've had, even before our corrective field action, on focusing on reliability. What we’ve seen is an improvement of our reliability numbers, in other words, a decrease in the number of complaints that we have on all of our external products, our external processors, cables, headpieces, batteries, et cetera. A 30% reduction over the last two years has been so exciting to see. Lastly, on the innovation part, talking specifically about AutoSense, we have three out of four patients preferring this new AutoSense. Now let’s remember, that’s in comparison to Naída CI Q, our previous generation, which they really appreciated the improvement they got there. This is almost a step function opportunity for them to see even better hearing performance. Just like Arnd was saying, that’s what Sonova stands for. We’ve seen significant progress in a multitude of our areas, which I think is enabling us to focus back on growth. Our key takeaways, it's been a great year. We've really started it well, and the Marvel launch has really helped us drive to the growth that we're seeing. We also have been honored, and we appreciate that we're slowly but surely making progress with those customers who lost trust in us because of the corrective field action. I'm happy to report that we've had some great progress in that area as well. A strategy isn't a strategy if you change it every day. Our strategy remains very constant and very consistent with the overall Sonova strategy, and that is, we'll utilize our continuous improvement, we'll focus on great execution commercially, and you will see growth. With that, I thank you very much for the opportunity to present on behalf of the cochlear implant folks, and I would like to introduce you to Christophe Fond, who's our GVP of Audiological Care. Christophe? Thank you. Thank you, Vicky. Very inspiring. Also, introduction. I'm Christophe Fond. I'm in charge of Sonova Audiological Care already for some years now, for almost five in this responsibility. I'm very glad to be with you today. Hopefully, next year will be in person, we'll see. What is Audiological Care, huh? You know it's a direct access to the end consumer for the group. If you look at the numbers, we have 3,200 Point of Sales into the world, we have 7,000 employees, mainly HCPs, audiologists in contact with the end consumer. If you think about those two numbers, they have been pretty stable in surface compared to last year number. In reality, we went through an optimization of the network, but also an optimization of the in-store capacity to get closer to the consumer demand, and by the way, to increase significantly the top line and the bottom line out of this optimization. In addition, during the journey, we are implementing omni-channel in all our markets in the world. We have a global strategy introduced by Arnd earlier today, I will come back in more detail of the omni-channel. Omni-channel is what we do, that will be the profile of our organization already now and more in future. Last but not least, in addition of all that, we go for a strong expansion of our network. Also, I will cover that with you today. If we look at the strategy priority and the growth driver, we are starting from continuous improvement. This is what a good retailer will do, is what a good organization is doing, and it's where we are financing, by the way, the full growth initiative of the pipeline from our continuous improvement. 3,200 stores, 7,000 employees, it's a large network. From there, by optimization, you can really go to the next level. The next level is the expansion, the right to do M&A or the right to do greenfield. That's exactly what we get from this continuous improvement. That's great because we are building now acceleration in openings greenfield and M&A, and you will see a couple of numbers I will share with you. In addition to that, I introduced that with the omni-channel, we have to move to consumer journey innovation. That is a big learning. Already it was part of the strategy two years ago. It's also an acceleration of our strategy, and we learned that from the COVID. There's many different example. The restaurant industry moved almost overnight to purely one-to-one to end consumer into the restaurant type of relation to an omni-channel proposition. We have seen that in different parallel industry also, and it's for us a clear reason to accelerate and to get closer to the evolution of the consumer behavior. On top, that's the beauty to be part of the Sonova group and organization, also including the new development with the to-come acquisition of Sennheiser, is to introduce into our network a new product and new services. All that, it's our strategy. It's also, by the way, in that order, the agenda I'm going to share with you today. We go back now to continuous improvement, this is just an example of what can be continuous improvement, but it's very easy to understand. Our performance of business is mainly coming from a triangle in between marketing, lead generation, in between in-store network optimization, and by the way, proximities to the end consumer, and in-store excellence means the productivity of the system at the end of the day. You cannot succeed if you are good only in one part of these three pillars. You have to cover the three, to put the three together as a system, you have also to have the enablers of the system, then you get traction. Then you get to the acceleration, and then you move to higher top line, higher productivity, but also immediately our higher level of EBITDA at the end of the day of the system. This is what we are focusing on daily basis. In addition, and here we are moving to the next level, it's the M&A and the development of the business. It's two pillar. It's the M&A on one hand and the greenfield. What we want with this strategy is network expansion. We strongly believe that despite digitization of the organizations and so on, at the end of the day, in our industry, the consumer will need at certain moment of the journey to go back to stores. We have everyday proof of these ideas of concept of what we believe. What we want to do first is to go for optimization of the network and what we are doing basically on daily basis. From this optimization, we move to new openings. On that we are increasing. We took the decision to increase the balance sheet investment, so we leverage more our balance sheet and move from CHF 50 million-CHF 100 million, the bolt-on budget in CapEx on yearly basis in order to get more acquisition. Here, it's excluding big acquisition. On the other hand, on the right hand of the presentation here is a P&L investment, so it's more the greenfield. On that we have three vectors for this greenfield. We have the normal stores, the store you know in our industry. We have also the World of Hearing, which is our big format, full product and full services, and we have this hub-and-spoke strategy. I will come back to that one in the next pages. The shop in shop as an opportunity. Shop in shop is not a detail of our industry. Look at what we do with Boots in U.K. We have a shop in shop model, but it's massive, and with that, we have 30% of the U.K. market with shop in shop. It's also something coming very nicely to our portfolio and offering. At the end of the day, what we expect from this network expansions is mid to high single-digit growth in addition to our classic organic growth. This not a small ambition, this is a big one. Moving to that in term of where, in term of strategy, first of all, we do M&A everywhere in the world, there is no market limitation on the existing market, but also looking at new market. In addition of that, we have strategic markets. The strategic markets are the seven markets we have here from Brazil to U.S., Canada. Strong presence is North America. We have to accelerate that one. It's also on the right, Japan and China, where we are also in strong acceleration. It's also the market we are traditionally in, which is in this case, France and Germany. Those seven blocks are the core strategic market. Doesn't mean, on the other hand, we don't do M&A everywhere in the world. For that, we change also the process in the mindset of our MDs and our local CEOs. It's to have the M&A at core of the organization, not something we can do on top, something really we talk about it in all reporting and so on permanently. One of the model we are driving at high level of speed. It's the World of Hearing. Here we go. The World of Hearing, so if you remember for the one joining us last year and two years ago was the launch of the World of Hearing. It's a hub-and- spoke model, and you can see from the pictures it's a bigger place. It's a bigger place because it's closer. It's A locations. For the one having a retail knowledge, A location is very much shopping mall, high street level. Normally in our industry we are more in B location, but that's A location, so we are closer to the consumer. We are opening our door at the end of the day to the consumers. It's a hub-and- spoke model because it's every World of Hearing is for 15 stores around it. It gives the opportunity for the consumer to have fitting access to all our store. When they want to move to higher level of medical sophistication or accessories and so on, they go next door to the World of Hearing, they see, they have access to all of it. It was launched two years ago. We went to a pilot. I will show you the numbers of pilot and stores. What is important to have in mind, and that's on the right hand, it's the proven benefits. First of all, it goes faster. The end consumer coming to the store, being in contact of the product, are getting to a faster closing process to buy the product. It's higher value for product because the opportunity to present the product, to give access and the chance for the consumer to test it give higher value to the technology presented by Thomas before. That's very interesting one, we have to keep on pushing in that direction. We get access by also our presence and profile of store and so on to a younger group of consumer. Part of the strategy of this industry for sure is to get in relation long term to the lifelong relation to the end consumer. It's all about it. When you go to this younger consumer means you create three years, four years younger, you create the opportunity to have an additional 20% or 30% of sales on top of the size of the market. It looks like a capacity management. We are, by doing that, increasing the size of the market at the end of the day. For sure, to be more visible, to be closer to the end consumer, it's a development of brand awareness. What you can see from the pictures, it's always World of Hearing plus the local brand. It can be Schoonenberg for the upper right. It can be in Vienna also, and on the bottom, you see the interior of a Connect Hearing Canada in Vancouver, where you have also a World of Hearing. We have also in New Zealand and different places. If I look at the map, the upper part on the right-hand was what we had and what was planned in terms of development two years ago. 10 stores, four countries to see how it's working and to see if it's working. It was a pilot. We are moving to this 2021, 2022 to 2022, 2023. We are precisely in the period, we increased the number of countries by six, and 6+, because I will come back to the plus later on in the presentation. It's six flags you have here on the map, we go on those stores to 100. At the end of the day, the ambition is pretty simple. It's to have one World of Hearing for 15 stores and to apply the logic of hub-and-s poke. We are very well engaged into the journey. We are in the middle of the journey. If you do the mathematics, we go to 200+ World of Hearing at the end of the day, that's exactly where we want to be globally. Moving from the expansion to the consumer journey and the innovation, that's a complex one. I will go step by step. If I start from the left, it is what a normal omni-channel should propose. Personalization, lead generation, omni-channel type of services or multiple services that you can buy online, or you can buy into the store. At the end, when you move this omni-channel logic into medical world, is telehealth. This is a proposition we are having today for our consumers. When you move to the ecosystem, at the end of the day, you understand that very well, is to, for the consumer to have the opportunity to start the journey into internet and then to move to the store and potentially to finish the journey with internet or call center services. Can be the other way around, that is the omni-channel logic. In order to get there, you need to have strong enablers, which are IT system, digital marketing, and product. We know that the product from Sonova are having full connectivity, so that's a good starting point. We are also very well engaged into this key enabler journey because we have the IT system, and we have the digital marketing. We are able to develop and implement this ecosystem. What is the vision here? It's pretty simple. This is the market today. The dark blue, it's in-store. The light blue, it's the blend. It's the omni-channel in-store mixed with digital, internet, and so on. The red on top is the pure digital, means 100% of the journey in digital. We don't expect and moving to the right, we don't expect this pure digital journey to be much bigger. Probably some improvement, more percentage there, but not big. What we expect is a Blend 1, which is at the end, the omni-channel, to be big and represent 70%-80% of the transaction. Again, we are well engaged into that direction. In order to support this ecosystem, you need to have a very strong engine in lead generation. We created last year, two years ago now, December 2019, the lead generation factory. It's a platform we created in Berlin in order to have an in-house digital marketing platform for online lead generation. That's very important. That's the internalization of any Social Blue type of proposition with plus, plus on top of it, because the difference in between internalized lead generation platform and externalized, it's you own the database, which is a fundamental, and you are able to reactivate this database to repurchase, which is a fundamental logic of our industry because it's where you are creating value. Also, you have at the end, the possibility to send this database to different store, and that create productivity at store level. The combination of these three factors, this is what you get from the lead generation factory. On the right-hand of this presentation, you can see that we have an extensive development in Europe. We have also already a very good development of the U.S. market and also very important one in China. Talking about China, because that's totally new to you, this is what we have. We took the strategic decision to move in China from the upper part of the funnel, from the lead generation, from the digital world. Knowing that we have also, being Sonova, a very strong wholesale platform means consumer contact platform into China. We start with the lead generation, and we create a strong contract, a strong relation with local player, but big local player. We talk about the Alibabas, the JD.com. We talk about the strong digital player of the Chinese market, the WeChat and Tencent, and so on. From that standpoint, we move to the engagement via our own application. I will show you just after a couple of numbers on this engagement. We are already pretty high in a short period of time. From this engagement level, we shift to the conversion. We do purely online conversion, so via JD.com or Tmall, WeChat. We do also the network partner development. We are working on daily basis with 320 stores in China, which are our customer wholesale in China, and we are delivering leads to those players. In addition of that, we have our own store in China, a small base for the moment, but we are learning a lot from it. We are developing the store in a green field. By the way, also World of Hearing will become a platform for the Chinese market. All our knowledge and this medicalization and the additional level of service will come also. The construction of the brand equity will join the Chinese market. From there, few numbers. I will not be too long on that one, but very interesting one. On our WeChat proposition, we have 430,000 followers. 430,000 followers, you could say for the Chinese market is not that big. There are 1.6 billion. You have to compare that with the current activity of this particular industry. Those 430,000 followers are 2x more than the five followers of the industry into this proposition. We are 2x bigger than the cumulated five next one. This year, we create a lot of traction because we learn from them, we understand, and we learn also from the conversion going to our network, consumer network, customer network in China. That's very interesting. The second part on the right here, it's our rating in JD.com. It's not only a volumetry traction, but it's also moving to qualitative traction. Here we have been ranked in the specialized store in JD in the top 20 out of 400 specialized store in China. That's great, and that's very good beginning for us in China. It's just the beginning of the journey. Moving to omni-channel, believing China is a digital market, I think that's pretty clear. Starting from the upper part of the funnel, I'm sure it's the right strategy, and this is where we go. Finally, and this is the last part of my presentation, is the adjacent product and the additional product we are implementing in our store. You learn that now we are moving that into our World of Hearing, but not only, also in the 3,200 stores where we have adjacent product to launch or launched already. Sennheiser will be one of the product, you see that here with the logo, because it's where we have thousands of hundreds contact with our end consumer at the end of the day. We are also developing, and that will be after my last slide, the medicalization services, moving to more tinnitus, to moving to more balance or cognitive training. This is not totally new for us. It's not a new segment. It's just a new segment to make it big. We are in cognitive training or we are in tinnitus already, playing this game and getting a lot of traction years ago in Belgium, in Germany, in mature market. To make that as a system is new for our organization. Two example. The cognitive training is what you have here on the upper left. It's 10% of the German network currently. We are moving that to the rest of the world. It means with this cognitive training, it is pretty simple to understand. We help the consumer at the end of the day to use the hearing instrument. By helping him, we create more stickiness in between our relation to the end consumer. We increase significantly the lifelong relation with the end consumer. When you move to the right here, it is more pilot phase, but very interesting one. We are having a platform within two markets, two countries, with Amgen. You know Amgen. Amgen is a specialized pharma in oncology, but also in osteoporosis. We were talking with Amgen and develop interesting idea, very simple concept. If you have a risk of falling and if you have, at the same time, osteoporosis, you increase your personal risk by a high multiple. I will give you a couple of numbers after. Basically, there is direct relation with audiology and balance. Balance training is very important of our proposition. There is also a very strong correlation with balance and falling, and falling is relation with osteoporosis because at the end of the day, if you have a balance issue and osteoporosis, this is no comorbidities. There is no relation in between the two. But if you have the two and if you fall, you are in big trouble mechanically. This getting out of the silo of the different industry, talking together about database, consumer evolution, and consumer behavior, we find that very interesting and very interesting for future development. All in, this was my presentation. In substance, it's super easy. One, it's we want to accelerate the size of the business and increase number of stores. We want to increase significantly our omni-channel proposition by having more system of omni-channel contact with the end consumer, but also more reason to have touchpoint by number of services or additional product in our offering. At the end of the day, what we want is to have all that together at the same time by increasing significantly our presence in the world. This is what we do with the execution of this strategy. Thank you very much. I think now we have a short break, and we have all to come back at 3:10 P.M. Thank you. Welcome back, everyone. I hope this was a good break for everyone. We were a little longer given that we were trending ahead in the sections before. I welcome you back to the second part of our Investor and Analyst Day and want to invite Martin Grieder up to share with you our new venture, our new business within the Sonova family. He will dive deeper in the Sennheiser Consumer Division, which wasn't as public as our business is, but he will also talk about where we want to take the business with regard to the speech enhanced hearables. Martin. Thank you, Arnd, a warm welcome to everyone and good afternoon. I'm delighted to be here today and to talk to you about our consumer hearing business and an exciting new growth vector we are entering. Those of you who have been with us for more than seven years, and I think there's quite a few of you, will remember that at my first Investor Days presentation, I showed a slide in my presentation which was full of Nespresso capsules. I did that to illustrate my 20 year+ of experience with Nestlé and Nespresso in the consumer goods industry. This experience obviously now comes in handy as I go on to lead the consumer hearing business for Sonova. During the next 30 minutes, I will provide you with an update on our acquisition of the Sennheiser consumer business. I will give you an overview of Sennheiser's business. Finally, and probably most interestingly, I will share with you the growth opportunities we see in this area and which specific segments we want to focus on. Let me dive right in and go back to the deal rationale of the Sennheiser Consumer Division acquisition. We are joining forces to enter a rapidly developing speech enhanced hearing segment, and we are jumpstarting our internal developments we have done so far. We are also entering a very exciting new growth vector, which is growing double-digit and which is a true wireless segment. We are gaining access to new distribution channels we are not in today. We are leveraging a strong Sennheiser brand through our licensing agreement, which you will have in perpetuity, which is attached to the acquisition deal. We will be leveraging our combined and complementary strength in the area of sound quality and audiological know-how. Finally, we believe we have a number of significant synergies in the area of production, R&D, and channel access. All in all, a great match coming together to really succeed in a new, exciting segment. Let's look at our two respective companies. Let's look at what we have in common, which is really important around things like culture, values, and passion, and where we complement ourselves really well and bring different and complementary strength to the table. We both have a strong passion for audio in our respective areas. We are both leaders in our market or in our segment. We have complementary strengths, us in audiology and Sennheiser in sound quality. Sennheiser brings a great brand to the table, we have complementary distribution networks, strong distribution networks. We count tens of thousands of HCPs as our customers. Sennheiser is present both offline and online in all of the key consumer goods retail chains. What we have in common is a customer and innovation-centered corporate culture. As we have been working together now for the last couple of months, we also feel that we have a good and similar culture which we can work from, which is fantastic. A great match as we come together with our respective strengths. If we start with the consumer and we ask ourselves, what do consumers look for when they buy a headphone? They look in the beginning. If you look at the five key consumer needs or at the top of the needs hierarchy, you see that actually Sennheiser and Sonova, we have all the expertise to deliver great products in those areas. Specifically, number one is wearing comfort, an area we've gained expertise over many, many years, which we can bring now into this new consumer hearing business. Second, as you would expect, sound quality, something which Sennheiser is renowned for and which their entire success has been built on over many, many years. You have long battery life, and you have better hearing in noisy situations, a key competence of Sonova we have built over many years. Finally, you have noise reduction, something where Sennheiser with its ANC technology, but also us as of late, have also built our ANC technology, and we are bringing these two technologies together. Again, if you look at the competencies we're bringing and what is required in the speech enhanced hearable business, I'll talk more about that later on, you see that we are well suited to play in this market and to win in this market. What does Sonova bring to the table? I would say first and foremost, what we call our Sonova X Business System. We have been implementing this Sonova X Business System over the last couple of years within Sonova, where we identify key growth opportunities. We put initiatives behind them, we invest into them. In doing so, we drive growth. We also look at continuous improvement, in doing so, we drive bottom line improvement. We have a strong focus on talent management. You have seen with our results in the past that this system is working. We will be using this system, and we will be implementing it in Sennheiser. As a matter of fact, this week, I'm flying to Sennheiser tonight, and we are actually having our immersion workshop, which is all about the Sonova X Business System. We have great technology in the area of wearing comfort, battery life, which is really relevant for the true wireless segment, as well as custom fit. We have a global setup, and we have significant economies of scale in the area of purchasing and information technology. We have, obviously, a very strong audiological care distribution network, where we count tens of thousands of HCPs as our customers, and we have more than 3,000 stores of our own. I was delighted before to hear from Christophe that I already have a very excited customer who wants to buy our products tomorrow, which is great. Thank you, Christophe. Moving on. Over the last couple of months, we've worked together on carving out the consumer hearing business of Sennheiser and working on this period between sign to close. The collaboration has been really good, and we're working in a collaborative and great way together with similar values, similar culture, and we are today well on track to close this deal before the end of this calendar year. I'm also pleased to provide you with an update that we have received all relevant antitrust clearances from the relevant jurisdictions, and here we are green and good to go. If we look into the future, and we have actually also kicked off another stream with Sennheiser, what we call our 100-day strat plan. We have been already working together with Sennheiser on what the growth opportunities will be and what the initiatives will be. Based on that, we today are confident, and we have an ambition to build a double-digit business or consumer hearing business. In addition, with our Sonova X system, which we will be implementing, we are also confident that we will be able, over time, to move this business from a single-digit margin business or EBITDA business to a double-digit business. Let me now move on to Sennheiser and share with you a little bit how this business looks and feels. Sennheiser does about EUR 250 million in sales annually. Its stronghold, or most of its shares, close to 50%, is done in EMEA, but then it's nicely distributed between the Americas and APAC. Within APAC, they have a strong position in China, which we obviously like very much. They have about 41% of their sales already today online, either directly through sennheiser.com or through outlets like Amazon or JD, et cetera. We believe there's good runway there to further drive that online business. As you can also see here, Sennheiser is basically present in all key consumer goods retailers around the globe, and we will be able to leverage and further build these great relationships which Sennheiser has with its customers b rand. Obviously, a key reason why we are doing this acquisition of the consumer hearing business of Sennheiser. If you look here, we have an aided brand awareness, or Sennheiser has an aided brand awareness, which is higher than Bang & Olufsen and higher than Jabra. Obviously below some of the big players like Apple and Bose. When you look at the conversion, meaning going from aided brand awareness down to commitment to buy, you see that actually Sennheiser has a 14% conversion, which is only shy of what Apple and Bose has at 17%. They have a really loyal fan base, and that's a great point or a great base to start from. Moving on to Sennheiser's portfolio. You can see here they are basically in four different segments. One is the premium headphones, the other one is the audiophile, which is their heritage. They're in the enhanced hearing business, and recently they entered the premium soundbar business very successfully. I will now talk about each one of those in a little bit more detail and peel the onion. Let me first start off with premium headphones. This breaks down into three different segments. The big one and the really attractive one is true wireless. Last year, it was around CHF 16 billion. You'll see later in the slide, it's already growing. This year, it's expected to grow to CHF 22 billion. It has double-digit growth, and we together, Sennheiser and us, we have a good competitive position in here with our combined strengths to drive nice growth in this segment. Over-the-ear is made up of both Bluetooth over-the-ear and also still cabled over-the-ear. Bluetooth growing mid-single digit and obviously cable declining. Most of Sennheiser's headphones today, or over-the-ear headphones, are already Bluetooth. Globally, it's a CHF 4.4 billion market, and again, Sennheiser has a good strong competitive position here. In the ear, and here we're just talking about in-the-ear semi-wireless and cabled. It's still a big segment, but obviously, as you would expect, declining as we speak. If we now again dive a level deeper and look at the interesting segment, which is true wireless, you see that Sennheiser has been able to build a strong portfolio over the last 12 months- 18 months. Today, actually, as we speak, they are launching their better product, which is the mid-range one. You see we are now nicely covering the price points from CHF 129-CHF 299. With all different technologies and benefits in those. This portfolio has been driving nice growth for Sennheiser in the past. I'm now sharing with you a video of the launch of the CX Plus, which is basically out today, first time. You're seeing something really new and fresh. [Presentation] If you're excited and pumped, we're taking pre-orders as of today on sennheiser.com and on any other major online retailer. A great product which they're bringing to market today. The next segment is Audiophile. This is obviously Sennheiser's heritage. It's where they've made their name, where they've made their brand. It's really handmade own transducers. It's a smaller segment of CHF 200 million, growing mid-single-digit, providing some great growth opportunities. Here you have some headphones. If you go to the real top end, they've got a range which is called HE 1. It starts at EUR 55,000 and obviously depending what you put on there's no upper limit. If anyone has some cash to spare, I can definitely connect you to one of those headphones. Soundbars. This is actually a great soundbar, which uses immersive 3D AMBEO technology. Sennheiser launched this a year ago and entered the premium end of the soundbar segment. Obviously, companies like Sonos play in there. This device you see here retails at EUR 1,500, so it's expensive. Sennheiser has had a very successful entry into the premium segment. If you read a little bit through Futuresource, they have been able to establish quite a very nice market share in this premium segment within less than a year. As I say, in this premium segment, I would say Sennheiser with this technology has a very good competitive position. Moving on to the Enhanced Hearing segment. This segment is for us, obviously, a perfect base to build our speech enhanced business from. Currently, Sennheiser sells the RF transmitters and headphones, plus the stethoset series. The stethosets are great for really elderly people because they are a good form factor, which really they can use, especially people who have problems with dexterity and so forth. These are still small markets, growing low single-digit. As I said, with the introduction of speech-enhanced hearables, we believe that this will be an additional form factor which will drive a lot of growth in this segment. Here we will have complementary distribution channels. We will be leveraging our tens of thousands of HCPs. We will obviously also be able to move into the distribution channels of Sennheiser with some of those devices which can be sold over the counter to consumers. Moving to the third part of my presentation, which is about future growth opportunities. If you look at the true wireless market, it is today estimated that it will finish off this year with about CHF 22 billion. This is based on an attachment rate of 20%, meaning today, only every fifth mobile phone will have a true wireless headphone. This attachment rate is projected to rise to about 70%, and then you obviously also factor in some ASP compression over those 9- 10 years. This market will triple from CHF 22 billion- CHF 59 billion. Our own consumer research shows that when you ask people or when people are looking for true wireless headphones, 7% are interested in speech enhanced hearables, which obviously is a segment where, as you've seen previously, if you combine forces, Sennheiser and us, we have all the competencies you need to move into this market and be successful and win in this market. Other segments we're looking at is Audiophile. Here, the technology is not there yet, but we're going to get there soon, and that's all about potential lossless wireless. If that comes, you're getting audiophiles very excited about this opportunity. Also, we're looking at custom fit. Again, a technology we master, and we've been mastering for many years. What is also interesting here, if you put a custom fit hearable into your ear, the sound quality actually increases significantly. Another segment we will be looking into. As you can see here, our ambition is not to be everything for everybody and go after the big mainstream market and fight with the Apples or the Samsungs of this world. No, we're going to take a very specific, very dedicated approach on some very interesting segments where we together have all it takes to play in that segment and to win in that segment. This is one of them, the speech enhanced hearables, which as you see, is on the crossroads of between true wireless headphones and hearing aids. You really need both competencies to be able to compete there and to be able to succeed there. We believe this market, in five years or so, will be worth more than CHF 3 billion. We believe we have the right and the capabilities to have a significant share in this market. What does it take, from our perspective, to win in this market? Couple of points here. You need a great and recognized consumer brand, which by the way, we didn't have prior to the Sennheiser acquisition. This is a great add-on for us. Two things you need, and which we have had, is you need to have strong knowhow in audiological technology. You need to have great expertise in digital speech processing, in algorithms, and in chip technology. This we've had for years, we can really bring this to the table. What you also need is great technology knowhow in the area of true wireless and audio and sound quality. Sennheiser has proven to have that over many years. You need access to consumer channels, online and offline. Again, Sennheiser brings this to the table. Finally, you want to also leverage or move into or sell these products through an HCP network. As you know, we count tens of thousands of HCPs as our customers, and as such, we'll also be able to leverage those channels. As you can see here, if you look at the key success factors to really win in that segment, we are well-positioned to do that. Here, obviously, just one more slide or two more slides. Here you see we have been looking at this for quite some time. Back in 2018, 2019, we did our market analysis. We came to the conclusion that this is a nice growth opportunity and that we want to reach the consumers earlier on their hearing journey. We then, based on that, started our inorganic developments of solutions and products, and we are today well on the way to launch some of those products into the market next year under the Sennheiser brand. We then also looked at potential acquisitions because as you saw in our analysis, we didn't have all the capabilities. We started analyzing that. We started nurturing some relationships and cultivating, and we are today delighted that we can partner with Sennheiser and acquire their consumer hearing business. We are well on our way to enter this market successfully. In closing, the acquisition of the Sennheiser consumer business will allow Sonova to reach the consumer earlier on their hearing journey. We will also be leveraging some great assets which Sennheiser has, its brand, its channel access, and its technology. We are well on track with the acquisition of the Sennheiser consumer business, and we will be closing this before year-end. We are perfectly positioned together with our comprehensive strength to play and win in this attractive speech enhanced hearable market and a number of other segments too, but specific ones. Finally, from an organizational point of view, we will be setting up this business as an independent business, which I will be leading and representing on the management board moving forward. That's it. Thanks a lot for your attention, and I'm looking forward to providing you with more updates in the future about this exciting business. Now I'm handing back to Arnd for some more topics. Thank you, Martin. Thanks for the summary of the Sennheiser Consumer Division, where we stand on the sign to close, but also the glimpse into the future here. I hope everybody appreciates the deeper insight. This is not a segment most of you are closer to or covering. Certainly, more to come as we get closer. Keep in mind, we're not closed yet with the acquisition, therefore, to some degree, we're still looking a little bit from the outside in. Before we get to the Q&A, and after we covered the business topics we wanted to cover, we wanted to give you an update on a topic which we know is increasingly important to all of us, the ESG topic. It's increasingly important not just because it's relevant for the investor community, although we do appreciate the increasing inquiries and interest. I think it starts off with being relevant for us as individuals, then it moves on to all of the different stakeholders we have. It moves from the relevance towards the talents we rely on and their engagement. It moves to the consumers who want to know that we do the right thing while we're providing them with the products and services. We even start to see it in larger tenders as a topic coming up in the questions we have to answer. Clearly an increasing interest on the investor community. Interestingly, when we drive some of those priorities and initiatives, they're very often linked to things which are also good in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our business. We wanted to share that in this, I would call, beautiful symbiotic relationship between all of our stakeholders and ultimately running a better business. We have defined a framework which is not unusual in the topics we cover, but it is the right fit for Sonova. We call it IntACT. In order to put the right topics behind a couple of categories which resonate well in the starting point of Sonova with our customers, consumers, and our global footprint. The four key focus areas for us is advancing our people, acting with integrity, protecting the planet, and serving society on a larger vision. Some of you may have seen that with the fiscal year results, we also have published our CSR report. As we always did, we renewed our commitments on the four different dimensions. I would say in a couple of areas, we also upped them quite some with our ambition level. As you can see on the chart here, on the right-hand side towards the talent side, significant focus on a diverse population of leaders in the organization. Not just because it is important to the outside world, we do believe it is important for the business success over time. Significant focus on developing our talents from within. You see in the lower right, governance topics from product reliability, supply chain, human rights due diligence. On the lower left, our commitments with regard to the ecological advancements. Couple of highlights here by driving the reduction of CO2 as we produce it originally, also move to more renewable energy. We, in addition to those efforts, have also committed to being carbon neutral in the operations this year. Then on the upper left, predominantly through, on the one hand, us expanding our product offering for the high-growth developing markets, also dedicated in our own foundation, the Hear the World Foundation, more support for people in the developing countries with regard to supporting children who can't afford the solution, also being on the journey to helping to train hearing care professionals, ultimately, as you heard earlier, we can't provide our products in a meaningful way if there's not the right trained personnel. You can imagine in a developing countries, that easily becomes a bottleneck. I want to dive a little deeper in the social dimensions, then Ludger will come up to share on the ecological side and the governance side. On the social dimensions, one of the key topics which we're moving forward with quite some focus is the topic of Diversity & Inclusion. We always had good progress on those elements supported by the culture we have in place. Middle of last year, to no surprise to many of you, it became a more important topic, not just on the outside, but also within Sonova. We used the opportunity to take our strategy to the next level and amp our ambition as well as our actions. If it comes to D&I, it's about diverse leadership structure, because we really need to make sure we're diverse throughout the different levels of the organization. As I said, important for our people, but also important for the business we're running to be most successful in an innovation and consumer outreach environment. Driving an inclusive culture and then also empowering our employees. You can see on the lower level here, a couple of highlights of things we have put in place or are driving with a particular focus. You see the governance element here. You see a particular focus on the diversity of leaders. Globally, we have concrete plans in place and driving on the internal promotion as well as on the external recruiting, a high focus to get more senior leaders on board and in position into the key positions. We also drive the same focus on ethnicity in the markets where it's relevant and have dedicated targets if you come to the Americas, the U.K., Australia, others, if it is relevant for the talent pool we have. Then on the inclusion side, one big element for us is not just the sharing, but also the active training of all of our leaders through unconscious bias training, but also for specific subsets of the leadership, a deeper education on D&I as a matter. The second one is all about how do we be a place where our people see they can progress with regard to their own professional aspirations and can stay at the company and continue to contribute. For some, that just means to get better in what they do. Then there's others who want to move up in the food chain. We created a cradle on the matter a couple of years ago, which now resonates widely throughout the organization, which is every employee deserves a development plan. I must say we weren't a particularly good place a couple of years ago if it came to development plans. If it came down to documented, and we're big fans of tracking and looking on things that documented, it was in the single digits. Now we're a couple of years on the journey. We have more than 90% of our employees having a development plan, and with it, the constant conversation with a leader on how they get better in their trade and where their potential is. More importantly, from an output perspective is the graph on the lower right. I think 50% internal fill, which we had 2017, 2018, 2019, is a good number. It's probably not yet a benchmark number for an industry like ours or for other companies in a tech environment. We've been able to move the needle up not by lowering the bar, but by developing our talents and enticing them to get on the journey to now being at a 70% internal fill rate, which really shows our commitment to our people because we develop them. It also has a significant business impact because you can imagine bringing people from the outside, while this is sometimes needed for certain skills, is always a risky endeavor. With that, I want to hand over to Ludger on the ecological side. Ludger. Many thanks, Arnd. This is such a great honor to talk to you about what we have done in the past and what we will do in terms of CO2 reduction on the one hand, later on what we do on the reliability side, which is part here of governance. First slide shows you a bit about where we are, a little bit on the history, and you see that we already reduced in 2017 about 23%, a bit more than 23% of the CO2. We have to do a lot more because we gave the commitment out that we will be operational CO2 neutral by the end of this year, and we will reach it because we said we will do it, and we will do it. What are we talking about? We're talking about here on the right side, Scope 1 and Scope 2. This is what we call operational, and that what everybody talks about when we talk about operational CO2. What we put in scope as well is business travel. These three areas have been in scope all the time for last four years, and now we enhancing the scope to the remaining topics of Scope 3. That's something where we are driving all the actions going forward on the one hand. On the other hand, when we talk about Scope 1 and Scope 2, we are looking for a lot of making sure that we are saving the energy and that we are really driving it to renewables. That's something which we'll talk on the next slide here. The next slide, it's about the three things which we can do to really get to CO2 neutrality. The one is avoidance of wasting energy. The other one is replacing the energy. The last one is a compensation. What we do is we are working on all three areas. The avoidance, think about when you go through office buildings in the night and how often have you seen lights still on when nobody is there. That's something which is a simple solution, where it's something where we can have a timer in the office buildings and make sure that we're saving some energies. The same is on computers which are still running. The other ones are light bulbs. If you have got conventional light bulbs still in the buildings, replace them with LED. It's not very costly, it saves a lot of energy, and at the end, it saves cost. Replacement, it's all about making sure that you have conventional energy, which you're replacing to renewable energy, which can be done by, on the one hand, going into contracts with energy providers. On the other hand, we can talk about what we can do to install renewable energy sources, as well as making sure that we are replacing old heating systems. On the third one, the compensation. That's something everybody needs to do in the short term, but we will make sure that we only compensate what we have to absolutely compensate. Therefore, we have selected carefully three projects. These three projects are all in countries which we have a lot of business in, and where the money is not as much available than in the areas where we see on the Western world, a lot of money flowing into these programs. You can read it on the right side where the projects are, but this is something that we have to do in the mean. We want to compensate more and more of these ones by replacing and avoiding energy consumption. What has been done already? Not that we only started in 2017 with all the efforts on reducing the energy. Even in 2014, when we built a new building in Suzhou in China, we have solar panels on the roof, and that's how far it goes back that people think about what can we do to really reduce the energy consumption or to replace it by renewable. The middle part, Murten, brand-new building, one of the first office buildings which are carbon neutral in Switzerland. This is something that we are really proud about. We want to go more and more into this standard, and there's a lot which we can still do. If you look to the big ones, which is Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as well as Suzhou, we already are working on that one, and the other ones are in the planning. We look at Vietnam, there's one where we painted the roof with a special paint, which is holding back the energy in the building, as well as installing on the building some solar panels. That's one of the things which has been done already. You look at Stäfa, which is one of our big sites, that's where we are doing the same job of installing solar energy very soon. Next year, we can talk about that one as well. We have got the other one in the U.S., which is another big one, which we are in the planning phase to do the same thing. Now switching topics. Not by saving the energy, but now talking about packaging and wasting a lot of packaging or energy by oversized packaging. Everybody knows about the problem that they get big packages, but then the amount of what is in the package is very small. This is a real big energy wasting because you are transporting it via air most of the time, and therefore you pay for the room and the weight. Therefore, what we have started already years ago, to think about what can we do in terms of reducing our packaging. As we have seen before, our goal is by the year 2023 to reduce 20% of the packaging. We are well on the way on this one because the slim packaging, which you see on here, is great results. 56%, 50%, 66% talk to it for itself. That's something which is applicable now for all the newer products. As the older ones are kicking out, all the newer ones will be replaced with the slim packaging. That means that we are on the way there, but we're not stopping there because this is only the packaging which is going out to the customer. We have a different project running to make sure that we are saving packaging when we talk about intercompany, when we talk about the internal transportation. All of this, what you see here on the packaging, has been ending up in a 38% reduction of CO2 for these impacted products, which is a fantastic result. It's a start, it's not the end. There's more which we can do in this regards. Switching topics again, going away from CO2 neutrality, going more into one which we want to talk about in terms of governance, and that's about making sure that we are getting better and better on reliability of our products. This slide talks about on the new generations, every new product which we are launching to the market is getting better and better in terms of governance. We are talking about a 15% in the lowest one, up to 30% in the higher ones there. Generation for generation with the new products, they're getting more and more reliable. Of course, we are working on getting the old ones better as well, but the big jump comes all the time when we're launching new products. With the new products, there is an expectation and there's a goal. A goal set out for all the new products which we are launching that the reliability will be better generation by generation. With that, I would like to hand back to Arnd. Ludger Althoff, thanks a lot. I hope that was an appreciated, somewhat deeper dive in some of the topics, but we want to make sure you see it's real and we're working on it the same way as we're working on many other things in the organization if it comes to ESG. If you want to have an impact across an organization with 15,000 people and all the different contact points we have, you also need to think about how do you drive this in a systematic way. Rest assured, there's clear goals and KPIs which link what we do in the individual actions and activities back to the commitments we have to the outside world. There's governance in form of a dedicated ESG council. There's collaboration where we need it. You could easily see some of the products can't be done by just one department, but we always have, from an accountability perspective, one of the management board members being responsible. We, by the way, have also elevated the game a little bit towards the management board members by introducing a year ago, some of the personal targets and with it, the bonus achievements of the management board towards specific ESG targets. We also leverage ESG in our communication towards customer as well as our colleagues, given the positive impact here. Now on a bigger picture, how are we doing? You heard it. We were on the journey. We're accelerating the journey, but even with being on the journey, as you can see here from the various rankings of, I think the renowned rating agencies, we tend to be in the upper percentiles relative to others on the ESG journeys. In summary on the ESG part, we keep on dancing on our ESG journey because the topic becomes more and more important for us as individuals, but also to all of our stakeholders. We have defined clear ESG commitments which are linked ultimately back into the business the same way we do with financial and operational targets. We see good results, particularly in the areas where we put a high focus on and where we move the resources required to make a step function change. Ultimately, the external perspective is a positive one with regard to the rankings we see. With that, I'm coming to the end point of the prepared presentations. We have shared that there is a Q&A session. The people who want to participate in the Q&A session with active asking need to switch to a different system for the dial-in so that we can hear the question from the speaker in person. Everyone else who doesn't want to raise a question, just wants to listen in to the Q&A, you can stay on the system you're on. The other ones have the guidance. Please call in. I would suggest we take a break until the hour, eight minutes from now. Then we will start the Q&A. Thank you. [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] [Presentation] Welcome back to the Q&A session. I trust the people who wanted to raise questions are on the other system. Just explaining the logistics briefly. You have me here on stage. If one question goes to one of the colleagues, I will bring them up, but from a distancing perspective within COVID, and us wanting to be without face masks in front of you, we needed to use a somewhat unusual format here. Operator, can you bring on the first set of questions, please? To register for questions, please press star and one on your touch-tone telephone. The first question is from the line of Oliver Metzger of ODDO BHF. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. The first one are on the market dynamics. On a two-year period, it's clearly above historic average. What do you see as the driver? Is it, in your view, the disposable income savings related to pandemic, or which reasons do you see? Second question is, you talked a lot about the speech-enhanced wearables, which direct towards also the whole OTC discussion. First, do you look on it from this perspective? Second, currently, there are two kind of OTC approaches in the market. What's your view about the design for OTC devices? Do you feel closer to the one which was presented by Bose some months ago, or do you think that the true wireless approach, similar also to Jabra, will be the one for OTC? Oliver, thanks for the questions and for going first here. On the market dynamics, I think we see some markets which are above, as I showed the U.S. market at 9% bigger, the U.K. at 11%. I also showed some which are still depressed. I think from a global perspective, it is the mix of the two worlds. The ones where we see more, I think, I would believe it's more of a pent-up demand matter at this point of time you've seen. I can't understand you. Can you hear me? Are you unmuted? I should be unmuted. Oliver, I think the others were hearing me, so I don't know where the matter is. Allow me to finish the question here. If need be, we get back to Oliver with the answer. I think at the moment, I would look more at a pent-up demand matter, rather than a fundamental change towards such a higher growth rate. We will see as we come out of the COVID, I think right now there's too many variables in the equation. From the speech enhanced hearables, I think we tend to think less about OTC from a regulatory perspective. Ultimately, we believe that there's a segment of consumers which does not come to the full hearing aid yet. They want to have an early entry device, and there's two use cases. There's one use case for a couple of hours in the day for a noisy environment. I think the hearable is the right form factor here. I know there's discussions, and we also explore the question of a full day easier entry device. That's, I think, what you time more to the Bose environment here. I think the speech enhance hearable phase is a very logical one because the hearable does exist. It provides value, and you can increase the value, and clearly there's a market and there's users. I think on the full day fitting device, I think the jury is out if you can really deliver such a device with all of the requirements that you get to low lead generation cost and a high satisfaction of the consumer. Operator, the next questions, please. The next question is the line of Martin Parkhøi of Danske Bank. Please go ahead. Hello. Martin Parkhøi, Danske Bank. I would just say that I think Oliver could not hear the answer to the first question, and I couldn't either. My two questions, I hope that will go better. First question is on the ActiveVent. I was just curious because as I can understand it, that you guarantee that the ActiveVent is lasting for at least six months, and then the user needs to replace it. What happens to the quality of the product if the user does not replace the ActiveVent after these six months? What is actually the price on a lifetime if you need to replace this every six months? Second question, could you maybe just talk on the, you didn't mention so much on the development in Japan. Could you maybe talk a little bit about how this is developing right now and the position of Sonova? Thank you. I think for the ActiveVent, I've invited Tom to join. Sure. Yeah, I can start to answer that question. The ActiveVent, as you mentioned, we guarantee six months. The device does not break as such, the ear is a or can be a nasty environment with all the ear wax. What will happen eventually at some point is that valve that you saw in the presentation does not open and close anymore. Right? The hearing aid is still working, but you don't get this additional benefit of the open versus the closed vent in certain specific situations. I can't hear you. Okay. I think the answer from Tom was that the hearing aid fully functions, but if there is debris coming to the ActiveVent and the mechanics don't work anymore, you would get to a place where the opening and closing doesn't work anymore. You have full functionality of the hearing aid, but you would need to come to get a replacement for the ActiveVent. From a pricing perspective of a life cycle, I think, Tom, you're closer to that, but I don't know if they can hear you, so I may want to give you my mic quickly. We're getting a hand mic. Let's see if that works. All right. I hope you can hear me now. For the life cycle, we sell the solution to hearing care professionals, and of course, we don't have control about to what price they will sell it to the end user. They will ultimately judge what the business model is that they will apply on the retail side. From that point of view, I cannot really give you the life cycle or the called life cycle cost of that solution from a consumer point of view. Okay. On the development in the Japan market, I think it's in line with the consumer sentiment in Japan being muted. I don't have the exact number, but from the last reviews we had, I would think about it more like in the German environment where we are sharing that we're slightly below two years ago because of the lower movement of the consumer. I think it does require a more open mind and an opening of the society for that market to recover. Thank you. You're welcome. The next question is Veronika Dubajova of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two, please. One is just sort of on the midterm guidance and one technical, what do you envision as a reasonable midterm timeframe? I didn't notice that on the slide. More importantly, when you think about that roughly 40 basis point EBITA margin improvement, would you expect to deliver that in every single year? Is it front-loaded, back-end loaded? How would you think about the shape of that? If you could comment on anything, if there is anything to flag on that would be helpful. My second question is just more conceptually on your positioning in the hearables market. I appreciate that there's quite a lot happening here, but I look at your efforts, and I compare and contrast it obviously with someone like Apple, who have now added a variety of hearing aid-like features to the AirPods. Obviously, you are going ahead against some really significant consumer brands. Why do you think this is a market where someone like yourselves or Jabra is more likely to succeed? And conceptually, how do you think about being able to compete against the likes of Apple when it comes to "this new hearables category"? Thank you. Veronika, thanks for your question. On the midterm targets, I think this is, let's say, the next 3 years- 5 years. If there's a change to the environment and our pathway, we'll note that, but it's really what is guiding us. We will always establish the next year guidance at the right point of time. From the EBITDA side, I think for us this is a goalpost we will strive to achieve every year, and the sum you would then probably expect will be slightly above that. I think it gives a corridor of the commitment to what we want to put back to an increasing operating profit while we use the rest of the investment capacity on the growth side. With regard to the hearing aid market, I appreciate the size and stature of some of the players. On the other hand, if you look into the market, there's lots of different consumers and their expectations in their approach. I think if you look at Apple, it's pretty much a closed system. There's a whole world of non-closed system people out there on the consumer side. More importantly, I think if you look at what we can bring forward between Sennheiser and ourselves, I think we're in a unique position to really have a high audio quality and, on the other hand, bring enhancements faster than others with regard to the speech enhancement side. That's a core business of ours. It's embedded in certain technology in the required miniaturization. I think we're going to be ahead of others. I think if I look at the large players, ultimately, they also need to keep in mind that they need to serve hundreds of millions of consumers. I'm not particularly believing that where it comes to very specific solutions, in that segment, that somebody would go very deep on what it takes from a technological perspective versus what they need to do for broad consumer base. That's our thesis, I think, to be proven, obviously. I think with bringing the Sennheiser brand together and our capabilities, a good starting point there. Again, I think the market, you really need to segment more finely by age group, by needs. As Martin was sharing, there's about 7% of the people who really look for speech enhancement. That already cuts the playing field into a smaller proportion. Understood. Can I just ask a follow-up? Thank you for the Sennheiser guidance. What does that hitting that double-digit margin number depend on? I presume it's a certain revenue level. Are you willing to commit to what that revenue level would have to be to hit that double-digit margin? Yeah. I think we can get to that level less so driven by volume, more by things we know how to do. Keep in mind, we're bringing a smaller organization to a larger organization. This is a carve-out situation where not all of the costs come over as a starting point. There's many synergies, even if it comes to just some of the sourcing side. On top of that, I think you've seen us over the last two to three years being quite effective in driving the productivity. I think I wouldn't attach it to it needs to be twice the revenue. I think with the growth Sennheiser has at this point of time, we're able to get to that kind of a profitability. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. The next question is from Maja Pataki of Kepler. Please go ahead. Yes, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. I have two. One on the Audiological Care. I would like just to clarify one of the slides. Did I get it right that you're intending to add mid to high single digit to AC growth through greenfield and acquisitions? If this is correct, is that one or the main reason for your increase in the medium-term top-line growth guidance? Maja, thanks for the question. I think it's part of the reason. Not all of the reason if you calculate the numbers through. Clearly, we expect that after Christophe and the team have built a more robust and stable retail business over the last couple of years, we can move forward to expanding the network. I think it does require us to make the appropriate investment. We need to fund this despite the improvement on the operating margin extension. It is a significant, well, it is a part of the total math, but not all. Thank you. Just to understand, I'm not quite sure I got your answer on the enhanced hearables. Maybe you didn't answer. Are you intending to get an OTC approval for the product down the road? If not, why is that so? If we're looking at Nuheara trying to get the FDA approval for their product, Jabra is doing something. Why are you then choosing to stay out of it? How do you think you can compete with the augmented hearing if there will be products categorized with an OTC stamp on it? That's obviously in the U.S. market. Yeah. I'm not so sure personally if the OTC stamp gives you more potential or less potential in selling. I think you need to go through, is it required for the type of device? If we get to the elements of speech enhancement we have in mind for the Sennheiser type of product, I don't think you need the regulatory approval and the medical positioning. As you can also see from other people who are endeavoring to go there from a hearable perspective. I think if you're getting to more specific improvements in line with testing and self-fitting you're doing, we would obviously need to go for that. I think on the OTC side, I repeat what we said a couple of months ago. For us, the jury is out. I think, A, we don't need to be an early starter to the segment. Secondarily, I think still needing to see the proof through the right testing and prototyping that ultimately the consumer gets what they're looking for. What we see from products in the marketplace right now, we see significant return rates, we see high lead generation costs, so we haven't seen the perfect product yet. Thank you. You're welcome. The next question is the line of Daniel Jelovcan of Mirabaud. Please go ahead. Yes, good afternoon. Just one last, just to better understand the ActiveVent potential. Is that just for the RIC segment on Paradise, or is that also for, let's say, older RIC styles, or is it also in the in-the-ear segment? Is there also a solution maybe in the future? I know a lot of patients, they would like to have a kind of [CIC solution, but they still have to wear these old, how is it called, the big prosthesis in the ear. Is that going into this direction as well? That's the question. Thanks. Good. On the compatibility, at this point, ActiveVent is compatible with rechargeable Paradise RICs, but it can be used to retrofit already sold Paradise RIC hearing aids. Whether we roll this solution out to more form factors, what you mentioned is a great idea. It could technically also work in custom products. We still have to discuss. Keep in mind, the RIC form factor from a business impact is the vast majority of our business. I think you need to note, Tom, we're in the 70% of the total. I think we normally do not bring technology backwards. We're relying on people buying into the new technology. I think we're addressing two-thirds of the potential of the new business, and we tend to not go backwards. Also, the bigger impact is the ability to win competitively with the new product sales. Okay. Thanks. You're welcome. The next question is the line of Lisa Clive of Bernstein. Please go ahead. Hi there. I have two questions. Number one, it sounds like you are making good progress in Advanced Bionics, while the sales performance has been pretty strong over the years, profitability seems to remain a challenge. How should we think about the margin trajectory? What are your guidelines for when that becomes profitable? I think in the past, there has been some guidance around needing to hit CHF 300 million-CHF 350 million in order to reach a reasonably strong sort of high teens, 20% EBITDA margin. Just thinking about how you could get to a more profitable business. Secondly, just thinking about your margin trajectory overall, it sounds like you are very comfortable with the ability to absorb margins. Just like a little bit of understanding where that can come from. Is there leverage in your retail business? Will that come from just increasing your penetration and your scale in certain markets? Or are there specific areas of the wholesale business that are not as efficient as they could be? Just any color there would be helpful. Thank you, Lisa. I think on the AB side, we said that when we shared the full year results, that while unfortunately at the quality situation one and a half years ago, then COVID was pulling us backwards, we see structurally the business to be at the place where we can achieve that 15% we had put out as a goalpost. We said we feel we're a year delayed, probably one and a half years delayed. A year delayed would be your exit run rate this year. One and a half years would be the first half of next year, I think we're feeling comfortable given the cost structure and what we're seeing on the real improvements we've done from a productivity in the business. I think with regard to the margin from here go forward, I think at the end, yes, there's leverage in the audiological care business, particularly with the effort Christophe is ongoing to get more consumers into the same store. Keep in mind that's a big, fixed cost, and he drives lead generation, but also in-store execution. I think it's broader. It's across the organization where we have opportunities, no matter if this is in operations from a lean conversion perspective, but how we improve other processes. There is enough potential for us to continue to improve. I think, as I said, it's a balancing act for us on how do we want to navigate this business, but there's more potential on the productivity than the 40 basis points, but we want to keep some of the money derived for the growth investments. Okay, thanks. Just to follow up on the retail side. As the business moves towards a more blended model of in-store and digital, will this affect your store footprint? Will you need fewer physical Points of Sale? Can stores be more efficient selling more units per store or do you think that the physical infrastructure will stay sort of largely the same? Yeah, Lisa, I think you're correct. If I think longer term and we see a lot more of the activity going virtual, and again, we're not believing that the whole journey will be totally virtual for the vast majority of the people, but more interactions, you ultimately don't need to have as much store space. You may remember we went after closing these stores last year, in order to get a kickstart on optimal footprint. I think the team continues to plan greenfield more in line with where we have catchment area, which we haven't gotten after. In reality, I think you're seeing two effects here. A weeding out where the stores are too close and with a reduced load in the store or the higher utilization you can drive in the existing stores, really not needing as many close to each other, but us trying to reach more consumers. I think in the sum, you're probably going to see an increase in the network, but that would be then over proportionally adding to the growth rate if the utilization is improving. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. The next question is the line of Niels Granholm-Leth of Carnegie. Please go ahead. Thank you. My first question would be, how much is the price premium expected to be for the ActiveVent solution? My second question would be if you look towards the U.S. market in particular and the effect from this Delta variant spread, are you really not seeing any effect on the U.S. market from the spread of the Delta variant? Thank you. The ActiveVent is like an addition to the hearing aid, right? It's not a new product as such. On the wholesale side, and of course there is a spread market to market, country to country. We are looking at something around CHF 70 on the wholesale side. Which would fall into the category of something like a 10% lift, probably a little bit above that relative to the product cost. Right? On the U.S. side, we have not seen a significant change on the demand side. We're watching very carefully. The teams watch every day. We on a global level, watch every week. It is interesting to observe, but even with the increase of the Delta variant, so far in the U.S., we haven't seen that having a significant impact on the demand side. As I was laying out, when we try to compare those different scenarios, it is interesting that a country like Germany, which has significantly lower infection rates and hospitalization rates, is the one amongst the larger ones, which is recovering the worst. While other ones where you see infection rates higher, but also movement more and more, less, let's say, negative messaging from the government, are doing fine. I think infection rates are an interesting factor, and we will observe carefully the U.S., but where we've seen headwinds was really more the sentiment of the consumer and them wanting to stay put no matter what the infection rate is. Are there more questions? There are currently no more questions at this time. Okay, we're at the end. I want to thank you on behalf of the team for your significant interest in staying with us over this three hours in a virtual format. As we said before, we would love to welcome you next time in person. We see how that works out. Thanks for your questions and your attention. We wish you all a good rest of the day. Thank you.