Of you from my side again. It's great to see such strong interest in today's Capital Markets Day. Thank you for joining us here in Frankfurt, and of course, an equally warm welcome to everyone participating online from across Germany and around the world. Before we begin, let me mention something that will not come as a surprise, especially to most of you. After nearly 20 years with Bechtle, this will be my last Capital Markets Day as CEO of the company. As you know, at the end of this year, I will hand over responsibility to Konstantin Ebert, who is with us today and already known to many of you from past events. I felt it was only appropriate to take this opportunity to say thank you and goodbye personally in this circle. That said, with a few to my right and to my left, I would like to point out that today is only September, and I remain fully in office until end of 2026. So there are still a few months left before anyone finally can get rid of me. Nevertheless, opportunities like this become less frequent, which makes me particularly pleased to be here today to exchange views with you and to spend this day together. As you already read, the theme of today's Capital Markets Day is Always prepared for success. This is one of the core messages of our Bechtle Vision, published this year in February. On a personal note, it was especially important to me to help shape a clear and sustainable vision together with six so-called mission statements for the future direction of our company. For me, this has always been part of responsible leadership. Ensuring that Bechtle is not only successful today, short term, on a quarterly basis, but also well-structured, strategically aligned, and fully prepared for the future. In that sense, helping to hand over a strong company and a clear strategic framework to my successor is something that really personally matters to me. The fact that our vision provides the motto for today's Capital Markets Day also fits perfectly with the agenda ahead. Starting from the CFO's view on our vision, we will focus on two key pillars of Bechtle's future success. The first is the continued internationalization of our business. This is an important strategic growth area for Bechtle, and you will hear more about it from Konstantin Ebert and James Napp, who is responsible for our business in U.K. and Ireland. The second pillar is one of the most important topics in our industry today: activating the potential of artificial intelligence in everyday business operations and especially customer solutions. On this topic, our CTO, Dirk Müller-Niessner, will share his perspective and our approach at Bechtle. Ladies and gentlemen, before we now move on to my colleague, Christian Jehle, our CFO, and as I like to say, my partial successor, we would like to set the scene with our vision video. Again, thank you for being with us today. I am looking forward to an insightful day, valuable discussions, and as always as I know, an open and stimulating exchange with all of you. Let us start with the video. [Presentation] Good morning, and also welcome from my side. Today, I would like to talk about our financial ambition for 2030, the plan that we have built, the journey that we are on, and where we are at present, and what the next steps are. Before we do that, let me put a few things into perspective. When we look at our performance over the last 10 years, what we have delivered is really strong double-digit growth. When we look at the business volume side, we delivered 12% of CAGR over the last 10 years. When we look at the bottom line, we delivered a CAGR of 10% over the last 10 years. Strong double-digit growth of the company over the last 10 years. When we are zooming in on this year, on 2026, what we said as a company is that we are going to grow the top line over 10% year-over-year, which means we are going to arrive at a business volume of more than 9.5 billion for 2026. When we look at the bottom line, what we said we would do is grow that by 5%-10% year-over-year. When you then look at the margin as EBT in percent of the business volume, when you look at the capital market expectation, that would leave us at a market expectation of around about 3.6% for the year 2026. Fast-forward, looking at our ambition for 2030, what we stated was that we will deliver a business volume of more than EUR 10 billion. We will deliver an EBT margin of 5%, which would then mean an EBT volume of more than EUR 500 million by 2030. That is to put the whole thing into context, what we said we would do, where we are today, and where we are going to go over the next four years. When we look at the marketplace that we are operating in, we can clearly identify four major trends that are important to drive growth. Number one is AI. AI is everywhere in our customer base, in all processes that we operate and that we see. What we also see in the marketplace is a clear trend around digital transformation and the renewal of infrastructure and the requirements in our customer base to do so. The third trend we see is around cybersecurity, around sovereignty, and around the cloud infrastructure that is being provided in the marketplace and that is driving growth as well. The fourth component is skills shortage, especially in the IT market. So those are the four key trends that we see that are driving growth in the marketplace. Now the question is how are we as Bechtle positioned to succeed in that marketplace? We have four topics how we address that. Number one, we provide expertise at scale. Take for example, the topic of cybersecurity. We have built an organization within Bechtle that covers more than 900 people that are building solutions and are delivering those solutions to our clients in the cybersecurity space. So we are really well prepared in that area. When you look at our customer proximity, we operate in more than 120 locations, really close to our customers. We operate in 14 countries all over Europe. Again, being very close to the customers, understanding their requirements, understanding their strategy, and helping them to succeed. We have a really vast vendor ecosystem. We work together with more than 270 OEMs all over Europe to deliver the best solutions to our clients. Last but not least, we provide end-to-end delivery. Whatever product we deliver, whatever solution we provide, we always cover the entire value chain from design to delivery to maintaining the solution. When we look at how we're positioned in the marketplace, that gives us a lot of credibility and a lot of confidence to deliver on the growth ambition within the marketplace. Now, results are not only about top line, but they're also about profitability. When we look at our journey to 2030, we have identified three focus areas that we are concentrating on to drive profitability across the group. Number one, we're focusing on organic growth and product and service mix, which means we're going to grow within the markets that we operate in, and we're going to strengthen our services business. The second topic is around productivity gains. We have identified specific levers that we are addressing, that we are building on to drive profitability across the group, and I'll come to that in a minute. The third topic we're focusing on is M&A. I think you all know we have a quite successful track record of acquiring and integrating companies, and that is another area that we're looking into. Now, what is important to note is the size of the boxes tells you something about the contribution that we expect from each of the three areas in terms of improving our level of profitability across the group. In a nutshell, what it means is we're not banking on M&A activities to drive profitability. It's going to come from the first two areas to the largest extent. That's the way how we want to get from 3.6% to the 5% of EBT margin that we are targeting. Now, what are the key levers to drive productivity across the Bechtle Group? Number one, it's global process harmonization. I think you can imagine then, if a company has acquired more than 120 units over 40 years, the process landscape is probably not as harmonized and not as streamlined as you want it to be. What we have done is we have launched a specific program to address that topic, which gives us the foundation to drive more productivity across the group. We have established a specific team that is addressing that matter, and that is currently in the process of being rolled out across the Bechtle Group to drive that program. The second topic we are focusing on is the go-to market approach. We have launched a program to look at our service offering, to harmonize it, to standardize it, and to use best practices across the group. The important point there is we have a quite decentral go-to market model right now. We do not want to abolish that, but what we want to do is we want to enhance it, we want to make it stronger, and we want to use best practices across the group really globally. The third topic we are addressing is technology and AI. There we have two areas. One is the investment into our own infrastructure. I think we shared it with most of you, we have launched an SAP S/4HANA transformation program, quite a substantial one. Costs us a lot of money with major expectation in terms of productivity improvements there. The second topic is we are investing into our own cloud infrastructure to provide solutions to our clients. The second focus topic is AI, and our CTO, Dirk Müller-Niessner, will tell you more about the AI program later today. These are the three productivity levers that we have identified. We have launched programs to drive performance across the group. Now the question is of course, how do we measure and how do we manage productivity? Besides the usual ratios around gross profit and gross margin and EBT margin, we have also established a KPI that we call EBIT as percentage of gross profit. When you look at our performance over the last 10 years, on average, we have achieved a score of around about 32%. 32% of the gross profit we have achieved is arriving at the bottom line. That is something that is quite a strong performance. When you look at 2025, we did 28%, and our ambition is to achieve the targets we have set ourselves for 2030, we will be north of 30% for that KPI. Now the question is, where do we see potential? You can see it on the right side of the slide. Two messages there. Number one, when you look at the KPI performance, you see the 28% for the group, but you can see that in the various segments, we have a different level of productivity right now. In particular, in France and in the segment other Europe, there is potential to improve. If we want to get them to group standard, there is room for improvement. The second thing you can see is the EBIT margin as percent of business volume in the various segments. You see a gap between the performance we have in Germany and the other segments outside of Germany. Major driver there is the level of maturity. I think all of you know we started the business in Germany. In Germany we have had the chance to really optimize processes and organizational elements over the last 30, 35 years. Whereas when you look at the areas where we have acquired businesses, they are less mature. What we are trying to do is, number one, get them to the same level of maturity, and also to provide the same breadth and depth of the service offering that we have in Germany. That is how we want to drive profitability. As I mentioned before, we have three focus areas, and majority of the contribution is going to come from growth, product and service mix, and the productivity gains that we talked about. We talk a lot about the P&L, but what we also want to emphasize is the need to focus on cash. We treat them as equal, and for us it is extremely important to demonstrate how we are converting all the profits that we are generating into cash. What you can see on the slide is our performance in the cash area. For example, when you look at our operating cash flow performance, we delivered EUR 290 million last year. Quite a strong performance, and it shows you how cash generative our model is. When you then look at an efficiency metric in the middle, like working capital as percent of the business volume, you can see that has come down substantially over the last years. That shows you how much better we have become, A, in managing our own supply chain, and B, when you look at how we have run cash collection over the last years, we have quite substantially improved performance there as well. There is more to come, more to do, and I think we have proven over the last years that we know how to optimize our performance in that area. On the right-hand side, you see the cash conversion ratio, and we have done 59% in 2025. When you look back 10 years, quite a substantial improvement there as well. I think what we have demonstrated over the last years, we can not only generate profits, but we are also highly cash generative, and we know how to manage a supply chain, and we know how to improve working capital. When we look at our capital allocation policy, the headline is what you see on the slide. It is really all about investing for growth while maintaining financial discipline. The foundation for all that is what you see on the left-hand side. Strong operating cash flow in combination with a sound balance sheet. I think at Bechtle we have demonstrated that this is a solid foundation for us as a company over the last 35, 40 years. A really solid foundation that we can build on. We have four focus areas there. One, we will continue to invest organically into our growth potential, invest into our people, into our skills, into our infrastructure. The second topic is we will drive targeted M&A projects like we have done in the past. When you look at our track record, we have acquired 126 organizations over the last 40 years. On average, three or four a year. I think that is quite a track record. When you look at the contribution we have received from those acquisitions, it is more than EUR 1.5 billion of business volume over the last 10 years. So also quite substantial there. Again, I think we've proven it. We know how to do it. We know how to acquire companies. We know how to identify the right targets, and we know how to integrate them. Third topic is around financial resilience. We will make sure we stay on course and manage the company accordingly. The fourth one is our dividend policy. If you have followed us over the years, you know that we spend about a third of what we generate on dividends, and we will continue to do so. Now, when you look at the whole picture, let me explain how all the components that I talked about today are coming together in order to support our ambition for 2030. We've talked about the market that we're operating in, and I explained the four key trends that we have identified that drive growth and demand in the marketplace. We also talked about how we're positioned in the marketplace and how we will be successful in the market that we operate in. We will not only focus on growth, but we also have a very strong focus on driving productivity and profitability across the group and address the levers that I explained today. When you then put the whole thing together, it's not only going to be the P&L that we focus on, but we will also generate cash accordingly and drive shareholder value that way. So in a nutshell, we have all the components we need. We've shown that we can do it, and we will continue to drive in the same direction. That means we will deliver business volume of more than EUR 10 million by 2030, an EBT margin of 5%, and we will deliver an EBT volume of more than EUR 500 million by 2030. That was all from my side. Thank you very much. With that, I'd like to hand over to Konstantin. Thank you very much, Chris. Good morning, everybody. It's a big thank you from my side that you're joining us today. It's actually my second Capital Market Day. I learned it earlier. It's a few years ago when I was fortunate to give an update of our more early-stage M&A strategy and our internationalization. I know you slightly look at me differently today, as Thomas Olemotz pointed out earlier. So I'm really looking forward for the next years, engaging with you more regularly and doing these formats together and be counterpart for you in your questions. With that, I would like to give an update today on our international expansion and our internationalization strategy. I also brought one of my colleagues with me who will give you a more real-life update later on how we are doing this. With that, let's start. Internationalization. It is, of course, a very important element for us of growth. We are in 14 markets today in Europe. We are clear number one in Germany, and we see a lot of potential to further grow in our markets across Europe. Of course, our strategy of acquiring companies as well as organically growing the internationalization is, of course, a very important element of growth. Not only that, it is also an important element of resilience for us. Resilience, of course, because we can better react across Europe to microeconomical circumstances to the different markets. We can better balance resources across different markets. It is a big element for us to operate more resilient and reduce dependencies on single markets. The other element is customer relevance. We see customers reacting very positively when they have partners like us, where they can rely on having an access across many markets. I will explain a little bit more how we even do that outside our 14 markets. Even just those 14 markets, those 14 core European markets from our point of view, are a big element for customers in putting their trust into us as a strong partner delivering their projects across countries. The internationalization matters because, as I just mentioned, it gives us a much more balanced footprint across the markets. We see that in coverage with our OEM vendors. We see that with customers, as just mentioned. We are much more balanced and able to react. It also gives us good access to larger customer opportunities. We have significantly won large customers across different countries, and we are also, with our internationalization, more and more winning significant customers out of those markets where we are investing and becoming more relevant because they locally see us as a much stronger player than years ago. One thing that we are sometimes forgetting is that one key element of our business is our cooperation with the big vendor partners, the OEMs, all the big IT companies from around the world. They very much like our strategy there because they really appreciate working with large international partners. For them, it is a way of making their business easier. It is a way of looking into some consolidation there. They have one big company to go to, and it is for us a very important element. When you look at our ranking with key OEMs, despite being in 14 markets across Europe, we are typically with all the key vendors somewhere in the rank of the first one, two, three, four partners on a global level even. We continue to drive significance for the large, mostly American vendors, driving their portfolio, and they are helping them generating projects across Europe. This is a very important element. Also the increased operational resilience is important. We are not just from a go-to-market point present in Hungary, for example, but we also have today a large internal IT team based in Hungary. We are cross-leveraging our presence across different markets. It gives us a more resilient access to qualified staff across market. It allows us to leverage cost benefits across different markets. We are continuously developing hubs like be it in Czech, be it in Portugal, and so on to also leverage for our internal processes and teams. That is also an important element of our resilience. We are not just acquiring companies, but we are combining it quite smartly, I would say, with our entrepreneurial growth. We have always built on a very decentralized network with our companies, with a strong entrepreneurial, close to customer mindset in our teams, and we are combining that with the element of our M&A strategy. What you will learn later on about our U.K. development, it is a great example for that. We are really putting effort into our organic growth. We are not, of course, not neglecting that. The teams we are building, we are growing that, we are driving the expertise we have. With the acquisitions coming on top, we are building models where we are really leveraging the enhanced portfolio to cross-sell, and not just use it as market share, but really use portfolio elements, strength of the companies to cross-sell and to leverage each other much better. The internationalization is also creating a big element of adding new capabilities. We regularly acquire companies where they have a very specific expertise. For example, we acquired last year a company called ITAM in the Netherlands, very specific on TCO optimization around software management. We start leveraging across our 14 markets, not just in the Netherlands and not even just in the Dutch customer base, but even across. These capabilities we are adding, we make them available across the group, and by that, we drive much better portfolio breadth and depth in the markets where we acquire, but also across the markets. Of course, M&A, that is an accelerator as well as an enabler of our local sales teams and helps us in the local markets where we acquire and across the markets. We are expanding our strength there across all our markets. We have a 14-country ambition. Today, we see we have still a lot of potential in 14 markets where we are, and we are continuously focusing on further developing them, and step by step, closing more and more of the white spots and chasing more and more of the opportunities that we have in those markets. What we also focus on is that we really leverage our multi-channel approach. We have very strong expertise in account management. We have very strong expertise also in a very fast and reliable operating direct business with very strong inside sales capabilities. We have our bechtle.com platform, where we can build basket models for our customers around the world. We have our Bechtle Clouds platform. All of these elements, we immediately leverage in a multi-channel approach for every acquisition as well as our own companies. It does not 100% fit into the multi-channel approach, but every acquisition is also immediately leveraging, of course, the whole corporate strength of Bechtle, be it financial stability, but also terms and conditions with big suppliers and so on, where we always can add a lot of value. The last point, the international customer support. We have a very well-established network across our 14 markets, but not only that. Over the years, we have built big expertise how we serve customers globally. We have a lot of customers who are relying on us around the globe. Last year, we have pulled the different elements of portfolio we have around Bechtle there, how we do that. We put that together in one unit called BID, Bechtle International Division, where we can support customers delivering roll-outs globally. We can export, we can create multi-local engagements. We can really fit to purpose of what the customer wants around his global IT roll-outs as well as infrastructure. That is a huge asset, and every acquisition we are doing is adding to that asset and capabilities, helping us secure these customers and winning a lot of really nice new logos there as well. The benefits for our customers are we are supporting them much better with an international account management. We have people available where they are, and we can support them locally because despite a lot of centralizations and so on, customers love it if you have local contacts. This is a huge asset for us. With our logistics networks and our infrastructure we have, be it from our warehouses from London, Hamburg, Neckarsulm, our headquarter, down to Paris, down to Spain, we can support our customers very well with cross-border deliveries, with roll-outs, and managing that whole ecosystem for them. Typically, also being able to make equipment available very fast and very reliable. As I mentioned before, our multinational customers put a lot of big bet on us there because besides our 14 markets, we are truly able to deliver globally, and we see this in more and more big wins for us, where we are really leveraging our network to support customers around the globe. We are delivering a consistent service quality. This is a very important element today because with our own hubs, combined with hubs of strong partnerships we have built over time around the globe, we are able to really support our customers on a very broad scale and be a very reliable partner. Also that is a key element of that internationalization. Every acquisition we do is fitting perfectly into that network. I would now love to hand over to James Napp, who is running our U.K. and Ireland business, and he will give you a perfect example of how we have been doing that over the last years. Thank you, James. [Non-English content] Thank you very much. Really appreciate the chance to talk to you today about the development of the U.K. business. I grew up in Germany and I have been with Bechtle for 29 years, so I have a real green heart. You are in good hands. It is okay. The development of the business has been. I will take you through the timeline, but it has been a really exciting journey over those years, and the map has not always looked like this. In fact, until 2019, it was just the one dot. I started, we started, back in 1997. It was a very transactional business back then. It was a product business, catalog business, and we grew the business, I would say, very modestly, very steadily over those initial years, in a transactional way. When we got to 2015, the market was moving, the competitors were moving fast, and we, together with the board, decided that we needed to start building more of a solutions and services business. We started investing into that. Of course, from a market perspective, everybody also continues to want to see the EBT. We had to do it carefully and make sure that we were doing that in a profitable way. From 2015 to 2019, we doubled the business. That investment's continued, and we started to build out those technology pillars and build out the additional value that we could offer to the customers. Then in 2019, we opened our first regional office in Manchester, and that's been such a success that we're no longer in that first building. We're now also in a second, bigger, larger building, as a part of that expansion. The reason we did that with the regional development was so that we could access the talent locally and have a greater proximity to those customers. There's three universities in Manchester, for example, so it was the perfect way, and it also gave us that northern base. As we moved on, we continued to grow the business strongly, so the business continued to grow, and we decided at that point in consultation with the board, and Konstantin hugely supportive, that we needed to own more of the delivery in the local sense. We have a lot of capability centrally, which we're leveraging, but we needed some capability locally around managed services, and we needed to own more of the service delivery and expand the mix into that area. We acquired a company called ACS, which was in the Midlands. Again, it gave us another geographical spread. ACS have a managed service business, which we've since developed, used that as a platform business to develop and enhance that managed service capability, which we now can push out across all of our locations in the U.K. Interestingly, as part of that acquisition, we also acquired within that an interiors business. The interiors business, I remember talking to Dr. Olemotz, and I walked up to him and he said, James, I hear you've bought a furniture business. I said, It's not a furniture business. It's a technology-led interiors business. We can now, and it makes actually a lot of sense because we can now go into the market and we can do full fit-out. Companies trying to get employees back to the offices, those offices have to be nice. You can't do a meeting room without the technology. You can't do any office now without a fully technology-enabled office. Actually it's been a real good Trojan horse into some of those businesses to get you early in the door. We picked up a GBP 1 million deal, GBP 800,000 was fit-out, but we also picked up GBP 200,000 of networking off the back of it. It's a really interesting kind of side note to that acquisition. We'll continue to develop that business, which will drag technology through with it. Really quite interesting. Very quickly on the heels of the end of 2022, the start of 2023, the opportunity came about to buy a volume business, what I would call a volume business Tangible Benefit. Great opportunity to get into London. It was about a GBP 70 million business, and that business was primarily transactional, primarily client, but they had some, and they have some very big customers, very big logos. We took that business and it has been an incredible journey to then overlay all of that technical value and the different technology pillars into those customers. That business has pretty much doubled since we bought it and integrated it. As you see in 2023, we integrated ACS as well. As we go, we buy, we understand, and then we integrate those businesses. If you are going back to what Christian was talking around the productivity and the systems, it is really important for us to do that integration piece, take out unnecessary costs, but also, almost more importantly, to drive positive synergies. We are looking where can we get into those customers? How can we sell more into those existing customers? Also on the integration piece and we integrated. Sorry, I will go back one. With the integration piece, really, really important. Anyone can do acquisitions, but how successfully you can integrate those acquisitions is another thing. You can quickly lose value, you can quickly destroy value, and I am sure that you have all seen that happen over the years. With companies who do a lot of acquisitions, but then the value of that acquisition gets diminished very quickly. We take a lot of effort and time in bringing the cultures together, in socializing the teams, because that will help drive synergies, it will help drive cross-collaboration, using the technologies from one acquisition into the customers of another. In 2024, we bought a specialist business. Back to the points around we are either buying volume or we are buying specialization and capability. We bought a networking business called Qolcom, and again, that business now will be fully integrated this year, in fact, two weeks, actually. It has been a busy period, but really, really exciting. You can see, if you look at the graph there, the way that over those last three or four years, we have really realized those synergies. Just to break it down again, back on that trend of M&A as an accelerator and enabler, we did GBP 138 million worth of acquisitions. Then the organic and the synergies growth, about GBP 100 million over the last three or four years, which is a CAGR, just on the organic and synergy side, of about 11%. Really strong. Then the M&A on top of that. Not only that, but the EBT growth has also been strong. We have grown our EBT percentage over that time as well. What are we seeing in terms of an opportunity to 2030? Big ambitions. You saw it on the numbers from Christian earlier. We have a market which is, in the U.K., still very fragmented. There has been a lot of consolidation in that market over the years. We have a desire to continue that consolidation, looking for the right opportunities. I think it is also important to know, you will see it within other IT companies in the U.K., the big ones are getting bigger, and it is getting tougher for the smaller ones. The scale really matters, especially with the vendors, as Konstantin mentioned earlier. Now having built this technology base, we have a great technology stack. We have all of the solutions, all of the services, all of the consulting piece, which we can offer our customers. We see a huge opportunity to own more of that customer life cycle within each customer. Customers want you to be there by their side. They want you to be a trusted partner, and that is very much what we are about and very much where we put our emphasis. We want to sell across multiple technology pillars into each customer, and increase the recurring value as well. Just in terms of market opportunity, I think it is clear to see on the left-hand side there is a huge opportunity for growth for our business. The tailwinds that you see across the top, I think Christian already touched on those earlier. AI is a huge opportunity. I know Lars asked me earlier, is cyber a risk or is it an opportunity? Absolutely an opportunity. Huge opportunity for us to drive additional business, and then that increase in managed services and owning more of that customer. We have to get close to the customer, and we can be really unique in that, especially given our platform across the 14 countries. In terms of the opportunity, that mix shift towards higher value, more profitable services and solutions for customers, and also to help us gain share. We expect to grow significantly above the market rate. Hopefully, I would say above even the group average, and with acquisitions on top, we really believe that we can take the opportunity which lies before us. To summarize, the opportunity for us to get deeper into our existing accounts is huge, and now that we have built this platform, we also see a big opportunity for us to get into larger customers, and develop the business that way as well. Expand within existing, and acquire new. In terms of scale, again, I think we have built the platform. We have a lot of capability now in the U.K., with putting some great standardized packages in front of customers. We are also using AI very strongly internally, so that is an area where we feel we can help with these productivity gains, which Chris was talking about earlier. Then, as I say, before building those recurring revenues to make sure that we have more repeatable business. Then finally, to accelerate across our business. We will be looking for volume acquisitions. We will also be looking where they come up for additional capability, additional skill sets which we can bring into the company, driven by those tailwinds and making sure that when we do integrate companies, that we are preserving the value which we have bought. It is absolutely crucial. I cannot tell you how important we feel that is, because I think one of our parts of our unique proposition within the U.K. is that we are not just a bunch of acquisitions coming together. We are going to market as one business. Then leveraging the skill sets across U.K., I., and Europe. To stay on trend, organic growth first, M&A as an accelerator and a capability enabler. [Non-English content]. Back to Konstantin to close out. Yes, let me close out. If you've seen in our vision and our mission, this is a key element of our drive going forward. We will continue to sustainably internationalize our business and further grow. We believe it's a very proven approach. We have shown over the last years, whoever was there a few years ago when I was here, we showed you in an earlier stage how we approach the markets, how we do the analytics, how we find targets, and so on. We are now proving really that we are on a very good track. We find the right targets. We are able to integrate them well, to leverage them across our companies in the market. So it's a very proven approach. We will continue, we will twist and tweak wherever, but you will see us to not leave that track, but stay right on it. I can say to be continued at that point. I would like to hand over to Dirk Müller-Niessner now, who will give you insight about what we are doing around AI. Thank you, Konstantin. You are welcome. Yeah, good morning. Now to something completely different. Sorry for that. My name is Dirk Müller-Niessner. I am CTO for Bechtle in the fourth year now, and I brought some insights of some views that we have, just to let you know. We will start with a small market view. We will have a technology view, then we will take the customer view, and at the end, I will let you have some insights in the Bechtle view. If you look on the market, maybe first, excuse this, but first from the technology side, we see that we came in the past four years from chatting parrots now to useful AI options. We see that it changed now from pilots and from all the use case discussions we had in the past years now to real agentic adoption, agentic lens in the enterprises and in the SMB market. On the other hand, we see some shifts. The market started strongly license-based, so you could buy a Copilot license, for example, per user. Now we see there is a strong shift to tokenized and consumption-based models. On the other hand, we see, first it was how to access a model, how to get, for example, ChatGPT directly, but now we are seeing more advanced models and multi-model agents and agents and autonomous agents and agent networks that has really improved in a very strong way over the past years. The last point is, and maybe just taking the word about security. Okay, yes, there was a lot of enthusiasm. Now it is accountability, and maybe there is some fear, but we believe that accountability is the driver. It is not the fear. Even if we hear all those stories today about technology and how worse it is and how the world will end, this is not our view at the moment. On the other hand, and quite true that you know that. If you are looking at the market spend on generative AI in Europe, then we see or we expect a CAGR of 34% in the next years. There is still a lot of opportunity, but if you see where we are coming from in 2022 and where we have been in 2025, there has already been a big growth for that. Stepping back to what I already said is we have always this motion in IT. They say you have to crawl, then we will walk, run, and then we will fly. If we reflect this on AI, then we see that we start crawling by using models, even if machine learning was decades before that, honestly. Then we move to data and platforms. We really get an idea to attach to the models the data that each and every business has. Then we attached workflows and think now we are there, that you have already not only AI assisting, I will come to that point later, but you have also agents that work for you, and then you will have at the end agent networks that work together. We see this already mostly in the development area where the developers have multi agents that work for them. Then we will have at the end, or that is our belief, we will have autonomous enterprises that even goes beyond the things we see today in the LLM project. On the other hand, what is the role of the VAR? I try to maybe have the same colors there. We started very with advice, bringing all those use cases into life and explaining first how can you use that or what you can do with LLMs. Then we started to architect and secure the needed data. The data is one part of the fuel for AI, the other is energy. In the next phase, you need support to organize all your data. You need to access LLMs. You will need to have an environment where you can run them on premises, for example. Then we will come to the point where we have to support our customers more in the process thing. I have detailed this a little bit more. As I said, we are still doing advice for some customers. Not every customer is now already there using AI, and it might be necessary. We built those cloud environments, we did that already in the past. This is where we have a strong play, as I said, on one hand, in the cloud, on the other hand, on premises. We can then connect all the data pools that are there, or we bring those data together. Very important thing, it's not only about that AI will break out some harnesses and so on, but you need to ensure that the data that you process, only the people that need to know and have access to that data have really access to that data. It's all about securing data, all about securing that the right identity is accessing this, and we have to secure this for our customers. Not only for cyber risks, but also for sovereignty reasons and compliance. The transform thing, maybe to go a little bit deeper into that, and we heard it already from Chris regarding how can we drive efficiency. A big point is to first get to know your processes and then do a review, how can you access or how can you elaborate your processes. Maybe then for the next thing, think about the new process. First thing is to get to know the process, then you will check which step of the process you can optimize, and then maybe you will have a chance to transform the complete process with the use of AI. For sure you have to operate all those environments, if it's not only in the cloud but also on premises. You have to run all those hardware stuff. You have to maintain all the databases, all the fabrics that you need to provide the data and access that. Why do we think that we have a right to win in that era? Let's start with the customer. We already know the customers very well. We have implemented their infrastructure, we have implemented their client environments, we have implemented their networking. We have helped them with their identities. We secure them every day. That's where we think, okay, we know customers best. On the other hand, if you look on the right side where we have the technology ecosystem, we are vendor-agnostic. We are in touch with every big vendors, if you're looking from the hardware perspective, even through software and supporting all those infrastructures. We are a strong security provider, and I think, Chris, you mentioned it already, we have roughly 900 people doing security business. We need that know-how to help our customers in this area. On the other hand, you see this logo, the Ipai logo. I am not sure if you are aware of. This is the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence. It is a strong movement in Heilbronn. We were right at the beginning, part of the Ipai. We have offices there. We have people there that develop our AI technologies for ourselves, and there we are in direct connect with our customers, too. We meet all the SMB and enterprises in Germany and Europe, at the Ipai in Heilbronn, and exchange their current position in the AI play. On the other hand, we help them to get ideas on how to solve those things that they have, and there are several big logos already direct in contact with us, and even public is already there. Maybe to have a few, I will go deep in that, too, but maybe have a few on what are we doing on our own. As Chris said, we have to drive efficiency, too. If we start again from the left side, we try to assist first, so AI assisting. That is what we first did. Give the colleagues a better insight in their daily doing. Maybe for example, if you look for email or if you are looking for meeting notes and all this stuff, that is the first part that we try to optimize. We had a bigger AI adoption plan, I think it was two and a half years ago, where we rolled out already 6,000 Copilot license then. There was some press release around that, and we really pushed the AI adoption through the whole Bechtle team, all over Europe, not only in Germany, all over Europe. We had it in France and Spain, wherever. We really try to, on the one hand, we help with AI assist the colleagues with their day-to-day work. On the other hand, we are really driving AI adoption, that the colleagues get an idea, okay, what can we do more than only assist? That is sometimes very hard for someone sitting there doing the day-to-day work to get an idea what could be the optimization beyond day-to-day work, and that is how we try to drive that. We have several motions there where we have AI acceleration, where we really try to give them, I will not say freedom, but space where they are able to reflect with colleagues and peers on how can we improve there. Then we take those ideas out of the field, so to say, because they are always knowing processes better than maybe we are from a higher level. Then we develop those AI features and functions, and then we roll it out to all the colleagues. There are some mentioned here from operating level and what we are really doing. One thing is I mentioned the Copilot rollout. The next thing is the BechtleGPT. That is our own version because not everyone has a Copilot license. That's why we said, okay, we need to develop our own LLM stuff where colleagues can access AI features. I will show on the next slide TenderX, and Next Best Actions, and as I said, AI-assisted development, I mentioned that earlier, is where we have our senior developers that develop our own platforms. We have them already attached to, for example, Anthropic and other models to elaborate and use agentic networks to provide new software parts or even develop faster than in the past. We see there quite good motions. Some details. The first thing is TenderX. As I'm sure you're aware of, we have a big public business and there are a lot of tenders, and these tenders are quite complex. We have developed an AI solution internally for us to work on those tenders in a faster way so that we can get an impression, okay, so the reason for the tender is that simple. You don't need AI for that. But maybe if you vote, how is your success rate and what do you need on capabilities, and what are the other constraints that you have in the tender? That's why we have built this so-called TenderX. We used our own technology. We bought, several years ago, Planet AI for that, and they are highly developing this together with the public division. I think the public division was last year here or for two years before in the capital market days and provided how they fuse this on public. Again, this is one of the examples that comes out of Bechtle, out of the real operations, that there's a need to improve, and we took that need and we developed the TenderX environment. This runs fairly enough on our own hardware. It's on-premises stuff because there's a lot of IP in it, and that shows that it's not only about to work only with the hyperscalers. We do IT and AI really on premises at the moment and try to bring those special features on-site, on premises. The next thing is Next Best Action. That's for our selling colleagues. What we are doing there is we analyze our own data, and I mentioned that data is very much needed. We analyze our customer data there and get an idea, okay, what are the signals out of the existing data to drive customer business? Easy example is there's a hardware we sold three years ago or five years ago. Then we run the Next Best Action motion and the AI come back and say, okay, these are the customers that need extended warranty or they need a hardware exchange and so on. Yes, you can do that maybe in other ways, but it's quite faster, the Next Best Action, and we bring all those insights that we gain out of our own data then in our CRM platform. We are taking our own data, mix it up, analyze it, and then push it to our CRM systems to give the sales guys those informations on their fingertips. Last on this slide, but there are more, is supply chain optimization. We started that two years ago. We really try to get all these workshops optimized. The warehouse, sorry. As we mentioned before, there are spread warehouses in Europe. We are then able to check and to determine, okay, what could be the best place for goods? Then we can redistribute them or bring them right there. Maybe it is better to have, I do not know, ARTICONA equipment in Hamburg than in Paris, for example, and that is part of those things that we do with the supply chain optimization. So maybe knowing what is the need, where to place it, and allocate those resources right before that. Leaving our own, maybe a few on what will be ahead, and there is a lot of discussion. I have not focused now on the security discussions we have around AI, but more on the things. Today, we built this transformation business that will take us for a while. I am sure this will not stop. It has landed, and it will not go away. It is the next big IT era, fairly enough to say. For the next two to five years, we see there is a strong discussion and movement at the moment for sovereign AI and sovereign cloud. We see that not only in Europe, this is a worldwide thing, but in Europe, we see there is a strong ask for that, not only from public, from our SMB and enterprise customers, too. This will drive us for the next two to five years because regulation is not ready. You know as Europeans, we always start with regulation. But it will come, and it will be faster. We are quite sure maybe you read the CRA documents from the EU already. They are in the preface, but that shows a little bit there is the direction and how the public looks on AI and sovereign infrastructure. The next thing that we see is physical AI readiness. Robotic will come, and I am quite sure that we will have some stakes in there, even if I do not know now today what it will be. But on the other hand, physical AI will need network. They will need to be connected somehow. They will need to get access to other data. So that will be an area where we really have a closer look, and for sure, I phrased it here like quantum cryptography. Yes, there are already some effects we see on quantum that will extend, and there is a speedup, too. Maybe it is more in the security way at the moment how we can secure data in future. But on the other hand, for the next 5-10 years, all those quantum solutions for complex tasks will be for sure on our radar. We have already sold one quantum computer to the University of Heilbronn some weeks ago. But that is a very little start, but we will have that on our radar for the future, even if this is not our home stake at the moment. On the other hand, coming back to the other things that will happen is on the one thing, the artificial general intelligence, AGI, that is for the techies already discussed deeply. We do not know when we will reach it, but we think that this will have an impact of our business. On the one hand, as we deliver infrastructure, maybe we can help our customers there again with data and access. The third topic here is the entire autonomous enterprise. If we combine that what we have today with AI and if we look for physical AI in the future, then maybe it is really possible that the enterprises will really run autonomous, and we will help them to run those things. It will take us a while, but pretty sure they will need IT, and that's why I think and believe that they need Bechtle. Martin? Yes. Thank you very much, Dirk. Thanks to everyone who did the presentation here today. As a first proof of our focus on efficiency, we are ahead of our time, which is great because we have now the opportunity to have really an in-depth Q&A session, which I will open right now. In a first step, we will have questions from people attending here in person in Frankfurt. Once we have all questions from in Frankfurt, we will open the Q&A session to the virtual room as well. Now everyone who has some questions, I already saw the first one was Florian Treisch. Please go ahead. You will have a micro from one of my colleagues. Just one second, please. Good morning, and thanks for taking my question. My question would be around the 2030 ambition. I really appreciate your 5% EBT margin, which I believe is implying some decent ambition here. If I look at the above EUR 10 billion business volume, you would probably agree this does not really look ambitious compared to what you have delivered in the past. Clearly, what have you put in as a buffer? Now pricing is probably a big tailwind. Are you expecting it to turn into a headwind? To get your thought around, you have obviously intentionally be a bit shy here to add details. The partial success of CFO. Yeah, absolutely. No, on a serious note, when you look at the numbers, that's why I put them into context to understand where we come from, where we are, and where we want to go. Of course, you would say like getting from 3.6% - 5% sounds ambitious. Getting from a guidance of more than 9.5%-10% or more than 10%, you're like, hmm, yeah, not as ambitious. I think two things to note. Number one, when we set that ambition, it was several years ago. This kind of statement, we've had that out there for quite a while, number one. We say we don't update it every quarter. We look at it on an annual basis. We have a midterm planning process. In particular, when we started this year, we had the same discussion. It's like, look, is that still ambitious enough? But with all the development in the marketplace around memory chip crisis, availability, and the uncertainty in the marketplace that we saw, we felt timing was not the right timing to basically update that ambition that we have. Therefore, our statement is basically we'll cross the bridge when we get there. We will see how this year is going to play out. We currently have the next phase of our three-year planning process. At the beginning of October, we have a small group of our senior leadership team coming together, having exactly that discussion. Also having gained some experience now with the memory chip crisis. I think once we've delivered this year, we will know where the right number will be. Until then, we'll stick with the figures that we have out there. Okay. Next question was from Martin Jungfleisch. Yeah. Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I've also a follow-up to Florian's questions on the 2030 targets. Can you split out a bit what is the underlying assumptions on that? You mentioned M&A is a piece, so can you quantify that a bit in terms of growth, how much that would add? And then also what's the underlying market size? What are you expecting in terms of market growth, and what are you expecting in terms of market share? Maybe that's a start. Thank you. What we don't share is the entire model, as you might expect, right? What we can share is some of the key assumptions. To answer some of your questions, number one, in terms of M&A, and I indicated that on the slide, the contribution we expect in the model coming from M&A is really minimal. So we're not banking on buying companies that have an EBT margin of more than 5% to help us to get to the 5%. That's not the focus item here. It's all about strategic fit. It's about finding the right targets and integrating them into the company. But in terms of contribution to the 5%, it's absolutely minimal. So it's going to come from the first two. When we then look at the other question you had around underlying market growth, when you compare the usual suspects, when you look at Gartner, when you look at IDC, what you find there normally is market size of IT budgets of around about 7%, 8%. Now with the change in memory chip pricing, that will probably change over the next years. But when you just look at pure market sizing, that's the assumption that's still baked into the model. And we expect to grow ahead of market. That's where we normally are. When you look at our current performance in Germany in particular, I think after the second quarter, it was fair to say that we gained market share. So I think we've proven that we can do it. So that's as much as we can share at this point in time. Obviously, we've done the detailed modeling around growth, around productivity improvement, along the levers that we outlined. I think it wouldn't be appropriate to basically share all the details around it. That is more about, do we have the proof points that we can do it? Yes, we do. Is the market sizing, is the market potential there? Absolutely. Do we address the right topics in terms of levers and measures that we're building? We think we do. Therefore, it's about credibility, and not about the very detailed numbers. Okay, thank you. I have just a follow-up. Maybe also when you look on the AI side of things, where would you see yourself benefit the most? Is it more on the hardware side? Is it more on the software side? For example, would you see more growth, for example, from AI PCs, to one of your SMB customers? Or would it be where maybe you move into data centers? Or is it maybe on the services side? Thank you. I personally, I'm sure the colleagues will add, but what you see on the market side, it's really the answer I think is across the board. Number one, when you look at what our customers are telling us, they need an AI transformation partner. Most of the SME customers that we're dealing with, they don't have an army of IT strategists running around telling them, okay, this is what you should do. They turn to us, and basically say, look, this is our IT strategy. This is our AI strategy, to the extent they have one. Then they ask us, what's the right infrastructure? How should we build it over time? What are the risks? It's a much more consultative approach than it used to be, even more consultative than it used to be. They're looking at us to be their AI transformation partner. Therefore, I think, the opportunity is in the services space, it's in the hardware space, it's in the data center space. It really goes across the board. That's what we see in the marketplace. Go ahead. One thing I'd like to add, sorry for that. Yeah, go ahead. Dealing with the AI question, I think it's important to differentiate between two dimensions. You already had a discussion on the first dimension with us, which is, let me put it that way, the outside dimension. We deliver the fuel to drive AI on our customer side. That is what we are right now discussing. Do not forget, especially if you ask for the assumptions for bringing up the profitability, the inside dimension. Dirk mentioned it, and Chris mentioned it. Also, we use AI as a really powerful tool to increase productivity and effectiveness regarding our own processes in all we do. That is important and that's why we need to take into account both dimensions, the outside dimension and the inside dimension, to bring up productivity at the end of the day and to increase effectiveness. I would like to add something on the outside view. Chris mentioned it is across the board. If you look at it, we just had this week a very senior meeting with one of our key OEMs. If you look at it a few years ago, there was a debate about if our business model is still viable because of the cloud PCs will go away and everybody is running around with a screen and so on, and that is all. Today we are talking about huge fat clients at the edge. Even PC manufacturers building kind of data centers under the table to complement a notebook and notebooks running 24 /7 through the tokenomics, we will all use our agents as much as possible on edge devices. We are in a very sweet spot because on the one hand, our traditional, very also transactional value-added reselling with hardware installations rollout will have a real tailwind very positively, but also the deployments of data center of consultative services, recurring structures around enabling the customers in making AI come to life in their environments. We are playing in all of these fields, and all of these fields are very positively impacted by AI. From an outside view, it is definitely a very nice spot to be in at the moment. From an inside view, we put a lot of emphasis with different projects and elements to become better, faster every day. Next question was from Sinan Doganli. Oh, okay. Then it is Andreas Wolf. Thank you. Thank you for taking my question. It's Andreas Wolf, Berenberg. It's impressive to see what Bechtle has achieved so far, and I'm looking forward to what Bechtle has set as targets. Just on 2030, it used to be a vision. Now you're talking about targets. There is a slightly different connotation. How shall we look at the 2030 numbers? It seems like you want us to hard code those into our models. The second question is on the product and service mix as a major lever to drive profitability. My understanding so far has been that this has always been part of Bechtle's business to improve the product mix underneath the surface. What's going to be different going forward? The last question is on efficiency gains, which is an important lever of your margin expansion, until 2030. If I look at other peers, also big peers, not necessarily the smaller ones, it seems like they are following the same route, or a similar route. Why do you believe Bechtle will be able to capture the efficiency gains rather than having to pass them on to clients in tender situations? Thank you. Okay. Maybe let me take the first one. First of all, I would never tell you what to put into your model, right? That's what you get paid for. On a serious note, when we put it out there, we said that we have a vision and we have an underlying We have several components that we put in as mission statements because we said the vision will not change, but the mission components might change over time and we might update them. We always said, for us, 2030, the numbers that we put out there were part of the mission statement or of the mission component. For us it was always an ambition, right? So, apologies if we move between, this is our ambition, this is the target. It is basically what we are aiming at and what we have built a plan to get to. This is the ambition that we have as a company. When you look at how we guide the capital market, it's always year- after- year. Therefore, I wouldn't put that into any model. But the point is, this is our ambition. So we try to illustrate basically what are we thinking about mid and long term. That's how I would qualify it. The second question around products and services. When you look at the margin profile, it's simple math exercise, right? When you look at the margin profile of hardware, software resale and services, when you do it right, the margin profile of services component is much more attractive, right? When you look at how we deliver that today, because of our rather decentral model, we have quite a few pockets of excellence. Yes, doing service delivery and providing services has always been part of the Bechtle model. Totally agree. What we try to do is really leverage those pockets of excellence on a much broader scale. When you look at some of the system houses we have in Germany, they are known as the center of expertise for certain managed services. We do not yet, leverage those services on a global scale. That is what we are trying to get to. Because, in many areas, I think we see potential and when done right, you can add incremental margin to the overall profile and therefore, optimize the mix that you have. Then your last question around productivity levers, why do we believe we can basically drive that versus some of our competitors? Number one. When you just look at the pure data, and I think I have shown it on one of the slides. When you just look at the overall productivity level of the group and just take EBIT as percent of gross margin or gross profit as a metric, you see there is quite a difference in performance right now for various reasons. Historic reasons, business-related reasons, various reasons. Therefore, just looking at the pure numbers, the potential is absolutely there. For me personally, and us as a management team, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to benefit from practices that we have in one part of the organization, in other parts of the organization. There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to increase the level of productivity across the board, number one. And two, also when you look at just a pure EBIT margin profile, you saw that gap between the various parts of the organization. I think it is all about. Bringing it together, working on it as one, and leveraging these benefits across the group. Short answer is, A, because the numbers clearly tell us the potential is there. B, when you talk to the management teams, they are totally up for it and they say, yes, we want to work together. We want to leverage best practices across the group. And number three, in various parts, we have shown we can do it. Look at profitability level that we have, for example, in Germany. We have shown we can do it. It takes time, of course it does, but we know we can do it. Next question is from Andreas Schmitz. Yeah. I think there's a lot of discussion about productivity and how it's going to be measured as a result of AI improvement. I think it's difficult to judge it because we have several elements. We have the cost of energy, we have the cost of agents and so on. Maybe I would leave it on a level of EBIT per employee, because then it's the final cost, which is even in it. You said there's an inside effect and an external effect. EBIT per employee was more or less flat in the recent years. You were only able to grow by extra personal and then increase the EBIT. To reach the higher margin, I think you should see from AI or other things an effect on per employee EBIT, and that's maybe diluted by international expansion, somewhat. Now the question is, what do you see in terms of real improvement in underlying profitability of companies not eaten up by AI costs, let's say, internally and by your clients? When you look at how we measure and how we drive productivity, we have shown a few examples of solutions that we have already built and that we're using internally. Dirk was talking about agents that we have built that support the sales cycle. We can see that the level of productivity improvement is really quite significant. Take, for example, Next Best Action. For that program, we've built a business case, and it shows clearly that using AI technology, leveraging the data that we have, it really allows us to drive productivity. Because in the old days, you would have had an army of people digging through the data, identifying the target customers, building a campaign, starting to deliver on the campaign, and then trying to measure progress. This is now done, not within weeks, this is done within days, number one. Number two, when you look at the impact that you generate, you can generate the impact much quicker than you used to be able to do so. That is just one example where we've built sales campaigns that are really successful, and the business case, only on a very small scale, shows productivity improvement. That's one thing. The second thing we have built is a tool that allows you to, for example, when you're the customer and I'm the salesperson, and you tell me about your architectural requirements, you tell me about your objectives, you tell me about your challenges, and you would allow a piece of AI technology to listen in on our call. Then for me as the salesperson, during the call, I would get proposals delivered by the AI agent in terms of how I could help you, from a technical perspective, what kind of solutions I could offer you, what would be the benefits for you. In the old days, you and I would be on the phone for an hour. I would take that away, go through my notes, come up with two or three alternatives, go back to you and say, look, would that work? Would that work? Would that work? And then we would talk about pricing. It would take ages to do that. In the meantime, we've built an AI agent that does it live on the call. So theoretically, you could place an order right after the call. These are just. again, these are on a very small scale at present, but just imagine doing that at scale, really delivering that across the board. What kind of productivity improvement you could deliver. And that, again, that's just small pilots that we've built. If I might add, if you look at the development of our headcount over the last two years, you can already see that it's more or less flat on our organic level. What we always say internally, if we have a discussion on that, what you asked for, the process itself doesn't really need to change. The way we run the process, that has to change by using AI tools. And we can't give you really a figure where the potential is. Is it 10%, 20%, perhaps even more? It depends mainly on the process element you look at, and that is right for Bechtle, and that is right for our customers as well. So there is, from my perspective, no really reliable overall figure which says there is a potential of whatsoever 20%-30%. Maybe we have a potential of 25% regarding our inside sales. If you look at the customer side, if you look at our multi-channel approach, it is probably below that. That is not really reliable, and that is why we do not deal with any specific figures on that. Sorry, wait for the microphone so that everybody can hear you. I do not doubt the productivity improvements internally, what you gave us the example. Not at all. Maybe it is even more than that. The question is, how much is kept on the bottom line? How much you spend on agent costs, on gigabytes, on tokens and other things. What is the trade-off? At what time do you get profitable, let's say? When you look at the solutions I just described, and the small business cases we have built, they add to our profitability. Net, they are positive in terms of the improvement profitability. The challenge for us is, and we've built a plan, we're working on that right now, is really to roll it out globally, right? Not to have pockets of excellence, but to really scale the whole solution and drive it across the board. That's why when you look at the productivity levers, the first one is so important, that we harmonize our process landscape across the board so that we can really deploy that at scale. But it's also true what you related to that. Of course, we are also with many projects we are building in a, I would call it initialization phase. Where you do investments in building something, and we then need to select, as usual in such a phase, you also have projects that you stop at some point. We have others that we select to drive forward, where we are investing, and then they need to get to that phase of scale. That makes it sometimes difficult to exactly per project define. We do have an AI board established where we are evaluating all these projects. We don't just open the floodgates to everybody developing whatever they want, but we try to put some boundaries and controls in to make early decisions where to invest and where to put money in to really drive efficiency or also to drive new go-to-market initiatives. That needs a bit of time because it doesn't only affect the systems. It affects the process itself. That's why we need a lot of in-depth discussions dealing with that question because the whole organization is affected by this on a process level. Not to underestimate, if you want to do it properly, the security and sovereignty layer is very important. Absolutely. There's a lot around data protection, as you know, and so on that might make it specifically in Europe a little bit slower, but also a little bit safer. Hopefully. Next question is from Lars Vom Cleff, Deutsche Bank. Yeah. Thank you very much. Good morning. I'll give you a two-minute break, and I would like to use the opportunity to ask James a question. Especially given that Chris hides your beautiful business under other European. Thank you very much for the details you've given us. I would be interested in the current market share Bechtle has in the U.K., maybe your market position, or also against the background of the strong competitive situation with Computacenter, Softcat, you name them. Maybe you could help us understand what percentage stake of group revenue currently is generated in the U.K., whether there's any intention to grow that relatively. Then, of course, a question on the margin. Is the U.K. business more profitable than the group, or is it less profitable? Yeah. Some good questions there. I think in terms of the actual market size, I think you can see from the slide I put up earlier, the market is vast, but it also depends how you break that down in terms of the actual TAM of our existing market. Clearly we have some room to grow against the likes of a Softcat and a Computacenter, but we're also gaining share there. Almost more importantly, we're gaining share across the piece. So we're taking share from other smaller resellers. We're looking for the opportunities, as I talked about, to consolidate the market and grow in that sense. So I think the opportunity for us to grow is definitely there, and we're really excited about it. And we believe having built the platform, like I said earlier, around those bigger enterprise customers, about deepening our share within each customer, which we already have. That will increase our share considerably over the next few years. And the second part of your question? Was about the relative stake of revenues you are generating or group revenues generated in the U.K.- Sure. whether there is an intention to grow that. Isn't it in our segment reporting? Isn't it? Isn't it? Well, I only see other Europe, but I might be. You saw James in his slide showed the revenue where we are in the U.K. Okay. Then I can do my math. He also shared the relative profitability. Yeah. It is above average. It is above average. The answer is it's always above average. Without disclosing the exact number, it is above average. What is more importantly even, it has improved over the last years with bringing these businesses in, adding more services businesses with the acquisitions of ACS, Qolcom. We have elevated our EBT percentage in the U.K. above company average and above where we came from before the acquisitions on a purely transactional model. I would like to add one thing. If you look at the classical channel reseller news and so on rankings, few years ago, we were ranking in the U.K. somewhere below the top 25. We have clearly leapfrogged. I don't know exactly where we stand right now, but we have really leapfrogged in those rankings and are clearly visible. Our friends from Softcat and Computacenter do see us in the rearview mirror in the meanwhile. They didn't in the past. They didn't care in the past, yes. Just to help you out with the numbers, it is 384 divided by 6.4 billion. That is the share of the U.K. revenue piece. Okay. I guess I have Ben with me. He can help me with that one. Let us open the Excel model. Then I know it is about the medium-term strategy and the outlook, but given the current environment, I cannot let you go without a comment on Q3, whether momentum is maintaining. Where you see the market, how you see your quarter developing? Well, I would say not much has changed versus the last time we spoke when we were in London, which was what? Two weeks ago, roughly. Quite frankly, Q2 went really well. We said we were quite pleased with the development. We also saw the first two months of the quarter going really in the right direction. So quite pleased there as well. Therefore, I can only repeat what Dr. Olemotz and I said at the beginning of the year. We will manage through the year. We will manage in a very careful way. We will look at the guidance quarter- after- quarter. We provide an update and an upgrade on the guidance after the second quarter. So I think we will continue on that path. So we will collect proof point after proof point. Until today, it is going really well. We are managing well. We are growing the way that we want to grow. Therefore, no change versus two weeks ago. Well, the structure of the development, which led to the performance over the year is still in place in Q3 as well. If I might add, as you know, and we always mentioned, and especially in the third quarter, the last month is the most decisive. So after the vacation period, September- Absolutely, yes. really bringing the most- Yeah. the best signals where Q3 is heading to. Now the next question, unfortunately, I don't have your name. Katharina Fiedler, also Deutsche Bank. First of all, thanks a lot for your presentation and taking the time. Bechtle has definitely demonstrated its ability to gain market share even in those challenging end market conditions. What gives you confidence and what tangible evidence do you see today that Bechtle is continuing to be in this strong competitive position or even continues to outperform competition? Building on that, which key metrics or indicators would you or even do you put focus on over the next one to two years to assess this storyline or continuing improvement? Okay. So maybe for your first question, what gives us the confidence to continue to deliver in line with our expectations? When you look at the performance over the first two quarters, I think we had enough proof points. In the current market environment, I think it's about two things. One, having access to product, which you measure through order income, your order backlog, and your growth rates. We've demonstrated that we're growing in that direction. We have a record order backlog. We had a record order backlog at the beginning of the year, and we keep adding to that. It's not that we're robbing our order backlog to deliver the numbers, but we keep adding to that. It's one thing. The second thing is how do you manage increased prices? Can you pass them on to your customers or not? The KPI we use for that is our gross margin. Gross margin year- over- year was pretty much in line with what we had delivered previous year. Therefore, that gives us the right proof points and the right data points. When you look forward, obviously before we changed the guidance, we had an in-depth review with all our salespeople around expectations for the rest of the year, order backlog, pipeline reviews. These are the things that you normally do. Then you put growth rates, order backlog, plus margin profile together, and you come to a conclusion. That's how we run and drive the business. Therefore, I think we have all the proof points we need, and we continue in that direction. Two drivers I'd like to add. The first one is the general economic development in the SMB segment, which is still key for Bechtle. As you know, it's still the backbone of our business. The second one is the development in our public business, especially in Q4. We already saw a really strong Q4 in the last year, especially in December. There's still a way to go to catch up the development over the year, but we are really confident that we will see a good business, especially in December in our public segment. Let me add a little bit some soft factors, maybe because you asked for a further outlook for the next years and so on. One side, I think from our portfolio, we are very well-balanced from services, managed services, hardware, and so on. We're in the client space, in the data center space, so we're pretty well-balanced. So we're able to provide breadth and depth. I think our market coverage, as I also showed earlier, is even on a global range, exceptionally well-positioned. We can support customers around the globe. Another element for me is we have an extremely positive feedback from our vendor partners, how we are developing, how we are growing, also compared with some of our peers. That is always for us an internal, very important proof point. What is the feedback we're getting from our vendor partners about how we are behaving in the market, how we are acting in the market, and how we are growing versus others? It's a little bit more a soft factor, but it's something that is very valuable for us to see how we are doing. Maybe I could just add one point there as well. Internally, as an internal metric, we track very carefully their average margin per customer. That is something which we are looking to increase the whole time. So that is a measure of our penetration and the ownership of each customer, especially with that aim of selling more of the technology pillars into each customer. Which is important to incentive our sales reps at the end of the day. Okay, next question is from Yannik Siering. Great. Thank you. Three questions from my side, please. The first one would be on volumes and pricing. On the last call, you mentioned that more than half of the growth at the moment comes from pricing. I would assume that at some point until 2030 that will normalize and volume growth actually comes back kicking in. Maybe you could talk about the relevance of that as quite a headwind on the margin side. The second one would be on OEM relationships. You mentioned about the strong relationships that you have. We have seen that some OEMs actually report incoming orders growing more than three times faster than revenues at the moment. So maybe you could provide an update on how you view the supply chain at the moment and availability of certain components. The first one, on the region in France. You talked about U.K. being above average in terms of margins. France, I think it is fair to assume and fair to say that it is below average, actually. Maybe you could talk about the challenges that you are facing there, and also about the timeline on bringing France towards group margins, at least, in the midterm. Thank you. Let me take the first two. In terms of volume and pricing. Yes, we said that, in terms of growth rates that we saw in the second quarter, more than half of that was price-driven. When I look at the current model that we have, we assume a similar scenario over the years to come. Now, the question is going to be how is that going to develop? That is why we also said we do not provide an update on the ambition that we have for 2030 in terms of the EUR 10 billion because we would have to see how that is going to play out over the fourth quarter. Normally, what you get is, during the fourth quarter, you get an outlook on 2027 and beyond. In terms of our current model, we assumed that trend to continue, but we would have to revise that once we know more about the fourth quarter and the outcome of 2026. This is as much as we can say at this point in time. In terms of the OEM relationships, actually it is quite interesting because our relationships with the OEMs are really positive. When we think about feedback we are getting, how we are positioning ourselves in the marketplace. You saw the OEM universe that we are working with, more than 270 OEMs. It is really a pretty broad portfolio. And we do have access to product, and that goes across the board. You see the growth rates and they are clearly demonstrating that we have access to product because we are still growing. Now, what has changed interestingly after the second quarter, in the past, we were always seen as partner our customers, basically discussing these increased prices with the OEMs, and helping the customers in that respect. Now, after we put out our Q2 results and we increased the guidance, we had quite a few larger customers coming back to us and say, oh, we thought you were our friends. You were trying to help us. Now you are putting out an increased guidance. Some of the customers were not too happy about that, but there is not much you can do. But in general, I would say that our relationship with the OEMs across the board is really good, which you can see in the growth numbers that we are producing. To add to that, we are really successful in managing with our customers, them understanding where the price increases come from. We are able to manage that quite well. What you just said about some customers, of course, saying, okay, the vendors do very strong announcements now you as well. Why do we not benefit from all that? We are managing that quite well. On the OEM relationships and looking forward, the price spikes we have seen are slowing down, but we are far away, very far away from a trend that we could even expect memory prices going down or having overproduction or anything like this. What we are hearing in the market is that before 2028, there will be no relief around memory demand and so on because that is how long it takes to build new production lines in Korea and so on. We see the prices of components, what we hear from the OEMs, not peaking anymore, as crazy as it has been over the last 12 months. But it is not going down. It continues to increase, but on a more reasonable level, whatever reasonable is. On France, maybe I can add something. Also, when we look to our competitors, France is maybe the most challenged market at the moment microeconomically. We have ourselves done a lot of projects, regardless of that, to improve our setup going forward. We have invested a lot last year into building a new warehouse space with our subsidiary inmac micro. Sorry, with inmac. We have built a totally new warehouse that has slowed us down to a certain extent as well, of course, because the big new warehouse, all the move and so on. We have some homemade topics where we have developed, but we are now back on a growth track. Actually, also there, we are performing better now than our competition there, despite we are still on a more challenged level at the moment. I expect that to last this year, a little bit into next year, but we are really seeing that we are making good steps forward in benefiting from all the investments we have done in the last 18 months. We even, if I might add, develop better in France than most of our vendor partners. Yeah. Which is surprising to see, but that is a fact. I don't know anybody in the industry, when you mention France, who starts smiling. There's a follow-up question from Andreas Wolf. Yes, thank you. Two follow-up questions, if I may. The first one is on the internationalization of sales. Is it right to assume that you will add an additional layer, or will you use existing capacity to address clients internationally? How shall we think of that? Is it an additional investment phase that might be ahead? Just to improve my understanding of that topic. The second question is on the OEM bonuses. Could you share with us what you've tailored into your 2030 ambition in terms of bonus contribution compared to the last 10 years? Thank you. I can cover the sales capacity. We're not heavily investing in this. We are fortunate enough to have very good salespeople in our organizations, but it's more an orchestration job we're doing there. That we are allowing sales reps to have a more international role when they have a customer who deserves that. We're not specifically investing. Of course, we're continuously trying to get great salespeople on board, but not specifically adding a layer across our countries and companies. That we are not doing. We are leveraging what we have and do this in a community approach in working together, regulations around that, et cetera. This is not an area where we are putting money in strongly. In terms of your second question, I hope you understand we do not disclose details of our model. Otherwise, I could just send you the spreadsheet, and you could have a look for yourself. No, seriously, in terms of front end and back end rebates, and margins that we achieve there, of course, we are trying to improve the margin profile overall. But it is not mainly driven by improving the hardware-software margin. It is mainly driven by adding service components to the overall portfolio. Therefore, when you look at our performance also this year, I have to say we are doing quite well in terms of the rebates and the thresholds that we are hitting. Therefore, I think we are doing a pretty good job this year. Whether we can improve that performance by 2030 remains to be seen. The majority of that is really going to come from the services side. The other comment to that is, we do not see fundamental changes in the behavior of our vendor partners. We see partially that they are more focused on investing in growth areas versus just volume areas when it comes to back end and marketing money, which plays in our favor because we do a lot of things where we exactly show these growth initiatives, be it internationalization, but also being the breadth of the portfolio. We are not concerned. We are managing that very closely with all the programs and everything, but we more see at the moment a tendency, what I mentioned earlier also about the consolidation of the market to a certain extent, that vendors are more looking to us versus spreading too thin. So we are not concerned. Okay, now I got it right. Next question is from [Fernando Anli]. Yes, thank you. On the margin target for 2030, you showed that one of the levers will be the product mix or the services mix, increased share of services, I guess. Germany and Benelux, it's my understanding, are already quite strong on the services side. It's more maybe France and other European markets. My question is, what's the strategy to increase the services share in these markets? Is it more coming from M&A or are there also opportunities to leverage existing expertise from Germany and France into the other European markets, and how would that work exactly? Well, the general approach is, as I mentioned earlier, we have certain areas where we have pockets of excellence in terms of services. Managed services, some of the professional services as well. What we are trying to do is really leverage those pockets of excellence globally or all over Europe if you look at our current footprint. Therefore, it's not like one or the other, and we're not banking on M&A activities to drive the service portfolio. It's really for us, when we look at some of the offerings, they're quite high margin. They're done really well, but they're done on a much smaller scale than they could be done. Therefore, we're expanding existing capabilities across Europe. When you look at the breadth and the depth of the offering that we have, it's probably the biggest in Germany, simply because of the number of years that we've been operating in Germany. What we're trying to do is provide a similar sized offering also outside of Germany. There, because we have acquired companies over time, they don't have the same level of integration and the same level of maturity and breadth and depth that we have in Germany. These are the two things. One, take the pockets of excellence, drive them globally. The second thing is work on the level of maturity and breadth and depth of the general offering, in particular outside Germany. We are not banking on M&A, as Chris said, but M&A is still a very important part of our strategy, increasing our service business and solution business in the future. Looking forward, you will see additional mergers and acquisitions over the last years. As you have been used to in the past. Are there any further questions here in Frankfurt? Seems not to be the case. I hand over to the virtual room and to our operator. Yes. Thank you very much. Indeed, we have a question, a raised hand from Mr. Bharath Nagaraj. Mr. Nagaraj, you should be able to unmute yourself, turn on the microphone and ask your question. Please, Mr. Nagaraj. Thank you. Bharath here from Cantor Fitzgerald. Hope you can hear me. It is probably a question you answered a few times now, but just maybe a slightly different version of it. Given the scale and pace of the AI infra build-out that you talk about in Europe, the 34% CAGR, what are you doing differently to capture more of that opportunity? Given those trends and given your heavyweight in Europe, why does not that AI opportunity lead you to a more ambitious 2030 target? I know you said you probably have not updated that right now, waiting for the end of the year, but just taking a slice of the EUR 290 billion European AI spend. If you take a portion of that goes to the channel, you would still add billions of business volume. Am I right about that? Thank you. In terms of the AI opportunity all over Europe, what we see in the marketplace is twofold. One is, as I said earlier, in particular in the SME space, we see a lot of our customers coming to us asking for support in terms of the transformational approach that they should take. They want to know what their AI strategy should be. They look at us as a transformation partner. So there, you have an opportunity that is twofold. One is, you can provide more hardware and software in terms of the solution that they need to drive their own AI adoption and AI strategy. Two, it is more a service-related approach so that the service part of the offering becomes bigger, because we have to spend more time and energy on basically advising them on how they should deploy their AI strategy. That is how we capture the opportunity in Europe. Okay. Understood. Just taking a slice of the EUR 290 billion, you should potentially see a lot more business volume added. Is that a fair statement or am I missing something there? Well, we do expect an increase in terms of the business volume. To what extent exactly? I think it's difficult to tell. Because what we see is that has really picked up, in particular over the last two quarters. I think we need a bit of a longer trend to identify the opportunity that is ahead of us. What we do see is we do see significant growth, and we also do see a significant increase in customer requirements to advise them on AI strategy. But I think it's too early to tell what the potential would be for that by 2030. Okay. Thank you. Just one other question from me, please. One of your peers talked about Microsoft's 2027 incentive framework, confirming that Microsoft is talking about a 5% margin reduction in some products like 365, OneDrive and SharePoint. Just wanted to get your thoughts on that impact and the impact for Bechtle. Yeah, we saw Microsoft last year as well doing big changes to their program. Of course, they are sometimes to a certain extent challenging. But as you've seen last year with the changes, we managed that very well. It actually, to a certain extent, plays in our favor because they are really upping their incentives around growth initiatives, around value creation with the customers. That's where we are very well set up for, because on the one hand, we are efficiently able to manage all the classical contractual environments like the CSP contracts and so on. On the other hand, we have very good capabilities around delivering the value around our customers that Microsoft would like us to see develop, and that's where we get incremental incentives and additional margins to work with. Therefore, our model in working there is changing to a certain extent. It's less pure license-oriented, but on the other hand, it's not playing in our disadvantage overall. We are still, if I might add, we are still one of the largest partners all over Europe, and that's why Microsoft relies on Bechtle regarding the developments you asked for. Understood. Thank you. Thanks for the color and thanks for the presentation. Thanks. Sure. Great. Thank you. There are two questions in the chat. First is from Laurent Picard, Bellevue. European IT spending is expected to grow at a mid to high single-digit rate over the coming years, and Bechtle has historically outgrown its market. Is there any structural reason why that should change, or should we expect continued organic market outperformance through 2030? I do not see any reason why there should be a change in the structural development that we see. When we look at our expectations over the next years, we expect to continue on that journey. Obviously, this year in particular, we are doing really well in Germany, and we have gained market share in Germany from our competitors. But when you look at it through a European lens, I would expect us to continue on that journey. Thank you. Next question comes from Chris Tong, UBS. With artificial intelligence, is there a greater focus on certain segments like cloud servers or services? How do you see this mix shift changing in the midterm? Well, maybe let me give you my view on that. I do not see a real shift as such right now. When you look at our activities in the marketplace, we are addressing the requirements around cloud infrastructure. We are investing into our own cloud infrastructure as well to drive AI development. But when you look at it through a market lens, I do not see any major shifts there driving a change in how we address the market. No, I agree. Sorry, give me a second. I think we will continue to see investments in data centers and so on. In the product mix overall, I think what is exceptional is that there will be a lot of compute coming to the edge because of tokenomics and so on. That is maybe the biggest shift that we will see there over the next few years, which does not mean that the other elements go down. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that from the technical side, totally agree. We see that this tokenization that happens now, and we expect that this will drive the customers to bring things on premises again. As I think Konstantin mentioned earlier, we see also a shift in the notebook or in the personal devices. We see that there will be capabilities that will be local on the device, even if there may not be all data on the device, but we see that there is a shift already, and we expect that to come. Fairly enough, from a technical perspective, we expected that earlier, but through silicon shortages and so on, this might be postponed for the next, I do not know, 12 or 18 months. Yeah. Yeah. [Non-English content] Okay, thank you very much. No more questions virtually. Last call for questions here in Frankfurt. Everyone seems to be satisfied. Thank you very much, everyone attending here in Frankfurt in person or virtually to our Capital Markets Day. I say goodbye to all those who have attended virtually. I invite everyone here attending in person to have a slight lunch with us and maybe some further discussions. Thank you very much and have a good day. Thank you.