Good morning, everybody, this is Martin Möllmann of adesso IR speaking. First of all, I'd like to thank you for joining our third quarter and nine months earnings call regarding our quarterly statement we have published today. Within our release this morning, you found adesso pretty much confirming the preliminary figures published on November second. After nine months, adesso reports ongoing strong sales with an extraordinary 28% increase compared to previous year. Following our measures to improve capacity utilization, the third quarter EBITDA margin improved significantly to 9.9%. However, earnings-wise, third quarter could have been even better. Hence, mainly due to the weaker first half of the year, adesso revised its 2023 guidance on EBITDA contribution. With regard to the fourth quarter and beyond, the executive board is confident that ongoing high demand will allow the company to build on the positive trend from the third quarter and return to a normal level of profitability in 2024. I'd now like to welcome as well our CFO, Jörg Schroeder, who will give us a deeper insight into the figures of the first nine months and the outlook for the remainder of the current year. I'm particularly pleased to welcome as well our future CFO, Mark Lohweber, to this call. He will introduce himself to you personally after the nine-month update presentation, and will also be available to answer questions afterwards. As always, I'd like you to mute yourself during the presentations. Feel free to open up the channels for the Q&A sessions afterwards. Participants on phones may want to mute or unmute their microphones via the star key, followed by the number six of their phones. Thank you so far, and Jörg, please go ahead. Thank you, Martin, for the introduction. Welcome, everybody, from my side also. I will first walk us through the facts and figures of the first nine months of this year, and then, as Martin pointed out, we will head over to Mark. So, starting with the nine-month update. You probably have seen the corporate news we released today, that sales-wise, we are still on track. 28% is the sales growth, comparing nine months of 2023 to the previous year, nine months rate. And 26 percentage points of that is actually by organic growth, so only 2% by M&A. So, we are still pretty much in line with our fast growth track here, and we still see a strong market demand. The lowering of the pace of sales growth just is a function of us slowing down recruiting, so that we don't lose too much profitability. But we are still very happy with 28% sales growth here. And, yeah, I will also come later to what we see for the future coming. On the earnings side, you see on the right-hand side, EBITDA is, although 25% less than the first nine months of the previous year, and that is something we are, of course, not very happy about. Although third quarter was much better, as Martin pointed out, we are roughly 10% EBITDA margin in third quarter alone. And, even though we didn't have a record-breaking license sales volume in third quarter, so the underlying, just the IT service business performed pretty well. That is a function of utilization, going up since June. In the last earnings call, we told you that the first five months really had a bad utilization rate. We took countermeasures, actually, in February, hitting the brakes on recruiting, so only recruit for the project that we have and not having too high of a pace of growth. With a delay of roughly three months, we saw utilization capacity increase by three percentage points already in June. We could hold that level, all through third quarter, basically. The utilization rate is not on spectacular levels. It's actually pretty much on average levels of the past years. That also shows that with average kind of utilization rates, we are able to earn good money in the core business of IT services. Nevertheless, of course, the EUR 53.5 million EBITDA is less than we expected, and that is why we revisited the guidance, and I will come back to that later in the presentation. So first, we look at the sales split by industry, and what you see here is that we grow in all industries that we are active in, and we grow basically, in most industries, double digits. Only automotive is lacking a little bit behind, only plus 6%, but all other industries actually grow double-digit figures. And our newest ones that we just carved out last year, retail and utilities, have very spectacular growth figures of 70%+ and 84%+, respectively. So, on that front, we are very happy, and even the longstanding industries, where we have a huge history, like insurance and banking, are growing beyond 20%. So for us, this shows that the market is still there. There's still a lot of room for digitalization work, optimization, software engineering, the work that we do in the market, and, we see that reflected here, that it's basically, true for all the industries that we work in. Also, when we look at the international split, we see that Germany grew by 28%, and basically, in the international area, again, a much smaller part of our overall business. You see, 82% of our business is conducted in Germany, another 11% in Switzerland, another 2% in Austria. So, 95% is the German-speaking area, the DACH area, as we call it, and everything else is much, much smaller. But we also have other countries where we are growing double-digit figures and now have reasonable million earning or sales figures like you see here in the Netherlands, EUR 9.5 million after nine months already, Italy, EUR 8.7 million, and Turkey. And this is just the domestic revenue of Turkey, EUR 7.8 million. So even though we are still a very, very German company, we also now have good business outside of Germany. Now, coming to the margin and EBITDA figures. The margin itself went down to 6.4%, or if you're just looking at 2023, improved to 6.4% for EBITDA. We had better margins in the past, and you also know that we usually target a corridor of 11% to 13%, and we are well behind that, that target. The reasons you see on the right-hand side in the key figures, our employee growth is still 32%, and we could only translate that to 28% sales growth. One reason is that the personnel cost, which increased by 35%, is-- and is the largest part of our overall cost volume, has increased disproportionately high. We still have utilization issues, not in third quarter in particular, but since we are comparing nine months, the first half year is included in there, and we have not overcome the deficit that we mounted in the first half year and even that out in third quarter, although third quarter itself was not so bad after all. If we look at the profit drivers, we see that utilization for the period we look at, nine months, is, of course, worse than in the past. Daily rates have improved a little bit, roughly around 5%. License and maintenance fees, in particular, license, we knew that license deals would be less than last year, which was the record-breaking year for our in|sure suite. But this year, we expected better things to happen, and we have lost also deals. So there we are, we are not happy in that regard. The personal cost per FTE increased by 3%, which is a little bit less than we saw after the first half year. So, we don't know whether it's the full shift already, but we see that with the pricing strategy that we have in place, we can cope with that kind of issue. Nevertheless, this is not good news, and if you start at EBITDA and go down from there, all other figures basically grow on proportions. We have increased PPA depreciation due to the transaction that we made. We had a worse financial result. That is... I will come back to that later when we look at the balance sheet, because we needed more debt in order to finance, the working capital issues within the year, and rising interest rates, of course. So we see in pre-tax earnings of EUR 4.9 million, and we see a high tax figure. That is because, not all items here are tax deductible. For example, the PPA depreciation is not deductible, and that is why income taxes seem to be particularly high, and that amounts to, a consolidated earnings for the group of, roughly EUR 0. So that is definitely something we will and need to improve on. Coming to the balance sheet, as mentioned, we see that and some KPIs. We are still impacted by our S/4HANA transformation. I mentioned that in the last earnings call. In April, we had to go live for our new SAP system, which on a strategic basis, I would say is the right decision or was the right decision to make. But in the first few months, active with the new system, we had a lot of issues facing, and processes that we have to relearn using that. So, what we basically saw here is that working capital went through the roof, due to increased contract assets of services that we already did but could not yet get into invoices. We see that reflected on the balance sheet in the contract assets item. Due to that fact that working capital increased so much, we needed more debt in order to financing the the growth within the year, and that is why the net debt position actually increased also, pretty much. You will see on the balance sheet that it's most of that is short-term increase, so we will pay that back. But all comes down to that S/4HANA transformation here, and the go-live will or gave us a headache all through the year, and this will also continue in fourth quarter. But I think that in terms of getting working capital in place where we usually are and hopefully even better in the future, so collecting cash earlier for our services is actually has been one reason why we did that transformation after all. But we still have way to go there in 2024 and years to come. So, goodwill increased due to the M&A acquisitions that we made. That meant that the equity ratio came down a little bit to roughly 27%. Yeah, that is where we stand after three quarters. Now, if we look at the guidance, it's like Martin pointed out, we revised the guidance. We still see a strong market demand. That is the first good news here. So, I think you cannot grow 28% when there is no market demand. Order entry levels are still on record levels, so even if we look at fourth quarter or next year, it's not that we are not growing anymore. We will grow. We are pretty confident and certain about that. So top line growth is and has always been our main priority. This, this holds true, and this shows that the underlying business is still intact, that the market likes the services we have to offer, and we think that is also something good we can take away from this. We reduced the hirings to slow the growth pace and bring up utilization, as mentioned, and that happened in June. The breaks on the recruiting happened early in the year, but we saw the effects of that since June. Now we are on a typical utilization rate since June, and that we see reflected in the numbers of third quarter. What we also see is that EBITDA is lower, so personnel costs rose disproportionately high. We have additional expenses from fixed price projects. We have two larger fixed price projects that did not run well, where we had overspend situations, and we had to show the additional expenses here. And as mentioned, less license deals than last year. third quarter last year, of 2022, actually had a license volume of around EUR 10 million, so that was one of the best quarters we or I think the best quarter we ever had for in|sure, and this third quarter was not holding up to that. But we see the EBITDA margin improved in third quarter compared to first quarter and second quarter, and we expect a return to usual margins in 2024, because we see that or we are definitely not happy with that result and want to work on that. And so that is why for 2024, we don't have a guidance out yet, but we are confident that we still will see growth and that we will see a return to usual margin levels that we have. So overall, if you look at the figures, right now, we are at EUR 833 million in sales and EUR 53 million in EBITDA. So, the sales guidance is still above EUR 1 billion, and we are still confident that we will reach that. And we revised the earnings goal of EBITDA. Prior to that, we had EUR 100-110 million, and we see that this is not achievable anymore. And so, we revised that to a level of EUR 70-90 million. Yeah, so that basically means that with a normal fourth quarter, we should be in that range. And of course, it's a wider range, but it includes all risks and all chances, so that is why the range is so wide. Overall, I can also say that we are not happy with the year 2023 on the earnings side. We are happy with the growth. We are not happy with the earnings, and we want to work on that so that in next year we come to usual margins level back. So, concluding with that chart of guidance, I will say thank you and hand over to Mark, who is happy here and will introduce himself. Hi, Mark. Yeah, Jörg, thank you. Yeah, just some short words from my side. I joined the board of adesso in July this year, and then step by step, took over responsibilities from Michael Kenfenheuer. First of all, it was the responsibility for financial services, then for large corporate accounts, and in beginning of next year, I will become the new CEO of adesso. I have joined adesso already in 2007. I was just gone for two years and then returned in the summer. So, when I started at adesso, adesso was a company of 500. Now we're very happy that we are over 10,000. So, one of the things which I stand for is definitely our growth path and being a adesso core. So, Jörg already said, how do we see 2023? We are happy that we are more than 10,000. We are happy that we will have, at the end of the year, probably over EUR 1 billion turnover, but we are not happy with the profitability. So, these are areas of also my specific focus. To me personally, I'm 54. I'm a banker and a lawyer. I originate out of Deutsche Bank, started my career in corporate banking and then, moved into IT quite early. Yeah, but you also see I'm coming from the business side. If we're looking at 2024, there will be two major focuses. One is continue our double-digit growth. This will also always be part of our success story. Then on the profitability side, we have to have a little bit of closer look. Next year, we will add two focus areas. One is we have started our businesses out of India. And the second one is managed services as a new portfolio part. So these are two areas where we have a strong market request from our large customers to compete with their global delivery service providers. We will not be in the first step be a global delivery company, but we are able to close some of the gaps we already have. Yeah, on the profitability side, it's basically in our business rather easy. It's utilization and mandate rates. We will have a stronger focus on both, already starting now, and continuing into 2024. Yeah, that's from my side. Now, I think we're going into the open question part. Yes. Thank you, Mark. That was very interesting and helpful for the audience, I think, as well. We've two questions at this point in time. First of all, Andreas Wolf from Warburg Research will have a start. And it would be helpful if you have questions that are or that address the CEO, so you would just mention that before your question, before your question. Okay, Mr. Wolf. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Congratulations on the strong third quarter growth. I have a couple of questions. I guess most of them are for Jörg Schroeder, but, let's start. So the most important question for me is, could you quantify the size of the cost overruns of the fixed price projects? And are those already fully reflected in the results that you have reported, or is there anything else expected for fourth quarter, or maybe the periods after? So that's my first question. The second is on the utilization. Who is in charge of the utilization within Adesso, and are those people also responsible for the hiring process? That's my second. The third is, when do you expect the contract assets sitting on Adesso's balance sheet to turn into cash? Would that be by the end of the year, or will this also reach into the next year? And the last, the fourth is... Mm-hmm. Is regarding the EBITDA margin range and your confidence with regard to the return to the targeted range, next year. What is this confidence based upon? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Wolf. So starting with the first one on the cost overruns, we cannot disclose the projects or the customers. So, we are obliged not to talk about that. I can give you a general ballpark of what we are talking about. It's a single mid-middle EUR million figure at this point in time. And you asked whether that is fully reflecting everything. It's fully reflecting everything, and also discussed with our auditors of the things that we see right now. There is things still ongoing, so it could actually become better or worse, so it's not completely resolved and finished. But at this point in time, with everything that we know and everything that we can operate in, and it's, of course, as the good German Kaufmann do, we are on the conservative side here. But we can just reflect in the numbers what we know at this point in time. So this is how the cost overruns are reflected. In terms of utilization, you asked who is in charge and who is in charge of the hirings. Well, basically, we have a hierarchy model at adesso, with... So it starts at the Executive Board level. We always look at utilization figures, as you know, with different kinds of KPIs. We do so in every board meeting that we have, and we meet at least every two weeks. So we look at that quite deeply, and it's also reflected in the business line leaders. Now, so someone responsible for the automotive business industry is responsible for the utilization in the automotive industry, and also, of course, in charge of hiring there. And it's in his own interest to hold utilization on a high level because we, as you know, we have an incentive scheme that is always designed for profitable growth, so always designed for year-over-year absolute growth of earnings figures. And for these business line leaders, it would be their own contribution margin. And of course, that contribution margin is higher when you have a higher utilization rate. It's also higher when you have more growth, so you always have to see that, that not one of them is going too far out of line. But that is how we do it, and that is how we always did it. But we have mechanisms in place to see when things go out of line, like we did in this year, and, then we react. This year was maybe a little bit late and took a little bit too long, but it still works. So as you also know, we are there for the long term, and, that also implies that there might be a quarter or two that are not that good, and we had that in 2023. Your third question was about the contract assets.... I expect actually to the year-end to, have a lot of that already at least built, maybe not turned yet into cash, but at least built. So changing the item from contract assets to receivables, and collect that then next year. So that will still take a couple of weeks or months, and also, depending on the customer and, the receivable management that we make with the customer and, what we have as, yeah, due dates in the contracts. So it will still take a little bit of time, but I would expect the contract assets to be lower in fourth quarter numbers. And then your last question about EBITDA margin and the confidence, why would we come back? I mean, you heard Mark. It's a focus. And everywhere we put a focus on, I think we will see room for improvement. It's high on the agenda. Of course, we wanna grow next year, and we see that the market demand is there, that we can grow, but we also know that the profitability where we are standing at right now is just too low. It is also pretty well reflected in the incentive scheme through all the managements, including the executive board. Yeah, we are incentivized also for profitable growth. We have a intrinsic motivation to improve on profitability, and that is where I take out my confidence. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. We got another question from Mr. Spang. Mr. Spang, go ahead. Yes. Hi, good morning, all together. Just a quick follow-up on last question from Mr. Wolf, concerning the profitability in 2024. Is the 11% to 13%, the you called it a usual profitability level, which is your target for 2024, or what is your usual margin you see for next year? Yeah, we don't have a guidance yet for next year, so that was just talking on general terms. We wanna grow, and we wanna come back to profitability, meaning profitability that we had in the past. The 11% to 13% I mentioned is part of the equity story. That is the range we see a sustainable EBITDA margin level in order to still grow that fast as we did in the past. So, if you look at the industry, we are not margin optimizers and have the best margin levels in the industry, and this is not what we are targeting. The level we are right now is way too low. That is not what we are looking at. So, on midterm, we wanna reach a sustainable margin level of 11% to 13%, which we think is an okay margin, when we still have that double-digit growth pace that we had in the last two decades, basically, in order to go forward. So, the complete guidance for 2024 will be released only in the beginning of 2024, so we are not finished with our budgeting process yet. It could be also below these 11% to 13%? For 2024, it could be below. We don't have exact figures yet. Yeah. Okay. Then on hiring, if you look on the last quarters, we see, which is in line to your mentioned focus on hiring, that net new employees were down from above 500 per quarter in fourth quarter and second quarter to high 300s number in second quarter and third quarter. So the question is, when do you see yourself in the position to speed up the hiring level again? A very good point. We discussed that, I think, two board meetings ago, and actually discussed that we wanna start again now, so that we don't slow down growth too much because recruiting is essential. We need the resources, and that is human capital, if you want so, and so that is why now we are again on the tracks and say, "Let's recruit for 2024 and onwards. Do you have any targets in terms of hiring numbers you can provide? No, we don't have particular targets in terms of figures. It usually... I mean, how adesso works is that we design that the incentive scheme, so for incentivizing for profitable growth, it works out itself. So every manager, all through the hierarchy, has the same kind of incentive scheme. And so if a manager wants to get paid pretty well, he needs to grow, and for that, he needs recruiting, and he needs to have profitability. So, the countermeasures we took in February were quite a harsh countermeasure from the board level because we saw that profitability will fade too much away. And now we think it's maybe not the complete turnaround yet, but as Mark also mentioned, how do we come back to profitability? The two main triggers here are utilization and daily rates, and this is both things we discuss with the next levels of management, and where we also will see measures that we take for also this year, but also for 2024, and that is why we think that profitability will at least come back. Yeah. Okay. And then last question, you also mentioned in the press release that order intake is still on record level. Can you give us an indication how much the order intake increased versus last year? I don't know the exact figure, but I think it's beyond the sales growth rate. Pretty sure about that, actually, but I don't have an exact figure. Order intake is increasing much or faster than revenue? Yes. Okay. Thank you. We have another question from Sven Sauer, from Kepler Cheuvreux. Hello. Thank you. Yeah, maybe moving from the profitability to sales growth. I was just wondering, the, you know, coming back to the record high, order intake, you also mentioned that after second quarter, but, you know, comparing the growth from second quarter, which was roughly at 30%, and now in third quarter, down ten percentage points almost. Just to clarify, this drop in, in sales growth, this was completely intentional and driven by lower hiring from adesso? Yeah, there are two factors, actually. One is the intentional factor, where we reduced hiring in February already, and if you don't have enough resources, you cannot bill on the same rate. So if you lower the recruiting rate, you will see an impact on the sales growth rate, eventually. So that is what we see. And another factor is that, since we are also looking at third quarter, in the area that we are looking at, third quarter 2022, last year, was very strong, and that was also due to, I think, a record quarter for in|sure license sales of roughly EUR 10 million. And this year in third quarter, we had, like, I don't know, EUR 1 point something million in license sales. So, of course, there you will see a drop in sales and a drop in profitability alone to that factor. On the sales side, this is, of course, a much smaller impact. On the earnings side, it's a bigger impact. But both of these factors show that why growth is coming down a little bit. Although we still think that 28% growth is, well, we're still very happy about that. Okay, thank you. No, it's, of course, in this environment, it's still a very, very, very good growth. I'm just wondering, also going into fourth quarter and in 2024 now, you're saying that you expect double-digit growth. And I understand that you don't provide a guidance, but double-digit growth starts at 10%, right? So the question is, if you could intentionally continue to lower recruiting going into the next year, where we would really then, at the very low end, see this 10% sales. Yeah, maybe one point or two about that, because I think that's a key question. We usually guide for... And that's also part of the equity story, that we want to grow faster than the market. And if you look at the market, only taking German figures from Bitkom, you see that the IT service market is growing something between 3% and 4% annually. The software market is growing a little bit faster, around 8% to 9%. That's... And if you combine our mix of of portfolio, large part of IT services, smaller part of software, then our combined market growth is roughly 5%. And we always try to do at least double that number. So we start at 10%. That, that's absolutely right. If you look at the history of adesso, you will see double-digit growth rates all the way. If you just look at the last decade, the compounded annual growth rate is 22%. So we are not claiming that we will grow every year, 22%. We, we don't know that. There will be years where we are higher, there will be years where we are a little bit lower, but on average, we wanna do at least the 10% and maybe a little bit more. Now, coming to 2024, there's also an element that we have to understand when we, and that's coming back to Mr. Spang's question. If you hit on the brakes for recruiting, that also means what we do now for recruiting is a large part, determining the growth rate for next year. Because what we do in recruiting next year will only be reflected after a couple of months, three, six months later, because only when the people are there, you can have them billable in projects. So what we are doing now, and that is the reason why I answered Mr. Spang's question, what you are doing now for recruiting, we are opening the gates again and saying, we wanna grow double digit next year. If we hit on the brakes all the time, we will have a tough time growing that fast in the future. Telling you all that, and we still don't have a guidance out there, and I cannot provide an exact figure, but we see a strong market demand. We see customers usually very happy. There are exceptions, of course, but usually very happy. We hardly ever lose a customer. The market demand for all kinds of services is still there. It's order entries are on record levels. So that is why we do more recruiting now. We are very confident that we'll, we'll see double-digit growth rates next year. Whether it will be 10, 15, 20%, I cannot tell you right now. We will first have to finish our budgeting process, and then we'll see. Thank you. That was helpful. Thanks. You're welcome. Okay, before I hand over to the next question from Markus Herrmann from LOYS AG, I like to remind all the participants on phones that you can unmute your microphone via the star key, followed by the number six of your phone, if you wanna put some questions here. Okay, Mr. Herrmann. Mr. Hermann is still muted. I think the question has been answered already, so I'm handing over to Mr. Jakubowski from SMC. Thank you very much. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, loud and clear. Great. Thank you for taking my questions. I have just two questions left. The first one is regarding your guidance. You have mentioned you have broadened the range for EBITDA. Maybe you could help me to understand this scenario, or give me some... Maybe you could describe the scenarios which would lead to the upper end, respectively, to the lower end of the EBITDA range. Given that we are already in mid-November, you are reporting, you have a good utilization at the moment and good order intake. I don't quite understand why you have such a broad EBITDA range in your guidance. That's the first question. And the second question, I think it's a part of the answer. It's the in|sure business. Maybe you could give us some details on your present in|sure business, especially on the pipeline for the fourth quarter and for 2024. And also, you have mentioned that you have lost one or two pitches this year, which is quite new for in|sure. As when I remember it right, for a couple of quarters, you won every single project in the market, which actually doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. Thank you, Mr. Jakubowski. So first, the EBITDA range. Yeah, it might look conservative, but we just try to reflect on all chances and risks involved. And the basic things here are about utilization. You are right, we are at 14th of November, but we haven't finished October yet. So we see utilization rates until September, so third quarter, basically, and now we will start with the monthly report of October. So we don't have a clue whether we can continue that utilization rate in fourth quarter. And that is, of course, a big risk, but also a big chance if it works out pretty well. Another thing in fourth quarter is that fixed price projects usually get finished, or at least you reach some milestones in fourth quarter and the year-end change, and so on. For that, you have to deliver quite well to the satisfaction of the customers. So there is always some room for doing good things and doing bad things, as we saw in third quarter, where we have two larger projects going south. We usually, I mean, we have one, two projects every year that are not working out as planned. But the majority of projects, and we have over thousands of them, usually work out fine. But if one or two go bad, it can have a big impact. third quarter would have been a lot better, if it wouldn't have been for these two projects. And so that is also reflected in fourth quarter. The third point is, then also for the next question, the question about in|sure. Last year, we had a record-breaking year, and we still have some kind of pipeline. I will hand over to Mark to answer that because he's overseeing that business and knows much better than me. But the question, what we expect in fourth quarter from in|sure, will also have an impact on the earnings corridor. So in all these risks and chances are reflected in the range of EUR 70 million-EUR 90 million EBITDA. But Mark, go ahead for in|sure. I think you are the man to ask. Yeah, maybe just a short statement on in|sure. Last year was record-breaking. This year will not be the same. We are still expecting license deals until the end of the year. Jörg said we lost deals. We do never disclose which these were, of course, and every loss is also something you have to have a close look at. We have made some changes in the management board of the in|sure, of adesso insurance solutions. As you've probably seen in the press, we have added this year also a very strong new component with our runoff business, Afida, where we are also able to deliver for a large insurance companies in the life sector a capability to cater for older p arts of their business. So overall, there has been maybe a little bit also a change here. But the pipeline for next year is as it was in the beginning of this year as well. We're looking very positive in the future, and we're very sure to continue the path we had in the past. And maybe if it's such a record-breaking year in 2022, everybody is a little bit over-expecting. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you so much. I have another question from Mr. Specht from Berenberg, who is on the phone. So please unmute your microphone via the star key and followed by the number six. Okay. Yes, we can hear you. Good morning. First question on the pipeline: Do you notice any significant changes regarding the duration of the book? Or, is it, let's say, the duration of your visibility is still only a couple of months? Second question would be on the fixed-price projects. Has there been changes, let's say, as a, let's say, percentage of sales regarding, fixed versus, traditional projects? Or if there are any, let's say, reason to believe that the number of fixed-price projects, will increase with the rising share of public projects. And the final question: Do you see yourself in a more active role regarding M&A going into 2024? Yeah, thank you, Mr. Specht. First, for the visibility, I think you are asking about the core business, so the contracts that we have, there's no change. So we usually get the normal amounts is for a quarter or maybe for a year, sometimes just a few days. So the visibility basically stays the same, so there's not so much change that we see. For the fixed-price projects, there is also not so much change overall. It's still in the range around, I think, 15% from the projects are fixed price project, the rest is time and material projects. And for the public sector, since you mentioned it, it's largely time and material. We have very large framework contracts there, where we then deliver people into projects, and that is usually done via a T&M model. So the public sector is not the driver for fixed-price projects. It's very customer-driven. You cannot do that with all the customers because you need a strong IT department on the customer side in order to have fixed-price ability, because you need a strong demand management, a strong requirements engineering from the customer side also. Otherwise, you will face a lot of difficulties in the fixed-price projects later on. Yeah, your last question was about M&A. We stay opportunistic, so we do M&A deals where we think it makes sense. The main priority will be on organic growth. One other caveat maybe is that I would like to have working capital in shape and cash flows in shape, so we don't wanna have the balance sheet over-leveraged. Not that we are highly over-leveraged, but I wouldn't like to take much more debt on, on the balance sheet, just for an M&A case. So we are still looking around. We still have projects running. But then again, what we will probably also see is more, not the one big game changer deal for EUR 100 million, but maybe smaller ones that we can integrate easier and have the firepower for. Very clear. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. Thank you. We have more questions from Mr. Sauer and afterwards, Mr. Wolf. Yes, thank you. I have a follow-up question on the in|sure business and in general, on the IT solutions, maybe also for Mr. Lohweber, a question. The reasons for the lower margins, is this because we are still in the investment phase of this segment, of these new products besides in|sure? And, I understand we also have this issue with the reconciliation and consolidation of the segment overview, but nevertheless, the business is still loss-making in the first three quarters in the IT solutions. So, you know, I was wondering also, going forward, from a strategic view, is this a segment that at one point will have higher margins than the IT services business due to the nature of it being a software business? Or, what's your expectation of this business in the medium term? Yeah, it's completely right what you said. Thank you for the question. We are still in an investing mode in this area. It's not where we already fully focus on profitability. There are sometimes years when, by license deals, you can cover up- This, so, that's, you know, where maybe sometimes there is a single view on a single year on the profitability. Overall, it's a build-up, still a build-up, and we already, but we already see now, in the medium term, where we get much more inflow from the maintenance. This is still not a big part of our solution business in the in|sure Ecosphere because, you know, it, it's not that we've started that early. But what we see in product by product, we see a more and more increasing baseline on incoming maintenance fees flows, and we added SaaS business also this year, and we also see some specific incoming revenue. Overall, it's a clear expectation that the profitability of the solution part is higher than from the services. That's the clear target in midterm. But we also have additional effects, which are very positive for us. All of these type of deals have a high visibility in our customers. So, if you look at the insurance business, adesso has a very high visibility on top level, top management level, due to these core products. This is a second very positive aspect for the rest of our business. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Then Mr. Wolf? Yes, thank you. I have a follow-up on visualization within adesso. Jörg, could you help us understand what comes first, the project win or the hiring? Just to better understand what actually drives growth and how the process works within adesso. As investors, discussions have shown there is room for clarification. And the second... Yeah. I s for, for Mark Lohweber. So where do we see the strategic focus over the medium term for adesso? So where do we see room to further develop the company? That would be helpful and interesting. Thank you. So starting out with the utilization, I would say that this is actually a distinguishing factor for adesso because we don't put either first. So we always do recruiting and sales on parallel levels. We don't recruit, hire to project, and we don't do a project and then get the staff on board. We do both, actually. We run on recruiting, and we run on sales, and usually this evens out. Yeah, you need the capacity of human capital in order to deliver the projects, and you need the projects to actually have business at all. So that is why we have both core business process of us running very fast. That also implies, unfortunately, that from time to time, you have a disalignment of these processes, like we had in this year. So we were pretty strong, also on the sales side, but even stronger on the recruiting side. If you have too much capacity that you cannot utilize the project, then you face profitability issues. We usually see that often early, and then we take countermeasures. But I would say it's an integral part of the success story of adesso, that we don't only do hire to projects. We would expect the growth rates to be much, much lower if we would do just that, only win a project and then look around, where are the people, and then hire them. This would take a lot more time and would hinder us in the success story that we had in the past. I know there are implications that from time to time we have these situations like this year, where we are not happy about, but I think we can cope with that, and we can realign the processes for at least next year. Thank you for the insight. Yeah, and, Andreas, your second question on, you know, where is the street--strategic next move? Let's split the discussion in two halves. One is our core market, Germany, where we are still continuing with the strong growth, and we see our basic model still working for further growth. Meaning adding new customers and then building up new business units fully. We were just successful with the retail business, and we've done this in the past and will continue with more and more industries. This will give us definitely quite some room for further growth. But as I mentioned in my introduction, there are two components we are now adding for more further growth inside of this. One is managed services, and the second one is delivery out of India. Those are two components where we are, you know, seeing more growth options because this is business where we currently cannot offer our services, as even to the large German industry group we are having. So this is. This will give us room to grow for a couple of years inside of our core German business. Then on the international level, we've added a number of international subsidiaries, as you know. We have some very strong and largely grown, like, Switzerland and Turkey, but we have a much bigger group of smaller entities who now have to go into the next level of growth. Each of the entities are in a market which gives another room for growth, plus, plus what we've not played yet is to grow with our German customers in those countries. So, you know, requesting from us to do a global delivery projects. Global is the wrong word. Maybe European delivery would be the next step. This is what we are aiming for. And overall, all of this, we've seen in the, in the countries, the model works the same way as we, as we work in, as we do our business in Germany. This overall will give us enough room to grow further into, you know, one of the largest European IT service providers at the end, which is our target. Thank you, and have a good start in the new role. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. One last reminder to the participants on phones. If you want to put your question, please unmute your phone via the star key and followed by the number six of your phone. Do we have more questions at this time? I don't see any more. So, everything is answered. Thank you very much for your interest in our call today and your participation. Especially thank you to Mark for joining us for this call. That was very helpful. I wish you all the best and hope to see you in person, maybe on the German Equity Forum in two weeks. For now, goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.