Here at Bechtle AG. I am very happy indeed to see that you are interested in our company, and as was the case last year, or rather in March, we are happy to welcome our international guests. This conference is being translated simultaneously into English, and in the Q&A session you can ask your questions both in English and in German. A warm welcome to everybody. Over the past weekend, temperatures here in Germany finally reached the levels we expect from the month of May. Spring is in full swing now, and at Bechtle, we like to be ahead of our time. We already reached our all-time highs for all KPIs as early as March 31st. I'm sure you will have read our reports from earlier this morning. My presentation is divided into four major parts. As usual, we are going to start with business development, and we're going to speak about the key financials of the first quarter of 2021. Then, of course, we are going to take a look at our share price development and we are on a good track long-term view. Then in the section concerned with our highlights, we look at the most important strategic and qualitative non-financial results that I would like to speak about. Finally, we're going to close by giving you an outlook on the current financial year 2021, speaking about the fundamentals and our targets this year. First of all, let us start with our business development. The first quarter of 2021 continued to be dominated by the COVID pandemic. Just like in the previous two quarters, we found the Bechtle business model to be robust and not just reliable, it facilitates profitable growth even in a difficult environment. This becomes obvious when we look at the first chart, revenue for the group and the operating business segment. In Q1, we experienced excellent top-line growth of 11.4%, or 10.4% in organic terms. The segmental view also shows a positive trend that is similar growth dynamics in both segments. The IT System House and Managed Services segment continues to be our growth engine, with growth of 22.4%. The system house companies abroad did particularly well. IT E-Commerce too experienced significant growth at 8.5%. Our German operations in particular showed strong growth at 19.8%. The trend in our trading companies continues to develop in the right direction since Q3 of 2020. The only way has been up. Let us now take a look at revenue trends in the different regions. As you can see in the chart, in Germany, revenues grow at a rate of 12.4%, driven by consistently high demand from our public sector clients. The positive trend becomes even clearer when we consider our companies abroad, even clearer than by looking at the operating business segments. At 9.8%, we experienced almost double-digit revenue growth here, and our French colleagues in particular, made an important contribution to this success story. Just to remind you, we are measuring up to Q1 2020, a very successful quarter for both segments and all regions. We hardly saw any impact of the pandemic at the time. Against this backdrop, our recent growth rates seem all the more impressive. Let us now turn to the profit side at segment level and take a closer look at our EBIT development. In the IT System House and Managed Services segment, we were able to grow our EBIT by 26.4% in the period under review. The margin increased by 40 basis points to 4.2%. In this segment, the cost savings realized in the previous quarters had a stronger impact. In addition, the share of services continued to rise. In the IT E-Commerce segment, EBIT grew by 4.6% with a slightly reduced margin of 3.9%. The reason for this was an above-average increase of cost of materials. The main impact here came from risk provisioning measures implemented in Q1, aiming to mitigate global supply shortages of IT manufacturers. At 4.1%, the group EBIT margin was clearly above the level of the previous year. When interpreting these figures, we must, however, take into account that the first quarter of 2021 was the last to experience the positive year-on-year effect of COVID-related cost savings. We'll conclude the financials review by looking at operating cash flow, which continues to be very positive. In Q1, operating cash flow was at EUR 20.6 million and thus, as you can see in the slide, on par with the high level achieved last year. Two factors were decisive in this respect. When it came to reducing accounts receivable, we not only repeated the previous year's success, but even outperformed it. This can be considered a remarkable success of our working capital management efforts in particular. What is more, we were able to reduce the outflow of funds from inventory buildup. In the previous year, one reason why inventories had been so high had been the high number of returns in March 2020, caused by a frequent lack of staff in our customers' incoming goods departments at the beginning of the pandemic. We already reported on this fact in earlier meetings. Free cash flow increased from EUR 7.8 million - EUR 11.8 million, thus by more than 50%. The important message is our cash flow and working capital improvements will have a long-term effect. Let us now look at our headcount. At March 31st, 2021, 12,306 people worked for Bechtle, which equals a year-on-year increase of 4.6% or 538 heads. The increase in staff numbers is noticeable but quite moderate, which is certainly appropriate in such uncertain times. What these numbers don't tell you is that we have also focused on training and upskilling measures for our existing staff. We invested heavily in their skills, especially during the time of the pandemic, in order to be optimally prepared for any future challenges in the IT world. Let us take a look at the performance of our Bechtle share. During the first quarter of 2021, at the stock exchanges, possibly in the hope for a quicker end of the coronavirus pandemic, it was especially those securities that had performed particularly well in 2020 that came under pressure. This mainly concerned the tech industry in general, and of course, Bechtle in particular. In February, our share price, same as most other tech securities, came under pressure in the context of the so-called industry rotation. From March onwards, however, the share price already began stabilizing, showing only a slight downward trend. The current share price, of course, to put this in positive terms, has some room on the upside, as they like to say. The median for the share price, according to our analysts, is at EUR 185. That's a figure which, given the strong start of the year, is not leaving us feeling uncomfortable. Let us now, as usual, turn to what we consider non-financial special developments that occurred during the first quarter, ladies and gentlemen. The year is still young, yet there have already been a number of strategic or operative highlights that I would like to mention here. From our point of view, these were the most important topics. Let's begin by taking a look at our cloud activities. In February, we stepped up our partnership with Amazon Web Services by embarking on a strategic partnership. The idea behind this is to support customers in implementing individual cloud strategies and in developing highly agile IT solutions. Specifically, customers will benefit from a comprehensive service offering and an extensive scope of cloud projects, as well as from a fast migration to the Amazon Web Services platform. This is a multi-year agreement which covers all of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and is primarily geared towards small and medium-sized companies and public sector clients. The next highlight concerns an area of particularly great importance, IT security. For some time now, Bechtle AG has been successfully qualified as an APT response service provider. APT here stands for advanced persistent threat. That means that we successfully support the operators of so-called critical infrastructure in defending against and overcoming advanced persistent threat attacks. Since the end of March, the German Federal Office for Information Security has included Bechtle in their public list of certified security service providers. Thus, we are now one of just 15 companies in total to be included in that list. The next item concerns an aspect of great importance to us, business with public sector clients, and also the connection to cloud business. Bechtle has been awarded nine lots in the European tender of the so-called Open Clouds for Research Environments project. This is a framework agreement that runs until 2024, it helps facilitate access to commercial cloud services for researchers and research institutions. This offer has been available since January. It's being offered by a national research and education network. Bechtle serves as a framework agreement partner, and as such, provides a highly scalable infrastructure as a service offering by IONOS Cloud and Microsoft Azure, as well as related cloud services. The framework agreements concluded with Bechtle provide universities and research facilities not only in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but also in the Benelux countries, Spain, Great Britain, and Ireland, with access to modern and secure cloud services. Now, to conclude, let me mention another development that, to be quite honest, was quite unexpected, but at the same time, very positive. It was unexpected because while we have spent years consistently investing in our brand, we had not been measuring just how successful we were in doing this. Kantar, an international marketing consulting firm, has done this now, and on March 11, they published their annual ranking of the most valuable German brands. With an estimated brand value of almost $1.6 billion, Bechtle has not only made it onto this ranking for the first time, but having achieved position 37, Bechtle was also named the best newcomer. In all modesty, for an exclusively B2B brand such as Bechtle, this is remarkable, and at the same time, it is indicative of the quality of our branding. With that, ladies and gentlemen, we already come to the outlook. On March 19, we published our forecast for the financial year. Not all that much time has passed since then, so on the one hand, you won't be surprised to hear that today we can confirm that forecast. On the other hand, I am, of course, aware that the figures for the first quarter are very strong and that they might possibly have justified an increase of our guidance. At this point in time, fairly early in the year, we decided against this for the following reasons. It is true that in the first quarter, Bechtle has managed to cope fairly well with the delivery difficulties in the IT industry. This issue can be expected to stay with us for quite some time and thus continues to represent a major uncertainty for the entire IT industry. Last year it was from this time of the year onwards that we had already been seeing similarly positive effects on our cost structures due to the coronavirus, which means that starting from the second quarter, it will be these high figures that we'll be comparing against. These pronounced delivery bottlenecks that we have mentioned repeatedly also continue to materialize. By now, there is talk that these problems could stay with us through the end of the year and even beyond. At this point, allow me to mention an interesting interview that Michael Dell gave to today's "Handelsblatt." Amongst other things, they address this very issue. By way of our response to the situation, we have been increasing our stock levels in order to ensure availability for as long as possible. We have close ties to OEMs and distributors, which in this situation has proven to be of particular value. Nevertheless, this does, of course, continue to entail certain risks for the coming quarters. Ladies and gentlemen, all in all, despite the uncertainties that I have mentioned, thanks to our great success in this first quarter, we have been given additional strength, and we continue to view the current fiscal year in an optimistic light. Much for now, and thank you for your attention. I look forward to any questions you might have. Ladies and gentlemen, we shall now start with our Q&A session. If you want to ask a question, please press the numbers asterisk and one on your telephone. Any questions, asterisk and one. The first question is from Baader Bank, Knut Woller. Please, why don't you ask your question? Good morning. Congratulations on the good start into the year, despite the problems mentioned. I have three questions. The first question, Dr. Olemotz, concerning the shortage of some components that you mentioned. It may come as a surprise to see the good start into the year. It might also have been driven by the fact that the manufacturers themselves had high stock levels already in order to counter that risk from their side. Do you have any indications as to whether these stock levels can be maintained in order to counter any supply shortages? The second question, cost effects that might be running out and that were already included in Q2. If I'm not mistaken, the service business in Q2 2020 was a little weaker. I believe that, as we can see now, there is going to be some easing of the COVID measures, because incidence levels are going down, and this should boost the service level and thus your margin. I shouldn't worry about the margin for Q2. Do you share this view? Third question, just recently, Dynacons in India, that was one topic, if I'm not mistaken. You had a revenue goal of EUR 100 million mentioned at the time. Can you update us on this? Thank you, Woller, for your questions. I will answer them in the sequence that you asked them. First question on the current shortage situation in the area of components. By the way, here we're not just talking about chips. This is something that you can read in the press, of course, but also, panels and displays to an increasing extent. There are various components that are needed for the products in the end, and that we are a little worried about right now. Of course, you are right at first glance, the strong growth numbers of Q1 don't seem to fit this picture. There are various explanations for that. One major explanation is one that I already mentioned in my remarks. It is also because we managed our own stock levels well, and that meant that in the big projects, we maintained our opportunities of delivering in time to a question. Of course, we are tracking the numbers on a daily basis and also, of course, weekly. It may seem to be a contradiction, but my answer is we were able to manage the situation quite well so far. The second point, of course, the strong market situation that we built for ourselves in the markets helped us along, in those markets where we're active. We have excellent relationships with our distributors who have a particular function in the industry, and also, of course, relationships with the manufacturers. Every week we talk to CEOs of the big manufacturers, board-level members, about the current situation, and that, of course, has helped us to handle the situation well. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're becoming more popular amongst our competitors, though, because, of course, we are in a very solid initial situation, so to speak. It also, of course, means that so far we have been able to deliver our products to our clients in time. Why are the numbers that good? Why are they not weaker due to supply shortages? Well, answer, first of all, our own inventory management, secondly, good stock levels at our distributors' level. Also, our good relationships at management level concerning our relations with the big OEMs. You are right, Mr. Woller, by saying that in Q2 of the previous year, we saw some weaknesses in the service area, and the reason for that was that in Q2, many on-site services needed to be switched over to remote structures. All of that has happened meanwhile, and that is also the reason why the System House segment in this past first quarter developed so well, looking at the profit side, because we really managed to handle the situation by replacing on-site services by remote offerings. That, of course, helps us along in this difficult situation, where it is still difficult to access some of the customer sites due to the pandemic. This should also mean, by the way, that Q2 will see good utilization ratios on the service side, and that should support our margin. Third point, development of GITA. Yes, we added another partner. Let me just stress at this point, that this global alliance has one major goal. The goal is that our core business in Europe is supported by this offering. It is not in the first place about making a top-line contribution to our group growth, and we are far away from the EUR 100 million that you mentioned and that we indeed did mention at one point. In this cooperation, we find that we are using our cooperation partners abroad mostly, and that means that these sales do not come under our balance sheet. That gives us an advantage, and we believe it is important to have a network of high-performing partners around the world in order to support our core business in the future with our existing customers. It's not so much about generating sales revenues, you need to understand the press article in that sense. Thank you. Next question, Martin Jungfleisch. Hi, good morning and congratulations on the good results. I have three questions. First question concerns the risk provisioning that you mentioned. In the previous year-over-year first quarter, EUR 6 million of provisions were made and the EBIT of E-Commerce in Q1 was lower than your sales revenues growth. What is the influence of these risk provisions on E-Commerce in Q1? That's the first question. Second question concerning the capacity utilization of your employees. The current capacity utilization shows that in the past 12 months, your headcount growth was lagging behind your revenue growth. Does this mean that there is still a lack of utilization so that there is room to grow here? For how long will the situation continue? That's the second question. One question about the mix. Can you tell us about the demand in the public sector and the private sector in Q1? Can you tell us whether we see more demand from industry clients meanwhile? Thank you. First of all, regarding the risk provisions, these EUR 6 million, Mr. Jungfleisch, are the right figure, absolutely. Just let's recall, it's been a year after all. What that was about, basically, was that for possible defaults, we wanted to be prepared. Basically, this was just adding things up because there is no such thing as collective impairments under German GAAP. We assumed that the creditworthiness level of our customers would be going down by one, and basically, that's what we try to determine, and it's been unchanged. We have not yet adapted this. In the first quarter now, in addition, what we've done is that we put in risk provisions that are closely linked to the issue of the shortage that we just talked about when Mr. Woller asked his question. What we looked at, just from the mechanics of it, was the major framework agreements and in how many of these we had penalty provisions, irrespective of the fact that so far we are not paying any significant penalties. We did try to put a figure on this risk. Reserves or provisions, let me put it that way, we tried to make available for this threatening risk. This type of risk provisioning is documented in the increased material expenses, which also explains why the margin in E-Commerce came under more pressure. The effect of this is about EUR 4 million, just to give you a figure. In other words, in our statements, both the issue of possible payment defaults post-COVID, let me put it that way. Think about the insolvency protection regulations, which will be retracted or no longer apply, but also the topic of possible penalties that might be imposed in connection with difficulties in deliveries. We made provisions for such anticipated losses. In the last quarter, this put pressure on the earnings, and in the ongoing quarter, even though these are two separate topics really that are being addressed, this has an impact and is giving us an added degree of security. If any of these risks should materialize, and let me repeat, at this point in time, there are no indications that this might happen in the short term. Even if it did, in terms of earnings, it would not hit us unprepared. Just to ensure that I communicated this properly, these are effects that we have in both segments, these provisions. In E-Commerce, it's more visible, because in the System House segment, we could set this off to a degree with the cost savings. In the System House segment, people are traveling more, they're more out on the road. These savings that we have and the use of cars, et c., we do not have in E-Commerce, which is why this negative impact due to the provisions is more visible in the E-Commerce segment than it is in the System House segment. It's been posted centrally. In other words, both segments are affected by this. We have an additional element to compensate for this. We have a good utilization in the service and in the System House segment, and I already mentioned this, and that is why in the E-Commerce segment, as Mr. Link has said, this effect is more visible, more apparent than it is in the System House segment. It's completely correct. In fact, it does affect both segments really. As for your question, Mr. Jungfleisch, regarding the workload of employees, to which extent they're working. Of course, the number of employees grew not as much, but it's above the previous year's level. Once the top-line growth gets kicked off again, also regarding the mix between consulting services and traditional infrastructure business, in terms of employee and headcount, we'll also have to have more growth again, not only in order to increase the degree of efficiency that is also switching over remote services towards collaboration platforms that can be used with our customers. At this point in time, the increases of efficiency are so tangible, though, are such that even though the number of employees has not grown as much as the top line, the top-line growth in the service segment can still be mastered quite well. That's also reflected, after all, in the margin that has gone up significantly, especially in the System House segment. As for your third question. The structural matters, the public sector versus the industrial sector. In the first quarter, the structure that we had seen towards the end of last year has continued to solidify, as it were. To put it in other terms, figures are still unchanged. The public sector client share in group revenue is still at about 38% in Germany, and that's because we're stronger in that segment there. Even stronger, that is. It is still above 40%, and these are figures that you are already familiar with from financial year 2020. From a positive point of view and structural point of view, demand from public sector client continues to remain high at an unchanged level. Putting it in negative terms, because that's also what you were touching on with your question, it is certainly true that in the industrial sector, we are not seeing as much momentum as there was prior to the pandemic, and that explains the weaker top-line growth compared to previous years. If less growth or weak growth is something that we even want to talk about, given the figures that we're talking about. Compared to growth rates in the past that were at 20% and more, of course, we are below those figures. Excellent. Thank you. The operator speaking. If there are any further questions, please press one and star on your phone. Operator speaking. The next question is posed by Andreas Wolf, Warburg Research. Please ask your question. Hello. Good morning. Andreas Wolf speaking, Warburg Research. I'd also like to congratulate you on the good start of the year. I have a short question, which is related to the service business and also to the increased efficiency that you could bring about thanks to remote services. Do you see a paradigm change taking place on the client side? Will that make it possible to provide more services remotely, which is also something that customer could possibly benefit from? If so, that could also have an impact on profitability expectations in that segment. Answer? Well, from a strategic point of view, that's a very interesting question, Mr. Wolf, and a very good question. Thank you for that. Providing an answer to that question, however, is not an easy feat at this point in time. Let me try and provide a cautious answer. I'm certain that when we report on the second and third quarter, we will see some of these trends having solidified, and then I'll be bolder in making such statements. What I'm assuming and what I'm seeing currently, what I'm observing is something that we've discussed before repeatedly, especially in connection with the implementation of collaboration platforms. That is the way in which all of us work together currently in our respective organizations, but also in how we deal with our clients. I believe we can assume that the time after, well, I don't like to use the term new work. I don't think that's entirely accurate, but I think it is fair to say that the time after the coronavirus, when it comes to cooperation within organizations and with clients, will be different from what it was prior to the pandemic. I think it is fair to say that we'll make more use of digital possibilities, we'll make greater use of collaborative forms of cooperation, which will occur on electronic platforms. Yes, Mr. Wolf, I also do assume, in fact, that this will impact Bechtle's service business. After all, our clients and we ourselves are currently experiencing that, in fact, this is about a specific service and services, these services do not necessarily have to be provided on premise, but they can also be provided remotely. These are efficiency gains that not only we at Bechtle can tap into, but our clients also. You can respond more quickly. You don't have any delays. Order processing is easier for our clients as well. Also something else that should not be forgotten is that at this point in time, people are increasingly noticing that it is still possible to uphold and maintain SLAs. In other words, our clients do place trust in the new service structure. For that reason, I do not believe that by the end of the pandemic, whenever that will happen, we'll go back to what was before and the previous levels. It is my assumption that this mix between remote and on-premise is something that will be shifted and the remote part will be benefiting, will get greater, not such that we'll only be offering things remotely. In many respects, that's not possible. It depends on the service in question, but I believe the share of remote will continue to increase in a sustainable fashion. Great. Thank you. Any questions, please press the star key and one. Next question, Holger Schmidt, Metzler. Please, go ahead. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I have two questions. First question relates to the cloud business. Can you give us an update here on the number of clients? Last year, we had a high number of trials. What was the trend here? What was the conversion rate like? How many of these were turned into clients? The second question is mostly about the start into the current quarter. What may have changed compared to Q1? Is it that the strong trend from Q1 simply continues in Q2? Well, thank you, Mr. Schmidt. On the situation in the cloud environment, you already mentioned the most important ratios. Let's just take a look at them. Increase of number of clients year-over-year, 60% from 2,100 clients that we had on our platform in 2020 to almost 3,400 in Q1 of 2021. We did even better in the number of seats on our platform. It grew above average. What is important, of course, in order to achieve the economies of scale, we're looking for growth of approximately 70%. In Q1, on the cutoff date, we had around 712,000 seats on our platform, so disproportionate rise compared to the number of clients. That is a good thing, of course. This is why it doesn't come as a surprise that the number of contracts we also are looking at grew by roughly 70%, 11,200 cloud contracts were signed with our clients. That meant that year-over-year, sales revenues almost doubled. Not quite, but almost doubled, going up to over EUR 16 million. That means we can be confident that we will maybe achieve the EUR 100 million in terms of sales revenues this year. It's going to be a tough race. We already see EUR 90 million materializing. The question of whether we make the EUR 100 will depend on Q3 and Q4, in particular, because the decision needs to be taken then, whether we will be able to hit this mark or not. The trend of trial seats, well, the trial seats we are reporting on throughout the year, and we did that last year as well, show us that 319 new c ontracts were signed. In percent, if you break that down on client level, it means that roughly 37% of the trial customers actually became clients, 61,000 seats all in all. The conversion has not been quite as high as we would have liked, but we know, Mr. Schmidt, these are the kinds of experiences we first have to have because this was the first time last year that we offered that high a number of trials, and this is why we are quite satisfied with the result, even if it is a little lower than what we had expected. From a market perspective, it is good that the number of seats outgrew the number of clients. Economies of scale, that's the buzzword here. I've already mentioned it. An important structural development in this context. Now, our start into Q2. We have valid numbers for April, meanwhile, I can confirm that the very good trend we saw in Q1 continued throughout the month of April, at least. Let me put it like that in diplomatic terms. We don't report monthly numbers, the numbers of April basically confirm all the comments I gave you earlier relating to the good development in Q1. Excellent. Thank you very much. My pleasure. There are no further questions, I hand back over to Dr. Thomas Olemotz. Thank you very much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your questions. As usual, I enjoyed talking to you. I believe we can say that the start into the year was a very good one. Judging from our discussion, you will have seen that we stuck with our tradition, not just as far as the conservative guidance is concerned, but also our conservative accounting in general. When you consider the information I just gave you, namely relating to the good start into Q2, I believe we have reason enough to be confident for good development of Bechtle in the future. Thank you very much once again. I hope that we're going to meet again in person soon. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.