Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby open this year's annual general meeting of Deutsche Telekom AG, and my name is Frank Appel. According to the Articles of Incorporation, I assume the chairmanship. On behalf of the supervisory board and the board of management, I would like to welcome you, the shareholders and shareholder representatives, as well as representatives of the press and our guests here in Bonn. If now and from now on I use the German masculine form, this is merely for the sake of linguistic simplification; the German masculine form includes all genders, of course. We are very much pleased to welcome you again this year in person here at the World Conference Center in Bonn. With the exception of Mrs. Schöttke, who is unfortunately unable to attend, all members of the supervisory board are present at this year's annual general meeting. The same applies to the board of management. To my left, I welcome the notary, Dr. Christoph Neuhaus, who has been appointed to take the minutes of this annual general meeting. A few remarks regarding these premises: the main room of today's meeting is this room here in New York, including the gallery, which is accessible to you from the outside. We have lots of guests, therefore I'm. The neighborhood couldn't. Probably also have guests up there. Then you can also follow the meeting in sound and vision in the Nairobi room. Audio transmission is also available in the other areas of the meeting. The attendance area includes all rooms that are open to you after passing the so-called accreditation, i.e., in addition to the rooms already mentioned, the outdoor area accessible to you from the inside, as well as all other adjoining rooms and areas, including the foyer, as far as the exit or accreditation counter. The speaker registration counter is located here in the main room at the right-hand side from as I see it, and we also set up an information stand for you. This is located in the foyer on the entrance level. The shareholders and shareholder representatives present will be entered into the list of participants. It is kept electronically and updated on an ongoing basis. It can be viewed at the terminals. These can be found in the main room to the right of the speaker registration counter and in the Nairobi room. Convening of the annual general meeting, together with the complete agenda and the management's proposed resolutions regarding the announced agenda items, was published in due form and time in the Federal Gazette on the 29th of February, 2024, and it was also published throughout Europe on the same day. A printout of the announcements is available to the notary and can be viewed at the speaker registration counter. The notary will enclose a printout of the minutes as an attachment. You can also view the documents relating to today's annual general meeting, which have been made available on the company's website in addition to the invitation and agenda since the convenience notice has been published at the speaker registration counter. The counter motions and election proposals we made accessible have been published on the company's website with all the necessary information. Copies of these can be found over there at the speaker registration counter and at the information stand in the foyer on the entrance level. The company has not received any motions for additions to the agenda pursuant to Section 122(2) of the German Stock Corporation Act. Today's annual general meeting will be broadcast in full on the internet in audio and video and will also be recorded for documentation purposes. These opening remarks, as well as Mr. Höttges' speech and any further remarks by Mr. Höttges, can be accessed later on the internet. For the sake of order, I'd also like to point out that the management board is supported by employees in the back office when recording the questions and preparing the answers. In order to ensure that the questions are recorded correctly, a short audio recording will be made and then deleted. Please understand that it's not permitted to make your own video and audio recordings of the meeting. At the accreditation counters, you received an AGM card for today. You will need this to exercise your rights as shareholder at today's meeting. In particular, your voting rights. You will also find all important information on this AGM card regarding leaving this meeting early and issuing authorizations and instructions. I, therefore, refer you to those. The AGM card must also be presented at the exit control when leaving the annual general meeting early. We will conduct the debate on the items on the agenda in the form of a general debate. Any speaker may address any item on the agenda and ask questions. I should have had a bit more to do this morning, unfortunately. I apologize. Perhaps this extends the meeting a little bit. I'm trying not to make it too long, sorry. Shareholders who wish to make use of their right to speak and/or ask questions are kindly requested to present their AGM card at the speaker registration counter over there. There you will receive forms for requesting the floor, which you should complete and hand over to an employee at the speaker request desk. I would like to ask those shareholders who intend to speak to submit their request to speak as early as possible starting now, so that we know how many shareholders would like to speak. I will explain the voting procedure in detail immediately before the votes. As a precautionary measure, however, I would like to point out now that the votes can only be cast here in this main room. Only here in this main room. As an acoustic signal to indicate the start and end of voting, we once again have the gong at our disposal. Let me use it now for demonstration purposes only. Following these organizational remarks, we will now move on to the agenda. Agenda item one is submissions to the annual general meeting pursuant to Section 176(1)(1) of the German Stock Corporation Act. In particular, the annual financial statements, the consolidated financial statements, the summarized management and group management report, and the report of the supervisory board will be presented under this agenda item. These and other documents relating to today's annual general meeting are available on the company's website. You can also view them at the speaker registration counter. You will also find terminals in the foyer where you can view the online version of the annual report and the invitation and agenda for today's annual general meeting as a PDF file. So much for the organizational remarks. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to pass the floor to Mr. Höttges, who will present his report for the management board. [Foreign Language] Κυρίες και κύριοι, αγαπητοί μέτοχοι, καλώς ορίσατε στην ετήσια γενική συνέλευσή μας 2024. Χαίρομαι που σας βλέπω όλους εδώ. Meine sehr geehrten Damen und Herren, herzlich willkommen zu unserer Hauptversammlung 2024. To our AGM 2024, and I am pleased to see you all here. Now the same thing in English again: the first version was in German. Szanowni Państwo, drodzy akcjonariusze, witam serdecznie na naszym zgromadzeniu ogólnym w 2024 roku. Miło mi was wszystkich tutaj widzieć. [Foreign Language] Ja, meine Damen und Herren, begrüßen will ich Sie alle. Stop, ladies and gentlemen. I would rather like to welcome you personally. Welcome to our shareholders' meeting of Deutsche Telekom in 2024. [Foreign Language] Was Sie gerade hier sozusagen live gesehen haben, ist mein Avatar. What you just saw live was my avatar, run by AI, so you can see me in countless versions, and it turns me into an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a contact partner for anyone in the virtual world. Everybody talks about artificial intelligence. AI is the talk of the town, but what does that actually mean for a company? My showcase this morning is about the question: how Deutsche Telekom is practically using AI in its day-to-day operations. We have more than 400 use scenarios, application scenarios at Deutsche Telekom, where we are using AI, one of which you just saw. I can basically communicate with all our employees in all languages on any subject. But what are we doing with AI practically, and why is it so important? Bitkom recently published a survey of 600 companies asking how important AI is for their business models. 31% said that it has no significance. 69% of all companies' surveys said that this will lead to a fundamental change of all the business processes and workflows in their company, and I am part of that last group. I think that over the past few decades, we haven't seen any other technology that changed our fundamental technologies in a way as AI will change it from now on, and that's why it's so important for us to actually deal with it in every detail. How can we use it practically, and where and how are we using artificial intelligence today? I'm in my living room here today. I'm a Deutsche Telekom customer, and let's say that tonight I want to watch a football match. Last night, we had a draw with Arsenal in the football match, but I am watching MagentaTV. We have the broadcast rights, but what happens? My internet breaks down. What can I do? I can call up the hotline, and so I can try to talk to the telecom agents directly, but we also have Ask Magenta, a chatbot that you can use in this sort of situation. Let me show you how it works. I'm using my telephone here, and I'm communicating with Ask Magenta. Hello, and welcome to Ask Magenta, your digital assistant. A lot of my answers are given using artificial intelligence. I'm still making the odd mistake. Therefore, I would ask that you double-check on any important information. Now, on your questions, please give me your question in a short sentence. My internet broke down. First of all, we need to make sure that the problem is not a problem with your line. Now, I have the customer data for your line here. Is this the line that we are talking about? Yes. Okay, I'm trying to find a solution to your problem. Let me just quickly check your line. Ich habe mir das Fehlerbild angesehen und eine echte Lösung. I just looked at the situation, and I have an initial solution, which I would like to test. In many cases, it is enough to just restart the router. I am now going to restart your router. Internet, telephone, and MagentaTV will be interrupted. Is that okay with you? Yes, please hurry up. Ja, bitte. bitte. Yes, please. The router has been restarted. Is the internet working again? Yes. Now, my internet connection is back. Thanks a lot, Max, for your support. Ladies and gentlemen, you won't believe it, but in 30% of all errors, such routine requests actually solve the problem, and this is not actually managed by people on site. This is automated. The chatbot understands quite naturally what the problem is and can then find the right technical solution in an automated way. Last year, we had 6.2 million customer queries, which were dealt with by our chatbot, and this makes us the leading provider of such AI-based tools in Germany. We regularly came out number one in this field by Computer Bild, for instance, in connection with the use of this automated avatar. Of course, there will be many more things that we can solve using our automated chatbot. However, there will always be a person in the background, a person in flesh and blood, who can take over if the chatbot cannot find a solution. We will always have someone who can help you to sort things out personally if need be. But AI is not just important in our dealings with our customer. We are also using it internally. If telecom knew what it knows, then it would be even stronger, and that's why all the knowledge that we have at telecom is digitized and then made available to our employees using AI. Let's use a query like, "What sort of training can I book at telecom?" For instance, on artificial intelligence, we have a chatbot which is called Ask T. Let me give it a shot. "What sort of training would you recommend to me in order to improve my AI skills?" Okay, now this chatbot is checking all the knowledge at telecom, is syncing it, and now it comes up with 2, 3, 5, 6 more training sessions. Apparently, I need to do more to really improve my AI skills. The chatbot just recommended six training sessions to me that I can use as an employee. Usually, you would have to open a website and kick off a manual process. Usually, I would have to spend 20 minutes to actually generate information based on the knowledge from telecom. However, using the Ask T chatbot, this information is made available immediately, and we can also use it to provide information on pensions, salaries, holidays, etc. All that will be made available to our employees in an automated fashion through the Ask T chatbot in the future. We're not just talking about customers or employees. In the engine room, we are also using a great deal of AI today. Let's look at the various use scenarios. On the web, of course, AI is extremely important. You may have seen this vehicle before. It is driving through Germany, and it is analyzing its environment by way of a radar, virtually. Why are we doing that? Because we are rolling out fiber everywhere, or that's what we want to do anyway, and for that, the vehicle is analyzing the environment. Our T-Cars have traveled 140,000 kilometers all over Germany, scanning the environment, digitizing the information. We made more than 145 million photos, and we actually analyzed 735 terabytes of data from our environment. Examples are like, "What does this environment look like? Would it be possible to set up a gray cabinet here for our optical fiber line?" We look at surfaces. Do we have tar, or do we have cobblestone? The radar also analyzes the trees along the streets. Are these shallow roots, trees with shallow roots, or not? We are using AI to generate a proposal for our technical service providers in order to figure out where to lay the fiber cables in the best possible way and how and what the ideal location is to set up the cabinet, and that has improved our efficiency by 75%. Let me give you another example. Let's say we have a field staff technician, and he just kicked off the process for fiber, but he's got a problem, and I can tell you that building regulations are quite something in Germany. Of course, the technician can try to learn all these building regulations by heart, but that's not possible. Last year alone, we hired 1,000 new technicians. How would it be possible for them to have all that knowledge available just like that? For that, we introduced another chatbot that basically provides all the information we need in order to roll out fiber, and this information is provided in an automated way. One example is the optical fiber cable and the way it is laid. If there is an obstacle underground, for instance, a big stone or a foundation, then the optical fiber needs to be laid rounded, and we actually refer to that as a particular radius. It's called the bend radius, and if the radius is too small, then the cable will break, and then the signal can't go through. Here, we can ask the chatbot, "What should be the bend radius when we are trying to lay an optical fiber cable here?" This is what the employee is doing right at the building site, on site, and the system immediately generates or provides a technical answer. It's a bit technical, I'm afraid, so ultimately, we're talking about a 10-centimeter bend radius for this optical fiber cable. So as you can tell, in the engine room, so to speak, we are also using a great deal of AI. By the way, your image with Magenta TV, your internet, all that is controlled automatically and analyzed in the background, and if there are any issues, then sometimes they are fixed automatically in the background without people having to intervene. The last example comes with Lisa from Innovation Management, a colleague of ours, and AI really was the number one subject at the Mobile World Congress. Lisa, where are you? Hello. Hi there. Lisa. Hey. From Innovation Management. Lisa from Innovation Management. How many apps? We all know the situation. I mean, how many apps do you have on your smartphone? What are we doing with these apps? How much data actually runs through those apps, even though I may not even want this? How often does it happen that I'm trying to find a piece of information, but I don't know what app I should be using? What do we need apps for to begin with? Deutsche Telekom is working to make apps superfluous, redundant, and Lisa is going to present the AI phone to you now. Yeah, I've brought one of our prototypes here. It runs on the T Phone, and it revolutionizes the way we are using our mobile phones, makes it much more natural, much more intuitive, and much simpler. Shall we show a little showcase here? Yeah, let's do it, and let's come up with a complicated case to demonstrate how it might actually work. Okay, so how about, say, you need a new gift for your dachshund? Yeah, so a friend of ours got a dachshund, and we need a present for him, and of course, I want to have a magenta present, so that's the search that we need to do now. Okay, let's test it. So we have this button here. Only works in English. Recommend me a gift for my sausage dog. Okay, auf Google gehen. Man würde den Vertrag. So usually, you would go to Google, you would enter the search there, then Google would route you to Amazon, Zalando, or whatever. Then maybe you have to watch a video on YouTube, and at the end of the day, you may find it cheaper on eBay anyway. Now, it wasn't working, but I'm prepared for that. Aber hier, so würde das dann aussehen. It's a demonstration effect. This is what it would look like. There are different options for presents. You can scroll down and look up more things. Let's say I want some more product information from Amazon. How can I skip the various domains and ask about what sort of material is used for this product? Well, that's relatively easy. You just press a button, and then you say, "Show me more product information or product videos." Let me test it. Show me a product video. Also zeig mir ein Produktvideo, und dann sieht man hier schon, dass YouTube jetzt ein Produktvideo ist. You can see that it is loading product videos from YouTube. Then you can click on UI. It's a little slow right now, probably because we have so many people using the Wi-Fi here, but you can stay within one user interface, and there's no need to go back and forth between different apps, and it saves a lot of time, and it's much more intuitive. Of course, we could use this in any internet-related situation. If I want to book a flight or a hotel room, then I don't need to use a dedicated app for that. I'm just telling the system, "Book me a flight from Barcelona to Palma de Mallorca," and then the phone will come up with relevant offers from the internet, right? Yes. I mean, usually, you would have to browse various portals to compare flight prices, etc., but you no longer need that. It's kind of your personal travel agent, if you will. Yeah. We are working to make apps redundant. We want to be able to use voice, make it more intuitive, to use all the functions the internet offers in order to get just one relevant answer to our question rather than 100. It's very customer-centric. Just the right answer. Thanks a lot, Lisa, for this product demonstration. Ladies and gentlemen, artificial intelligence is here to stay. We currently have 400 use scenarios, use cases at telecom. We want to become the leading telco, and for that we need artificial intelligence. We will use it everywhere in our areas to become the leading digital telco, and for that, we need AI. It makes us better vis-à-vis our customers. It makes us faster in processing customer queries. It makes us more productive and more efficient in our work, and that gives us more capacity to use our technology with greater efficiency. So just meant to give you a glimpse into this very important topic for the future of this company. [Foreign Language] Weil wir Digitalisierung für den Menschen bauen. Wir haben die Expertise, wir haben das Know-how, aber wir haben auch die Infrastruktur und damit eigentlich die perfekten Voraussetzungen, da ganz vorne dabei zu sein. Ich bin der festen Überzeugung, dass wir einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten. Wir sorgen eben nicht nur für Digitalisierung nach vorn, sondern wir stellen sie jetzt schon sicher, und ich glaube, dass das ein ganz wichtiger Beitrag ist für unsere Gesellschaft, und deswegen bin ich stolz auf die Telekom. Ich glaube, dass wir als Unternehmen Telekom eine Aufgabe haben, die weit über Technologietransfer in die Gesellschaft hinausgeht. Ich glaube, dass wir eine Aufgabe haben, als Vorreiter und Vordenker zu funktionieren und Vorbild. Man kennt Magenta. Das Internet ist Magenta, das weiß man einfach. Und als ich dann das war nie so ein Arbeitgeber für mich, den ich im Blick hatte. Und dann habe ich jemanden kennengelernt, der bei der Telekom arbeitet, habe geguckt und festgestellt: "Alter, das ist total der geile Laden." Wenn man Telekom hört und nicht so viel damit zu tun hat, denkt man: "Ach ja, die machen ein bisschen Mobilfunk und die machen ein bisschen Festnetz." Aber dabei ist die Telekom ja so viel mehr und macht so viel mehr. Technik ist für mich gar nichts Künstliches. Technik wird von Menschen für Menschen gemacht, und wir als Telekom nehmen eine führende Rolle ein, neue Technologien zu entwickeln. Was könnte für mich eine schönere Motivation sein bei der Arbeit, als sie mitzugestalten? Die Zukunft. Zukunft ist kein Zufall. The future doesn't happen by chance. It takes confidence. Wenn wir heute das Richtige tun, Erfolg morgen will follow as a natural consequence, inevitably. That calls for the right attitude to listen, be open to new technologies like artificial intelligence, to knuckle down, get stuck in, and always do more than the competition, and to trust, believe in your own power for change. Ladies and gentlemen, Deutsche Telekom delivers all three of these ingredients, and they are the very reason I enjoy being here. Es ist nicht nur das Geschäft. It's nicht nur das Geschäft. It's not only about the business, but the people around me, in the tech unit, and out there in sales with our customers, and that motivates me. Wir strengen uns jeden Tag an, besser zu werden. We do what we can to become better by the day. 2023 was another record year for our company. My warmest thanks, therefore, go to all the people working for Deutsche Telekom, regardless of where you are right now. Liebe Aktionärinnen und Aktionäre, Damen und Herren, Ihre Kundinnen und Kunden, seit zehn Jahren bin ich jetzt der Deutsche Telekom for ten years. Making this my tenth address to the shareholders meeting, I think that is a great opportunity to look ahead. To look to the future for a good future. What more can we do to safeguard a positive future? What will make us strong going forward at Deutsche Telekom? This is what I'm going to talk about today. First of all, the future needs growth. What you can see here in the background is what we call our flywheel. It describes how we grow. First, we invest more than our competitors. That helps us attract customers because they can see that we offer compelling service. This boosts our revenues, which also boosts our efficiency because we can utilize our big machines more, which means that our earnings are rising, and then we have more money left to invest. It's that simple at Deutsche Telekom. In zehn Jahren haben wir €173 billion over the last ten years. We are winning almost every single mobile test in Germany and almost all of the customer service tests, and that's why we are winning a lot of new customers in the US, in Germany, and in Europe. Last year overall we gained 7.6 million new mobile customers alone, plus 610,000 new broadband customers and 357,000 new TV customers. Service revenues up 3.6% to around €93 billion. Earnings up 6.9% to €40.2 billion, and free cash flow up 40.7% to €16.1 billion. Now, the last increase, ladies and gentlemen, is of particular importance to you because today another important instrument, the dividend, is in your hands, which should be up 10% to €0.77 per share, providing you approve our proposal. Ladies and gentlemen, our goal used to be to become the leading European telecommunications company. Well, we achieved that. Your Deutsche Telekom today is worth more than Vodafone, Orange, Telefónica, KPN, and British Telecom combined. Our new goal is to become the leading digital telecommunications company. We believe that digitalization is the future. It helps us to improve customer satisfaction. It will help us to earn more and to cut costs. How does that work? Much of our business is local. Our networks in particular are always where you are. We are also local when it comes to our customers because every market is different. Our costs are largely incurred elsewhere, for instance, for the development of products or software. Take routers for the whole world, or applications for business customers, for the Internet of Things, or computer programs we develop ourselves to manage our networks. The costs are the same, always, even if we are developing this for many customers. The more customers we have, the less consequential these costs become. Today, Deutsche Telekom has 300 million customers worldwide. Our task going forward will be to leverage this advantage because our business combination in the US shows just that. This is where the flywheel is moving at a particularly strong pace. We originally anticipated economies of scale worth $6 billion as a result of the business combination of Sprint and T-Mobile US, but we now expect to hit the $8 billion mark per year, by the way. T-Mobile US is paying out dividends for the first time, half of which come to us. Last year it was $375 million. From this year on, however, we expect as much as $1.4 billion from the US coming to Europe. However, we can use even more advantages. For instance, we are a leading provider for business customers in Germany and Europe, but not in the United States, despite having the best network there. So far, this does not exist in the US, though. And these are fields where we want to improve our cooperation between the US and Europe. T-Mobile US are benefiting from our experience just like we are benefiting from theirs. Without the US, ladies and gentlemen, our high investments, last but not least in fiber in Germany, would not even be possible. As you know, these investments are of great importance to us. Secondly, future needs infrastructure. This is the core of Deutsche Telekom. However, our core is constantly under pressure from new and established competitors. That's why we make sure that we continue to be the number one with our networks. We are rolling out optical fiber in the fixed network, fiber to the home, FTTH. 70 million households can subscribe to a fiber optic line from us. 8 million of these in Germany. We are building two out of every three new lines in Germany. Last year alone, we installed 2.6 million lines, and this infrastructure is used by 1 million customers already. We will keep up the pace for this rollout in Germany, regardless of all the things that are happening around us, even as it becomes harder to do so because inflation is affecting us as well. Everything is getting more expensive, and this also holds true for our network buildout, especially civil engineering works, which is why it's important that we are permitted to lay cables more cost-effectively, what's known as micro trenching. It's allowed in some municipalities, but not in others. They should all allow it because if you don't need to dig that deep, then it becomes cheaper. In mobile communications, the future is already here. It's called 5G. Our 5G network covers 67% of the population in Europe, around 98% in the US, and 96% in Germany. The network in Germany, by the way, is clearly better than its reputation also in an international comparison. At least that holds true for Deutsche Telekom's network. Industry magazine Connect gives our network a score of outstanding, and video streaming is possible from virtually anywhere with the telecom now. 5G is good for our customers. The network is clearly faster, and we process way more data using this infrastructure. Nonetheless, I also look at 5G critically because for us as a network provider, 5G came with large investments. At the same time, we have fierce competition here in Germany. So from a merely economic point of view, so far, this has not proven to be profitable for us. Technologically, we made a lot of progress. There was still a step backwards in terms of regulation because we now have a fourth provider on the market who is actually put in a privileged position by the regulator. They got important frequencies, and right now, these frequencies are largely untapped because this other provider rarely builds a network of their own. Our competitor is saying that they have the most modern network, and I quote that here, "But basically, it is just one big white spot." And now the next problem is around the corner, the third-party providers, as they are called. They don't have a network of their own, and they are using ours until now at fairly negotiated prices. But now, they are calling for regulated prices as low as possible, which would mean you lease, you win, you build, you lose. Ladies and gentlemen, mobile frequencies should not be distributed in one section anymore. It looks unlikely It looks unlikely that there will be an auction for the next available mobile spectrum, which is good for starters because we'd rather invest the billions of euros in our infrastructure. However, if the money is not actually invested in the network but in the third-party providers instead, then this will not benefit the mobile buildout in this country. That's why we advocate a clear and honest procedure when it comes to allocating frequencies to prevent a situation where things actually get worse rather than better. A politician recently said to me, and I quote, "Germany wants everything at the same time: maximum competition, lowest prices, highest investments, and full coverage." End of quote. Truth is, that can't work. My proposition is maximum buildout, fair prices, but also fair competition among all the players in this field, meaning a flywheel rather than a downward spiral. Ladies and gentlemen, we at Deutsche Telekom, we really love butterflies, and of course, everybody has a good cause: nature conservation, conservation of buildings. Yes, that's right. What about our future? What about our future regarding power lines, wind turbines, and mobile communications? In Germany, it has to become easier to build. Some things are getting easier, but the planning law for faster rollout is still stuck in the cabinet and is not released. Ladies and gentlemen, having a joint is possible in Germany, but we don't seem to have a concept for mobile rollout. Investment needs security, and the future needs security. This is my third point. The world has changed since we were young. Much of what we learned about ethics, about morals, is currently being swept under the carpet of history. This has implications, ladies and gentlemen. This is why we give security a higher priority, and at the same time, it has become a business for the future. We have now a dedicated unit looking after online security called T-Security, with a revenue of €344 million in 2023, which is an increase by 9%. A month there looks like that: 56 million attacks on the network identified and defended. 200,000 customers protected against the botnet attack. 116,000 customers warned about potential misuse of their data. This means that the customers can change their passwords before anything happens. This is the reason we upgrade our security. Together with the Cologne Chamber of Commerce and Industry, we have now created a dedicated training program in this area. Ladies and gentlemen, our most important asset are safe networks, and this is what we are very well aware of. Wherever data comes together, we are building firewalls, we set up barriers, and we develop our own software. Now I would like to mention OpenRAN. For antennas, we now have more providers, which makes us less reliant on individual vendors in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, your Deutsche Telekom is the provider to the Western world exclusively. This also is where the 200,000 employees work. This provides more security to all of us, even if the world is getting ever more dangerous. In other parts of the world, the risks are much higher than in the environment of Deutsche Telekom. We are very well positioned for the future. This brings me to my fourth point: future needs innovation. Businesses must keep reinventing themselves. Nokia used to be the global market leader for cell phones. Then the iPhone came along, and the rest is history. This means the Deutsche Telekom also has to constantly reinvent itself with the help of AI. I already showed you some of the examples, and this helps us improve quality. It brings us closer to our customers, and it enhances our productivity. In the field of software development, for example, by more than 50%. Also for innovation, one thing is true: scale lightens the load. Deutsche Telekom now is the largest European telco in Europe, and we are also the most valuable telco company. T-Mobile US, by the way, is now the most valuable company in this sector, and we own the majority of T-Mobile US. We are competing with large companies such as Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and others. We do not want to be the shrimp among the whales. This is why cooperation is a very important part of our future strategy. First example: secure online shopping. When you shop online, you are asked to verify your identity with a password, and very often you receive a second text message with another password. This is called two-factor authorization. We have now developed technology together with Vodafone and O2 that automates this process. A text message is no longer required, and the cell phone handles everything in the background. Second example: the automated customer advisor. I already showed it to you. Right now, we are using existing technology, so-called large language models. The most famous of them is probably known to you. It's ChatGPT. These models have a good level of general learning, but they have very little in the way of expert knowledge, and they reproduce text parrot fashion. We, however, want them to actually speak to our customers in the way we interact with our customers. This is why we are now working on our own language model. We are doing this with partners such as SoftBank, SK Telecom in Korea, or Singtel in Singapore. This is a product that we, in the future, can also sell to other companies. So we are using AI not only for ourselves, but AI is also a business model for the future, especially for our B2B customers. Talking about our B2B business, we now have more than $15 million of revenues with our B2B customers every year. Major customers, big customers are served through T-Systems. T-Systems struggled for a long time. Compared to many competitors, it was too small. So we had a disadvantage regarding the scale, and our wage costs in Germany are higher than elsewhere, and our classic business is shrinking. But one fact remains: every Deutsche Telekom business must make a positive contribution to the results of the entire group. This is now also the case for T-Systems. In 2023, for the first time, T-Systems managed to make a positive contribution because we transformed the business and focused on two markets: first of all, on cloud services and on digital services, digital solutions for companies. Two examples: first, safe driving. In the automotive industry, parts are cut from aluminum for batteries, for example. These have to be absolutely error-free; otherwise, it will end in disaster. T-Systems has designed artificial intelligence that can perform the necessary checks. Second example: cancer diagnosis. Radiologists view thousands of patient scans every day on the computer screen. It's easy to miss something, but AI can also make an automatic check and will tell doctors if there is an irregularity somewhere. These examples go to show that AI is not a threat, but it makes our life easier, more secure, and also longer, in fact. Many of our business customers are served by Telekom Deutschland. Revenue in 2023 was €9.3 billion, up 2.4%. The legacy business, the core business, is in decline there too. Here again, we are more and more focusing on digital solutions, and Telekom Deutschland is collaborating even closer with T-Systems in this area and talks to customers together. We are a one-stop shop for all customers' needs: telephone, data centers, security, cloud, and digital solutions. We can generate major growth. It helps that our customers have known us for years and trust us. Artificial intelligence plus human empathy, for us, both belong together. This brings me to my fifth point: future needs people. Ladies and gentlemen, Deutsche Telekom is changing. We count on experience. We rely on new talents. The future means bringing these two together. Deutsche Telekom is multi-generational. 5,350 young people are currently in training at Deutsche Telekom, or they are studying at Deutsche Telekom, only in Germany. The average age used to be almost 50 years, and it's currently at 41.4 years. At the same time, we are training our own employees. 78,000 employees have already gone to AI training, and they are now fit for the future, fit for the next generation. Solidarity makes us stronger. Deutsche Telekom is an inclusive company, and this means we always invest into the telecom community. We are always right in the community. We support the weakest links in the community, for example, with special discounts. For children who can't afford digital tools, for people who can't afford telephony, or we aid after natural disasters. Our social activities last year had an equivalent value of €1.5 billion. We also stand up to online hate and propaganda. We raise awareness of the issue, for example, with TV commercials. Most of all, we support organizations that focus on tackling the roots of this problem. This is important because it's about the future of democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, Deutsche Telekom does not divide, but it connects the world. This is what our brand stands for. By the way, since last year, our brand has been the number one brand in Germany. We are the number one brand in Europe, and we are the number one brand of telcos at a global level with €73 billion worth. This takes us to the level of Apple, Google, and Amazon. We are extremely proud of this. My last point: future needs transparency. For years, we believed we were living in the information age. But today, we are heading into the disinformation age. Online, you find a mix of facts and fake. Truth stands side by side with fiction. People create their whole worlds for themselves. We are tackling this with radical transparency. This is a program that we have defined for ourselves for 2024 because radical transparency builds trust. We explain our actions. We talk about our successes, but we also talk about our mistakes: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Take, for example, our report on sustainability. We don't greenwash Deutsche Telekom, but we say it like it is. On the positive side, we continue to cut our carbon emissions: minus 11% compared to the previous year. The future is net zero by 2040. On the negative side, only 25% of used cell phones are returned to us. We can only recycle a fraction of the cell phones we sell. The future should be 100% circular economy. On the encouraging side, our openness is appreciated. Our report on sustainability is winning awards, for example, the Building Public Trust Award in the DAX. Also, our financial communication has been showered with accolades. In 2023, we were awarded the Investor's Darling prize. Ladies and gentlemen, we weren't always the darling. For many people, the T-Share betrayed the trust for a very long time. Talking about the new economy, the share price dropped by around 90% 20 years ago. This is precisely why Deutsche Telekom has a particular responsibility to seek dialogue, to explain its business and its strategy over and over again, and to make its decisions transparent. This is why we have a face-to-face shareholders' meeting here. We are always trying out new formats, for example, on YouTube. On YouTube, I dealt with questions from retail investors. We invited the so-called Finfluencers, people who talk about stock trading in social media. I already got some practice for your questions later on, so the season is open. Shareholders, everybody can reinvent themselves if they seize the opportunity. Deutsche Telekom has done just this. You have been loyal to the Deutsche Telekom share as a retail investor since 1990. You now have a good dividend, and you have a 400% dividend since the IPO in 1996. We used to be a slow-moving team. When I started, we were receiving 4.5 million complaints by customers a year. Today, it's only 300,000. Ten years ago, 10% of all the technicians' appointments were canceled. Today, it's only 0.5%. Ten years ago, the share price was around €11, and today, it's more than €22. The value of Deutsche Telekom has doubled. In 2014, €55 billion; at present, €110 billion. Who would have thought ten years ago that we would get there together? But this also makes me optimistic in spite of all the headwinds, and in spite of all regulation, we made this. We look into the future. We continue to invest. Around €16 billion are planned for this year, and this wins us customers and enables us to grow. This year alone, we will increase our earnings by 6%. Regarding the free cash flow, we again want to grow by another 16%. Regarding the earnings per share, we plan to increase the value by 10%. This is great news for your dividend because it is based on exactly this value. Ladies and gentlemen, it is important for us to answer the question: how can we grow the value of your Deutsche Telekom by another €50 billion? We are gathering the necessary momentum now with the best fully automatic networks in all our global markets, by unlocking the benefits of our economies of scale becoming more and more efficient, by always and in every market getting maximum customer satisfaction, and by acting profitably in all the markets and segments, by staying curious all the time and using artificial intelligence to become faster and to become the leading digital telecommunications company, and by taking responsibility for people and for the environment wherever we are active. But above all, through growth with new products in established markets like optical fiber in the United States or with the new smartphone of the future that we just presented to you. The future for us is not far away on the horizon, but it starts right at our feet. We are shaping the future with every step we take. Ladies and gentlemen, it doesn't stop at the horizon. We won't stop. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Höttges, for the very comprehensive and outstanding presentation, showing how successful our company is and how many new ideas the company has. My special thanks go to the board of management and, of course, to the employees of Deutsche Telekom for their work in the past financial year and for what they have achieved. I believe I'm doing so also on behalf of the shareholders and their representatives. Thank you very much. This takes me now to the report of the supervisory board. If you wish to take the floor, please request to do so at the speaker registration counter. This comment cannot be heard by the interpreter. It's up to Mike. I would like to ask you to request the floor at the speaker registration desk later on. Please stop your remarks now because I'd like to move on to the report of the supervisory board. [Foreign Language] So I möchte Sie noch mal bitten. Again, I would like to ask you, if you wish to take the floor, which is your perfect right to do so, to request the floor at the speaker registration counter in the back later on so that I can proceed now. As I said, I will now explain the report of the supervisory board, which is in our management report on page 7 forwards. I will summarize my oral report and be brief. The detailed report can be found in the annual report. The supervisory board, again, closely monitored the management of the business by the management board in the last year. We had 31 meetings in total: 7 plenary meetings, 1 closed-door meeting, 23 committee meetings. Attendance rate was 97%, and that's very high. Cooperation with the management board was and still is very good and very trusting. Due to the high frequency of meetings, we are in close, regular dialogue with the management board, as you can expect from us. The main basis for the fulfillment of the statutory supervisory duties were the written and oral reports of the management board. The supervisory board regularly discussed the current situation of the company at its meetings. The management board fulfilled its information obligations comprehensively and promptly. The content and scope of the reports met the specified requirements. The management board also reported on individual issues in writing or in discussions between the meetings. In addition, I also exchanged views with the management board, in particular with the Chairman, Mr. Höttges, at regular meetings. On the basis of its reviews and the auditor's reports, the supervisory board has come to the conclusion that there are no reasons to doubt the appropriateness and effectiveness of the financial statements, the internal control system, and the risk and opportunity management system. We discussed the transactions and measures that the management board submitted to us for approval in accordance with a catalog of transactions requiring approval in fiscal year 2023 with the management board and examined them in detail. We approved the measures presented in each case. The auditor audited the annual financial statements and the consolidated financial statements, as well as a summarized management report and group management report, and issued an unqualified audit opinion in each case. The supervisory board approved the annual financial statements and the consolidated financial statements following its own review at its meeting on February 22nd, 2024. The annual financial statements have thus been adopted. Allow me to briefly summarize the main focus of the supervisory board's work in the past financial year. It's quite a long list because we intensively looked at many topics. First of all, of course, we have the annual and consolidated financial statements, but also the implementation of Telekom's strategy on its way to becoming the leading digital telecommunications company. Other key topics were the private client business, business client approach, platform business models, and the portfolio strategy. We also looked at the business strategy and development in the segments. The use of artificial intelligence, which Mr. Höttges intensively presented earlier on, was, of course, another important focus. I agree totally with Mr. Höttges that artificial intelligence will have a major impact on all parts of the business. We had the dividend policy and share buybacks at Deutsche Telekom AG and T- Mobile US. Of course, we welcome, same as the management, that for the first time, T-Mobile US is going to pay out a dividend. The effects of the global semiconductor and supply chain crisis and how to deal with it were another topic, and it remains to do so. It's not over yet. The market and competitive situation have also been intensively discussed, and we have been able to convince ourselves that the company is extremely well positioned here and prepared. The financial and debt situation have also shown positive development. ESG, the abbreviation of sustainability-related areas of responsibility of the company: environment, social, and governance. We have, again, focused intensively on this topic. Congratulations on the awards you have won in this regard. It shows that this company is really well positioned here. The budget and the annual financing plan for 2024 and the medium-term planning for 2024 through 2027 have also been discussed. We have personal matters. I will discuss this later in greater detail. We had the resignation of Mr. Adel Al-Saleh and the appointment of Dr. Ferri Abolhassan. We reappointed Mr. Gopalan. Regarding governance, we made some adjustments as well. I will explain the details in a minute. We changed the structure of the supervisory board committees. Regarding the 2023 financial year, it has been another very strong and successful year for Deutsche Telekom, despite the challenges posed by geopolitical tensions, increased energy prices, and the high inflation. Fortunately, the inflation rate has gone down, but for a company with many retail customers, the price increases cannot just be handed down, so this has been a real challenge. Sales rose by 0.6% to achieve €112 billion. Adjusted EBITDA AL saw a strong increase of 4% to achieve €40.5 billion. I think it makes sense to report this. Now, the reported consolidated net profit was more than double the value of 2022 with €17.8 billion. Mr. Höttges has just described the financial figures. The operative business has shown very good development in all areas. Mr. Höttges shows that this is also very important to cooperate here with T-Systems. The company is developing into a leading digital telecommunications company and is well prepared for the opportunities and challenges of the future and has thus laid a very good foundation for future successes. The very good business result confirms the outstanding work of the management board. On behalf of the entire supervisory board, I expressly thank the management board and all employees for their hard work and their success. The team has certainly deserved this. Based on the results achieved in 2023 financial year, the management board and the supervisory board are proposing a dividend of $0.77 per share, in line with the announced distribution policy. The task is now to consistently pursue Deutsche Telekom's strategy shown and outlined by Mr. Höttges in his speech. I am confident that the board of management and the employees will succeed in continuing to demonstrate the strength of Deutsche Telekom. Let me now speak about the personnel matters. As you know, there has been a change on the management board. In October 2023, we terminated the appointment of Mr. Adel Al-Saleh to the management board of T-Systems with the effect of the end of the 31st of December 2023 at his own request. At the same time, we appointed Dr. Ferri Abolhassan as his successor with effect from the 1st of January 2024, for three years. With Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, most welcome, we have found a proven expert in the field of digitization, cloud security, and artificial intelligence for this challenging position. He already knows T-Systems thanks to his many years as T-Systems managing director. With over 20 years of experience in IT, he has the necessary expertise to successfully continue Adel Al-Saleh's work. Of course, I also ensured myself, and I had been able to follow the activities of Mr. Abolhassan in the past. I've been able to convince myself that he, at any rate, has the necessary qualifications to continue the work of Adel Al-Saleh. Congratulations and the best of success for your work going forward. I'm also very much pleased that at the beginning of this year, with effect from the 1st of January next year, we reappointed Mr. Srini Gopalan for another five years to the management board for Germany. Of course, I've known Mr. Srini Gopalan for a very long time. We cooperate very intensively. The business here is very important for this group, and he expanded it and developed it further with a lot of success. He has had a lot of success with the build-out of optical fiber, the optical fiber network. The reduction of copper and the build-out of optical fiber. We have no doubt as supervisory board that Mr. Gopalan, of course, strengthens our position in that regard going forward. We're really happy that he has extended his contract for another five years. Welcome, and we're glad to have you on board for another five years. This brings me to the changes in the supervisory board. On the side of the shareholder representatives, we had the following changes. First of all, Mrs. Margret Suckale and Mr. Harald Krüger were reelected to the supervisory board in April 2023. Dr. Reinhard Ploß was newly elected. These two will remain in the supervisory board, and Dr. Reinhard Ploß will be new. In terms of office of Mr. Lars Hinrichs and Mr. Karl-Heinz Streibich, end with today's annual general meeting. We're proposing for both of them to be reelected for another two-year term because we are convinced that the mandates that supervisory board members normally end after 12 years. Therefore, we are extending their term of office for two years because they've already been on the supervisory board for 10 years. We're following what is being requested by many investors to limit the term of office in the supervisory board. The new members are appointed for four years instead of five years because you can have a maximum of two extensions. Now, regarding those two persons, Mr. Lars Hinrichs is, among other things, a Managing Partner of Cinco Capital GmbH Hamburg. He has years of expertise in the areas of entrepreneurship, venture capital, business development, and strategic partnerships. He has broad knowledge in the areas of e-commerce, social networking, and social media. Karl-Heinz Streibich is honorary chairman of the acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering in Munich. He was previously chairman on the management board of Software AG. He has particular experience in the areas of IT services, telecommunication services, and also in managing international IT and software companies. He's also well-versed in artificial intelligence. The CVs of the candidates can be found in the invitation to the annual general meeting and have been published in advance on the internet. Of course, the supervisory board has based its search for candidates on the competency profile that it has adopted. This ensures that the areas of expertise considered to be essential are covered by the supervisory board as a whole. Both candidates are ideally qualified with their areas of expertise for our board. This can also be seen in the qualification matrix, which is available on our annual general meeting website. On the side of employee representatives in the delegates' meeting on November 7th, 2023, Mr. Odysseus Tassidis, Mr. Konstantin Grewe, Ms. Petra Steffi-Kreuzel, Ms. Kerstin Marx, Mr. Frank Sauerland, Ms. Susanne Schoettke, Ms. Nicole Seelemann-Wandke, and Ms. Karin Topel were reelected to the supervisory board, while Mr. Eric Daum and Mr. Christoph Schmitz were elected to the supervisory board for the first time. Ms. Nicole Koch and Mr. Lothar Schröder did not stand for reelection and stepped down from the supervisory board on November 7th, 2023. First, I'd like to welcome Mr. Daum and Mr. Schmitz. I'm delighted to have you here today for the first time. On behalf of the supervisory board, I would expressly thank Ms. Nicole Koch for the work carried out, but in particular, also Mr. Lothar Schröder, who served Deutsche Telekom as a member of the supervisory board for over 17 years and for their dedicated work to both of them in the interest of the company. If you'd like to follow today's proposals for the reelection of those two persons, I would really be pleased because cooperation with those two candidates is excellent. We are having a very critical but also very constructive dialogue amongst ourselves but also with the management board. This is something that you can expect from the supervisory board. Ladies and gentlemen, this brings me to corporate governance. As you can see from the annual report, Deutsche Telekom has complied with the recommendations of the German Corporate Governance Code in 2023 since the last declaration was issued, with the exception of recommendation C5. In the current 2024 fiscal year, we will fully comply with the recommendations of the German Corporate Governance Code. C5 concerns my position due to my temporary dual function as chairman of the board of management of Deutsche Post and chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom. This dual function has now ceased with my departure from the board of management of Deutsche Post in May 2023. I can say that both for Deutsche Post, DHL, they fared well during that time, as did Deutsche Telekom. I don't believe that this dual function led to either of those two companies not being led in the proper manner. What's perhaps also important to note is that I have taken part in all meetings in all supervisory boards in which I have been a member. Apart from that, I have attended all the meetings, also of the committees, as is my duty as Chairman of the Supervisory Board. I'm also required to know what's being discussed in the various committees. Therefore, I am also a regular guest at the audit committee meeting led by Ms. Kollmann. I think this is my normal duty as Chairman of the Supervisory Board, that I do so, although I'm not a member in that committee. This has many positive aspects because it clearly improves the work of the Supervisory Board as a whole. Next, in this section, I'd like to inform you about a change to our internal Supervisory Board governance. With effect of January 1st this year, the Supervisory Board has adjusted the structure of its committees. First of all, we have created a new committee, which is the Strategy, ESG, and Innovation Committee. Deviating from the text here because I was responsible for this, I think it is essential that the supervisory board deals with the long-term strategy intensively in the form of a committee. This should also be linked up to ESG. In the past, we had the T&I, Technology and Innovation Committee, and ESG was not so clearly focused in a committee. This year now gives us the opportunity, together with the management board, to discuss those very important topics in a very focused and concentrated manner. Secondly, the Finance and Audit Committees were combined because we're convinced that both the look into the future and the look back needs to be combined. Therefore, the workload of the new committee will clearly increase, especially in the field of remuneration. We want to make sure that the entire world of figures is covered in a uniform and holistic manner by the Audit and Finance Committee. We will have one committee dealing with ESG and strategy and innovation, one dealing with audit matters and finance matters. In addition, we have the Presiding Committee and, of course. Das habe ich jetzt alles schon erläutert. Kommen wir zur Aufsichtsrats- und zur Personalkommission. Regarding remuneration, as a consequence of this change under item 8, we are proposing to adjust two areas. We have two points. First of all, the background, of course, is the change in committee structure. On the one hand, the level of remuneration for the work of the merged Audit and Finance Committee should be adjusted in line with the expanded range of tasks. Committee members should receive an increase from €40,000 to €50,000, and the chair, an increase from €100,000 to €120,000. Furthermore, the appropriate remuneration needs to be granted also for the work of the newly formed strategy, ESG, and innovation committee. For members, there would be a change from €30,000 and for the chair, €70,000. Apart from that, the remuneration structure, composition, and amount of the supervisory board remains unchanged. Moving on to the remuneration of the management board. The remuneration system for the members of the management board was last approved at the 2022 annual general meeting. The structure of the management board remuneration has not changed since then. We have submitted our remuneration support to you for approval at this annual general meeting, as every year. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to summarize my report on 2023 as follows. The supervisory board closely monitors the work of the management board on the basis of legally compliant and effective corporate governance. The supervisory board is convinced that Deutsche Telekom is strategically well aligned and structured, is clearly on a course for operational growth, and is also in a good financial position thanks to solid balance sheet ratios and a strong free cash flow. Therefore, the management board has thus laid an outstanding basis for mastering future challenges. Dear shareholders, this ends my report as Chairman of the Supervisory Board. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your attention. I will now call up agenda items 2 to 9. Please now call up agenda items 2 to 9. Please refer to the invitation to the AGM published in the Federal Gazette for the wording of these agenda items and the corresponding resolutions proposed by the Board of Management and Supervisory Board. With regard to agenda item 2, I would also like to point out the following. As part of share matching plans, treasury shares, in other words, shares in the company, were transferred to plan participants in the current financial year. The company also repurchased treasury shares. As a result, the total number of shares entitled to dividends has decreased compared to the number stated in the invitation. The Board of Management and Supervisory Board have therefore adjusted their proposed resolution on agenda item 2 as announced in the invitation to the shareholders' meeting for this case. The Board of Management and Supervisory Board then proposed that a resolution be passed. The net retained profits of €12,311,000,000 be generated as follows: distribution of a dividend of €0.77 per dividend-bearing share, totaling €3,816,544,283.42, carrying forward the remaining amount to the new account of €8,494,455,716.58. You can view the amended proposal for the appropriation of profits on the company's website and at the speaker's registration counter. I am now announcing the current attendance. Attendance at the shareholders' meeting on the 10th of April, 2024, in Bonn. Right now, we have 3,608,081,332 dividend-bearing shares. This corresponds to the relevant amounts in euro or 32.3%. That's 4,986,458,596 dividend-bearing shares of the shareholder stock. In addition, postal votes were submitted for 21,118,776 dividend-bearing shares. These will also be taken into account for the vote, which means that we have 3,629,200,108 dividend-bearing shares here, which corresponds to 72.7% of the shareholder capital. That's the current status. It's always a big challenge to read out these numbers, but I understand that my colleagues double-checked that the figures I quoted were correct, which brings me to the general debate. Some housekeeping. As chairman of the meeting, I am also guided by the German Corporate Governance Code that an ordinary AGM should be concluded after four to six hours at the latest, which is also in your vested interest. With this in mind, I will ensure that today's AGM be conducted swiftly. In order to do justice to this, in the interest of all shareholders present and in view of the requests to speak that have already been received, I am limiting the speaking and question time to 10 minutes per speaker from the outset, just like last year. Previous experience here and at other AGMs has shown that 10 minutes are sufficient to adequately deal with even complex issues. You will be informed of the expiry of your speaking and question time by the notice on the lectern. If the progress of the rest of the meeting makes it necessary, I will further limit your speaking and question time. Of course, you always have the option of making a second comment if you have any further questions. The board of management will respond to questions from a small number of speakers, just as in the past. I will answer questions directed to the supervisory board myself. The board of management has stated that unless it disagrees with my answers, it will adopt them as its own. In the interest of all shareholders and in order to concentrate the meeting, identical questions from different shareholders will only be answered once and summarized. I would like to ask shareholders who have a concern in their capacity as a customer of this company not to raise this question in the general debate, but to contact customer service representatives instead. Please go to the information desk in the foyer on the entrance level. In the interest of all shareholders, we will not answer questions that are not relevant to the agenda during the general debate. Mr. Höttges already demonstrated that Telekom is getting many fewer questions than before because of the well-automated tools we have. But if you have a question relating to products of Deutsche Telekom or any technical problems, please refer to our customer care staff here. I mean, every question or every complaint, rather, is one too many, and we will always try to answer it. But please, let's not do this as part of our general debate here, which brings me to our first group of speakers. Das hat man mir vorher zwar gesagt. Ich habe es wieder vergessen, dass es noch eine Musik gibt. Es gibt eine Musikgruppe. Okay. I'd forgotten that we always play some music before we continue with the next group of speakers. Mr. Hendrik Schmidt from DWS Investment is first followed by Ingo Speich, Deka Investment, and then the third speaker, Henrik Pontzen from Union Investment. So Mr. Hendrik Schmidt from DWS Investment, you have the floor. Thank you, Dr. Appel. Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren. Mr. Höttges, ladies and gentlemen, members of the supervisory board and the board of management, and dear co-shareholders. My name is Hendrik Schmidt, and I am representing DWS Investment GmbH, one of the biggest European investment funds, and we are representing the shares we hold. Mr. Höttges, first of all, a word of thanks. I very much liked how you presented to us in your introduction what Deutsche Telekom stands for and how you described how you're dealing with technical challenges. Very impressive. Let me state that in the past fiscal year, Deutsche Telekom continued to successfully improve its organic growth path and improved its earnings. I would like to therefore thank all current and previous members of the supervisory board and the board of management for their commitment and the excellent work. Please pass this on to whom it may concern. Mr. Mr. Abolhassan, we wish you all the best, and we hope that you will give us shareholders a lot of reason for joy. A couple of numbers of free cash flow, which is up €5.7 billion. Then we have deleveraged by €2 billion, which is also impressive. However, the reduction of net debt, considering the proceeds from the sale of the towers business, doesn't seem that perfect to begin with. Let me give you a couple of examples from the German market. My first question is, how do you assess the current competitive situation in Germany, and what changes may result from the establishment of the fourth mobile provider? Mr. Höttges already talked about it. What will the abolition of the ancillary cost privilege mean for the German fixed network segment in the medium term? Your fiber rollout continues to be a strategic corporate goal. What is the effect of inflation and the lack of skilled labor here? Will this impact the speed at which the network is rolled out? Will it mean that investment costs will be up? I would also like to ask you to give us an outlook or an update on the current situation of the fiber rollout. Let me talk about inflation, technology, security, and selling or disposal of shareholdings. To what extent is Deutsche Telekom's situation affected by the current inflationary environment? What measures have you taken to counteract that, and which areas are affected the most? Infrastructure investments have risen over the past few years. Again, what is the impact of the inflation situation here? What is your outlook to 2024 and your forecast in this regard? What is the current status regarding the review of Huawei technology, and what might be potential financial implications? Last but not least, according to media reports, the German government is planning to reduce its stake in Deutsche Telekom. First question, can you comment on that? Secondly, what implications might this have on the capital structure? Pleasantly enough, Deutsche Telekom proposed a 10% rise in the dividend and also announced a share buyback program. How are you going to prioritize things here in the future? Will the board of management give priority to a higher dividend or to a continued share buyback? Net debt at Deutsche Telekom, including lease costs, is within the target range or not within the target range. When will you reach this target? We got a 70 eurocents dividend last year. This year, you are proposing a dividend of 77 eurocents, which is 10% more. Earnings per share now stands at €3.50, which means that it is more than twice as much than in the past. Based on that, the distribution ratio of around 21%, however, is below the communicated range of between 40% to 60% of net profit. According to the annual report, you had proceeds of more than €12 billion from the sale of the tower business. The question is, why aren't you using these funds, at least in part, to fund a higher dividend for us shareholders? The planned share buyback program has been designed such, according to you, Mr. Höttges, that shareholders will be compensated for the capital increase from 2021. So you are trying to do that retroactively. But how can you make sure that we really benefit from this supposed bad network of yours? About the US, the takeover of Sprint by T-Mobile US is showing the synergies that we were hoping for, and cash flow has increased significantly. However, on a negative note, your US subsidiary is also making headlines in other fields. There is a lack of data security. The antitrust authority has launched an investigation. What measures are you taking in order to counteract that? Has the supervisory board looked into this matter? When can we expect further measures, and when will the supervisory board safeguard better control? From our point of view, hacker attacks and data theft are among the biggest problems for customers in the telecommunications industry. That's why this should be a top issue for this board of management, particularly for this very company where the trust that you expect customers to place in you is part of your customer value proposition. Your subsidiary, T-Mobile US, was also covered on pages 159 to 161 in the annual report. There was a total of seven antitrust proceedings against T-Mobile US. For over 12 years, there has been a legal battle over promises made as part of your prospectus. As the risk is pretty low and as this topic is not deemed to be highly relevant, it has not been covered that much. This, to me, looks like a sigh of relief. There have been various trials with a total amount of more than €1 billion. Following the business combination in the U.S., several trials are now pending, the first of which was admitted in Chicago in November of 2023. Again, you said that you can't reliably estimate the financial implications. On page 171 of the annual report, you said that you made provisions to the tune of €8 billion for this purpose, which means that the total costs are slightly down by €100 million, but the long-term provisions compared to the short-term provisions increased by €470 million. Can you please tell us how this increase came about and what the reason is? That said, your U.S. subsidiary, as a result of various hacker attacks and a lack of sufficient data protection measures, is also criticized by others. We also pointed this out at last year's AGM, and we asked several questions back then. Back then, we asked you how you make sure that the group's data protection regulations be observed in the U.S. as well. You then said that T-Mobile U.S. is deciding on that independently. I would like to state, however, that this is not in the very interest of the company. It is not acceptable for the group to accept any risks in terms of data protection in the U.S. I think it is not acceptable either that I need to tell you again that it is really necessary to take resolute measures here, which is in the vested interest of you and this company and us. For a couple of years, we have also discussed the current status of corporate governance in this company. In the past, we raised some deficits, some of which have been eliminated by now. However, there are still a couple of aspects which are still relevant, and we repeatedly requested you to change things here. Specifically, we still criticize a lack of independence of the members of the audit committee, but not just at the very top of the audit committee, but overall. This is the reason why we are not going to approve the actions of the supervisory board at today's AGM, just like last year. We critically remarked last year that Dagmar Kollmann has been a member of the supervisory board for 10 years. That's why we don't consider her to be independent anymore. We don't think that this is acceptable. At the same time, Mr. Karl-Heinz Streibich is proposed to be re-elected to the supervisory board. The first time he was elected to the supervisory board was 2013, so also more than 10 years ago, which means that we don't consider him to be independent anymore. Last year, the audit committee only consisted of non-independent members. Electing Mr. Streibich would continue the situation, which is why we will disapprove it. Mr. Streibich will only be elected for two years, and we believe it is important to prepare the company for a successor. It's really important to really redefine responsibilities of the Audit and Finance Committee. We will approve Mr. Hinrich's election because we have received ample information on how this mandate is handled. We believe there's still room for improvement when it comes to proving the competence of the members of the supervisory board using the relevant matrix. It is important to look at the competence profile. It comes with 30 buzzwords, and it's important to describe every competence. From our point of view, however, it would be much more effective to really allocate competences quite clearly to every individual member, saying, for instance, this is an expert when it comes to data protection. Last year, Mr. Schröder left the supervisory board, who'd been in charge of that before. So my question is, who is now in charge of data protection on the supervisory board, especially considering the pending trials in the United States? Let me wrap up my comments. Ladies and gentlemen, it has become clear once again that the disclosure of the annual report and the corporate risk report only happened with a delay. I mean, you did get an accolade, and I'm happy to confirm that. But given reporting obligations in line with CSRD, we don't think that the delay between that was acceptable. When can we expect that the finance and sustainability reports will be combined or integrated, which means that this information is provided simultaneously? On page 90 of the sustainability report, you said that you are using the materiality analysis from 2022 for your report in 2023. Can you already tell us what changes you're expecting here for the future? The last point that I would like to talk about is to do with the proposed capital measures. You said that you want to use some contingent capital. However, right now, there doesn't seem to be any intention of issuing an authorization for such contingent capital. This is also to do with participation rights. We believe that participation rights should no longer be relevant. That's why we are going to reject the relevant item on the agenda and demand or request that the supervisory board no longer refer to any such participation rights. Apart from that, we will approve all the other proposed items, and we wish you, the supervisory board, and the board of management all the best for 2024. We are hoping that the share price will continue to develop positively, which is in the vested interest of the shareholders here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Schmidt from DWS. Now I would like to remind the following speakers that it would be good for everybody to restrict their speaking time to 10 minutes. Now we'll have Ingo Speich from Deka Invest, then Henrik Pontzen from Union Investment, and then Friedrich Beckendorf of DSW, the protection community for small shareholders. Hello. My name is Ingo Speich. I am representing Deka Investment. Just like last year, I would like to start my presentation with great praise. You are holding an annual general meeting in the form of a presence meeting, a face-to-face meeting. Thank you very much for that. Please keep it up for next year as well. Ladies and gentlemen, after an excellent year 2022, the Deutsche Telekom share, including dividends in March 2023, could see a plus of 20% and was ahead of the DAX companies. But it's important to compare this with competitors, not only in the operational business. You were better, but the Magenta share was having an 11% premium over the telecom stocks index. So a very good year for Deutsche Telekom again. Höttges, you really brought Deutsche Telekom back to a success path, not only in the operational business but on the stock exchange as well. This is not only true for one year, but it seems to be a permanent development. The most important point here is T-Mobile US. The success of the subsidiary in the US is also now showing its consequences here, and we think it's a good idea to use this company in order to improve the cash flow. The increase of the dividend by 10% and the share buyback program is based on the success of the business in the United States. T-Mobile is accounting for two-thirds of the adjusted earnings of the company, and we have a mobile phone company with a smaller share in Europe now. We are now depending on the US. If T-Mobile US gets a cold, it will probably develop into an influenza here. The operational business of T-Mobile US cannot be properly controlled. We are not against T-Mobile US, but please take into account the risks involved. This is even more important as in the United States, cable and mobile phone operators are competing more and more. There are FMC products to win over mobile phone customers, and we can also see that the markets are almost saturated now. The strategy change towards fiber will now also come in the US, and this requires billions of investments. How can you make sure that this is best done? What is your aim? You, Mr. Höttges, are also in the board of T-Mobile US. What are your demands regarding the local management, and are you happy with the increasing dependence on the US business? What do you have in your strategy if there is a downturn at T-Mobile US, and how can you make sure that the customers will be happy in the long run? Will you need more investments in the future, and what do you think about the competitive situation in general? How fast will you go for convergence and combination products? There is another aspect for the US business, the balance sheet structure. Only a very well-running machine in the US will make it possible to also reduce debts here. If the machine in the US is no longer working properly, you will have a problem here with your indebtedness. We always want to have a strong balance sheet, and this is something that we are still missing at Deutsche Telekom. What are your plans regarding the leverage ratio in the fields of fiber to the home, 5G rollout, and T-Mobile US? Let's move to the business in Germany. The fiber rollout. With all the enthusiasm regarding the future investment into fiber, there doesn't seem to be a lot happening right now. We are focusing on collaborations, but we as investors are supporting the investments as fiber and 5G are definitely the technologies of the future. But the earnings expressed in the ROCE cannot be under the capital costs in the long run. The next EU Commission should not regulate the earnings on newly built networks. Please raise your voice in Brussels and in Berlin. The expensive fiber network should not be just drain our funds but should be profitable for us. What is the take-up rate regarding the fiber technology? Do you see the increased costs for private households also as a risk? What do you think about the risk of increased regulation from Brussels and Berlin? Ladies and gentlemen, the Capital Market Day in October will probably give more clarity, but some of the aspects already have to be raised today. The business model needs to be expanded, and what is very important is the unregulated business where Deutsche Telekom can really show its expertise. What is your view on the unregulated business? Do you see opportunities here? What do you think about vertical integration? Do you want to invest more and more into data centers and towers? The opportunities and risks are very big in this area. This is a question which is central to us as shareholders because it can become very expensive very quickly. You always have to move carefully, and you should never lose sight of the quality of the T-Share. One buzzword that is heard everywhere is artificial intelligence. This is a technology which will completely change the value generation in all the companies, not only today but also in your quarterly report. You talked about more than 200 applications or use cases, but Deutsche Telekom has not the economies of scale of the big US companies. What does artificial intelligence mean for you strategically, and how fast can you generate value based on artificial intelligence? Is your size big enough, or do you have to join forces with your competitors? Ladies and gentlemen, climate change is happening very fast, and major companies are in a special responsibility here. Business processes will change, and you will have to develop a climate strategy to do this. Deutsche Telekom has made a lot of progress regarding sustainability and has developed a sustainability policy which is unprecedented, but you also have to keep it up, and this needs to be mentioned as an item on the agenda of the shareholders' meeting. The shareholders should have a right to also make their voice heard. In other countries, this is already done, and this would give you more backing for the implementation of the sustainability industry. What do you think about a say on climate? You don't have anything to hide here, quite on the contrary. Ladies and gentlemen, finally, I would like to turn to the agenda. We are against the reelection of Karl-Heinz Streibich. Because of the reelection, Mr. Streibich will be more than 10 years in the supervisory board, and this means that he's no longer independent, and there are no independent members in the audit committee. We also would like to see a new generation in the supervisory board, especially regarding the balance sheet complexity of the US subsidiary. We need financial expertise, and with Mr. Appel, the quality of the supervisory board chairman has worsened, and we will not approve your activities. For all the other agenda items, we will vote in line with the proposals by the boards. We now wish you a lot of success, and we are looking forward to another face-to-face shareholders' meeting next year here in Bonn. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Mr. Speich. Next on the list is Mr. Henrik Pontzen from Union Investment. We'll have Frederik Beckendorf from DSW, followed by Florian Honselmann by the Schutzgemeinschaft der Kapitalanleger in Munich. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Henrik Pontzen, and in the portfolio management of Union Investment, I'm responsible for the topics of sustainability and active shareholders. We are one of the largest shareholders of Deutsche Telekom, and we represent the interests of our 5.8 million investors. Ladies and gentlemen, from a shareholder's point of view, the Höttges era is a clear success story. The figures speak for themselves. Ever since Mr. Höttges started in 2014 as a CEO, the T-Share has provided a total return of 167% based on the share price development and the dividend. This is an extraordinary outperformance compared to the DAX, only providing a total earnings of 96%, and the European telecommunications sector only 12%. So 167% compared to 96% and 12%. This is really a difference in quality. Deutsche Telekom has the majority of T-Mobile US and can finally harvest what it sold and invested in the past. What are the priorities that you now have for the use of the funds that are generated? Do you want to continue to reduce debt that can be a problem in times of high interest rates? If so, to what extent and until when? I would like to support the previous speaker. There is still room for maneuver here. Mr. Höttges, your contract will expire in 2026. What do you want to achieve by that time? What are the risks and opportunities you see regarding artificial intelligence? You already talked about the opportunities. It doesn't stop at an avatar, but the risks are also obvious. You are not only being faster and larger and more efficient, but you will also be more vulnerable and more dependent. So how do you want to control the risks, and what are your strategies in this area? What are the expectations you have regarding the fiber rollout in the United States in view of the expected size of the business, the scope of the investments, and the expected returns compared to other investment possibilities in the United States? What are your expectations regarding the development of the U.S. mobile phone market? Ladies and gentlemen, as a sustainable investor, we place a lot of emphasis on ecological, social, and governance-related criteria, ESG for short. For climate protection, Deutsche Telekom is a pioneer and is very high on the climate ranking of Union Investment. They are ranking number one at present. Congratulations for this achievement. This is really commendable, but at the same time, there are still major governance deficits, and this leads me to our vote. We praise very clearly things that can be praised, but we also have to criticize things that can be criticized. Here, the structure of the supervisory board is not correct, especially concerning the finance and audit committee. The chairwoman, Mrs. Kollmann, is not independent, but independence is not a luxury, but it's an absolutely necessary and indispensable element of the work of the Audit and Finance Committee. The problem here is not restricted to the chair, but also the composition of the committee is not sufficient. Most of the members are not independent, and this is why we will not approve of the actions of the members of the supervisory board under item four, and we'll also vote against Mr. Streibich as a member of the supervisory board. He is no longer independent based on our criteria. The same is true for Ms. Kollmann and Mr. Winkels. Now, under item number seven, we think that your plans regarding the profit participation rights are not in line with our strategies. I already mentioned the outperformance of Deutsche Telekom. Mr. Höttges, it's also your success, as I said, and excellent work also needs to be excellently rewarded. But success always has many fathers and mothers, and some of them were heard in the video that you showed in the beginning. The success, the basic income has increased so much that it's no longer in proportion. Between 2013 and 2023, your fixed income was raised by 42%. Mr. Apple, what about the remuneration of the employees of Deutsche Telekom in the same period, and how do you explain the difference in the development? We also say that the latest increase by more than 20% of the fixed income cannot be seen in the remuneration report. The remuneration report does not provide the transparency that we would deem necessary. We see some weaknesses regarding the content and the form, and we will reject the approval of the remuneration report under item nine of the agenda. All the other agenda items will be supported. Thank you very much for your attention. See you next year, and we hope that we can celebrate successes again, and I hope it will be another face-to-face meeting in Bonn. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Ponsson. The next speaker now is Mr. Friedrich Beckendorf, then followed by Florian Honselmann by SDK, and after that, Jack Abramovich, which would close the first group. So first, Friedrich Beckendorf from DSW in Düsseldorf. Thank you. Sehr geehrter Herr Vorsitzender, Herr Dr. Appel. Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Friedrich Beckendorf, and I'm speaking on behalf of those shareholders who have transferred their voting rights to DSW. First of all, I would like to express my pleasure that this year's shareholders' meeting of Deutsche Telekom again happens in a face-to-face meeting in Bonn. This is really a great tradition, but this is not a matter of course, unfortunately, and I'm convinced of the fact that this form of a shareholders' meeting is a good indication of the appreciation that a listed company shows towards its shareholders. Regarding the participation of the shareholders in the shareholders' meeting, Deutsche Telekom has really been a prime example among the DAX companies. Ladies and gentlemen, Deutsche Telekom again had a positive and successful year, 2023, in view of the many special effects impacting this. For example, the divestment of GD Towers, the tower business in Germany and in Austria, and the many unadjusted and adjusted KPIs regarding organic and inorganic growth rates makes it difficult to really see what the growth was. Organic growth by 4% in earnings EBITDA AL and free cash flow increased by 41%, however, show that it was a strong year. For these great achievements in the past year, we would like to especially thank all the employees of Deutsche Telekom, and we also would like to ask the members of the supervisory board and the board of management to pass on our thanks to the workforce. The already mentioned GD Towers transaction with a 49% minority share still with Deutsche Telekom was to participate from future value increases. Compared to the last shareholders' meeting, you did not see any risks regarding further impairment, but in the fourth quarter 2023, you had to write down, and now the book value is down to €3.4 billion. Perhaps you can now explain the background of the impairment and in how far you think it is possible to have a value increase in the coming years, and please also take into account the slightly improved business outlook for GD Towers. Let's stay in Germany. Fiber rollout has gained pace, and the target for 2023 was set to be 2.5 million new lines and an existing business of 8 million FTTH connections. The internal ambition of up to 3 million new lines, however, were missed. What were the main reasons? Was it a lack of capacities in the construction industry or a deliberate slowdown in view of the higher rollout costs? What were the average costs in 2023 compared to 2022? We see a gap between the booked and the already established lines. The active take-up rate is at 13% to 15% compared to 30% for your competitors. Don't you have to take into account earnings in rollout? Why don't you do what the competitors do, preselling the fiber connections in order to get money in? Looking beyond the Atlantic, an important milestone was the insuring of the capital majority in T-Mobile US. At the end of the year, the majority was at 50.6%, but now you have been selling T-Mobile US shares in the market. What is the logic behind these sales? The great development of T-Mobile US is undoubtedly a big success story, but now T-Mobile US is accounting for two-thirds of the earnings and the revenues, so people are already seeing the danger of an agglomeration risk. Do you also see risks in the US business, or could you also imagine to even expand your participation in T-Mobile US? Last year, there were rumors about Amazon's offer to take over some part of the business, and this resulted in a great turmoil in the market. At the end of the day, there was a cooperation between Amazon and DISH. What do you think about the current competitive situation in the United States? Has this become fiercer last year, and how can T-Mobile US still show its strengths? Let's now come to the worried child. This is the systems business, which has lost market share, and it's no longer as successful as in the past. The positive news in 2023 is that the T-Systems business made a positive cash contribution of €11 million, so that it was no longer a cash burner. The target to have an EBITDA margin of €9 million is now still intact. What are you now planning, Mr. Abolhassan, as a new board member? What do you want to do differently from your predecessor? Höttges, in the World Congress in Barcelona this year, you, together with the three other companies, appealed to the politicians to come up with a new regulation approach, and you also talked about a €200 billion gap in the requirement of capital. There was a white book on the telecommunications sector submitted by the European Union that also included the Digital Networks Act. What do you think about the suggestions made by the EU Commission, and how probable do you think is an overregulation of the telecommunications industry in Europe? Before I come to the agenda, I would like to talk about the pleasant share price development. Last year, there was an increase by 16.6% in January of this year with €23.22. There was a new record high for more than 20 years, but still, the possible sale of shares by the German government is a threat. Do you have good capital allocation? Well, it would be desirable if the federal government, as a responsible main shareholder, should tell very soon what they want to do. Do you have any information on the timing and the plans of the German government? I would like to turn to the agenda. Under item two, you are suggesting a 10% increase of the dividend to €0.77, and in line with the dividend policy, you want it to appropriate 40% to 60%, and this would mean we would have a share of 48.1%. So you are already making a huge step towards a profit-orientated dividend payment of around 50% of the adjusted earnings. We welcome this, but this should not be the end of this. What are the ideas of the management board regarding future dividends? The two gentlemen suggested for election to the supervisory board are met with our unrestricted approval, but last year, we already criticized the published qualification matrix regarding the competency profile of the supervisory board, and I would like to congratulate you today. You do not only have the most competent supervisory board that I ever saw, but it has even become more competent. Now it fulfills 109 of the 120 possible competence fields, and we would like to ask you to revise the form in which you present the competency matrix. Regarding the remuneration report, we would like to ask you to answer the following questions. What are the reasons to change the target remuneration of the board of management compared to last year? Why were the target values regarding the ESG factors, reduction of CO2 emissions and energy consumption, higher than the values in 2022, although it is now based on the values without T-Mobile US? For future remuneration reports, we also would like to see a comparison of the target values and the actual values, and we also would like to ask you to change the illustration, and this would result in a more transparent presentation and give us a better opportunity to assess the remuneration, but we are planning to approve of the resolution. As last year, there is the special termination right on the part of the CEO for the remuneration. Mr. Höttges, after more than 10 years as CEO of Deutsche Telekom, you are really at the height of your power, and I don't have the impression that you lost any of your aggression vis-à-vis your competitors. Last time, you said you were really interested in fighting your competitors or also vis-à-vis the politicians when you are criticizing politicians in Germany and in Europe and say that in this case, it would be better to invest in the United States. Can you share some ideas on what you plan for the rest of your life? Do you want to completely use your term of office until 2026, or will you just stay until the time when your favorite for the successor will take over? How far do you already have succession plans? Let me come to the end of my contribution. Ladies and gentlemen, for the current business year, in line with the financial figures that you committed to in 2021, you expect further growth: 6% for adjusted EBITDA AL, 16% for the free cash flow, and an increase by at least 10% of the adjusted earnings per share. Also for future dividend development, these are good outlooks for telecom shareholders. Now, I would like to thank all the employees and the boards for the work done, and I would like to wish you a lot of success for the year 2024. Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Mr. Beckendorf. Next, we have Florian Hanselmann for SDK (Schutzgemeinschaft der Kapitalanleger), the Association for the Protection of Investors. Then we have Mr. Jack Abramovich to end the first block, and then we'll have answers to all these questions and then have the second round of questions. We'll start now with Mr. Florian Hanselmann. Yes, thank you very much. Dr. Appel, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Florian Hanselmann. I'm speaker of the Association for the Protection of Investors, Shareholders Protection Association, which attends up to 400 shareholders' meetings annually. Ladies and gentlemen, I can only underline the congratulations of the previous speakers regarding the presence here at this shareholders' meeting. Unfortunately, this is not evident for many other DAX-listed companies, and I hope that the situation will continue for Deutsche Telekom in the coming years. The operative development of this company here, it is difficult to set this into context. Regarding the adjusted values, we have sales that went down 2.1%. Regarding service sales, we had a minimum growth of 0.6%, and without the special effects from the sale of the towers, the net earnings would have gone down by two digits to €8 billion. Unadjusted, thanks to the sell towers, there has been a multi-year high with a result of €3.50 or €3.60 per share. This is something we haven't seen in a long time at Deutsche Telekom. Besides the remarks regarding the agenda, I will limit myself to the risks entailed here. I'd like to take a closer look at those risks here. It's not a mere financial participation, which we can just allow to run its course. T-Mobile really managed to be profitable in the US market and the growth that we're seeing in the group against a greatly increased net debt, which has doubled to €242 billion. This has gone down to €132 million thanks to the sell towers, but profitability suffered due to integration costs. But as I said, the figures shown by T-Mobile seem to be decent, so everything seems to be well on track in operative terms. Finally, the cooperation with Sprint also paid off. The mobile network in the US that we're having there is better utilized than we had expected, but there are some things that we need to be taking a closer look at. First of all, you've been saying 50% plus X. That's your target. This is what you want to be measured by, and this is what you announced during the last annual general meeting. You said you were successful, and you achieved that goal earlier than planned. We did have an immense improvement due to the deal with SoftBank. 48.75 million shares will be received, and so this improves our share, but we might have to buy back. This is a very good deal, not for us though, but for SoftBank. As if this isn't difficult enough, you're also endangering our majority participation by participating in the share buyback program. Regarding the strategic setup of T-Mobile, we have issues here. A few weeks ago, there was the announcement of a joint venture with Lumos that wants to enter the optical fiber business. This is something you can do, but in September 2022, the fixed net and fiber business of the old Sprint was sold to Cogent for $1, which gave us $1 billion in depreciation and impairment in the balance sheet. Now, with regard to corporate governance, this time we don't have a hack attack, but an increase in customer complaints in the U.S. They feel damaged by T-Mobile, and even if this is a strange situation because monopoly investigations is something of the public authorities, and if customers of Verizon and AT&T feel damaged, they should return to their own company instead of complaining about T-Mobile. This is an effect which we can't really understand, but now, this complaint went forward, and therefore, the deal with Sprint might have to be reversed. This is a risk, the risk of very expensive arbitration proceedings. It is a risk that cannot be neglected. I have a lot of questions here with sub-points that I'd like to raise in this context. First of all, market capitalization of Deutsche Telekom is significantly below that of the US subsidiary T-Mobile. Buybacks of T-Mobile, is that a suitable means of generating value for telecom shareholders? $15.2 billion. The amount of money required for share buybacks exceeds the accumulated payout to shareholders of Deutsche Telekom. Do the boards wish to expand the valuation and value between parent company and subsidiary? Now, the transfer of T-Mobile shares to SoftBank, does this cover all the compensation mechanisms? Are there other claims that need to be fulfilled, and to what amount? Third, if the strategic goal is to maintain and secure the strategic majority at T-Mobile, why does Deutsche Telekom wish to participate in share buybacks of the subsidiary? Isn't there the danger that with its insider knowledge, the board members would be speculating against other market participants? Fourth, how does the board assess and evaluate the litigation by consumers in the U.S.? After the litigation has been admitted by the courts, even though the integration of Sprint on the whole fulfilled expectations, this fusion is reflected in the net debt. In the past fiscal year, due to the partial sale of the cell tower business, there has been some amount of correction. How far do the boards assume that the absolute amount of debts can be maintained, especially against the massive share buybacks planned by T-Mobile? Seventh, T-Mobile announced that they wanted to build out their own fiber network. So what's the charge for capex that the boards expected? If T-Mobile moves away from being just a mobile operator, what are the effects of that and why? Were the fixed net and fiber mobile network sold for $1? Did this fulfill regulatory requirements, or was that sale a strategic mistake that we should have avoided? At this point, I'd like to underline that we are not against participation in T-Mobile US, but we need to take into account that between 60% and 70% of our sales cannot be considered a mere financial participation that is allowed to run its course without being checked. I'd now like to speak about the agenda. You will get approval for all items on the agenda. Especially, we are pleased about the payout of the dividend, although we believe that it could have been higher given the revenue from the sale of the cell towers. There's one point that we cannot go along with, item seven, because we already exceeded the limit for resolutions regarding equity and because we also have a critical view on participation rights. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank you for your attention. I'm looking forward to receiving answers to my questions. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Hanselmann. Now, to end the first round of questions, we now have Mr. Jack Abramovich. After the first questions have been answered, I'll have Mr. Schmitz, and after that, Mr. Maximilian Eberle, Frau Gerburg, and Günther from Kaufbeuren. First of all, before the questions will be answered, we will have Mr. Jack Abramovich. Thank you very much, Mr. Höttges, the management team, and the employees of Deutsche Telekom and the shareholders. I'd like to thank all of you, not once, not twice, but three times. First of all, I'd like to thank you for the great work, which meant that Deutsche Telekom became the most valuable brand in the world and is amongst the 10 most valuable brands worldwide. You've been able to increase the value of the brand by 17% to €73.3 billion. That's an increase of 84% since 2020. Secondly, I'd like to thank you for the great development of the share price and the dividend. Last year, the share price increased by 16%, and the dividend is to increase by 10%. This is good for investors and employees who hold shares. But most of all, I'd like to thank you for combating hate on the internet with a strong position of Deutsche Telekom as a pioneer in this regard. They did so before a certain conference took place in Potsdam before we heard about that in June or July last year. Thank you for that. It is and remains extremely important to show personal standing and courage, and I'd like to thank you for that. I still remember the times when all those who doubted the Wall Street overtake and those who had predicted the end of growth in the U.S. Nevertheless, 2023 was the year with the fastest customer growth rate in the U.S. T-Mobile US is a clear market leader in 5G and gets top remarks from Google and even has great coverage in the rural areas with broadband and 5G. The Deutsche Telekom will have paid out more than the original stock market price. In the times of zero interest rates, Deutsche Telekom was a very good share, and it still is so. What I'm concerned about is still the buildout of fiber. Homes Passed doesn't tell us anything because you can only earn money if you connect customers to the fiber network. So in the future, you should talk about Homes Connected and have the corresponding forecast. At the end of 2023, not even 1 million customers were connected to a fiber network. Also, the disputes regarding the buildout of fiber in rural areas are not ideal, and it would be great to have solutions on that, to have fair access for all. It will also be good to take into consideration the investments needed, both for Deutsche Telekom but also others who were there first. Now, parallel buildout currently doesn't help us in Germany with the lagging behind in comparison to other countries. I'd like to welcome Dr. Ferri Abolhassan regarding T-Systems. I'd like to speak about something regarding T-Systems that also worries me. In 2023, we had a reduction of orders of 8.2% to €3.6 billion. What's positive is the growth in digital solutions cloud, but the classical IT business is a catastrophe, to put it bluntly. For years, different management staff have been promising improvements, but T-Systems remain a burden on the otherwise good business results with a positive cash contribution of just €11 billion in 2023. Therefore, my question is this: Will the management stick to that type of business forever? Is it flexible and good enough to hold our position against international competition, or wouldn't it make sense rather to move away from the classical traditional IT business and to concentrate on cloud and digital solutions? Now, we will approve all items on the agenda except for item seven, which is out of date, and it is surprising that Deutsche Telekom still wants to go along with participation rights. Apart from that, 2023 was a very good year for Deutsche Telekom and the shareholders, and I'd like to thank everyone for that, and I'd like to thank you all for your attention. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Abramovich. Now, I'd like to start with answers to the questions that I already have. I have here the answers for Mr. Schmitz. He had two questions. First of all, how is the supervisory board dealing with that topic? It was a question regarding network security at T-Mobile US and in how far the supervisory board is dealing with it. The answer is multi-fold. First of all, the supervisory board regularly is looking at cybersecurity during its meeting, and the management also explained to us what has happened and how they dealt with it. Next, the audit committee in each of its meetings receives a report on cybersecurity, which also includes the situation in the US, and then, of course, they ask back, and the Chief Security Information Officer provides a report. Last year, I spent several days with T-Mobile US during the occurrences. I also asked to speak with their Chief Information Security Officer, who explained to me very extensively the measures taken in order to avoid such things in the future. The second question by Mr. Schmitz was this: At what points are data privacy and data security being considered by the supervisory board, especially in regard to the current litigation cases in the US? Now, I already spoke about cybersecurity. Of course, the audit committee also looks at data privacy and data security, but we're also discussing this in the supervisory on the whole. We also have at Deutsche Telekom the Data Security Advisory Council. We have several members here, amongst them Mr. Schröder, and we're very glad that Mr. Schröder will continue to remain the chairman of that advisory council despite his leaving the supervisory board. I'd like to add this. You asked how we assess the situation. First of all, there was the independence of supervisory board members being raised and their qualifications. Let me say this. I already said this in the past and also in bilateral discussions with some of the speakers. I understand that there is a formal criterion such as the length of office in the supervisory board, but another thing is how you act within the supervisory board. From my own profile, you know that I've been active in five supervisory boards. I've been supervisory board chairman during the financial crisis at the Postbank. I'm in the supervisory board of Adidas and the Fresenius, and for the last two years, I've been chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom. Apart from that, I also led the supervisory board at Deutsche Post and DHL. I cooperate with many audit companies that are auditing repeatedly. We just had the change at Deutsche Telekom to move over to Deloitte from PWC, and I think I can assess what independence is, what it looks like, and what topics need to be addressed. Of course, I'm pleased to find that the DSW, the Association for the Protection of Investors, last year awarded me the prize of good governance. If you look at the list of companies there, you'll find very many renowned companies. Now, regarding those two persons, Mrs. Kollmann and Mr. Streibich, I can assess that these persons are highly independent, although they've been in the supervisory board for a long time. Of course, it is my task to attend audit committee meetings and finance committee meetings regularly to see how the discussions are being led, how difficult issues are being addressed and discussed, and how questions are being asked. This is certainly the case for those two candidates, and therefore, I think it does make sense for Mrs. Kollmann to continue chairing that committee and for Mr. Streibich to continue on the board. I just wanted to explain to all shareholders present my reasons and how I assess whether the members are independent. This is something you can expect from me. I'm just not looking at the formal criteria, whether they are fulfilled, but I think we can really say that there is very good governance and supervision in this company and by the supervisory board. Therefore, I would like to ask you to follow our proposal and approve the reappointment of Mr. Streibich and Mrs. Kollmann. Then, the qualification matrix. There's certainly justified criticism on how this is legally regulated. It is perhaps difficult. I myself also believe it should be done differently. There should be a list of qualifications, and each supervisory board member should name three. But if Telekom was the only company to implement that, then everyone would ask us, "How are we just having so few qualifications?" Therefore, the legal requirements should be changed that were saying regarding the listed criteria, every board member should mention the few criteria for which they feel particularly suited. Then you would get a good profile. If you're talking about my person, I feel qualified for all the topics that the supervisory board member should handle. Otherwise, I wouldn't trust myself with doing this job. If I didn't tick off certain things anymore, I wouldn't be doing my job. So it's not so much just ticking off these boxes. I'm sure that the supervisory board members are well suited to do their jobs, but we also want to have a certain profile, and that would make sense to have only a limited number of qualifications that you tick off. But for that purpose, we would have to have a change of the legal requirements. Otherwise, we would be the only company doing this. This is not so much an answer to the questions, but a remark that perhaps helps create transparency for all the shareholders to understand our reasons for making those proposals. Now, I'd like to hand over to Mr. Höttges for answering questions to the management board, and then we'll come back to the other questions. Thank you, Dr. Schmitz. You asked a couple of questions on the company's strategy and the ancillary cost privilege. The abolition of the performance-based privilege means that for the first time, we can reach 12.5 million new households because they can now choose what provider they want to use for their TV. Previously, this was a privilege of the cable operators, which meant that this market has now been opened. This monopoly has been dropped, and I would like to thank the regulators for allowing free competition in this field after all. We believe that this also offers additional market potential for our optical fiber. As long as we weren't able to offer this to 12 million households, of course, we weren't happy about that. We believe that now that this is possible, it will offer new impetus to our Magenta TV product and our fiber rollout. In fact, we already set up some partnerships with housing associations, which will make it possible for us to get in touch with these 12 million households. You asked about how fierce competition is in Germany. In mobile communications, we've seen that competitors recently have been very aggressive in bringing their prices down. The German mobile communications market continues to be highly competitive. Not only are there the big network operators here, but there are also what we refer to as the multicolored cards, like the Aldi, Lidl supermarket chains that are also active in this field. We want to position ourselves on the basis of the best network, superior network. Secondly, best customer service. Needless to say, we also want to increasingly integrate the families, not just for mobile communications, but also for the fixed network, so an overall connectivity offer. I think we're very well on track, and this helps us to stand apart from our competitors. Last year, we were clearly the winner here in Germany. With support from politicians, with support from asymmetric privileges, however, there has now been introduced a fourth network operator, 1&1. We believe this is a wrong decision because it means that not a single new antenna will be built. In addition, the expensive spectrum that we would like to acquire will become even more expensive, and this is a spectrum which is not even used for customers. In fact, customers are prevented from using it. I believe that the market will become even more competitive as a result of the regulators' measures. It's basically a question of who's faster and who's more efficient. We need to be better prepared for what happens. We need to make sure that we always find better answers. So far, we've been very successful, and now I can't wait to see whether 1&1 will really roll out an infrastructure of their own. We'll see. Then you asked the question about how inflation and higher costs impact on our fiber rollout and whether we have reduced our targets. First of all, yes, we have witnessed a massive increase in civil engineering costs in Germany, and yes, interests are also at a very high level in this market. Yes, the fiber infrastructure has become more expensive than we would hope. Having said that, though, we put our blinkers on, and we'll just see it through because now is the right time to roll out the fiber network. Last year, we announced 2.5 million came out at 2.6 million. I always tend to be more ambitious than our internal goals. We considered to do 2.3 million to 2.4 million. Of course, building capacities are also an issue, and sometimes it's not possible to reach all your targets, but we won't stop. In 2024, we want to go beyond the 10 million mark in Germany regarding the number of fiber lines, and we want to connect another 2.5 million households in Germany. We have this big rollout program here. Telekom is building two out of three lines here, and this is the potential that we have to generate revenues in Germany in the future. As of today, we expect investments to increase further in the Germany operating segment this year and in the next year. We are at €4.6 billion right now. This is the amount that we are investing in this segment in Germany per year. That's a huge amount which is invested in the infrastructure. Including Group Headquarters, we have investments that are even slightly higher than that. You asked the question on where and how we expect things to develop from here. I cannot predict what the outcome of the current political debate is going to be. Right now, we are not assuming that anybody wants to take part of the mobile communications network out of operation. When it comes to the Huawei access network, I mean, here, some things are certainly dependent on the relevant deadlines and dates. However, a short-term switch-off of all Chinese antennas is not possible. It's not even technically possible, nor would it be acceptable from a security point of view, and customers would have to suffer from it. That's why we are still using Chinese components for our antenna network. However, when it comes to any other network components, be it the aggregation network or the core network or software where data is converted into information, for all that, we are not using Chinese components anymore. At the same time, we are making major progress with regards to the Open RAN technology. What is it? It means that we are segregating software. It would mean that we would ultimately have a much bigger choice of antenna vendors, Nokia, Ericsson, Chinese suppliers as well, but also new suppliers from Japan and Korea that we could possibly use. We are making major progress in this field, and next year, we want to establish 3,000 new antennas in Brandenburg and replace the current ones, which I think the breakthrough of Open RAN in the mass market is imminent, and this will give us more flexibility when it comes to selecting vendors in this field. You asked a question on the overbuild for optical fiber. That's a bit like a storm in the teacup. Maybe you could say that 2% to 2.5% of all rollout areas in Germany have parallel structures for the fiber rollout, and nobody seems to bother that our competitors are doing a 100% overbuild of our network in the areas of their responsibility. But the moment we overbuild a network which was built by one of our competitors, there is an uproar. Honestly, I mean, this is such a very small share of areas where this is even the case. Our hometown of Bonn, this is the place where we were the first to roll out fiber. Apparently, the town now invited E.ON to overbuild our infrastructure here. Thank you very much. We've seen decades of regulation. Now we have competition in the infrastructure segment as well, but this does not only affect telecom. I think it's good that customers have a better choice to use different providers for the infrastructure rollout. It's good that the telecommunications markets have been liberalized, and we also have a sound legal framework for telecommunications companies in Europe, which is good. It's convergent. With that, I'd like to hand over to Christian Illek. Thank you. A question from Mr. Schmitz on the role of inflation and its impact on business and what measures we've been taking to mitigate the situation. First of all, energy costs in Europe in particular. We hedged them long-term, including staff costs wherever we didn't have any long-standing contracts, mainly in Europe. Then civil engineering costs. Mr. Höttges already commented on that. Thirdly, interest rates. What did we do? In the energy segment, the share of power purchase agreements has increased. Our goal is to reach 50% by the end of 2025. In actual fact, we increased hedging for the next couple of years. When you look at forward pricing today, then you can see that it is possible to do something for energy prices here right now because energy prices have decreased considerably. When it comes to cost control, we've taken various measures. When you look at discretionary costs, for instance, we often said, "Okay, then we're not doing it." We refer to that as stop doing. We changed from variable funding to fixed funding. 91% of our funding in Europe is fixed now, which means that there is no risk regarding the future. In Europe and in Germany as well, we increased prices in order to overcompensate the effects of higher inflation rates. Mr. Höttges already talked about our reduced target of the fiber rollout. Right now, we are taking various measures in the field of procurement, renegotiating contracts. In some areas, we are dealing with monopolies, especially in the civil engineering segment. We have also launched measures to improve the efficiency of our fiber rollout. Much on the topic of inflation. There was another question on infrastructure investments. Over the past few years, investments have increased. What are the priorities regarding the future, you asked? First of all, there is a minor decrease year on year. Last year, we spent $16.6 billion. This year, we are planning $16 billion. This is mainly driven by the US. This entire decrease comes from the US. Ex-US, there is a minor increase, or it remains flat. In Germany, there is a minor increase as in Europe. In the US, the reason for the situation is that the network integration is complete now, which means that current CapEx is enough for this year in order to achieve our corporate goals. In terms of our systems business, systems business is flat, but CapEx is an issue, especially in terms of civil engineering. We need to become more efficient here regarding the fiber rollout, and we need to discuss with our vendors what prices are acceptable and which prices are not. You asked about proceeds from the sale of our tower business and why we don't use it to pay a higher dividend. This is based on adjusted earnings. It does not include proceeds from M&A transactions. We've also demonstrated to you how things have developed over time, and we don't want to make ourselves dependent on possible fluctuations resulting from M&A transactions. Here, we are at a 48% distribution rate right now, and we believe that that is quite good. It is within the communicated range of between 40% to 60%. Of course, we did use the proceeds from the sale of the tower business to make sure that we stick within our target range to bring net debt down. We are well on course to achieve our target here for 2024. Mr. Speich asked several questions on how we want to further develop our business model. In the next couple of years, the lion's share of our value creation will also come from our networks, which is why we are massively investing in state-of-the-art technologies, fiber and 5G. At the same time, we are planning to invest more in growth business. For that, we have set aside $2.5 billion, which will be invested in growth fields. This is about areas where we want to complement our core competencies, meaning we are going to acquire stakes and companies in order to exert an influence and to make sure that we, as a group, can also use these state-of-the-art technologies. Sometimes we may acquire a majority stake, sometimes a minority stake, but at any rate, we want to have a share in the innovative power of startups. This is about things like network security, Internet of Things, generative and artificial intelligence, expansion of our core business in cooperation with business customers. These are the most important aspects of the $2.5 billion that we will be investing in these growth segments, but the core will continue to be our network infrastructure. You asked several questions on the fiber rollout, and you asked whether this is a long-term venture. I already answered that. Yes, it is. Right now, by the way, 60% of the households in Germany are using a super-vectoring line, and 90% of the households are using a VDSL line. These are lines that offer up to 250 megabytes per second. I can tell you that customers are very happy with that. Now, we are offering a gigabit line, and customers are wondering, "Do I really need that?" That's a discussion that we need to have, of course. That's why the level of acceptance for new fiber lines is still fairly low because customers who are using super-vectoring are already quite happy. They don't really see how they can benefit from an even faster line. We are, of course, trying to win new customers. Right now, we are making a lot of progress with the fiber rollout. This year, we want to go beyond the 10 million mark in Germany, and these will be 10 million households that can actually get a fiber line. It doesn't really matter - we will no longer then distinguish between homes passed and homes connected. In 2023, we've already been quite successful. We gained 300,000 new customers for FTTH. This year, the goal stands at 450,000 new customers that we want to migrate to this new technology, FTTH. There will certainly be more demand for higher bandwidth. That is as certain as can be. Once the demand is there, it would be too late to start with a rollout, which is why we are already starting now, even though the level of utilization may still be fairly low, but we already anticipated that in our business case. Then you asked a question of the impact of European regulators' policies. I will not tire of pointing out the deficits here. At the Mobile World Congress, I also discussed this with my peers, and we were sitting there on that stage saying we do need to see a new start from Brussels. For that, the EU Commission has launched a white paper that covers several subjects, such as what would be an adequate involvement of big tech companies in sharing the costs of infrastructure rollouts. You know that huge investments need to be made, and others do not have to pay for it. The deregulation of the fiber market is part of that white paper. Then harmonization of the sale of spectrum across the 27 member states and EU taxonomy. These are further topics that are discussed there. Access of the European telecommunications industry to tools that make it possible to assess their level of sustainability. This white paper addresses a lot of important subjects. It is a step in the right direction. The new commission will certainly deal with it. Whether or not this will actually be ratified, whether it will lead to this market being more consolidated, more liberalized, and becoming more fair regarding the big tech operators, that is speculation. I mean, we are still hoping that this may happen, and we hope that this white paper be ratified by whom it may concern. You asked a question about data centers, and you asked whether we should be investing in deregulated markets. First of all, yes, data centers are an important business model for us. In Poland, in the Netherlands, in the Czech Republic, we do have such data centers. Our DT Venture Capital partner's entity is also using it. You might want to check it out for yourselves. We are one of the biggest data center operators in Germany. About the towers business, you know that we sold our majority in the towers business in Germany and Austria, which means that we will still keep a 59% stake. This means that using the rights we still have, we can still get back to acquiring the majority rights. We are very happy with the proceeds from the sale, and we already pointed out that we look at the towers business as a growth business, both organically and non-organically, and we want to have our share in that. Right now, we are preparing the spinoff of our towers in our European subsidiaries. This offers us more potential for growth and also more potential to monetize this business. There was another question on climate. I think if you follow us on social media and other areas, sustainability and social responsibility is a core of our identity and the brand DNA, also referring to inclusion. In society, we want to be seen as a responsible company having a positive impact on society. This is not only true for Germany, but for all countries because the customer will believe in us and will buy our systems. We are doing this also to profit, and we know about the need to reduce CO2 emissions and the use of energies. We are really making sure that we can autonomously control our energy supply based on PPAs, power purchasing agreements, so that we directly buy electricity from renewable electricity suppliers. 50% of our need is already based on PPAs so that we are not dependent on the general trading market. We are on a good track here, and we are fulfilling the corporate governance code, and we want to make sure that we well position our company. Now, let me continue with the next questions, although there are still a number of questions open from the last round, but we don't have the answers yet. I would like to ask Daniel Schmidt, then Maximilian Eberle, and then Mr. Hans Oswald. First of all, Daniel Schmidt, please. Daniel Schmidt, are you here in the room? Perfect. Thank you. First, I would like to apologize. It's my first time at a shareholders' meeting, and whenever you have a first time, you are very nervous. I would like to thank the chefs for the lunch. The chicken they served was really tender and great. Now, let me continue with my address. I have got some questions to the board of management. How many subsidiaries does DTAG have? It's very difficult for me to gain transparency. I also would like to see how much revenue is to expect with Omnichannel in Germany and in Europe, and does this shift the ratio between Germany or the EU and the US? I would like to know how much you invest into AI research. We already saw the AI fund, and the Magenta Smart Speaker, for example, was terminated because of the big competition from Google, Amazon, and so on. This is the end of my first address to the shareholders' meeting. For the first time, I wanted to be quick. Thank you very much, Mr. Schmidt, for this contribution. Next, I would like to ask Mr. Maximilian Eberle, followed by Hans Oswald, and then Peter Streichan. But first, Maximilian Eberle. That's great. Thank you. This was faster than I expected. First of all, I would like to thank all the employees worldwide, and please tell me later on in how many countries the Deutsche Telekom Group is active right now. I remembered it was 28% in the past, and revenues in Germany in 2022 amounted to 23% of the total group. I would like to thank Dr. Appel. Dr. Appel is for a while not more our President. Now, you are no longer the CEO of Deutsche Post AG, and this means that you have a lot of time to focus on the mandate as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of DTAG. 31 meetings in one year. It's really remarkable, but I would like to know how many of those were virtual meetings and how many were face-to-face meetings. Now, there is a point where probably I will be criticized, but it's my suggestion, as people were also talking about the remuneration of the board of management, my suggestion is that you should get 20 times as much as the average pay of a normal employee in Germany, maximum. I would like to know how the management board and the supervisory board want to reduce the extremely high bank debt. There is something that I don't understand, and this is that you are making a lot of profits. Chapeau, but why don't you use part of these profits in order to pay back your debt with the banks? This is not free. There is another point, which is giving me headaches. As you know, the largest single shareholder is the government in the form of the KfW. If we heard this correctly in Germany, I think it was in February of this year that the KfW sold a major part of the shares of Deutsche Post AG. This is a reasonable thing to do because we need money for the government. But now, I would like to know the following. The supervisory board and the management board could not prevent this. So what would happen? The current share price, as was said, is excellent. But if the KfW now sold €5 billion of shares to just put it on the market, what would this mean for the share price? Then the next topic. Perhaps you still remember Donald Trump, unfortunately, he wants to become the next president of the United States again. He does not really like German companies a lot. What will this mean in view of the strong focus on the United States at present? Can't this have negative impacts for the companies so that you can subject to fines? I think the United States are more brutal in this way than Germany. The power of one single person seems to be very strong there. I can remember two years ago, Mr. Höttges told us that we want to make it possible to have perfect communication at Deutsche Bahn AG. I do not know whether this topic is really still very important, and it doesn't give you a lot of revenues. But there is one point which should not be underestimated. What happens if it's not artificial intelligence? But how can you put it? Telekom AG, possibly, focuses again on communication between human beings, from human being to human being, and perhaps also employs more severely handicapped people. Because you could take small steps which create positive impact, more money perhaps, for fun and entertainment in the company. Fitness, for example, jogging. That's something to be promoted. So wie ja auch die Aktionäre eine ordentliche Dividende zugesetzt bekommen. The shareholders get a reasonable dividend of €0.77. I hope that the employees will also get an additional bonus because without the employees, these fantastic results would not have been possible. In this context, I also look forward to one of the following speakers and the countermotions presented. I think we should all fully support these countermotions. One thing is very clear. I would like to pay a big compliment to the board of management and the supervisory board that there is not only one meal offered for the lunch break, but two. Also, thank you very much for the great framework program, supporting program here. I'm quite surprised. Last year, apparently, more shareholders were present. Perhaps many were at Dinkelackers in Stuttgart today. I don't know. It's really great to see that you are one of the few companies who are not afraid of meeting people face-to-face. I represent the cards 25565. I'm not here with my own shares, but in order to not give rise to any misunderstandings, I'm here on behalf of shareholders I've known for years and who trust me and also Deutsche Telekom AG. Otherwise, they wouldn't hold the shares. They are also, of course, very happy about the 77 cents dividend, and they hope that the board of management and the supervisory board will then also not give up to the strong headwind that we expect from the United States. Now, I would like to thank everybody for the mindfulness, and I also would like to thank for the great organization. This is something that I don't know from other companies. Sometimes you are not given the right to speak very early. Thank you very much for this. If you also want to experience another telecommunications shareholders' meeting, then you could perhaps go to 1&1 to Frankfurt in the Opera building because there all the figures will be presented that are published in the annual report, and there won't be a real show like here. Thank you very much. You can see I did not use up all my 10 minutes, and I'm grateful that even if I don't have a script in front of me, I could probably get across all the messages that I wanted to share with you. It's really a great and entertaining show, and thank you very much for the mindfulness. I wish you all the best for the rest of the shareholders' meeting and good success to the next speaker. Thank you very much, Mr. Eberle, for this refreshing contribution. Now, on the list, we have Hans Oswald, then Peter Streichan, and then finally Florian Erlach, or Erle and Florian. Well, whatever. But first of all, Hans Oswald, please.. Appel, I brought you my computer in order to watch the time, but you'll probably remind me if I don't use too much time and if I speak too short. I hope that my computer works now. The rostrum is very high for me. I'm not that tall, but I will manage somehow. My name is Hans Oswald.. I am in the board of an association for housing, and I would like to welcome all the visitors here. Let me talk about Item One first. I would like to express my thanks to the telecom employees for all the work done in the last business year. This is what was said by a journalist. There are boards of management and supervisory boards who just want to give us a punch-and-judy show. Are you also one of them? I would like to get a statement on this question from you. Over and over again, the shareholders' rights are disrespected by supervisory boards and management boards. Now, I would like to ask a few questions to the members of the board, but I would like to ask you to give me free answers, not just read out what the best back office sends you, but just talk to us freely. Mr. Höttges, you can do this. You are a good speaker. Really, chapeau. You are doing this very nicely, and I can only compliment you. You really know how to do this. You really turn your shareholders' meeting into a sales event. I really like this. You're doing something for the business. You foster sales, and you also show the press and the public to do something. You are really very convincing in sales and marketing. You are really very good. Thank you. Mr. Frank Appel, Mr. Timothy Höttges, a shareholders' meeting is not for cuddling with shareholders, but it is an exchange with the shareholders, the real owners of the company. Please give us your view on this. The share price of Deutsche Telekom threatens to go down. What is your total debt? What is the interest rate that you have to pay for your debts? Please give us a comprehensive answer because this is a very important topic, and in the past, I sometimes missed a real clear answer on this topic. Perhaps give us a real clear statement. Why should we approve of the activities of the supervisory board and the management board in view of the debt ratio? Do you have the highest debts of all the DAX companies? Are you the kings of debt? Do you have a plan to repay your debts, or are you without a concept here? I also would like to get some more information on this. Once upon a time, this is how all the fairy tales start. Once upon a time, the share price of Deutsche Telekom was €105. Now, it went down, and now at present, we are at a share price of around €22. Mr. Hötzges, yes, you did a good job, but it was not very difficult to get the share price up from €8. Nevertheless, it was a good performance you showed in the past 10 years. This is also something that you have to appreciate. You also have to accept a little bit of criticism. The previous speakers of DSW and SDK and also Max Eberle gave a great speech. I'm always surprised by what he can do without a script. Many shareholders lost a lot of money with a telecom share. But what happened to the shareholders' action against the company? I no longer hear anything about this. Perhaps you can share some information. I would like to ask the shareholders to support my countermotions. My countermotions and the proposal for elections were, again, censored by the boards of management and the supervisory board. Mr. Appel, you should do something about it because I'm surprised to see what you made out of my countermotions and my proposals for election. Not once did you mention that there are also other candidates for your supervisory board. You got a lot of criticism today from the institutional shareholders, and you did not mention once that there are also other proposals for election. This is not democratic, and I do expect you to correct this. Ich stelle hiermit den Antrag gegen Antrag zu TOP 1. I would like to have a shareholders' meeting in a hybrid form and to adapt that to the last meetings. You should make sure that we have hybrid meetings so that all the shareholders have the possibility to attend the meeting, also from abroad, either physically or virtually. €0.77 of a dividend. This is ridiculous compared to the maximum pay of €9.1 million. This is 35 times as much as our federal chancellor, Olaf Scholz, gets. He has to answer all the questions raised to him himself without the support of a back office. Frank Appel, thrown out by Deutsche Post and flown into Deutsche Telekom. This is how you are presenting yourself to us. I also have to say, yes, you do have some good sides. You are normally very fact-based. You are not very emotional. You cannot really see what you feel inside. I do like your calm way of leading the meeting. That's also something that I would like to mention here. For telecom shares inside a trade, I didn't find you. Don't you own any telecom shares, Dr. Frank Appel? For Mr. Hötzges, I found half a million of telecom shares. This is to be praised, Mr. Hötzges. I would like to get some more information on inside a trade. This is perhaps your private matter, but it might also be public. It would be good if you talked about it. But if members of the board of management and the supervisory board own shares of the company, I like it. I would like to submit another countermotion regarding the remuneration report. The supervisory board should just cut the salaries of the board of management by half on a probation period until they prove that they are up to do their job. Also Also in times of corona, the pay was inappropriate and disrespectful, especially if you even raise your salaries during these times. $9.1 million in maximum pay for the CEO without any pension benefits and extra benefits. There are so many other benefits. This is a whole list. It would take me hours to describe who gets what from where. This is in the annual report, and you can read about all of the details if you are interested in it. €9.1 million maximum pay. This is 460 times as much as a salesperson earns, 430 times as much as somebody with a minimum wage earns. This is the daily wage of €43,000. This is really a lot of money that you are earning or that you are getting every day, not necessarily deserving this. This is more than €5,000 per hour. How do you want to explain this to a normal telecom employee, and how do you want to justify such a salary? Coming back to a comparison, the CEO gets more than 32 times the salary as our Federal President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and 40 times as much as our Federal Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. This leads me to the countermotion number three on item number three to reject approval of the actions of the Board of Management. I would like to see individual votes on individual members. Many shareholders in our area also think that the remuneration report should also be called a fairy tale. The Grimm Brothers would really be envious. We, as shareholders, are always surprised if you, as the Chairman of this meeting, reduce the speaking time for the shareholders with the excuse that the shareholders' meeting should be over within four or six hours. The Board of Management members or the Supervisory Board members have an unlimited time for their interventions, but you should also now do some overtime when you are meeting the owners of the company here in the shareholders' meeting. This was a good comment, Mr. Oswald. You already exceeded your speaking time by three minutes. Three minutes. That's unbelievable. We are not doing this because we don't want to sit here longer, but because we want to give all the shareholders the possibility to take the floor and to get their questions answered. So please come to an end. Dr. Frank Appel, I already expected this, and I'm well prepared for this. That's obvious. So let me just call out to you. In view of the remuneration that you get, you do have to work longer every now and again. If I see what you did to my countermotions and proposals for election, this is incredible. Just go to the internet and take a look at what is published here. I have four candidates, and here the supervisory board members were criticized. So please use this and elect my candidates. They are much better. Then there is also no criticism about the 10-year tenure. They would be fresh, and they would really do a great job. Ms. Grüneberg, isn't she here? I'm talking about the plow horse. Can you imagine? I can well imagine Ms. Grüneberg behind the plow with a whip in her hand and you in front as the plow horse. Then you just plow through the streets, and you bring in the fiber. You lay the fiber lines. Then we get some more millions every year, won't we, Mr. Frank Appel? If you wish so, I will limit myself, and I will request the floor another time because with counterproposals and so on, according to the shareholders, Stock Corporation Act, I have unlimited time to speak. Correct? I will come up with something so that you also get your right and that the annual general meeting can be finished at 3:00 PM sharp. But perhaps we just add a few overtime hours so that you earn your remuneration. Mr. Oswald, could you please ask your questions? Thank you for your generosity, Dr. Frank Appel. I wish you a good continuation. I'd also like to welcome Mrs. Jung. I also got to know her in other annual general meetings, especially at Allianz, where she spoke at length about me. But I don't bear grudge against her. I can bear that burden. So talk to you later, Doctor. Thank you for your praise. Now we continue with Peter Streichan and afterwards Mr. Florian Erlach. After that, we will again answer the questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking to all of you. I don't exclude anyone. This is the first praise earned by the boards that preserved us against this terrible language mix-up and confusion of gender-appropriate language in German. I will continue with my thanks. This is rare in my case. Please bear with me that I repeat what several speakers have already said. I'm glad that we are having a face-to-face meeting here. This is not only a question of respecting us shareholders and of respecting the culture of shareholders, but also a question of democracy, the democracy of shareholders. I think it is astonishing and regrettable that the initial point to be able to hold virtual general meetings without having a pandemic or a national emergency. I am glad this is possible. This is an attack to the democracy of shareholders, and I particularly regret that the starting point for that attack to an important part of our democracy emanated from the federal parliament, the only elected general body that we have. I can only suggest that you read the minutes of July 2020 of that meeting. Apart from the fact that that vote took place far after midnight, which is the hour of witchcraft and ghosts, at the time, there was a lot of ill will against us shareholders, especially small shareholders. It's really astonishing to see that politicians reproach their fellow countrymen that they're not being democratic. We're coming here because of democracy. I didn't read a test from Google, but it's really amazing if members of parliament who love to eat for free reproach us of doing so at AGMs. This is completely beside the point. It should be rejected. This reminds me a bit of the worry of the lion who loves to eat meat, who is complaining that there are carnivorous plants. Now, according to the motto, "Everything has been said by everyone, just not by myself," I want to come back to this question of holding these meetings face-to-face. Shares are an important element to secure our old-age security and to better distribute wealth. Therefore, I appeal to all of us, myself included, please go into the world and advocate shares. The ownership of shares is important, not only in our society, but in general, shares should again be appreciated and valued. More than 60% of DAX capital is in foreign hands, not only by some plutocrats, but also in the field of old-age pension funds, firefighters in New York, and so on. The neo-socialist countries such as Norway and Sweden, who are well known for their social culture, are also putting their stake on shares. Therefore, the shares are very important, and we should advocate them. Now, I have some questions for the board, which hopefully can be answered. First of all, I would like to go along with that question regarding the debt situation and the interest burden. For the time from 2020 through 2023, I would like to have an overview in that regard. Next, what about fulfilling the ratio of disposals with disabilities in the company? Has it been over-fulfilled and fulfilled? Please give us exact percentages or provide measures to remedy the situation. Next, I have a question regarding the gender pay gap. How many careers have you received within the company, and what's the current situation in that regard, Deutsche Telekom? Now, next, the question is, have you ever considered at all how to deal with the lack of qualified staff and, in that regard, create opportunities for elderly people? Regarding the lack of qualified staff, I am coming back to the German parliament, the lower chamber, to not admit virtual AGMs without a pandemic as a necessity. This shows the lack of expertise at that level. Now, I'd like to show this to you. This is in the Almanach of the Bonn Jazz Festival. It says, "We in Bonn support a multiple offer in terms of music and sports and other events." So what do the telephone baskets are getting? What are you paying to the Bonn Jazz Festival? This question not only applies locally here, but also across Germany. If you have figures on that, I welcome them. We've also spoken about remuneration. I don't know who looked at the remuneration report and the invitation. It's symptomatic that it covers almost half of the entire text of the invitation. I'm firmly convinced that it's not only just this crazy Harvard Business School jargon, but that the authors of those lines are unable to write this in simple words, subject, verb, object, to explain this to us, laymen. That should be the idea in the background, that a modern new remuneration system should be created. I have no difficulty with high salaries. However, I think that they should be in proportion. Now, it is difficult to show and describe these proportions mathematically. I remember that both Telekom and The Post at some time were one company in the past led by a federal minister. There have been made comparisons already regarding state representatives. Now that today they get a salary of €300,000, they wouldn't die of hunger. But now, people are being paid about 55 times as much. I think we should stop this terrible bonus culture. As an offer to the 21st century, this is a query, a task for the supervisory board. Let's create a new fixed system. The bonus should be scrapped. Let me give you just a ballpark number. Who doesn't work for us, want to work for us for €5 million, can become a pop star or basketball player or investment banker or whatever. But he shouldn't be working here at our Deutsche Telekom. I know it's difficult, but let's be innovative. In the various bodies, let's consider the various options, and then we will be able to master the technical difficulties. Now, regarding our voting intentions, there's more light than shadow. Therefore, with the exception of the remuneration report and this antiquated participant rights situation on behalf of my family, especially my wife, I will agree with the other items on the agenda, the other proposals. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Streichhahn. Also thank you for sticking to the speaking time. To finish off the second round, I'd like to ask Mr. Florian Erlach to speak. My Name ist Florian Erlach. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Florian Erlach. I'm a damaged shareholder of Deutsche Telekom. I will only ask three questions. There have been some letters that were sent before Easter and that were left without an answer. I hope that in the coming days and weeks, you will find the time to answer them because they also have perhaps repercussions under penal law. Let me start. Why was the shareholders' letter to the management board dated the 1st of March not answered? We have indications here of the prosecutors in Berlin that have found and that have started investigations in that regard. Secondly, why was the next shareholders' letter to the management board on the 4th of March not answered and made available, accessible to all shareholders? We also have here the problem of delay of insolvency proceedings. Why was the letter of the best penal lawyers in Germany not made available to all shareholders? Now, if we look at the situation, we have the problem that your supplier is dealing with data of customers of the Deutsche Telekom. You also have the link here to data privacy and the problem of possible violations of data protection, of business secrets, and the unauthorized utilization of protected data according to various legal stipulations and the penal code. Now, for all persons, of course, we assume the absence of guilt. I hope that in the coming days and weeks, you can answer to these letters. These are conference letters also from the prosecutors. Regarding tax fraud, you've already been caught in Germany. I would be pleased to receive an answer in writing. If this was also shared with other shareholders, there are also penal proceedings in Hannover. Probably your successors have to work on this. Thank you for allowing me the time to speak. I hope that you will receive the discharge. We might meet again over the coming few years. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Erlach, for your questions. We will now proceed to answer those questions. I will start with a question raised to the supervisory board by Mr. Ponson regarding the base salary of Mr. Höckles between 2019 and 2023. It has risen by 42%. How did the salaries of the employees of Deutsche Telekom evolve in that period? The development of the average salaries of the employees of Deutsche Telekom can be seen on page 26 of the remuneration report. I don't have to read out long tables and figures. You can see it quite nicely in the report, how the development was in comparison to the management board members. The calculation you made for Mr. Höckles is correct. You may be surprised why the base salary rose from 2023 to 2023. This is due to the situation that in 2022, he took a sabbatical for one month. Therefore, the remuneration was reduced because this sabbatical was unpaid. This explains the difference between 2022 and 2023. The supervisory board, of course, looks at these topics on a regular basis. Of course, we compare ourselves with other businesses, other companies in our industry. The outcome is that the remuneration of Mr. Höckles is commensurate with those paid in other companies. Therefore, it has been increased in the past years because that remuneration was not always appropriate. We made that correction. Therefore, this remuneration rose. This is correct. I would like to remind you how much value was generated by Mr. Höckles and the board, the $50 billion, over the past years. Therefore, the management board needs to be paid in a way that is competitive in the market. This is something we have achieved. This is also the view held by the supervisory board. Beyond that, Mr. Höckles is one of the board chairmen with the longest term. Salaries tend to increase with your term of office as chairman of the management board, as is also the case in other companies. That was for that question, Mr. Höckles. There was a question regarding network security at T-Mobile US and how the network and the customer data are being protected, especially after the occurrences you have mentioned. First of all, we have a very intensive and close cooperation on both sides of the Atlantic with our so-called security teams who work in Germany. T-Mobile US is part of our group DT International IT&T Security Leadership Team, which meets at regular intervals and has regular exchanges. We cooperate here at this level. We also cooperate with external companies. In addition, the US have their own activities. We have a new CISO leader that has been hired, a very experienced person from the banking industry who is now going to restructure the entire area. We strengthened the organization. We hired new staff. We changed the employee structure. We also changed and adjusted the structures and processes in the entire company after those occurrences. In addition, the supervisory board of T-Mobile US reports regularly about the progress they made. They have a so-called Nomination Governance Committee. In that committee, the progress made is being discussed and presented. Let me say now, just offhand, we have made massive progress in the US regarding IT security. This is being recognized both internally and externally. This is true also against the background that, of course, in the past, we had two different companies. We had T-Mobile and Sprint that we needed to integrate. The same applies to the T-Systems. We are making big progress there. We are regularly reporting on those internally. There was a question regarding AI. I think I spoke about that explicitly today. The core of it was a hard piece of my speech. I don't want to repeat all the details I presented. We have some 400 that we're already having. We differentiate it between models that we purchase from the outside, where we're simple takers. Then we have models where we are shapers, where the foundation, the large language models, are being enriched and trained with our own data and aligned according to our own rules. And then there are models where we are the makers, where we are developing our own AI phone, where we have the model that we are developing with our partner, SK, and others, setting up our own telecom-specific LLM. At the same time, we want to be a facilitator. So what we have as AI, we want to make that available to our business customers in the form of a business model so that we can generate sales together with our clients who do not have the capacity and the money to build up their own capacities. This is a very comprehensive topic for us. There is a paper that a presentation I made at the Mobile World Congress, which you can download on the internet. Before you speak about the next question, I forgot to mention who's going to speak after these questions have been answered. So next, we would have Mr. Markus Dufner from the Association of Critical Investors and Mr. Wilm Müller. The next question was what I want to achieve until the end of my current contract. And I remember what Giovanni Trapattoni, who used to be the coach of Bayern Munich, once used to say, "Ich habe fertig," which is wrong German, actually, meaning I'm not done yet. And the same holds true for me. I still have a lot to do, finishing fiber rollout in Germany and Europe, question whether we are going to have a convergent business model in the US, market leader, mobile communications, artificial intelligence, rejuvenating our management team, modernizing our IT architecture. There's the question of the further enhancement of our brand and its significance for society. As long as I can help to boost the value added of this company, I will continue. I'm really enjoying it. We've set up an excellent team, a very diverse team as well. The work on the board of management is a lot of fun, even though it sometimes is difficult to find the right way given the fact that there are so many different opinions. I dare say that we are the industry's best team anyway. I'm thinking about all the tasks I have at hand rather than when I would like to stop. Of course, I am thinking about the future, though. As for the question of who is going to be my successor, this is a discussion we need to have together with Frank Appel as chairman of the supervisory board. That will be an issue over the next two years. I don't want to end up an old man walking through Deutsche Telekom's halls. There was another question on AI. Has that made us more dependent and more vulnerable? Yes, of course. This also comes with a risk. But one thing is quite important to note. Deutsche Telekom started issuing guidelines on how to use the internet as a self-commitment at an early stage. In fact, we were the first company in Germany to do that. We wanted to give ourselves a framework for how we are handling data. This is used as a point of reference also with regards to ethical questions. Of course, customer orientation, transparency, security, getting ready for the future, these are all things that need to be borne in mind. Our security experts are checking things internally. We put internal control mechanisms in place. You need to look into all these things specifically. Yes, we need to be very careful here. If you are skilled, then you can also prepare yourself for potential negative effects and do something about it. That's precisely what we're doing in the context of AI. Dr. Illek, Mr. Speich asked about the stake in T-Mobile US that we are striving for. As you know, we gave a guidance to the capital market that did not mention a specific figure. But we said below 50%. No, actually above 50%, but below 55%. At the end of the year, we stood at 50.6%. I think we want to give ourselves a bit of a bigger buffer. So if it becomes more than 50.6%, don't be surprised. Whether or not there will be a fundamental change of our stake, this is something that we will discuss at this year's Capital Markets Day in October. Another question was what are your demands towards the other members of the T-Mobile US board? We are the biggest shareholder. I mean, I think the dialogue that we've set up with them is good. Whether these are discussions on day-to-day business or the medium-term trend of the business, it's all covered. I think you've seen that the Americans have always exceeded their targets as they have this year so far. Therefore, we do have a promise that they at least meet their targets, not just in terms of the infrastructure rollout, but it also applies to revenue per customer and a lot of other KPIs. I mean, it is for a reason that T-Mobile US is the world's most valuable telecommunications company. Next question was, how can we make sure that we gain a sustainable competitive edge in the US with our network? First of all, we offer the largest 5G coverage, 98%, as we've heard. Our speed is about twice the speed as the one offered by AT&T and Verizon, which is proven by tests every month. That figure doesn't come from us. The same holds true for customer service. J.D. Power have confirmed that we offer the best customer service. We are still ahead of others by 12 to 15 months, even if we didn't do anything for a longer period of time. We offer different kinds of spectrum. There's also a C-band spectrum that we might want to also continue investing in. Therefore, the Americans continue to expand their competitive edge regarding networks. That's part of their value proposition. How do we assess the competitive situation in the US? How do we want to achieve convergence there? Regarding convergence, that's the $1 million question. Convergence remains to be seen. There is not a clear trend that would tell us whether convergence is coming or not. In some non-European markets, such as India, we can see a trend towards convergence. In others, we don't see that at all. In the UK, for instance, and in the US, that question is still open. What we do is we come up with convergent offers called fixed wireless access in the U.S. We are also looking into the marketing of a fixed network infrastructure in the U.S. I also wanted to say that there are rumors there about possible transactions. These are just rumors. We haven't entered into any transactions here. The next question was, how do you make sure that the billions of euros invested in fiber will pay off? Just as Mr. Höttges was saying, the fiber rollout will continue to be an issue for the next couple of years, probably beyond 2030. Basically, we need to offer nationwide optical fiber in order to be ready once the demand is there. Right now, we already have a highly efficient super-vectoring infrastructure. Last year, we had a fixed network market share of 80%, which means that a lot of customers choose Deutsche Telekom deliberately. In the long run, we need growth in this company. What we need to do, especially regarding efficiency, is we need to improve in order to meet our financial goals and to have enough money left for our investments in optical fiber. As for the Americans, they have contracts that make it possible to buy fiber from third-party providers that you can then resell. They are also considering joint ventures as another option, but this has not yet been decided. This is how this is handled on the other side of the Atlantic. Next question, what security mechanisms did we put in place in order to prepare ourselves for a negative trend in the U.S.? There's no indication for that. Last year, the US increased their guidance three times. There is no precedence, really. But we've also seen that the Americans, last year in particular, are always able to respond quickly whenever it's necessary to improve their cost structure, for instance. What they did is they cut 5,000 jobs in the back-office roles and in the technology. The Americans are self-sustained. Don't forget that. They are not funded by Deutsche Telekom, by us. We have a share buyback program, which has an effect of around $1 billion per month. We would be able to make adjustments in the US anytime if necessary. But I don't see any indication that the US business may take a nosedive. The next question came from Mr. Schmidt on the stake which the German government holds in this company. Schmidt, we have no information whatsoever about whether the German government wants to sell part of its stake in this company. Apparently, there are plans to gain proceeds to the tune of $4 billion. Whether or not this will also affect us directly, we don't know. What we can do, however, regarding the share price, is that as part of our share buyback program, we can respond by increasing volumes if necessary. As we have more free float, this will also be absorbed by the hedge funds, so about 20% of sales volume. But I don't know whether it happens at what dimension and when. There was a question on shareholder remuneration. In the future, the Board of Management, does the Board of Management think that a higher dividend is more important than other factors? The dividend is based on the adjusted earnings per share. We have a payout ratio of between 40% to 60%, which we'll also put to a vote today. Of course, there's always the option of a share buyback as well as an alternative. We've always said that we decide that from one year to the next. There is no mechanism that would automatically determine whether we opt for a higher dividend or for a share buyback. Generally, the dividend is center stage. The next question was about Deutsche Telekom's net debt. Net debt, including leasing, is still above the target range. We said that we will come out at 2.75 by the end of the year or last year. We came out at 2.82. That doesn't sound like a lot, but at least it was a $4 billion reduction in net debt while EBITDA remained flat. So it's quite something. That was at the end of last year. This also supports our activities in the U.S. and the fiber rollout. Depending on our stake in the U.S., this may also have an effect on our net debt. I wouldn't say that we are far away from the target range regarding our net debt. We'll stick with our goal for the end of the year. There was another question. The share buyback program looks like you want to undo the capital increase. Doesn't that have a dilution effect? How do you make sure that the shareholders really benefit from the best network? First of all, the dividend. That's the lion's share of the shareholder remuneration. We will decide from one year to the next whether we want to continue with the share buyback as well. At what dimension? We believe that our earnings per share, our adjusted earnings per share, will rise by 10% this year. That'll have a positive effect in other fields as well. We'll stick with a payout ratio of 40% to 60%. Right now, we are at around 50%. We're fine with it. There is no new policy in place. The next question was, when can we expect the finance and sustainability reports to be consolidated and to happen simultaneously? In 2016, we already adapted our result to the United Nations Sustainability Goals. We give an outlook to what we've achieved and what we failed to achieve. We won an accolade called the Integrated SDG Report in this field. Of course, our reporting in the future will be much more comprehensive in this field than what you've seen so far. You will see a combined report of sustainability issues and finance KPIs. There is one more. What change do you expect regarding the materiality analysis compared to 2022? Our sustainability strategy has been geared to the same criteria for basically two decades. We look at what the Global Reporting Initiative requests from us and what other standards are in place. We look at positive and negative trends along environment, social issues, and human rights. We also look at energy consumption, Scope 3 emissions, etc. Of course, we will be using the CSRD directive as a guideline. There's one more. The question on long-term liabilities that increased by $470 million. The question was, how did that come about? $300 million come from the higher provisions for Obama Health Insurer. $100 million come from a higher risk of litigation. But we're not saying that this is really necessary. It's just a precautionary measure. This explains 400 out of the 470 million. Thank you. Let us now continue with the next round of questions. The next speaker is Mr. Markus Dufner, followed by Wilm Müller, Savvas Georgiadis, and more speakers that you can see here on the screen. Mr. Dufner, you have the floor. Schönen guten Tag. Good afternoon. Herr Dr. Appel. Dr. Appel. Mr. Höttges. Members of the Supervisory Board and the Board of Management, Dear Shareholders, I think I covered you all now. My name is Markus Dufner. My name is Markus Dufner. name is Markus Dufner. I'm the Managing Director of the umbrella association of the Critical Shareholders based in Cologne and at today's AGM. We are representing more than 275,000 voting rights, mostly from foundations, environmental associations, and smaller investors. Today, I would like to talk about climate protection, supply chain, corporate responsibility, Chinese vendors, job cuts and doping allegations against the T-Mobile cycling team. Whenever technology giants team up, then you can move mountains. That was a headline of an interview under the heading of responsibility with Salma Zamzari, who is a marketing strategist and marketing expert, a brand expert, actually, in our company. In this interview, Mr. Ansari talked about how the company makes sure that the company's vendors support a circular economy in order to jointly change the world. The manager said that there are always risks in connection with Ericsson and other vendors and that these risks definitely need to be covered. She said that such vendors are real giants in the market. Just like any other telecommunications companies, we rely on them providing us with important network equipment. Yes, it's clear that telecom equipment such as routers, switches, antennas, etc., are necessary to build, operate your networks, and to offer your customers the best possible network. That goes without saying. There are a lot of superlatives here. Maybe we would have to double-check whether all these things that you claim are true. Then Mr. Samsari said, "That's why every year we are buying lots of equipment from our technology vendors." Now, ladies and gentlemen, there is an important piece of information. I quote. These big vendors also have a major carbon footprint. In order for Deutsche Telekom to reduce its carbon footprint by 55% by 2030, all the vendors need to be brought in. This is only possible over the next six years if all vendors join in, according to Mrs. Ansari, because most of the carbon emission cuts need to happen on the side of the vendors. Mr. Höttges, Dr. Appel, my question to you is, don't you feel that in this way, you are shifting most of the responsibility for the achievement of your environmental goals to your vendors? Ingo Speich also talked about it. My question is, when will the board of management launch an initiative in this field? Das wäre dann eben als Tagesordnungspunkt auch auf der nächsten Hauptversammlung hier. It might be a good idea to put this as an item on the agenda of next year's AGM, climate protection, something that the shareholders would then be able to vote on. Questions. Please tell us how the carbon footprint of Deutsche Telekom developed between 2022 and 2023. Please tell us about Scope 1, 2, and 3. What vendors, in accordance with the scorecard of Deutsche Telekom, showed the best performance, which the worst performance, which were the biggest shortcomings among vendors, and what was the performance of Huawei? As we're talking about Huawei and the partial ban of Chinese components in mobile networks, we've heard a lot about that. Still, together with Telefónica and other providers, Deutsche Telekom is sharply criticizing the German government's plan to ban network components of Huawei and other Chinese providers in the German core network. This had been agreed also with other countries. Sweden have said that from 2025 on, Chinese components will no longer be permissible in the Swedish core network. So you see, it's possible. I think you've had enough time to prepare yourself for such a ban. Why haven't you done so? Mr. Höttges, does it not make sense to you that there needs to be a balance between innovation and investment security? How big is the risk that we are suffering from the fact that we are using Chinese components? What alternative do you see if some of the Chinese components were to be banned? Is there a risk for T-Systems in South Africa? I mean, this is a topic that has not been dealt with. Mr. Höttges, today, you have the opportunity to bring us shareholders up to speed here. So let me give you some background. State capture means that state resources are distributed to certain clients. T-Systems was the second largest profiting company of state capture mechanisms. It became known that the Frankfurt General Prosecutor started investigations against T-Systems. This case is of great interest, as shown by the fact that the media have always talked about it. Last year, I asked you whether the Frankfurt General Prosecutor gave Deutsche Telekom insight into the documents. Your answer was that Deutsche Telekom or T-Systems have not yet received any information. So my question is, what do your lawyers know about the investigations? When did Deutsche Telekom or T-Systems get a view of the documents? Are there still investigations ongoing against Deutsche Telekom or T-Systems? When do you expect the opening of criminal proceedings, or do you expect it after all? What are the provisions in the case that the state capture case in South Africa proves to be negative for Deutsche Telekom? Patriotic investment and job cuts. Mr. Höttges, how patriotic was the investment of Deutsche Telekom in the past, and how patriotic will it be in the future? This is a term you used last year. Last summer, you threatened to move investments abroad because of the high prices. But you said that you are still investing patriotically. But the conditions are getting worse. Investments abroad could be worth more than in Germany. Slight threat here. You said, "If the framework conditions don't change, we feel ourselves forced to use our strength in other countries, for example, in the United States, where the revenues in the mobile phone industry are three times as high as in this country." My questions on this: what do you think about the situation for investments today? What do you plan to invest into Germany in 2024, 2025, 2026? How much will you invest into the enlargement of the 5G network? Mr. Höttges, with your booster program, you want to save costs. Is it really necessary to cut so many jobs? How many jobs will be affected, and where exactly will they be cut? Now doping at Deutsche Telekom and injunctions. At the end of last year, documentation about Jan Ullrich was in the headlines. Mr. Höttges, or all the other board members, did you see the documentary on Jan Ullrich? Perhaps this reminded you of a negative chapter in the history of T-Systems and Deutsche Telekom. Long before the documentary, it was already clear that Deutsche Telekom, as a sponsor of the Deutsche Telekom cycle team, was acting negatively. There was an injunction against Spiegel, publishing this information. He said that somebody was commissioned to go through the hotel rooms in order to collect syringes every day. If this phrase was repeated, a lot of high fine was looming. You can still read about this article in the Spiegel magazine. Mr. Höttges, starting in 2000, you used to be managing director for finances and controlling. Then you had a T-Mobile in Germany. Since 2006, you were the head of the home. Then you were CFO. Since 2019, you have been the CEO of Deutsche Telekom. Since when did you think that these allegations were credible? Were you involved in the actions against Spiegel? If so, why? If not, why not? What do you think about the activities today? Was there any apology ever towards the journalists of the Spiegel or other journalists who reported about it? It was on November 27th, 2007, that Deutsche Telekom said that they would immediately withdraw from cycling sponsoring. The slogan of Deutsche Telekom always was to hide things instead of really making information available. Mr. Dufner, you are already one minute above your time. Please come to your close. Yes, last point on item 8, the newly founded committee for ESG strategic innovation should have the same remuneration as the audit and financial committee because the ESG topic should not be worse paid than the topic finances and auditing. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Dufner. And we will now, well, first of all, I have to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Oswald has requested to have individual ratification of the actions of the supervisory board meeting members and the management board members. And if a certain number of shareholders support this motion, we have to take individual votes. Whether the quorum is achieved will now be investigated on the basis of the HV cards. So Mr. Oswald, you and all the shareholders who also would like to see individual ratification of the actions of the supervisory board and management board members are asked to go to the speaker's rostrum and show their cards so that we can count this. You'll have 30 minutes to go there. So roundabout until 7 minutes to 3:00. Please go to the speaker's registration desk. I will then give you the results of this before we move to the votes. This is important, I think, in order to make sure that we take into account Mr. Oswald's request. This now leads us to Mr. Wilm Müller and then to Savvas Georgiadis. This will be followed by Sven Hölling. Finally, Dr. Barbara Grimberg as will our speaker in this round. Mr. Müller, great to see you again. Dr. Appel, Dr. Neuhaus, and all the other persons. Mr. Will Müller, that I am Mr. Will Müller. I welcome all of you. I'm the managing director Will Müller, that I am Mr. Will Müller. I welcome all of you. I'm the managing director Will Müller, that I am Mr. Will Müller. I welcome all of you. I'm the managing director of and unlimited partner of a company that was founded by my ancestors. I'm representing my own shares. I immediately would like to apply on item 2 of the agenda that, unlike your motion, a dividend is not paid in the euro currency, but that it will be paid in the suitable currency by having one or several ordinary shares of the company Riebeck AG AG to be bought on the stock exchange. One or several shares of this company should then be paid as a dividend, or it should be used in a raffle for all the shareholders of Deutsche Telekom. My reasoning for this counterproposal is that the shares of the company is the most usual means of payment in the world. I want to establish it like this in the world. For the tone in your invitation, and thus less important, I would like to apply on item number 3 that we will have individual that you will have ratification of the actions of the members of the board of management. The reason for this is that I really like this event here today. This is even further down in your agenda, and this is why it's even less important. I would now like to suggest on item 4 on the agenda that none of the members of the supervisory board will be approved for the actions. This countermotion is based on the fact that there is something that I don't like at all. This is that I'm not Mr. Will Müller, but I am Will Müller. I really can't stand this. On the agenda, I also would like to apply for an additional item to be put on the agenda under miscellaneous. This item on the agenda should make it possible for all the shareholders to either congratulate for the ratification of the activities of the board members or to submit their protests. That's everything that I wanted to say. Thank you, Mr. Will Müller. Apologies that we did not mention this before. But I welcomed you very nicely. I think it's a pity that you don't want to approve of our activities. But we just have to acknowledge this. This is your right. We move on to the next speaker, who will be Mr. Savvas Georgiadis. I hope that I did not mispronounce your name. Sven Hölling. Dr. Barbara Grimberg before we answer questions again. Thank you, Dr. Appel. I am not such a drama player as the previous speaker. But my name is Georgiadis. I just wanted to mention this. I would like to speak on item 6 on the agenda, the election of the supervisory board members. I would like to make a proposal for election. I am not really pleased about what was done so far. I think it's okay. I think it's okay that you have your own favorite candidates. But for fairness reasons, I also would like you to mention other candidates or possible candidates for the supervisory board. This brings me to my countermotion. First of all, dear participants of this year's shareholders' meeting, thank you for following my statement very attentively. I decided that I wanted to take the floor here because I would like to suggest myself as a new supervisory board member. In order to get a better impression, I would like to present myself. I try to stick to the time allotted to me. My name is Sawas Georgiadis. I was born in Cologne. I grew up in Cologne. At present, I'm living in Nürnberg with my family. After training as an electrician, I studied electrical engineering with a focus on electronics. In the past 16 years, I have been working as a Managing Director of INSG GmbH. I'm supporting the automotive industry in the development of vehicle functions for autonomous driving, brakes, steering assistance, and others. I'm also working as a voluntary judge at the financial court in Nürnberg. I'm also a member of several committees at the Chamber of Industry and Commerce on trade and services, but also on securing skilled workers for the future. I would be happy if you supported me as a candidate. I would like to use my experience in the past in the supervisory board in order to bring about positive benefits for the company. Thank you very much for the attention. I hope that we'll have a fruitful shareholders' meeting here. Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Georgiadis. Thanks for accepting my apologies that I mispronounced your name. Thank you for your courage to speak up here. The next speaker is Sven Hölling, followed by Dr. Barbara Grimberg. Mr. Hölling first. I first need a glass of water, please. Cheers. Dear Mr. Höttgens. Dear Mr. Appel. I can really say, "Dear Mr. Appel. Dear can really say, "Dear Mr. Appel. Dear Mr. Höttgens." I wanted to thank you for abolishing apps. I really like it. There was an association at ProSieben. Can I tell the people that their app will be shut down? Or is it too early for that? I can say that. Okay. So I am here today. Well, I asked people here. I come from Bremen. It's difficult for me to talk here because I'm quite nervous. I got some criticism when I went to the shareholders' meeting of Saturn in Essen. I praised Deutsche Telekom at the time because this shop is in a mall. The mall is infested by rats. I asked the managing director to shut down the store. I ask you, Mr. Höttgens, if you think about also asking the shop in the waterfront. It's infested with rats. Please also ask this shop to be closed down. This is something that you have to decide for yourself. Now another question. I've got a question to Mr. Höttgens and Dr. Appel. I'm not quite sure. You said that we have complaints of this. I asked people here whether I can ask this question. If you say, "No, this is not opportune here. I want to follow the rules here." Then you can say, "No, I don't want to talk about it." It's about the boxes here. Such a box in Bremen. I really like it. I really want to speed up a little bit. I'm very nervous, I have to tell you. See, if you walk past these boxes in Bremen, there is a helmet up there. There are these little pylons. Could you also imagine this in a different way? Graffiti full of rubbish and dirt. Can you also imagine this? This is why I protected Deutsche Telekom in the meeting. I hope you understand all this. I would like to ask you to, if you think about it, that you also think about closing the shop at the waterfront because it's infested with rats. I want to mention something else. I have a little problem. I've got some sort of a problem with the payment of the share price. I am partially retired. As a partially retired person, I can get some money from the social office. Other pensioners can also get extra money because the increase was brought about by bitcoins. I can't fight against bitcoins. Otherwise, I am forced to go to the social office, to the labor office, and to get some money. Now they are only paying my rent. I have another 6 minutes. I'm really speaking here without any script. I'm not reading out anything. I would like to ask for something else, Mr. Höttgens. I come from Bremen. I just want to know how much policies are here because you said that here the federal government also is part of the company. So is this a party? Is this part state-owned? The other half is sold on the internet? I don't really know about this because in Bremen, there is a housing company. They are trying to be part state-owned and part privately owned. I do have some problems with this. I don't like it very much because this will only be to the detriment of the shareholders because many companies, unfortunately, no longer have any money. So, Mr. Höttgens, thank you. A big, big thank you. I also thank you for the €0.77. I hope that when, well, with the bitcoins, that this increases €200, that we will get €2.77 or slightly more because of the bitcoins. It's getting more and more. Then the pensioners here will also profit from that because at Saturn Hansa, they talked about the pensions based on shares. This is not possible at present. It was promised to them by the politicians in the federal state that they could get their pensions based on shares. But most of the companies are not paying any dividends, any money. They just say, "We don't have any money. Please don't laugh about me." I will be finished very soon, Mr. Höttgens. I hope I did it right. I hope it was right to say this personally to you with boxes here. This is very important. Now you have to take a decision yourself how you want to deal with this. I would like to spend my last 4 minutes saying the following. I come from Bremen, as you know. Our mayor was accused of crimes against humanity on Facebook. So if you're on Facebook, you don't get money from them. You don't get a cent of them. I can tell you what I got. Please talk about our topics here. Yes, this is part of your topics. I'll make it short. I wanted to ask you, will you give me a tablet? Unfortunately, mine was destroyed. I would be very happy. So I would like to have an SM tablet which costs more than €1,000. If the apps are shut down, it will no longer be worth anything. I would be very happy about it, Mr. Höttgens. I wish you all the best. I would like to ask you to really go undercover, come to Bremen, and to take a close look at what is happening there. Not show this publicly. Just go there undercover so that nobody recognizes you. Mr. Appel, I also would like to ask you to do the same thing if you are willing to do so and if you have time to do so. This is very important because it's about shareholders. I really tried at Saturn Hansa to praise your company. I hope that you are grateful to me and that you reward me for that. I'm really very grateful for your applause because I would know how you respond. I think this is really important. I didn't know that I was in a meeting of Saturn Hansa because it was said Ceconomy. On the internet, they said that they are a communication and internet company. Suddenly, I was sitting there in this meeting and didn't know where I was. One more sentence on the internet. I was really a big, big fan. I thought the internet is great. It's great movies, great music. But now, no. I no longer think that because there are people who now want to own the internet. They ask the citizens to pay a fee. In addition to this fee and their internet costs, they have to pay more and more money because these gentlemen just said, "Hehehe, hehehe." They were just rubbing their hands. I also did this, "Hehehe," when I got Facebook. I was dancing. I can now go to the US. No, I didn't get anything. But just to close this, I wanted to thank you. I will also communicate to the managing director of ProSieben that their app would be dead. If you want to give me a tablet because my tablet was destroyed by a party and they don't want to give me a new one, although they've got enough money based on bitcoins, just as our mayor. He was at Markus Lanz. I've got another 50 seconds. He was at the Markus Lanz broadcasting show. You'll still find it under the media library of ZDF and ARD. This is in the Magenta box or however you call it. So I go into streams for these gentlemen. Louis Klamroth contacted me that I should go to Hart aber Fair. I do this. I think it's fun. They get what they want. I hope you support me because I really like it. I hope that you support me as well, Mr. Höttgens. Please also talk to the broadcasting station so that I can advertise for you there. That's everything. One more sentence. No, no, Mr. Höttgens. Mr. Höttgens, if you leave us, well, you are still in my heart. We have always been good friends. If you give me a tablet, then it's great. Please go undercover and come to Bremen and check these cabinets. Thank you. Thank you for this phrase. I'd like to remind all speakers that the 10 minutes is not a target number but a maximum number. You don't have to utilize all the 10 minutes. You can be brief, which would be in the interest of all participants. The next speaker is Dr. Barbara Grimberg. My request, nevertheless, so that I don't have to restrict speaking time even more, please remain below those 10 minutes. Thank you, Dr. Barbara Grimberg. Nice to have you here again. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm glad that you please thought of coming. What was not so nice is that I only have 10 minutes or even less to speak. You know, sometimes women just take a bit longer. It starts right away with some criticism. In your speech, you said yourself that you're a master at listening or you're trying to listen to tackle things and try to improve the world. But this does not include your saying from the start that the AGM should last only 3 to 5 or 6 hours. It is dependent on how many participants you have here at this AGM. You said it would be nice to have a dialogue with these shareholders, a critical one but also one that gives room for improvement. So it might take a bit longer. On the one hand, you said future needs growth and therefore investments. If you want to be successful, then it would be really positive not to pay an extraordinary dividend because more money would remain within the company. Equity would increase, and thus liquidity. Therefore, then also your rating would improve. It's not so great right now. Somewhere in the management report, I saw a triple B or a triple B plus. There is better than that, also of other companies. On top of that, investments and being successful in the future include, as I repeatedly told you, a different salary system for both the management board and the supervisory board. I said this repeatedly in the past because you, as you're sitting here as board, are quite a big cost factor. You said that Germany has the highest wage costs in Europe and actually in the world and that that really impacts competition and your competitive position massively. But it also has something to do with your remuneration in the boards, which goes into the millions. It's good to have a face-to-face meeting here with that dialogue. But as I said, limiting speaking time is not something nice. Moreover, you're talking about constructive discussions. Then you could have dealt with my multiple applications in a much nicer way. Why didn't you even start by trying to implement the salary system I have proposed? Because that's a decisive factor. Because, to put it bluntly, you're all state employees in the end. If you put that into relation with what a minister or ministerial employee gets or a state secretary, then you're overpaid, also in relation to a minister who gets a bit more. I believe that you should really consider my proposal and then check my proposal against your salaries and implement my proposal. In the context of transparency, you've been talking about it. It's also mentioned in the management report. I think it is sad that you no longer have the external presence. In the past, there used to be buses which displayed advertisements of your products. We no longer have the various information stands in the foyer that we used to have before the COVID crisis. That would have given us some nice insights. We had this nice introduction by Mrs. Schliesser, who presented the new app, something that the previous speaker spoke about regarding chat queries. But this is not so new at all. We've had this at the WAZ, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a local newspaper. They've had this for the last 4 to 5 years. You can query those. And then you call them. You get the automatic voice that responds to you, repeats your question or at least the key elements of your question and asks whether it got it right or not. So it's not so new at all. The same applies to health insurers who have a similar query system. Or have you been advised by them? And you were talking about your construction sites, optical fiber, AI regarding different lines and so on. If you're going to use that system, since when have you been using it? I think it is questionable. There has been an explosion. A house exploded in Bochum at the Karlstraße in Linden. When the optical fibers were laid, the house exploded. There was one person that died. There were two, I believe, who were severely injured. You're saying that with trucks and buses, you've been driving more than 140 kilometers through Germany, making billions of pictures, taking billions of photos. You actually imitated Google by collecting pictures, picture frames. I would be pleased if you could send me a printout, first of all, of the street that I live on in Bochum and perhaps also send me a nice picture of my home. That would be a nice thing to do. On the other hand, you also said appreciation of the shareholders is important. Yes, I can only repeat myself. Appreciation of the shareholders is not compatible with limiting speaking time. It is not compatible either with not allowing a vote on changes or increases of the salaries of your boards. The shareholders can vote on the other items, increase of capital, and so on, shares and departure sufficient rights. The same should be possible in connection with your salary increases and not only regarding the report about them. I received the 310 pages of the management report in paper. It contains a lot of things. But I didn't find a single page which displayed the salaries of the management board members and the supervisory board members, neither the fixed salaries nor the variable remuneration. They are not contained in the print version that I received. In the context of your security committee, you mentioned the persons that are included there. One person who has been on this committee for a long time is going to leave the supervisory board but will remain there and take on an advisory position. Professor Reinhard Höttgen, does he also get such a position? In the context of civil engineering, you said you have the approval to use reduced heights. How deep are they? What's the normal depth? What's the reduced depth? What's the cost of both of them? Furthermore, on transparency, I don't think it's a nice thing if you look at the telephone register on CD-ROM or in the internet. For instance, the address with telephone number of Deutsche Telekom is not contained. They contain only either private customers and advisors and perhaps a cell phone number, but just one single number and nothing else. The genuine address of the group headquarters is not listed. I already spoke about salaries. Next, you repeatedly underlined how valuable the brand of Deutsche Telekom is. But actually, it's only a virtual value. You cannot sell the company. It serves you to improve your immaterial assets or intangible assets and perhaps with a credit rating, but nothing else. Furthermore, on page 27 of the management report, you're talking about more than 80,000 antennas. What's the power consumption of those antennas? On page 28, you're talking about Eurogate. Eurogate was the overarching stock-listed company. What's your relation to those? Did Dr. Eckelmann contact you, or did you contact him? Page 28, you're talking about campus networks. Was that a tender or an award due to EU contracts? Or did you apply as a national or submit a tender as a national provider in Germany? You're also speaking about the Federal Army IT regarding tank communication in operations and satellite use and the mishandled conference call that foreign agents were able to listen into. Now, in the context of your campus networks, on page 29, you're talking about the industry frequencies. Actually, we used to have this around 1980. At the time, we called them fixed or permanent lines between headquarters and the very subsidiaries in operations where you were able to query respective revenues and sales. Now, I exceeded my time. I saw that. On page 34, transport, you're talking about value generation. What do you mean by this? Forwarding agencies, fake papers, and so on, or the various sites of loading and unloading? What do you mean on page 38, 57 by paying customers? The figures they're paying later, do you mean me? I pay my connection fee. Afterwards, the units I've consumed. What does it mean on page 42 in the context of catastrophes and telephone for free? Will there not be any phone charges in that context? Page 88, you're talking about 100% green power that you're using also in the US. This, I think, is a big lie. If you're looking at the German power market or electricity market with gas-generated electricity and so on, and then in the US, you even have the oil sands, which are used to generate electricity. Furthermore, you're saying that no end devices are leased out anymore in the US. What were these devices, routers, telephones, or whatever? What were these? What's the cost of the dismantling of the telephone cells? How many of those do we have in Germany? What's the cost of dismantling them? On April 4th, we had an article in the local newspaper regarding cell towers in natural protection areas. How far have you considered nature protection, nature conservation in that regard? If you're definitely generating profits, those profits should be divided by four. One quarter, this includes August 12th, should be paid out to advisors or reserve for advisors and bonuses. One-fourth for maintenance and repairs, one-quarter for dividends, and one-quarter as provisions for crises and such like. Regarding the salary remuneration system for management members, you should consider that it is certainly feasible because you, as formerly federal post office or German postal services, you had major structural changes. Because there was a differentiation then at some stage between the Deutsche Telekom and the postal service, and that was further modified. There was the transition from being civil servants to being employed staff. The other modification that occurred in the same manner that we no longer have telegrams and so on. You should take that into consideration, I believe. You should consider that you're not the owners of the company. You are perhaps to a certain extent because some of you do hold shares. But actually, you are employees and almost state employees. If an SME entrepreneur as a share company is looking for a new managing director, and if that person doesn't come up with results after some time, then they get warnings and rating. Then he or she will have to leave. You should consider this as well if we are talking about remuneration of the management board. We're talking about thresholds for Social Security for the various parts, sickness insurance, Social Security, and care insurance. Then you have those honorary contracts, several millions, if you work well. But you have to pay taxes on that and insure yourself. I expressly ask you to come to an end. You have had the longest speaking time by far. But in the interest of everyone, I'd like you to limit yourself. Thank you. You should take all that into consideration. $1 billion of your bonuses are actually employees. Some of you, many of you, get less as a salary. But they contribute more to economic growth than you. I keep up my application. I thank you for allowing me to speak a little bit longer. I wish you all the best. Do consider my proposal and implement it because all those bonus systems, this can't continue in Germany. The same as the pension insurances and pension payments have been shortened. Similar measures are going to be implemented. Thank you. Thank you for having finished your remarks, Mrs. Glimberg. I can inform you now as announced that the term now of 30 minutes has elapsed regarding to obtain the quorum on the proposal mentioned earlier on. Now, in the light of the request to speak, I see myself forced to further limit the speaking time. Therefore, limit the speaking time of the coming speakers to five minutes. I hope you can understand this. Furthermore, now, let me look for this here. I would like to ask you that in 15 minutes' time, I can close the list of speakers. That would be a quarter past 3:00, so at 3:15 PM, I would close the list of speakers. So if you wish to take the floor, please file your request at the speaker registration desk so that we can allow everyone to have a word. Now, we will answer the last questions. I will start with Mr. Weckendorf, who had two questions. How detailed did you look at the succession planning? From Mr. Höttgen. Mr. Weckendorf, of course, this is an ongoing topic for the Supervisory Board, especially for the Procedural Committee. We're informing ourselves on a constant basis about our talents. I keep having talks with employees and leaders at the respective levels to see how qualified our staff is, to see and know what type of potential we have within our group. We look at different criteria called age, for instance, how long management board members can remain on the board. Of course, the supervisory board and myself, we are aware that Mr. Höttgen has a contract until the end of 2026. We are always in discussions on how we are going to search a successful successor for Mr. Höttgen and what criteria we are going to use. I'm sure that given the outstanding position of the company, I believe that within that period of time, we will find a very qualified successor. The next question is, what are the reasons why the target remuneration has been adjusted once again in 2023 compared to 2022? I already mentioned that. That was due to the sabbatical. There was no salary increase. It was a technical effect. Why were the target values for the target achievement of decreasing energy consumption above the numbers for 2022? When determining the values for T-Mobile US, we've been told by the back office that they don't understand that because according to the remuneration report, the target values for 2023 are below the level of 2022. That's because the ambition level 2023 did not include T-Mobile US. Then you said that there are many questions on the remuneration report. The approval. The remuneration report 2022 was something like 92%, but last year it was slightly above the year before that. So much for Mr. Beckendorf's questions on remuneration. Mr. Eberle asked the following question about it was a question about 31 supervisory board meetings, and these were plenary and non-plenary sessions. 8 of them were virtual meetings, and 23 of these meetings were physical meetings. Individual supervisory board members were granted permission to attend some of the physical meetings virtually, but the large number of meetings were completely held face-to-face. Mr. Höttges, thank you. I would like to briefly answer Mr. Höttling's question. Sorry, have I forgotten to mention the next speakers? So Dieter Kühmichel is going to be the next speaker after this Q&A. Mr. Höttling's question referred to a building in Bremen, a store there. Thanks to Ferri Abolhassan, who's in charge of service, we know exactly what this situation is all about. You talked about rats in the building, and in fact, we've done a lot of things to actually fight the rats. We brought in an exterminator, we used poison, etc. You can see that our board members even know about such a case where one of our stores is battling rats. The second topic was multifunctional cabinets and casings, which are often dirty, and that is a nuisance that we come across loads of times in Germany. We are spending a lot of time to retrofit and renovate these cabinets. Nowadays we often put telecom information on these cabinets. Whenever we roll out fiber in a region or wherever we improve 5G coverage, we use such space for advertising. It's good too because this is sort of our business card, if you will, and that's why we are really annoyed to see vandalism whenever our cabinets are treated badly. I'm afraid I can't follow your request to give you a tablet for free. If we do that, then next year round we have another 20,000 shareholders who want the same. Now, Mr. Beckendorf's question on T-Systems, and you asked whether they are still part of the group and will continue to be a member of the group. We've put T-Systems on a new footing, and that starts with IT service, AI, security services, cloud services, digitization services. These are things that we offer our customers, you know, personalized services in the area of software. We've seen good growth and positive cash flow at T-Systems last year. In this we created a basis, a sound foundation, so to speak. I mean, this likely will never become a multi-billion business, but we are making $5 billion in revenues nowadays. We have a good footprint in Germany and other European countries, a good international footprint with customers wherever they are, also outside of Europe, and will continue to evolve that business because we believe that companies much more rely on digitization now than they used to. In terms of revenue and market share, we are among the large operators in Germany, but internationally we are a smaller player. We look at two factors as central factors for establishing ourselves successfully in the long run in this segment. Namely, we always need to have people on site. You know, we are not serving our customers from, say, India or so. We always have German-speaking staff on site who support their customers right there, and this is also reflected in customer satisfaction. The TRI*M value stands at over 90%, which is excellent by way of comparison, and that is also to do with the fact that we're so close to the customer. At the same time, we offer a high level of stability and reliability. Maybe that's somehow made in Germany that comes with a claim, and we have a high level of security failure, failure security rather. With digitalization and cloud business becoming ever more prominent, we will continue to support our business customers here. We stand by our T-Systems business. You asked about new fiber customers as opposed to customers with an old contract. The fiber rollout is a long-term project. Like I said, we are rolling out the infrastructure for the next couple of decades. I always say, you know, three generations after me will still light a candle for us in the church, thanking us for rolling out the infrastructure for the future now. Customers will be able to use it for their digitization purposes in the future. We are not only focusing on metropolitan areas but also on rural areas where traditionally we have a large market share as well. The pre-marketing for fiber is part of our toolbox, but it is not the only factor. It doesn't matter whether we achieve 30% or 50% of pre-marketing. Once we've decided to roll out fiber in an area, we try to sell it as best as we can, but it is not necessary to first have a fixed number of customers in order to then continue with the rollout. You asked about my further plans for my life. I think I've already answered that. Mr. Schmidt asked about the number of our subsidiaries. We have 379 affiliated fully consolidated companies and 70 associated companies and other investments, meaning companies that Deutsche Telekom does not hold a majority in or not anymore, partnerships, etc. Given the international footprint we have, these numbers make sense. Mr. Schmidt, you asked whether artificial intelligence is an integral part of our strategy to become the leading digital telco. Answer: Yes, it is. What's the role of the Magenta Smart Speaker in this context? We took the smart speaker off the market because it simply wasn't successful. Maybe it'll come back at some stage, but we did not develop the technology for the speaker in vain anyway. When you're using your TV and you take your remote control in your hands, then you can use this very voice assistant to call up programs, to search movies, and to ask questions. Meaning, the technology we use for the smart speaker is still in use only in connection with our Magenta TV platform. Those of you who haven't tested it yet, you might want to do it because it's a great service and often makes it much easier to search something on your TV. Mr. Eberle, you asked what the future election, possible selection of Donald Trump as new president would mean for us. Well, that's hard to answer, as the Trump team have not yet published the cornerstones of their plans. We don't know. But traditionally, the Republican camp stand for a more liberal approach, and the business combination of Sprint and T-Mobile US was under a Republican leadership. The Democrats actually rejected it. So therefore, we as a group benefited from that, and we were not the only ones. The Americans, the American people also benefited from it because they now have a top 5G coverage, which was one of the obligations we had to enter into when doing this transaction. Then you asked, what kind of policy will a possible Trump administration pursue vis-à-vis Deutsche Telekom? Well, we don't know. There are certain procedures in place that may govern that, and so far we've always fared well. Okay. Question from Mr. Hanselmann. After the transfer of the 49 million shares to SoftBank, are there going to be more dilution effects in connection with the Sprint integration? The answer clearly is no. I mean, there's always a dilution effect in the form of the management compensation because the US team is also paid in the form of shares, but this is something that existed even long before we even talked about the merger at a time where T-Mobile US was still a standalone company. Second question: How do we assess the complaints, the complaint by consumers against T-Mobile US? This is a class action. For those of you who don't know, there are customers from AT&T and Verizon, and they sued T-Mobile saying that as a result of the combination, the business combination with Sprint, AT&T and Verizon had to increase their prices. Now, we don't think that this has any merit, but the complaint was admitted, and we're not expecting any negative outcome or a negative ruling. Incidentally, we are no longer part of this trial to begin with. Then there was a question about the market capitalization of DTAG as compared to T-Mobile US. Is the share buyback program and the compensation for the board of management adequate? Last year we launched a 15-month program with a volume of up to $19 billion, which includes $3.75 billion in dividends being paid or that we would get in part, and another $15.25 billion in the form of share buybacks. So we have maximum flexibility. We can sell into the share buyback, for instance, which is what we are doing right now, and the cash that we are getting can be invested either to reduce our net debt or to support our own share buyback. This was another question that came up. The question was: What is the target stake in T-Mobile US that we hold in the US? We could increase it, of course. The question is: Why does T-Mobile US have a better rating than DTAG? That's a difficult question. We believe that in the telecommunication segment, the US is the world's most attractive market. We have a homogeneous market with 330 million people. We have much higher ARPU, less regulation, all in the United States, and that plays a role. I mean, if we had a formula for doing the same here, we would use it, but these are probably the main reasons why T-Mobile US has a better rating than DTAG. There was a last question on Lumos. These were just rumors in the press, and no decision has been made by the US team on it, so I can't tell you what the financial implications from that may be. We said that as a strategic goal, we want to safeguard the strategic majority in T-Mobile. The question was: Does it then make sense to sell into the share buyback? Answer: There's generally no risk of us losing those shares. We can always stop the buyback of T-Mobile shares, which would mean that our share would go up. At the same time, we have access to 6.7 million shares from SoftBank, at a given price that and right now the share stands at around $160. In addition, we have access to 28 million share options from SoftBank based on market prices. Yeah, I mean, there's no risk that we might be losing the majority in T-Mobile US here whatsoever. The next question was: Why has the Sprint Fixed Network business been sold to Cogent, and have we done this to meet regulatory requirements? In the wake of the merger with Sprint, we also acquired Sprint's fixed network business, which was very much loss-making. We did the math, and it turned out that selling that business was more economically viable, which is why we sold it including liabilities to the tune of $600 million. Mr. Oswald asked about the amount of liabilities plus interest. At the end of last year, that was €132 billion, and interest payments amounted to €5.5 billion worldwide. Then Mr. Beckendorf asked a question about the shielding in GD Towers and the impairment. That was described in the management summary. We said that the operating outlook of the business has actually improved rather than deteriorated, and we said that the business is likely to grow and that valuation increased by 7.68%. If the WACC comes down again and if a business develops as planned, then we can do a markup again right up to the amount of the proceeds. You asked about sales in the market at T-Mobile US. I already said that we are selling into the share buyback in the US, also to use the proceeds to bring our own net debt down, but we are not going to put the consolidation in the US in jeopardy through that whatsoever. Well, there are more open questions, but as it is already quarter past 3:00, let me tell you that we have now closed the speaker's list, and we are not going to accept any further requests for the floor that are newly registered. Getting back to Mr. Oswald. On item 3, Mr. Oswald requested that approval of the members only be granted individually. Now, shareholders representing part of the shareholder capital supported that, but in accordance with the statutory requirements, the necessary quorum was not achieved, which is why it is not necessary to only grant approval of the actions of the members here individually. Mr. Oswald then demanded the same for the members of the supervisory board. Beforehand, we are talking about the members of the board of management. Again, a certain number of shareholders supported this request, but let me state here for the record that in accordance with the statutory requirements, a quorum was not reached, which means that it is not necessary to vote on approval of the actions of the supervisory board members individually. We can do that collectively, both for the supervisory board and for the board of management. Now, let's continue with the next speakers. The names will be shown here on the screen in a moment, I take it. Can I remind speakers to stick with their five-minute speaking time, please? Herr Kühnmichel? Mr. Kühnmichel, are you here? If Mr. Kühnmichel is not in the room, we will then move on to Mrs. Christa Hillen, then Mr. Hans Osvald, and then Mr. Eberhard Erich Eichmann. [Foreign Language] Guten Tag zusammen. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for the invitation. It's my first shareholders' meeting ever, and I think it's highly interesting. It's really great to see the truth being told here. I didn't really expect it here. My question refers to 5G and the health risks involved. Mr. Höttges, earlier on this morning, you said that 5G is good for the customers. This is what I noted down. With AI, we can recognize cancer and future needs transparency. There were other quotes from your speech. I have to say, today we are talking a lot about money. We are talking about the future, about shares. What is missing here is the human factor, although you said that human beings are important. I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother, and I am always happy for every tower which is not built because I'm firmly convinced of the fact that all these towers are health risks. risks. This is something that you can read even at the website of the Radiation Protection Agency, that it cannot be excluded, that there are health risks involved. The WHO in 2011 already said that it might be carcinogenic or promoting cancer. Do you also take this into account? Topics such as radiation protection, when you talk about 5G, we are talking about electromagnetic radiation frequencies. Some of you might know that electromagnetic weapons are already used in wars. There is a microwave pistol that was already developed in 1992. In the taz newspaper, you find a report that this weapon can result in psychological and psychic damage, disturbances of the mind. How are you observing this? I work a lot in the forest, in nature. I can see that many trees are dying, that many trees are destroyed, and many forests are cut, with the idea that the radiation will reach people more quickly. I think it's, Katie, how much is destroyed? So this is a very important question for me. What is the ratio between glass fiber and 5G? Fiber is deep in the earth. Not only 20 centimeters deep would probably help avoid a little bit of 5G. This morning, in your charts, you said 6G. Did I see this right? Were you talking about 6G? Wow. My God. Then we will be dying even faster. Then there is a second question. There are rumors that there are 10,000 telecom employees who are not working on a project. It means that 10,000 civil servants will get their salary, sit at home, and don't have any work. Is that really true? Are there so many people without a project that still get their salaries, and how much money are you spending on them? Knowledge is something that you always have to get. This is what I want to tell the audience. Always ask questions. Ask, ask, ask until you get the answers. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Before Mr. Oswald will take over, I can already answer two of his questions. You asked whether I have telecom shares. Yes, I do have a significant amount of telecom shares, but I bought all of them before I became Chairman of the Supervisory Board, and I did not buy any new shares. I do own shares, but I didn't buy any new ones since I took office. What did you do about my countermotions and proposals for election? It was not mentioned, and this is not democratic. We published your countermotions and proposals for election on the website, and we are treating them in line with the legal requirements. Mr. Oswald, you asked many more questions, but we will answer them later on. Now you've got the floor for the second round of questions. Ja, Herr Dr. Abel, ich verdanke schon wieder Ihre Zeit schon. I can see the clock is ticking already. Ich finde es nicht toll, dass Sie jetzt noch einmal die Redezeit verkürzen. Good that you are again shortening the speaking time. Mrs. Glimberg made a comment already, and I also proposed her as a candidate for election. She knows how to speak, and this would be a new candidate, nobody who is depending on you. You should also perhaps listen to a woman every now and again. Ich bin richtig erstaunt, was Sie da vorhaben. I'm really surprised by what you are doing here with the restriction of speaking times. I can remember during the corona pandemic, shareholders could ask 50, 100, 150 questions. Mr. Lehner, I saw you. I welcome you. Can you still remember me? There used to be speakers asking hundreds of questions. Ja, gut. Auf gut. Auf jeden Fall wurden da die Aktionäre gefragt. The shareholders' rights were better protected at that time. It's inappropriate what you are doing here. But let me now. Jetzt fällt mir schon wieder die Maus weg. Now my mouse is missing. Last time I forgot to bring my glasses, but perhaps you can give me my mouse. Ja, gut. Ich habe jetzt nicht Ihre Maus gemeint, auch in den Telekom-Geschäften? I wasn't talking about the mice in your telecom stores. I also have mice in my garden, and I always catch them and release them again in the forests, perhaps. One of them reached your stores. Well, I would like to make another motion, Mr. Frank Appel, so that you are also busy. I'm just scrolling through my computer now. There is this wonderful Stock Corporation Act, and I love hearing your voice. You are speaking so nicely, and this is why now I would like to put forward the motion that you, Mr. Frank Appel. I now raise the countermotion number 3. The chairman of the meeting should slowly, carefully, and clearly read out the results of the votes so that all the shareholders can easily understand and unambiguously perceive the results of the votes. Over and over again, when I listen to the vote results, 99%, I am really starting shivering. Is it really possible to get a result of 99%? Last time, I think you even said it's 99.6%. This was not even possible for Putin. He only got 87%. The Notary Public, I didn't see him. Is he there somewhere? Yeah, you are there. Mr. Notary Public, I also would like to welcome you, of course. I would like to speed up a little bit. Otherwise, Dr. Frank Appel will get a fit here. We would love to have a look into the IT system together with you in order to get some more knowledge of the IT system because the thing about the 99.6% is incredible, and it's not possible to have these election results. Just imagine there are shareholders who have 1%, 2%, or 3% of the shares. If, for example, one shareholder holds 3% and we have a presence, normally 50% of shareholders are present for Deutsche Telekom, it's slightly more, and then the 3%, if there is a 50% presence, are basically 6%, and then it's not possible to get 99%, but only 94% is possible. But probably you have to have a PhD to understand this, but it's really not sounding very credible if you are always insisting on 99.X%. I would like to ask you to show me the IT system in detail, or are you also authorized, and do you have the knowledge? Can you really go into the systems and check whether the results that are presented are actually right? You can give me your answer personally. I would be grateful for your answer. No answer here. A strong boss has strong employees, weak boss has weak employees. Mr. Oswald, your five minutes are over already, so please come to a close. Well, it's always difficult with you, Dr. Appel. It's difficult with you. Ich möchte vielleicht noch eins dazu sagen zu Ihren Vergütungen. Coming back to the remuneration, Sie wohnen ja da bei der Post. Raising the remuneration over and over again. You were the CEO at Deutsche Post, and Mr. Nikolaus von Bomhard was the chairman of the supervisory board. He is the remuneration professor. He actually managed, under your auspices, to raise his salary five times in a single year by 100%. It's incredible, and this is then called the horizontal remuneration spiral. We are not at the shareholders' meeting of Deutsche Post, DHL. I know that we are not there, but this is just a comparison. The remuneration spiral is just heated up, and you then justify your remuneration by saying that there are even higher remunerations elsewhere, and you are saying that it should always be like this. Thank you very much for your generosity, Mr. Appel. I would like to say goodbye to you. Let me ask again whether Mr. Kühlmichel, Dieter Kühlmichel, is now in the room. He also wanted to take the floor, but this is not the case, so we'll now continue with Mr. Eberhard Erich Eichmann before we answer some questions again. Sorry, I just have to get a sip of water. Okay. The five minutes are running. I also wanted to make a comment concerning the speakers' time. There were complaints that there are restrictions, but now I think that there are at least 30 speakers during a shareholders' meeting, and if everybody speaks only one minute longer than expected, this will make the shareholders' meeting longer by half an hour. If they speak two minutes longer, this is already an hour. So I don't know how to do this now in the half minutes left. The first question—this was a question regarding artificial intelligence and how far this could get out of hand so that the artificial intelligence gets control over us because cybernetics should not control us, but we want to control cybernetics. We want to control technology, but Mr. Höttges already said that there are some security mechanisms built in there. The second point, data protection. Here I found, if I go to the MagentaCLOUD, that there is a field where you can approve cookies, and you can either approve essential cookies or all cookies. If you accept all, then this means that you accept that people get access to your device and to process the data, and that this can be also sent to third-party countries, for example, the United States. Last year, we had the 10-year anniversary of the NSA affair. The question is, what are the risks involved? I also saw it outside. There was also a text shown at a computer. Now we still have Joe Biden, but you never know. Perhaps it will be Donald Trump soon, but it's also about other countries. Perhaps some of the information is just reaching other countries. It's always said, for example, when I go to the MagentaCLOUD, this was about the question of data protection. How safe is it so that you do not, in some way, really have data going to countries where the mafia is strong? The third point, when competition was established in 1998, 26 years ago, we had the case that we, as Deutsche Telekom, had to make available our lines to the competitors at a price which was lower than the costs for this service. Höttges, if I remember correctly, said that something similar is now looming, that those persons who lease are at an advantage over those who own lines. I have asked this question over and over again during the shareholders' meetings, and Mr. Obermann once said several years ago that this is a distortion of competition, that we were forced to make our lines available at dumping prices, and that the competitors, of course, did not want to invest into their own networks. My question is, is this threatening again, that we are forced to make a loss? Four minutes were enough for me. Thank you. This was my last speech here in my decade of life because during the next shareholders' meeting, I will be older. Thank you very much, Mr. Eichmann. Let me ask again whether Mr. Dietmar Kühlmichel is still here. Otherwise, we would delete him from the speakers' list. I can't see anything right now, so we will answer some questions again, and after the answers, we will then have Mr. Reiner Almich and then Mr. Utter. First of all, we'll ask some questions. Mr. Oswald, you asked another question addressed to me. You said Mr. Höttges earns €43,000 per day, €5,000 per hour. How do you want to explain this to a normal telecom employee? I already told you that we take a look at remuneration intensively over and over again, and of course, the size and the importance of the company is playing a role here because we want to get the best management members for the company, and this is only possible if we have the best remuneration. As you know, we lost one of the members of the management board. We would have loved to keep Mr. Adel Al-Saleh, but we are happy to have found a great successor, but it's our obligation to appropriately pay the board members, and this means in comparison to other companies in Europe. I don't even want to talk about companies in the U.S. This is why the supervisory board is deeply convinced of the fact that the remuneration that we offer today is the right remuneration for the board of management, and I hand over to Mr. Höttges for further answers. Thank you very much. I now come to a difficult question raised by Mr. Schmidt. He asked how the omnichannel sales are developing in Germany and Europe and whether the balance between the capitalization of Europe and of the US are changing. For omnichannel sales, it's about sales in one channel, for example, a shop, and then a new sale in another channel. So the call center gave the first advice, and then the shop makes the deal. The advisory and the contracts are happening in different systems. In Germany, we generate about $1.3 billion of revenues with new customers and existing customers and B2B customers in the same year, and $90 million of these $1.3 billion transactions, 7% are transactions where the advisory and the contract happened in different channels. In the Europe business, Dominique Leroy's business, it's similar, but this does not have any impact on the ratio regarding the market capitalization between T-Mobile US and our German Deutsche Telekom. Then somebody asked about the number of countries Deutsche Telekom is present in. Of course, the focus of our business, where we have our network infrastructure, are in the US, T-Mobile US, and in the European countries, but especially due to these systems which accompany our European customers worldwide, we are also present in other countries, in Brazil, in Mexico. All in all, we have a footprint of more than 50 countries in the world. You also asked, what will be the impact on the share price if KfW sells its shares? My colleague, Mr. Christian Illek, already explained this in detail. This would just be mere speculation. I don't know. I would wish for this to happen as soon as possible so that we've got clarity again and that we don't have this overhang looming on our share, but our major shareholder will probably act responsibly. What about the mobile connections along the railroad lines? I was talking about the Black Spots some years ago. We did a lot since then in Deutsche Bahn, and the project of supplying mobile connection and all the railway lines, we made a lot of progress. We've got 20. Our agreed target for all the long-distance tracks were achieved, and also for the smaller tracks. In 2023, we mainly reached our targets, and this was far ahead of the date that we announced, but we are not happy with that yet. We are still working together with Deutsche Bahn to improve the mobile phone connections in a train, but this does not only depend on the masts and towers, but this also requires some changes in the trains. The Deutsche Bahn currently is working on a project for lasered and coated windows so that the radio signals from outside come into each wagon so that we do not need repeating over wagons. There were player improvements, which was also shown in the tests, but this project is here to stay because it's not easy to have good coverage in all tunnels and at all lines. Mr. Eberhard, you asked about human-to-human communication, for example, with disabled people in spite of artificial intelligence. Well, I hope I could get it across during my speech, how important our employees are for us. This was the most important point in my speech. If I didn't get across the message that we are inclusive, it didn't come across that we also include severely disabled people who are an important part of our workforce, and I'm in touch regularly with representatives of severely disabled people. If it's about accessibility in our buildings, a new agreement on inclusion that we renewed in 2022, and if it's about inclusion offices and inclusion support in our company, I think we are a role model at Deutsche Telekom based on our responsibilities, our history, but also our understanding of ourselves. We want to integrate any type of minority, and this also holds true for severely disabled people. We now have 7.6% of disabled people working in the company. The legal requirements are thus outperformed significantly. Mr. Oswald raised the question in the context of the AGM with a Judy show, and I can read this out, but my colleague said, "You're not here for the first time, Mr. Oswald. You're a regular customer here at our telecom AGMs." What is your feeling that we don't take you seriously, you, our shareholders?" I can assure you, also from my side, we are having this face-to-face meeting because we're taking you seriously. We're having this face-to-face AGM because it's important to report on our business transparently. This shows our appreciation of our shareholders, and everyone has the possibility to speak about the matters that are relevant, and we appreciate the exchange with each and every one of you. For us, this is a lived shareholder culture. We are every time looking forward to this AGM. Furthermore, Mr. Oswald, you asked, "Did you, did we invest in shares?" I said, "I've invested in more than 500,000 shares, but I actually have clearly more because since the beginning of my time here at Deutsche Telekom, next year, 25 years, every year I reinvest in Deutsche Telekom." I think it makes sense that the Chairman or CEO invests in the own business and feels like the owner of that business. Then he will do the right things and take the right decisions. Now, publishing, Mr. Aller, publishing your letters regarding four GmbH companies, the information that you have provided to us, we took note of this, and not only today, but it is a matter that we have been dealing for quite some time. With regard to the information provided by you, we furthermore still have not detected any violations on the part of Deutsche Telekom or any need for action by us. Please understand that regarding matters that beyond that concern your matter, we cannot be involved as Deutsche Telekom and will not wish to be involved as Deutsche Telekom. I'll continue. The question of Mr. Eberler regarding the financial liabilities of Deutsche Telekom, how we're going to reduce them in absolute terms. We're looking at a different figure, the ratio of net debt liabilities and the revenue. This is the debt ratio, and an increasing EBITDA leads us to a reduction of debt. Nevertheless, in 2023, we reduced the debt by $10 billion in absolute figures, mainly due to the sale of the cell towers, and this then led to the situation that we have a debt ratio where we are at the upper level of our intended target of 2.75, and it has been mentioned repeatedly. The Americans are doing about two-thirds, are accounting for about two-thirds of the EBITDA contribution, but they account for 75% of the debt. Now, regarding the additional bonuses, the participation of employees in those schemes occurs through certain programs which is called Shares2You. All employees can take part in that and become shareholders themselves, and within three years for two shares purchased, they will be given one for free by Deutsche Telekom, and of course, they're also participating in the dividend payout. Now, for the leaders, there is an additional scheme. Now, the question of Mr. Oswald regarding the debt level, and similar to what I just said regarding Mr. Eberler, we are reducing our indebtedness via the increasing EBITDA, not by reducing the debt in absolute figures, and currently, this has led to a situation where we're actually quite well on track. 3.07 with an indebtedness end of 2023, seeing that this indebtedness is going down, and this is also appreciated by the rating agency. We have now a B+ with all them. Triple B+, so this is well perceived as well. You asked the question regarding the complaints by shareholders. I think this is the prospectus liability proceedings regarding the third IPO. We presented this in 2021. This was also approved by the courts. We have come to an agreement with most complainants, and where we haven't, we have made corresponding provisions. I have a question from Mr. Dufner. He asked about the development of emissions in our value chain. In the two previous years, we had emissions on Scope 1, 2, and 3 in '22, which stood at about 12,000 kilotons CO2 equivalent, and in '23, we had 10,700 CO2 equivalents. Now, I'm giving you the exact values now, but you can also read them up in the CR report. There was a scope one, 212 kilotons in 2022, down to 199 kilotons. A scope two, from 21 kilotons to 18 kilotons in 2023, and now the biggest contribution to our footprint, which happens in the supply chain, meaning the production of the hardware produced by our suppliers and the use on the part of our customers. And development scope three, 11,800 kilotons in 2022, went down to 10,500 kilotons in 2023. Next question goes in the direction of purchasing climate protection equipment of the network suppliers. Aren't you moving a major proportion of the responsibility for climate protection to the equipment providers? Since we're purchasing our equipment on the world markets, we can only jointly achieve our climate protection goals together with the providers and suppliers. Therefore, we are using a so-called scorecard with the most important information about our suppliers' products at the end of their life cycle, how much is being recycled, and so on. Now, we ourselves are constantly investing in new network technology, thus optimizing the energy efficiency of our devices and equipment and our CO2 footprint. In In scope one and two, we're going down to zero. Currently, we're very much trying to reduce our own energy consumption, and the rest that remains, we're covering that with renewable energies. Scope three, we want to achieve the same thing, but we need the suppliers for that and, of course, the consumers. We want to optimize technology, and once we've completely switched off copper and only have the optical fiber network, we have a huge potential for saving energy consumption in our network and in our group. By taking over data centers that we're running for our business customers, we are relieving the burden of the customers for their CO2 footprint. We're taking that on, and on the whole, we're optimizing the energy footprint of industry and our partners. Furthermore, you're asking about the vendors and the footprint of Huawei. Huawei is one of the participants in this entire structure where we're defining exactly with our suppliers and discussing how to reduce CO2 emissions with respective devices. I can assure you that Huawei, with its antennas, is one of the most energy-efficient suppliers that we are currently using in the field of antennas. You asked why we're not going to prohibit high-risk suppliers in the core network, why we aren't prepared for that. Let me repeat this and reiterate it. We don't need a legally binding prohibition of high-risk suppliers. As Deutsche Telekom, we have decided very early that in the safety-critical elements of our network, we're not using any components of risk countries. Of course, we are using US suppliers who support us, and the current political discussion in the press does not refer to the core network or the IP aggregation network, but the so-called RAN the Radio Access Network, so those antennas on the rooftops. And here with the open RAN technology, we're focusing on a technology which in the future will make us much more independent from current suppliers and will offer additional procurement possibilities outside of China or Europe. Let's think about Korea, for instance, or Japan. Mr. Appel. Okay. Let's continue with the next speakers. First of all, we have Mr. Udo Rütter, then Mr. Rainer Martin Hellmich, and then Mr. Thomas Kirchner. Let me start with Mr. Udo Rütter. Sehr geehrter Herr Dr. Appel. Sehr geehrte Frau Dr.Dr. Appel, ladies and gentlemen of the management board and the supervisory board, dear shareholders, I'm Udo Rütter, and I represent my own shares and the shares of third parties. I see four minutes, 46 seconds here on the clock, and I would like to complain to you, Mr. Apple, as chairman of this AGM, because you're treating shareholders unequally with their right to speak. I originally requested to speak, and then you allocated a second round to Mr. Oswald before I was able to start with my first contribution, and this inequality is not acceptable. What's important in a shareholders' meeting, especially if it's happening face-to-face? First of all, what the management board says. That's important what the other speakers say here from the audience, but what's extremely important is how we as owners and you as shareholders react to what the management board presents to us and what the speakers say by appreciating what you say or by applauding or rejecting what you say. That's a major sign of this face-to-face or hybrid AGM, and no one sees and hears that reaction in a virtual AGM. It's absolutely correct that you continue on this path to either face-to-face meeting or in a hybrid form to discuss with us very openly. Mr. Höttges, you raised one point today at the very beginning, and I don't want to be switched off after three minutes here. I want to have the same speaking time accorded to me that the original speakers or the speakers at the beginning had so that I can say what I have to say. You spoke about AI as an important element, major element for the future development of Deutsche Telekom. I would like to say that what's more important is human intelligence in the company and to promote that. If you've seen this over the past 20 years, we as shareholders really suffered from the fact of what happened with Deutsche Telekom 20 years ago. Deutsche Telekom was a ruined company with a share price of €6 and €7, and only afterwards when Professor Lehner and good management board members put Telekom back on its feet, that we as shareholders have the opportunity to benefit from this. This would never have been possible if Dr. Lehner and the good management board and the good supervisory board hadn't done this major groundwork and hadn't made it possible that Deutsche Telekom comes back from that trough, from that ruinous phase, and stands today now with very good results. I would like to thank Professor Lehner most cordially, also on behalf of all shareholders, that he has made this possible. There are clear differences between companies that are holding annual general meetings. On the one hand, there are companies that focus on virtual meetings, virtual AGMs, and you can observe, especially this year, which companies are doing so. The companies that are holding their AGMs in presence, face-to-face, are showing respect towards shareholders. Often, those are the companies that have good results to show for. On the other hand, we have the problems where there are other companies that have poor results or that are dependent on other parent companies, fear, or shy away from taking on the responsibility in those face-to-face discussions. I would like to speak to the representatives of the federal government who are here on the supervisory board, and I would like to advocate this topic, that this is being picked up again by German politicians. Originally, the German legislator wanted to create some rules during the COVID crisis to allow resolutions to be passed, so they enabled AGMs to be conducted virtually. But this is being abused, meanwhile, especially by companies that are dependent on other parent companies in order to avoid negative discussions or complaints by shareholders. This is a point that needs to be changed again. At the same time, I would like to appeal to the voting rights advisors. Originally, they decided to agree to those changes in the statutes only for certain situations where it is not allowed to hold these AGMs in presence, face-to-face, due to the COVID pandemic or otherwise. They were convinced by the German Institute for Shares by letter that they agreed to holding virtual AGMs even without the need of pandemics or similar. Next time statutes are going to be changed, that should be limited to five or six years, and these matters should not be decided against the explicit wish of the shareholders. More than 50% favor the face-to-face AGMs, and you shouldn't counteract that. Another major point, Mr. Illek, I would like to take you to task here on that matter. We were talking about the indebtedness of the company. Last year, we had the outstanding free cash flow due to the sale of the cell towers, and we had this special effect which reduced the liabilities by about €10 billion. But if we are looking further ahead into the future for 2024 and 2025, we can only expect a free cash flow of some €8 billion. That's what the analysts expect. If we expect the dividend to remain more or less the same at about 70%, this takes about another €4 billion, so that this leaves just about €4 billion to pay back debts. I'd like to hear a plan or a sketch from you today, what you propose to plan for the next three or four years to increase the debt, reduce the debt, maintain it, and what means you want to generate for that, and how you want to give us the assurance that we will move away from that high indebtedness. We have the debt in the U.S., and we have the high cash flow from there, but that will not be a thing that will go on in the future. The competition in the U.S., Verizon and AT&T, are not resting on their laurels and are not sleeping. We've had a growth market, and this allowed us to achieve the huge cash flow, but this is not assured for the future. I would like to hear a few words from you, what the situation is with our competitors at present, what are Verizon doing, AT&T, and T-Mobile perhaps to attack again, and they might try to win customers back from us, and that might not allow us to maintain the growth, and that again would not allow us to reduce indebtedness. I'd like to hear about your plan a bit in more concrete terms than you've done so far so that we get a better idea of the situation there. What's also important for us, private shareholders, are not unimportant for a company. Many stock corporations are focusing on institutional investors, but institutional investors are often foreign investors. I can only underline what Mr. Streichan said earlier on. Foreign investors participate out of proportion in the value generation of a company. Politicians still haven't understood it. Politicians still believe. Let me put it this way. They don't understand that the creation of wealth and insurance of income in old age is only possible if the German economy generates profits, and that profit can be distributed. Private old-age insurance with shares is something that was started, but only very timidly, and it almost failed again. This is something politicians don't understand. Please, as a company, deal positively with the private investors as you've done in the past. Advocate this publicly. You asked for five minutes, not ten. Thank you for, Mr. Appel, for again interrupting me, but that's not necessary. I think the audience would like to hear another few sentences from my side. I'll be quick. My appeal was I'm not saying Apple, but my appeal was that you become active again. For instance, we have the German Association for the Protection of Investors, that you advocate in those fora for the telecom share. The more people participate in the company by means of shares, the bigger will be our purchasing power in Germany and the more reliable our income in old age. Thank you for your attention, especially to you, Dr. Appel. I'd like to thank you for your patience. Thank you. Next we have Mr. Rainer Martin Hellmich, then Thomas Kirchner, and then Mr. Josef Steurer. Let me start with Mr. Rainer Martin Hellmich. Ja, erst mal vielen Dank für die Wortterteilung. My Name ist Martin Hellmich. Thank you for giving me the floor. My name is Martin Hellmich. I'm a very small investor, so I'm only representing my own shares here. Sometimes I'm also a spokesperson of the SdK. I would just like to mention that the German Protective Association for Shareholdings was mentioned here. SDK, my association, can also offer that. I just meant to mention that. I spent the first two hours at my computer this morning following the perfectly hybrid format of the shareholders' meeting online, and I would like to really say a word of praise here. I very much liked it. It's nice to see just how full of life this shareholders' meeting is. Mr. Höttges, this is what I very much like about you. Not only do you know how to motivate people, but you really spice things up, and I find that quite impressive. Please continue along these lines. Now, here's a little but. What I didn't quite understand this morning, but I'm sure you'll be able to explain it to me, is you said that AI is important. You mentioned an AI avatar. You also talked about a chatbot, and then there was this lady or a gentleman who was supposed to solve your problem. I thought it was quite remarkable when this computer voice was asking whether the router, whether it would be okay for the router to be restarted in order to solve the problem, which actually is a good idea. Then the chatbot also asked whether you, as a customer, accept that your internet connection is disconnected for a moment, including the call. That happened, but the call was still ongoing. How did that work technically? I didn't quite understand it, and maybe you could explain it to me. I felt that I don't know. You were trying to wind me up, but maybe. Yeah. Generally, yeah. yeah. Certainly, we're coming in. There is an explanation, and at any rate, there is no way around for us to dealing with this AI, and hopefully, it'll be more of an advantage than a disadvantage. There was something that I thought was quite funny. Your vehicles have traveled a distance of 140,000 kilometers in Germany figuring out the right spots for the fiber rollout. As you know, there are the ESG topics. I think on the pictures of your vehicles, I only saw combustion vehicles. I don't think there were any vehicles running on electricity or hydrogen or something like that or combustion. Have you ever thought of optimizing that a little bit? I know that these are not usually the kind of things that we like to discuss at a shareholders' meeting, but I don't really want to deal with all those numbers on net debt, etc., as the previous speakers. Instead, I just wanted to mention the fact that you might want to use more environmentally friendly vehicles for these 140,000 kilometers here in Germany for your fiber rollout. Then you talked about providers of the Western world. I always understood that telecom is fighting racism and is fighting for freedom of opinion. You are fighting against fake news and things like that. The company has always made it clear where it stands. But then you referred to yourself as a provider from the Western world, and that doesn't sound so open, after all. Maybe you could comment on that. Maybe there's something I misunderstood. I don't mean to trigger a political debate here, but I thought the way it was phrased was slightly unfortunate, but maybe you meant it in a completely different way. In the same context, you said, and Dr. Illek also referred to it, that there are providers such as ZTE, Huawei, and others that sometimes are not quite so unproblematic. At this point, I would like to briefly refer to Mrs. Merkel, who used to be the German Chancellor, and the eavesdropping scandal that we had with the Americans back then. Now we are working with the Americans as well, and I think we should be somehow sensitized. To wrap up, and I know that we're under time pressure here, Dr. Appel, I would like to just come back to one topic that Dr. Illek briefly mentioned, namely the third IPO. Und tatsächlich, wie Sie schreiben auf der Seite 159 im Geschäft, we've heard about prospectus liability. And in the management report, you also referred to that. And it turns out that in the meantime, you've been able to reach out of court settlements with almost all plaintiffs. Maybe you could specify that a little bit. I think you could give us the exact numbers in millions or so. You said that originally, it was €78 million plus interest. Now, if you calculate that over a 20-year period, then that's quite a bit. So it would be nice if you could give us the detailed numbers here. I mean, I'm guessing there are more potential plaintiffs, people you might want to also enter into an out-of-court settlement. You only sent the offer to the plaintiffs six months after making the promise in November of 2021. Since then, we've seen various dividends paid out. We've seen a rise in interest rates. I wonder, how do you intend to deal with all that interest? I mean, there may be still the odd plaintiff who's willing to enter into an out-of-court settlement, and then maybe he is paid, I don't know, three dividends plus interest. That would still be an acceptable amount overall, I guess. It would be nice if you could tell us that. Then there actually won't be another final complaint anymore. Maybe there won't even be another final complaint. You said that this is just a very low risk. How so? Because actually, the Federal Court of Justice issued quite a clear ruling, and that ruling is based on the amounts involved. I will leave it at that. Thank you for listening, and thank you for your answers in advance. And I wish you every success. And Mr. Höttges, once again, carry on. It really makes fun following you and seeing that you're so motivated. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hellmich. The next speaker is Mr. Kirchner, followed by Josef Steurer. Ja, guten Tag zusammen. Good afternoon. Mein Name ist Thomas Kirchner. My name is Thomas Kirchner. I'm a shareholder, private shareholder. Und ich habe jetzt gelesen bei der Hauptversammlung, wie sind das Netz? I saw that it says here, "T, we are the network." So infrastructure and the network, that's what the T stands for. My question or my appeal is this. Mr. Höttges, in his speech, many times he said, "We're the greatest, and in terms of numbers, we are better than all our competitors combined." He said, "We are the number one network, and network coverage is the best." The board keeps on telling us how great network coverage is in Germany. Obviously, network coverage from T-Mobile. The thing is, though, there are still a lot of white spots in our mobile network in Germany, but telecom doesn't see that because telecom only looks at the number of households against the number of people who live in this country. That's how you come up at a network coverage of over 90%. You might want to calculate the actual network coverage against the backdrop of the size, the area of the Federal Republic of Germany. I'm not talking about 4G, 5G, fiber, or copper. I'm talking about the standard network that you can use to issue an emergency call, for instance. Let's say you are somewhere in a remote area, in a forest where nobody actually lives. After all, Telekom is a company that has very strong ties to the German government as well. I wonder. I mean, there are two disadvantages. Of course, it comes at a higher cost to offer 100% network coverage, and at the same time, as a large company, you bear a great deal of responsibility to cover the whole of Germany, the entire area. There is a disadvantage to it that Mr. Höttges also mentioned, namely that because Deutsche Telekom is the greatest operator, competitors can use its network at lower prices. My proposal, one possible option, may be that you are starting with a 2G network. Let's say when I'm in the forest, then I don't care whether I'm using E-Plus or any other provider to make a phone call. If I have to place an emergency call, then I don't care what provider I can use for that. It should be possible. That's the main thing. Even in remote areas where telecom is not making a lot of money with it. What I'm saying is, in every area in Germany, one provider at least should be obliged to ensure an adequate level of coverage. That's my proposal. I just meant to ask you whether you are satisfied with the previous way of calculating the level of coverage and what you have to say about my proposal here on how to recalculate it. Thank you very much, Mr. Kirchner, and this brings us to Josef Steurer. Good afternoon. Informiert wird die gesamte Telekom-Mannschaft, und zwar die gesamte Mannschaft. To the entire team here. I would like to praise the whole team. We've learned that usually you say thank you when you get something for free or to someone who does something as a volunteer. At Telekom, employees are paid decently, including the board, I guess. Anyone who knows me knows that I believe that the work of a cleaning woman is just as important as the work of a board member at Deutsche Telekom. Special praise goes to Mr. Höttges. You will remember or may remember what I said last time. I said, "America is a very difficult place for German companies." But there are positive examples of Chrysler, for instance, and Mercedes. I mean, they initially were successful, but then basically sank $14 billion back then. But you have learned from the mistakes made by others. You have set up a business combination in the US, and the business is working very well. It is profitable. So I am critical towards America myself. I'm being quite frank about that. For me, ideally, all profits would be transferred from the US to Germany. But at any rate, I would like to praise the way you've set up that business. Now, there's one thing that got me a little concerned. People in this country now have started talking about using shares for people's pensions. I was amazed to hear that from the liberals in Germany. I don't know. It looks as if we don't have enough funds for that. If Mr. Höttges, shares are really used to fund people's pensions in the future, then the telecom share will certainly also play a role for that. We should just bear that in mind. The telecom share initially was sold as the people's stock. It was a long time ago. Back then, we had a red-green government, and nowadays, I don't think we would still call it that. At any rate, you have managed to actually make it into a successful people's stock. However, even with regards to the work in the US, some things also seem to be going in the wrong direction, and there are a lot of lawsuits. I mean, VW had some experience in that area. €30 billion is all I say. Yesterday, I heard on the radio that was about COVID. A lady sued AstraZeneca because she said that she had suffered some damage after a vaccination. She said that she suffered a thrombosis after the vaccination and almost died. Part of her intestines had to be removed. I don't know if this lady would have been able to even sue that company in Germany. I mean, imagine. If you do that sort of thing in the U.S., then you can sue the company for as much as $250 million. In the U.S., that is. I wonder. We used to have a lot of green teachers in the past. Today, it's a lot of lawyers. I wonder, why don't we have laws in Germany that make it possible to sue companies the same way here as you can sue them in the United States? If it's $2 million here, then probably it would be $2 billion in the U.S. Just mentioning the Wirecard scandal and the scandal that Olaf Scholz, our current chancellor, is involved in, that's another case in point. Now, back to another subject. Telecom is developing software again. At the last but one shareholders' meeting, that was the time when this unfortunate Ukraine war was started. Back then, we developed some software in Russia. Back then, we still had 2,000 employees in Russia. What has become of these employees? Have these employees come to Germany? Who is now developing that software? By the way, this is something that I've seen with several store corporations. Apparently, the Russians are very apt when it comes to developing software. One software developer once told me that the Russians are completely stupid, but that they're good software developers. Now, talking about the lack of skilled labor at Telecom, do you also have that problem? Do you have a problem finding skilled labor in IT or elsewhere? It's a problem that we can see all over the world. A lot of reports on health and mental health. According to one report I read, 1 in 5 employees got sick because they suffered from mental health issues. So what do you do to make sure that your employees remain mentally healthy, so to speak? Somebody mentioned Huawei. The EU took some massive steps against China and Huawei, but then telecom still relies on Huawei to some extent. Last year, Mr. Weber from the CSU, a member of parliament, he also takes a very how can we say that? I have to watch my tongue here. Let's say he was fairly critical of Russia, and he also criticized China, saying that China had been using balloons for spying purposes. One of our ministers went to China and just was photographed with a panda and stuff. I wonder, I mean, why would you allow someone to just be shown with a toy panda? Our foreign minister, Mrs. Baerbock, she went to an automotive trade fair, then explaining to the entire automotive industry that it would be necessary for them to withdraw from China. Thank you for listening. Maybe I'll make my statement earlier on next year so that I have the full 10 minutes. Thank you. Today, it's not really easy to handle this AGM in an efficient way. We have the last three speakers. Please stick with your five minutes speaking time. The next no, first we'll answer the previous questions. I still have one of Mr. Dufner's questions. He asked about the newly founded committee for ESG and said that this should have the same remuneration as the finance and audit committee because the topic of ESG should be well paid. Thank you for wanting to give us more money, but the supervisory board had an intensive discussion about it. ESG is a very important topic, and as is shown in our publications, 40 pages are devoted to ESG and personnel. So you can see that it's very important to us. We also have to say that the audit committee requires a lot of work, and this is why the supervisory board said that ESG should have the same relevance as the executive committee. I hope that you understand this, but nevertheless, thank you very much, Mr. Dufner, for even suggesting that we should get more for the activities in the ESG committee. And now over to Mr. Höttges, please. Mr. Müller had questions on cycling and especially the injunction against the Spiegel magazine. This injunction is 25 years ago, Mr. Müller. The cycling commitment was stopped 17 years ago, and this was in line with a very comprehensive investigation work, and we supported all the investigation authorities very much. In the following shareholders' meetings, we made statements on the topic of cycling over and over again. So please bear with us that we cannot go into details on this topic. That is a long time ago. The former communication boss, Mr. Kindervater, also publicly apologized towards the Spiegel journalists. I also would like to clearly say that we never tried to conceal everything we did. Quite on the contrary, we dealt openly with everything that happened, and we drew some consequences, and we then also withdrew from the cycling sport, unfortunately. It was definitely very bad for the generation of cyclists following that such an important sponsor withdrew from their sports. A question by Mrs. Glimberg, you asked about a photograph of your house taken on the basis of the AI car. We clarified this. We checked this, and this is possible based on artificial intelligence, and it's also very quick to do. The street that you mentioned in Bochum was not photographed by the T-car yet. So unfortunately, there's no photograph of your house in our database. But we will keep dealing with this, and perhaps we will drive past your home at some point in time. Grimberg, you also asked about civil engineering and what is the micro trenching and what does it cost. Well, the normal trench is 30 centimeters wide, 60 centimeters deep, and micro trenching is only 30 to 45 centimeters deep and has a width of 15 centimeters. So it's 20% cheaper than the standard trenching. So why does Germany still have the antiquated rules? You have to go 60 centimeters deep and 30 centimeters wide. It does not only damage our roads in Germany, but it costs a lot of money. It doesn't exist anywhere else in Europe, but sometimes it's difficult in Germany. Mrs. Glimberg asked about the mobile phone standards and asked what the average electricity consumption of an antenna is. 14,230 kilowatt-hours is the average requirement for a mobile phone antenna. They need a lot of electricity, and this is why we are trying to do some projects where we've got batteries, where we can charge the batteries overnight and use the electricity overnight or have solar cells close to the mobile phone antennas to get some support. But this technology is not mature enough yet. If you think that we've got 80,000 antennas, this is 1.1 gigawatt-hours that we need in this area, and this is quite a lot of electricity needed. I can continue with one of Mr. Streichhans' questions on the gender pay gap. On the topic of gender pay gap, we had 63 requests and 448 questions since 2013. On the topic of equal pay, we have been doing the equal pay check since 2018, which is also checked by the authorities. Until now, we don't have any indication telling us that we have discrimination here. Second question on our indebtedness. Our financial debt without the digits after the comma: in 2021, €20 million, and in 2023, €123 billion. The interest paid was €4.4 million, €5.0 million, €5.4 million, and €5.5 million in the respective years, and most of the interest is to be paid in the United States, €4.5 million. Now the question on skilled workers, how far we've got a program for pensioners, for retirees. We We don't have any, but last year, we had 10,700 new recruitments in the business, 4,000 in Germany. Tim Höttges already mentioned it. We've got about 5,400 trainees in training at Deutsche Telekom and 635,000 qualification days or training days in the European business, which is almost five working days per employee. We are well equipped and well positioned in order to meet the challenges of the lack of skilled workers. You also asked about sponsoring costs. Just on the fly, we've got sponsoring costs of €65 million in Germany. This is part of our communication mix. It's not only sports, but it's also cultural sponsorship, musical sponsorship. You might remember the Telekom Festival or our jazz festival. For the bond side, for culture and sports, including Telekom Baskets, we spend about €5 million per year. Question by Mr. Dufner, which vendors are well assessed based on our scorecards. The answer might sound very simple. All of them have a good score because otherwise, they wouldn't be on the list. Those who don't meet our standards will no longer be used as vendors and will no longer be taken into account in our ESG scorecards. All have a good or at least appropriate standard. Next question regarding the balance between security and innovation when we choose the components of Huawei. I think just banning these components for political reasons would not be a good idea. I already mentioned this. We always have to see both sides of a medal. If we don't want to be lagging behind in technologies, we have to be aware of new technologies existing all around the world in all sectors. You also ask a question regarding financial risk because of Chinese components, vendors. If you take a look at procurement and vendors, the value risk is between $200 million and $500 million max for the group. With a tight capital of $450 billion, it's relatively little. As an absolute figure, it might sound very high. Then you asked for alternative suppliers for network components. I already mentioned OpenRAN technology now opens up new vendors to us next to Nokia and Ericsson, whom we are using already. There are suppliers such as Samsung, Toshiba, and others that are now also possible for our network infrastructure. So we've got plenty of opportunities to use other antenna service providers. Then you also asked about the booster program. Is it really necessary to cut 2,000 jobs? Where exactly and how will they be cut? We have to be aware of the fact. If a company like us invests $173 billion a year, then we have to do everything in order to have good efficiency in our company at the highest level and to really keep good cash flow so that we can also continue to invest into the infrastructure for our company in the future. We are doing this, and we had a project testing the cost structures, especially in our Bonn headquarters. These were classical cost types such as how many office rooms do we have, how much square meters in office space do we have, how many people do we employ, and what are our HR costs. The largest levers in this program are the right-sizing of office space, the reduction of IT costs, the use of digitization, the cloudification and automation of decentralized data structures, the optimization of our procurement, the reduction of HR costs, leaner organizations, and flatter hierarchies. All this taken together was the booster program, and we handle this in a socially compatible way for all the affected people. Let me tell you very clearly, in Germany, we have a disadvantage in wages compared to other countries, and we've got clearly more highly paid people compared to our competitors, Vodafone and 1&1. We have to come up with a higher productivity. Otherwise, we will lose out vis-à-vis our peers. This is just the plain truth that we have to see. This also means that we have to go for these efficiency programs, which are not fun, but they are necessary. You also asked about state capture. The investigations by the Frankfurt General Prosecutor still are ongoing. We are cooperating with the investigation authorities. We don't know anything about the current status. DTAG and T-Systems have not received any insight into the documents. We are building provisions based on the legal requirements as far as is necessary, and we will keep you up to speed on this situation. Okay, then the last three speakers. First, Armin Klein, then Michael Salten, and finally, Frederik Beckendorff again. First of all, Mr. Armin Klein, please. Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It fits in with the last answer about the job reduction, very socially compatible. I got some information. There was activity by Verdi and you and the German TUC that the people will not be hired, but that they will be leased out to another employer and that they can stay there until they reach the pension age. This is really a role model, and this is really great. I think it was the first time after the war that this happened. I thought that this was excellent. I want to praise this, and I think you couldn't have handled it any better. Second topic, we heard about the pension. Do you plan to have shares for the employees? If so, who will be the eligible persons? Thank you for your information, and have a nice day. Thank you very much for the very focused questions. And now, Mr. Michael Salten, please. Sehr geehrter Herr Dr. Appel. Dr. Appel. Liebe Mitglieder des Board of Management, dear Co-Shareholders. Ich bin eigentlich gekommen, habe gesagt, dass ich vor 20 Jahren immer einen schönen Telekom-Stift gekriegt habe. And I hoped that I would get a beautiful pen again like in previous years, but I didn't get it, and I was deeply disappointed. The staff all have their pink magenta pens, and additionally, I didn't get any paper, which I know from other meetings, so perhaps you could take it into account for next time again. On remuneration, I would like to contradict Mr. Appelt. There is a country where the salaries are not rising as quickly, and this is Japan. I do not have the current figures, but normally, they have 10 to 15 times as much as the average salary. This would also be used in Germany because this would reduce wage costs. Germany really has to now take a different view because these are very high costs for the company, and I think the shareholders could also be happy with that. If in the next years, we have an increase in dividends again, then all of us would be happy and satisfied, and we then don't criticize the high salaries of the board members any longer. Thank you. Mr. Salten, we've got a pen for you, two even. Then you've got one for your wife. Now, finally, Mr. Friedrich Beckendorf. He is on his way already. Thank you. Just one more question on the ESG targets in the STI. You said the back office didn't really understand the question, so let me spell it out again. On page 34 of the invitation, you describe the target values for the ESG targets: reduction of CO2 emissions and energy consumption for 2023. It's 185 and 4,871. If I take a look at the report, then on page 47, I find values for the year 2022 without T-Mobile US of 179 and 4,704. These are not reduction goals, but these are goals for the total consumption. In my understanding, the target values for 2023 thus were higher than the actually achieved values in 2022, and this is something I didn't understand, and this is why I asked why this happened. Thank you very much for this question again. I hope that the back office can provide an answer. Thank you very much for the short and precise question. This leads us to the end of the speakers' list, and we continue with answering some of the questions, but let me point out that after the completion of the general debate, we will take a vote and that then the possibility to pass on the voting rights to proxy voters are ending, and you can no longer change any of the previous instructions. So I'm saying this right now in order to make sure that it's not a big surprise to you when we start the voting process. First of all, answers to the questions raised by Mrs. Glimberg. Mrs. Glimberg asked about her application. Why didn't you make any more positive feedbacks on my application? We treated your applications in line with the relevant requirements, and we also published your proposal for election on our homepage, and otherwise, we don't make any positive or negative statements on the proposed candidates. And then you said in the last annual report, I couldn't find any information on the remuneration. You'll find this in the remuneration report. This has changed in recent years. Previously, it was done in the annual report, but now there is a special remuneration report. Ever since 2021, we have been publishing all the remuneration information in a separate remuneration report, and you find this on the homepage and annex four in the invitation to the shareholders' meeting. It's a very lengthy report, but this is due to the legal requirements. And your final question to me, Mrs. Grimberg, the committee on security, will the previous chairman retired but now is still an advisor? Do you have this similarly for Mr. Lehner? Mr. Schröder is still the chairman of the Data Privacy Advisory Board. It's not a committee by the supervisory board. He already had this post before when he was still in the supervisory board, and he continues this. Now, Professor Lehner, I no longer see him. Otherwise, I would have loved to welcome you. So welcome to you, Mr. Lehner. It's great to see you here. After he left the supervisory board, he never had any further tasks or mandates with Deutsche Telekom any longer. Now over to you, Mr. Höttges. The question by Mrs. Glimberg. She was interested in novelties of chatbots, and she pointed out that at the local newspaper WAZ, such systems have been in use for quite some time. That was well observed. But our chatbot, Frag Magenta, has been in use since 2016 as a digital assistant. There is a difference between machine learning and AI. At the time, we worked with machine learning tools, and since the fall of 2023, Frag Magenta Voice is available at the mobile hotline, and this is based on artificial intelligence as presented this morning. Therefore, a dialogue in natural language is possible. It also understands colloquial language and dialects. It learns it over the course of time, and understanding language allows a better solution of problems by means of the assistant. We can react even faster to complex requests by means of this automatic system. If the health insurers were advised with their query systems, I do not know that and can't answer to that, but I believe all companies that use and process customer requests and queries will, before long, use AI-based chatbots. It will never replace all the people in our service organizations, but they will accomplish standard tasks that are highly repetitive. Another question, Eurogate. Mrs. Glimberg is asking whether there was a public tender in which many companies took part, Deutsche Telekom, due to its convincing concept. One, this tender, and yes, there was a public tender on this matter. Furthermore, Mrs. Glimberg asks regarding postpaid customers and whether she is a postpaid customer. I'd like to apologize for our difficult telecommunications language. Yes, she is a postpaid customer. What is it? It is someone who has signed a permanent or long-term mobile contract as opposed to a prepaid customer who first has to pay and then can use that balance for making calls. A postpaid customer usually has a permanent contract with us or long-term contract with us, and they are highly valuable because they stay with us for a long time. She is a postpaid customer, and I'm grateful for you being our customer, Mrs. Glimberg. Oh, please continue. I have a question from Mr. Küffner regarding investments in Germany and in the US. Now, in 2024, 2025, and 2026, how much will you invest on the whole in Germany during those years, and how much will be invested into the mobile network? Sorry if I am difficult to hear. Okay, we don't have the figures yet for 2025 and 2026. I would limit myself to 2024. We are in the region of €5.5 billion here. I can tell you by way of indication that for the following years, we are expecting a slight increase. 2026 will also be part of our capital market communication. For mobile, we have about €1 billion of those €5.5 billion that are going to be invested. Comparing this to the US and the technical, they have $8.6 billion. This is €7.8 billion compared to €8.5 billion for the current year, and in the medium term, the outlook will also be part of the investor day of the US Americans. The US are four times as big as we are, so you have to put this into context to compare the figures. Second, the leasing of end devices in the US. It's a question by Mrs. Glimberg. You may remember that this is an old business model that we inherited from Sprint, where end devices are covered in the balance sheet and then depreciated over time. Therefore, regarding the sales, there are no costs, and this massively burdened us, and this was the difference in the definition of EBITDA. This has been reduced by more than €5 billion in the past years, and now we're expecting sales in that regard of just under €100 million. We had yet another question by Mrs. Hillen. Several services without project. There's a rumor that there are 1,000 civil servants at Deutsche Telekom without project. We don't have an explanation for that rumor because we only have 1,000 civil servants, and the majority of those civil servants are all employed as required according to their positions. Of course, we're trying to find external opportunities for civil servants to reduce that number, but where those 10,000 come from, I can't tell you because we just have 12,000 civil servants on the hall. So it might be a translation error. I have further questions by Mrs. Glimberg asked questions regarding the business report, management report, page 34, relating to transport and value generation. What's meant by that? Regarding transport business, we're talking about public transport here in the management report. We have digitization in focus here, which we're supporting in public transport by providing digital solutions of telecom and infrastructure and the operations and for the comfort of passengers and also providing technical support here. On page 42, what's the context with catastrophes, emergencies, and telephone for free? Weren't any fees charged there? That's the very topic I raised in my speech. After catastrophes such as the earthquake in Turkey, in Syria, in Morocco, Deutsche Telekom immediately stopped requiring and charging fees for text messages or phone calls, and we provided and offered connections for free to the people living there. This is our business model. Very quickly, we open up the lines so that people in crisis areas can enter into contact with each other. This also applies to our Congstar customers, by the way, and we therefore want to show that we are solidaric. We want to be pragmatic helping people, and we also had similar activities when there was the flood in our area in Western Germany. Thank you. Mrs. Glimberg, you also asked regarding campus networks for the Federal Army. In 2020, we received the order for a 5G network on the campus of the Federal Army in Hamburg, and we implemented this. The tender was awarded in the form of a public tender by the service provider of Deutsche Bundeswehr, which is responsible for communications at the Bundeswehr. Therefore, we cannot speak to the communication listening in Singapore, and I wouldn't speak to that, against the background of modernizing the Federal Army. We, as Deutsche Telekom, of course, are being awarded many public tenders and offers and are trying to support public infrastructure. You're also talking about cell masts, cell towers in areas of national conservation. On our homepage, you can find the sites that are not approved, that we requested, and that are not approved. This is how we're trying to be transparent, where we're trying to say we want to build, and we don't have the economic restrictions to build. We just lack the approvals for certain sites because the customer often doesn't understand when there is a white spot, but objectively, we don't have the option because those sites are being approved. This often happens in areas of natural conservation. Those are challenges. Protection regulations are quite tight, and we don't have the normal approval process here, and usually, those approval processes take some three, four years, and there are no replacement sites. We are in constant dialogue with the public authorities and responsible persons to find solutions, but this is certainly a very, very tough matter. You asked about those telephone booths. All remaining 12,000 telephone booths in the public area were taken out of operation. They're gradually being dismantled and recycled. According to plans, this dismantling will take until the beginning of 2026, and then be completed. For dismantling those public telephones, provisions were made in the past in order to cover those costs, and thus, those costs do not burden our operative results. Further questions were received from Mrs. Hillen. Deutsche Telekom pursues the debate about the effect of electromagnetic fields very carefully and has done so for many years. Also, with regard to 5G, we are relying on the expertise of national and international expert bodies, be it the Commission on Radiological Protection, the International One, or the German One, and they confirmed in thousands of analyses again and again that the safety standards sufficiently protect both humans and the environment. We do perceive your worry, your concern, but there's no evidence or proof whatsoever that mobile networks are unhealthy. Magnetic fields only occur when there is an electric current, but we use optical fiber. We don't have any electromagnetic radiation in this case. Therefore, the risk can totally be excluded in this case, and therefore, this is nothing that is being discussed in the public, whether optical fiber is damaging to health. Another question from Mr. Eichmann regarding artificial intelligence and the risk that it could gain power over us humans. AI should not control humans, but it should be the other way around. We absolutely see it in the same way. We should always keep control over AI, and I don't share the worry that creativity or the possibility to take your own decisions or to formulate goals, this is something that is still far removed for artificial intelligence, and we want to keep things transparent. We use those machines to facilitate our routine tasks, our day-to-day work, and we're all trying to make sure that all use of AI is transparent for the customer, perhaps via a website where we are documenting those applications so that you know what's happening. Regarding your data, you are protected by the European GDPR and corresponding national laws and regulations. Another question from Mr. Eichmann: If the network should again be overloaded or overstressed, a third provider, is there a risk that we have to give off our products at reduced prices? The answer is yes. That's the great worry, the concern that we keep having, that the infrastructure that we've built up, that it is being made available to third parties at reduced prices. This immediately leads to the fact that whatever price you call, that that price will always be too high. You're discussing with someone because you're legally required to do so. You're discussing with the Federal Network Agency about what price is acceptable and adequate. Is it the purchase price, the procurement price? Are those the variable costs that you have? We will have to have a basic discussion on that. We have competition regarding infrastructure, and that competition should not be regulated once again and then, furthermore, include regulation of the price because this would entail the risk, or it might do so, but the danger is there, and we have to keep an eye on that, Mr. Eichmann. What we used to have in the past in the fixed line is looming on the horizon in mobile, and we need to make sure that the market will not be overregulated. You asked about passing on data when you're using cookies, passing on those data into the MagentaCLOUD outside of Europe, especially to the US. The times of cookies are almost over, as you know. The cookie times are almost past. When using cookies, we always offer the possibility of accepting them or not accepting them. You can nevertheless still use the MagentaCLOUD completely and entirely. Use of our MagentaCLOUD is not tied to your accepting the cookies. In the case of many apps, however, you accept the cookies, and you accept that your data are being used, and you have those apps free of charge earn their money with the data that you're making available via cookies. Often, this is highly intransparent, and we've been fighting this for a long time. Of course, we're trying to have data transferred only if the customer has agreed to this, and we will always adhere to the data privacy regulations and the data privacy framework and similar regulations. Now, let me pass on to further questions. Mr. Hellmich, you asked about the showcase and how you keep up the computer voices when you reboot the computer. When you use a chatbot, you're doing so by using the MeinMagenta app on your mobile or the cell phone. So if your internet fails at home, your mobile network should still be working. Otherwise, of course, you would have a problem. Then you would have to wait for the new start function, and the internet would have to be relaunched. I just assumed that my cell phone and MeinMagenta can be used parallel while the local network internet is not working. You were asking whether speaking about the Western world is in line with talking about a company which is open. Is this a contradiction? I don't think so. We are an open company, open to the world, and we've often been reproached for cooperating with Asian partners. Nevertheless, our profile was shaped in such a way that we don't have a risk profile with regard to Africa, to South America, no active business in India or China. Our infrastructure, our networks are exclusively located in the Western world, and if you're looking at creditworthiness or the legal framework conditions, the Western world is still considered to be a better, a safer market than the markets I just mentioned. Therefore, we are at an advantage. This is part of our DNA that with our huge infrastructure equipment, we are present only in Europe and the US, and we're using that advantage also with regard to our investors because we're saying you're better off to invest with us because you have more transparency than if you had such markets as Africa and so on. Then you raised the question regarding our commitment to e-mobility and the 140,000 kilometers we did with the AI vehicle. Mr. Hilmich asked that question. First of all, we're within a transformation of our entire fleet. Our target is gradually and continually to convert all our vehicles to climate-friendly drives. Between 2017 to 2023, we've been able to reduce our CO2 emissions of our vehicles in Germany by 35,000 tons. In 2023, at Telekom Deutschland, we issued the internal requirement only to purchase and order vehicles which are e-vehicles. We continue driving using the vehicles we have, but all new vehicles purchased and procured need to have electric drives. For our systems business, we already implemented this in 2023. On that basis, the business vehicles in Germany have almost at 100% been switched over to e-vehicles. Furthermore, the retaining period for business vehicles has been raised to three years, which makes for better utilization and greater sustainability. The full electrification of our service vehicles, which includes vehicles for the field service, for technicians, requires ample preparation. In 2023, the necessary requirements or conditions have improved, especially in the V-segment. The vehicles on offer, we need to have vehicles which can carry replacement parts and tools, that situation has improved. However, the market still does not provide for efficient small transport vehicles with the necessary reach and mileage. If we are going to switch over to e-mobility there, we are relying on the necessary mileage. Regarding the measurement vehicles or test vehicles, I also asked that question when I used it. I remember that the answer at the time was that they are too heavy to build in electric drives. It was extremely inefficient because the vehicle has to be on the road permanently, and it required diesel engines, but in the long term, there will certainly be a solution to this problem. Mr. Kirchner then asked about network coverage in relation to the number of households and the number of people who live in Germany, and you asked why we are measuring coverage of households rather than coverage based on area. Let me be quite clear here and tell you we are measuring both. In my speech today, though, I only talked about household coverage, but in Germany, we have a coverage of 96% of the population with 5G, and right now, we have an 84% coverage of the area in Germany with 5G, so that's a difference. But when you look at 2G, so emergency coverage, then we are talking about a 99% coverage of the entire area in Germany with mobile communications. So you may be saying we are still short 1% or 2% that also need to be covered. These are the conservation areas and forests. Here, our goal is to achieve 100% as well, and in future, this may actually become possible using satellites. We are working on it, but right now, we cannot guarantee 100% coverage of the entire area in Germany, but we've entered into partnerships with O2 and Vodafone, not One&One, because once again, One&One, we're not willing to take part in the antenna rollout, but we are working to also establish antennas in these areas together with the two companies that I just mentioned. You asked about the different providers that can be used to make emergency calls. I already talked about that. But I got a couple of additional answers here. So Mr. Beckendorf, you had a follow-up question on our climate goals. You asked about how things developed here. Thanks for your precise observation. The reason for the slightly higher values in our ambition is that we are continuously expanding our network, which means that we are continuously setting up new antennas, making the network denser, which means that we are using up more energy. That's the trade-off. On the one hand, we want to have nationwide coverage of optical fiber and 5G, but that means a higher electricity consumption at a higher cost. But data volumes are also rising. Customers are using up more data volumes, and therefore, it is extremely challenging to say that at the same time, we want to keep energy prices at the same level. I think what we need is a KPI that is based on volumes, maybe gigabytes or something like that, but so far, such a KPI has not yet been defined. The reason is the continued network rollout also, and particularly so in the US. Mr. Steurer then asked about mental health issues among Deutsche Telekom employees. You asked about diagnosis and how things have developed and how we look at that. We offer a lot of easy-to-use offers to support employees who are affected by mental health issues. Psychosocial consultant by experts, we are offering workshops to raise awareness on resilience, on healthy self-management. We are offering our employees to use gyms in order to remain in shape physically, to stay in shape physically. This is something that we definitely need to take seriously, and we do, but this is not a problem that would be particularly striking at Telekom, but we are taking it seriously. Then you asked about a lack of skilled labor. We already commented on that. Incidentally, I think that AI, artificial intelligence, a subject that is keeping us busy the whole day here, may also prove to be helpful here, may help us to compensate for the lack of skilled labor in this country to some extent. But after all, we have a global resource management system in place. Telekom has thousands of employees across the globe providing services, for instance, IT-related services. We have software developers, a software development center in Spain, in Greece. We have software developers in Eastern Europe as well, and we have a big team in India as well who are helping us to provide IT services just because we don't have enough skilled labor for that in Germany. You asked about our business in Russia. As you know, we used to have 2,000 software developers in Russia. You asked what has become of them. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we decided immediately to shut down our site in Petersburg, and we then offered our software developers to work at various locations in Europe, which also means that these people then had to leave Russia, at least those who wanted to work for us in Europe. We were pleased to see that over 1,000 employees then decided to leave Russia in order to continue working for us in Europe, and these people are working for us right now. The biggest sites they chose can be found in Greece and Thessaloniki, more specifically, where there has always been a large Russian community, and in Spain because it's so nice and warm there. Why is Telekom still using Huawei equipment even though policymakers are trying to oppose the influence of China? I think we've discussed this at great length today. When it comes to security-relevant components, we are not using Chinese products, and we always try to remain independent of vendors regardless of where they come from, and this also holds true for new technologies that are currently being developed. Let me continue with the question from Mr. Rüter. How do we want to bring down net debt? I already said before that we very much focus on the level of net debt, and we want to bring it down by increasing EBITDA. When you look at the guidance and you look at what we achieved last year against our guidance, we set $2.3 billion EBITDA growth or 6%. Is that way above or below the level of previous years? Let me refer to the last press conference on our financial statements. We had 8% EBITDA growth in 2020, then 8% to 7% in the years after that up to 2023, so that was an ongoing trend, and therefore, we are confident of going back to the defined range for net debt. The guidance was 18.9%. I thought you were saying 18% that you were saying 18.9%, but the guidance actually said 19%. Then the competitive situation in the US market. There is fierce competition in the US, but that didn't just come up last year. Both Verizon and AT&T are very active in the market promoting their services. Cable operators are very aggressively attacking the mobile market and offering very low prices, but we have the best network, and we offer the best value for money in the market, which was also reflected in the numbers for '23. In addition, T-Mobile US has various special levers that they can use. In rural areas and in small communities where we've been underrepresented, where we used to be underrepresented, we now have 5% more customers. There's the business segment that is growing much faster than the market. Thirdly, our high-speed internet, where we gained 2 million new customers last year, and therefore, we are quite confident of seeing another successful year in the US in 2024. There was a question from Mr. Klein. You asked about whether we are offering shares to our employees. Yes, we have a program in place, Shares for You, which makes it possible for employees to invest up to €1,000 in shares. If they get four shares, they get one share on top for free. We rolled it out. 36,000 employees chose to take part in this program, and the plan is to also roll out this program internationally to our subsidiaries. There was a question from Mr. Haenisch. I don't know if he's still here. It was about out-of-court settlements in connection with the third IPO. 91% of all plaintiffs accepted an out-of-court settlement, which means that we basically covered $70 million out of the $78 million that were originally claimed, and 99.5% of those addressed accepted our offer. Why not 100%? Because we weren't able to find some of them. Apparently, some people had already passed away, and in other cases, we didn't have any information about their whereabouts, but we are convinced that this is a very good offer. Otherwise, 99.5% of all the addressees hadn't accepted it, but some of the cases are still pending. That's it from my side. We have now dealt with all the comments. Mr. Oswald said that he now wants to table a motion requesting that the chairman of the meeting be removed from office. So you have three minutes to present your motion here, and I would ask that you stick with that speaking time. Das konnten wir leider nicht verstehen. Vielleicht gehen Sie kurz zum Mikro und sagen. You might want to use a mic. Otherwise, we are not able to hear what you have to say. All questions have been answered. So with the exception of Mr. Oswald, we can assume that all questions have been answered. I am asking, is this the case? I am asking everyone here, with the exception of Mr. Oswald. If not, then please go to the mic. Letzte Frage, und zwar möchte ich gerne mal wissen: Sie haben ja über Fernsehtürme und. Last question. You've talked about. Darf man sich einen Fernsehturm zum Beispiel in towers in Bremen auch mal angucken von innen. Is it possible to look at the inside of a tower, say, in Bremen or so? Just for us to have the option of seeing what they look like from the inside. So would it be possible for me to contact you and say, "Look, I would like to check out what these TV towers look like. I'm a Telekom shareholder." Or is that not possible? Because I think actually people should have a right to see what those TV towers look like on the inside. Okay, let me confirm that unofficially. But first of all, we only own a minority of these TV towers, but Mr. Langer is here, and he hasn't done anything today so far. He will certainly be glad to go and see and inspect one of these TV towers. Why don't you send an email to Mr. Langer? I will give you his email address in a moment, and then he will make sure that you can inspect such a TV tower from yeah, I can basically promise that. I'll be done in a moment. But one last can you confirm one last thing? It's about Radio Bremen. I'm taking part in all the streams. I'm all Magenta, and I'm attending TV shows. Can I go to Radio Bremen and tell them that they can switch off your app? Nochmal. Es gibt Millionen von Apps in diesem Land. There are millions of apps in this world, and we are using AI to develop a terminal device that will make apps redundant. Once the customer uses that and uses voice to call up a certain function, then these apps will no longer be needed, no need to even switch them off. Therefore, personally, I don't care what you are telling that lady, Babette, at Radio Bremen, but we are trying to make things as easy as possible. Now you've answered all my questions. Thank you. One last comment on the tablet. Somebody broke my tablet here. You might want to give me a new one. I went to One&One, and they also broke some of my equipment. I don't know. Maybe it works again, but I don't know. It was a Samsung tablet. So thank you. Okay, so let me ask once again, with the exception of Mr. Oswald, whether there are any questions which have not yet been answered by the board. Ja, vielen Dank nochmal für die Wortverteilung. Thank you for giving me the floor once again. Bitte nicht zu Babette. Ich möchte Ihnen keine Fernsehshow. No, I'm not trying to sell you a radio show or something like that. I'm just glad to be here, and I don't want a tablet either. I just have a simple question regarding the litigation. Dr. Illek, you tried to explain it in detail, but. Question ist: How do you want to handle the 0.5% of people who did not accept an out-of-court settlement? And that's also about interest payments, right? And it might be a good idea to reach out to those remaining 5%. I think most of them have commissioned lawyers, so maybe it should be easier than you would think. And yeah, that would still be important to me. Ja, das war es eigentlich soweit. That's it. Thank you. Do you want me to answer the question immediately? Okay. Well, with an approval rate of 99.5%, we don't see a need to reach even more. But how about interest rates? Do you intend to cover them? Our provisions also cover that. Okay, so you would be able to cover that using the provisions that you've made? And of course, we will use the provisions as we need them. If we don't need them, we will. Wie sieht es aus? Sind Sie schon soweit, Ihren Antrag zu begründen? Resolve them. Okay, Mr. Oswald, would you now like to present your motion here? Ja, Herr Dr. Frank Abel. Ich danke Ihnen. Dr. Abel. Thank you for being kind enough to give me another four minutes. Frank Abel. The right to speak is one of the main rights of any shareholders, and it is also embedded in stock corporation law. Ahead of this meeting, you have expressed that, and this has been criticized by a lot of shareholders, not just by me. Others criticized it even more than I did, and this will have a major influence on the election results and distort them. If you give the shareholder the right to speak but then limit it, then this will have a bearing on the results. It looks as if you are doing this with intent in order to have an influence on the results, and therefore, I would like to table a motion here for the removal of the chair from office. I would like to ask the shareholders to support me in that motion. There is one location where Telekom installed a fiber network, but some errors occurred, and the building site was shut off. The builders continued to work, and the authorities then told them to stop. Ich bin Vorstand vom Verband Wohneigentum. I am Vorstand vom Verband Wohneigentum. I am myself heading an association, a housing association. I told Mrs. Pohler from Deutsche Telekom on WhatsApp about this incident. I sent her various newspaper articles on WhatsApp. In fact, I brought some of these articles here about this poor work done by Telekom. It's a botched-up job from Telekom. I think it is very detrimental to Telekom's reputation when you open up the street and then cut the electricity and make it impossible for people to use their telephones because some of the telephone lines were cut as well. Then the pavement was damaged. All the building works weren't done in line with the regulations. The builders didn't have a toilet or anything that they were able to use. I sent various reports to Mrs. Pohler from Telekom asking her to forward them to you. I don't know if she did, but we might want to discuss it. At any rate, what I'm saying is that such things are very detrimental to Telekom's reputation. The company, Circet, is associated with Telekom in some sort of way. There may be a connection through an Australian company, and it would be nice if you could look into that. I know that sometimes you are going to building sites yourself to inspect them. In this case, I was affected myself. On one Sunday morning, there was no electricity. It wasn't possible to make any phone calls. Then it was raining, and they stopped working again, and there was no electricity, like I said. Mr. Haenisch understood, and we will look into it. We have a lot of building sites that we are working on. We have a lot of service providers who support us in that. Whenever errors occur, we apologize for them, and we will look into it. This sounds a bit out of the ordinary, that there was a blackout, but we will look into it, and we will inspect this building site. I think it is an exception, certainly is an exception. Our claim, of course, our goal is to make sure that residents and fiber-to-the-home customers are satisfied. Mr. Höttges, I don't want you to apologize for this, but I would like to ask you to use proper construction companies. They come from a former Yugoslavian state. Mr. Oswald, I gave you the opportunity to talk about your motion. Mr. Höttges gave you an answer. They will look into it, and now I'd like to ask you to talk about your motion. I already presented my motion, so then you can take your seat again. Okay, and I will now comment on your motion. There were so many people who criticized the speaking times, and you cut many people short. Mr. Oswald, I now would like to ask you to take your seat again. Mr. Oswald submitted the motion to remove me as Chairman of the meeting. Ich habe hier ein großes Plädoyer für die Aktionäre der Demokratie abgegeben. I wanted to say a lot regarding the shareholders' democracy, and the benchmark for behaviors is the parliament. That used to be just ahead in the building, and there was also a proper order, and this was based on good reasons. Sometimes very important topics are handled in three or four minutes; otherwise, things won't work. I think what is true for the Federal Parliament can also be true for our shareholders' democracy, so I am against the motion submitted by Mr. Oswald. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Streichhahn, for supporting me. Now let's say again, Mr. Oswald submitted the motion to remove me from my office as chairing the meeting. Removing from this position is only possible for a very important reason. Mr. Oswald, I could not see any material reason in your statements that would make it possible to remove me as chairman of this meeting, and the points mentioned by you are no reasons that doubt my abilities to lead this meeting, so I cannot have a vote on your motion. We checked this already legally, and the restriction of the speaking times did not result in discrimination against any of the shareholders. Okay, nobody spoke up, so we assume that we answered all your questions. Let me say that this is true: all the questions have been answered. Yes, you'll come to this, Mr. Müller. We will come to the other counter motions, but there is no question in the general debate any longer, so I will close the general debate. I would like to thank all the speakers for the questions and the Board of Management for answering the questions, and we will soon move to the vote. Now we have some music again, so we will come shortly to the votes. In accordance with Section 17, Paragraph 2 of the Articles of Association, it is my responsibility as Chairman of the meeting to determine the type and order of voting. Votes will be cast using tablets as mobile recording devices and electronic collection boxes. Votes will be allocated to the shares by scanning the QR code on your AGM card. The votes recorded using the tablets are transferred to a computerized system for counting. The votes, the transfer, and the subsequent count are monitored by a notary. The addition method is used to determine the result of the vote. The votes in favor and against are counted separately and added together to determine the number of votes cast. Abstentions are not counted. In order to ensure notarial supervision, you can only cast your votes here in the main room that is in this room, New York, including the gallery accessible from the outside. If you would like to take part in the voting, please come to the main room now and have your AGM card ready. For the sake of order, I would like to point out that votes cast by the company's proxies and votes cast by intermediaries, proxy advisors, and shareholders' associations who make use of the virtual voting card service differ from the above. They are carried out by means of a release of the previously electronically deposited votes on the part of the proxies present or the representative present of the respective intermediary, proxy advisor, or the respective shareholders' association. After this approval, the votes in question are also entered into the computerized system for counting the votes. Shareholders also have made use of the postal voting option. These votes are already stored electronically and are taken into account by the computerized system when the votes are counted. I will now tell you the current presence. So here are the current figures: the presence or the number of shares for which the numbers were cast have changed at present. We have 3,693,345,000 stocks present, and this is 44.07% of 458,596 shares divided into a capital size of €12,364,076. Regarding the procedures, I would like to point out that I first ask you for a vote on the proposals made by the boards. If these are confirmed, then there will be no longer any necessity to vote on the counter motions. Let's now move on to the first items on the agenda. On item 2, we will see a vote on the updated proposal that I already presented in the beginning of this meeting. The deviation from the motion in the invitation results from the change in the number of shares entitled to dividends compared to the number on which the invitation was based. As already announced, the dividend to be distributed in accordance with the proposed resolution remains unchanged at €0.77 per dividend-bearing share. The resolutions proposed by the management on agenda items 3 to 9 will be put to the vote with the wording as set out in the invitation to today's shareholders' meeting published in the Federal Gazette on February 29th. With regard to agenda items 3 and 4, I would like to draw your attention to the voting prohibition pursuant to Section 136 of the German Stock Corporation Act. For the sake of order, I would like to point out with regard to agenda item 5 that anyone who wishes to reject only one or two of the Deloitte appointments proposed under subitems A to C must vote against the entire proposed resolution under agenda item 5. If this draft resolution is rejected by a majority, I will conduct a separate vote on the subitems A, B, and C. With regard to agenda item 6, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that you can decide on the election of each candidate separately in this resolution. The resolutions on agenda items 2 to 9 require a simple majority of the valid votes cast. The resolution on agenda item 7 requires a majority of at least three-quarters of the share capital represented when the resolution is passed. The resolution on agenda item 8 also requires a simple majority of the share capital represented when the resolution is passed. If you wish to vote in favor or against one or more of the resolutions proposed by the administration on agenda items 2 to 9, you must now present yourself in the main room that is here in the room, New York, including the gallery. The votes are summarized. This means that votes are cast separately for each of the items put to the vote, but in a collective process using the tablets. You decide independently of each other to what extent you participate in the voting processes by casting your vote and whether you vote yes or no or abstain. Once the vote has been opened, give a clear show of hands to the employees who are authorized to receive your votes. An employee will then come to you. First present your AGM card so that the QR code on it can be scanned. You then inform the employee for each of the resolution proposals of the administration for agenda items 2 to 9 whether you wish to support the respective resolution proposal of the boards, that is, vote yes, or against the respective proposal, i.e., vote no. If you wish to abstain from voting on individual agenda items, please also let us know. Then check the voting request displayed on the tablet. Confirm to the employee that your voting request is displayed correctly. After this confirmation, the employee will finally cast the vote. If you wish to abstain from voting on all items on the agenda relating to the resolutions, you do not need to inform our employees of your wish to vote. Our staff will be happy to answer any questions you may have about the procedure. I now would like to ask the staff to take the votes here in the room. The vote is now open. Liebe Aktionärinnen und Aktionäre, I assume that everybody now had the opportunity to cast their votes on the agenda items 2 to 9, that they were able to cast their votes. Do you still need to cast your vote? Then please raise your hands very clearly if this is the case. Mr. Oswald would like to cast his votes. Gut, dann frage ich nochmal. Sind noch Stimmen? Let me ask again. Do you still need to cast your votes? Please give a clear signal with your hands if you still want to cast your votes. Das ist nicht der Fall. This is not the case, so I will announce that all the votes on agenda items 2 to 9 have been cast, and I hereby close the vote. I will announce the results of the vote as soon as I have the results from Herrn Wilmüller as Tagesordnungsergänzungsantrag bezeichnete Beschlussfassung. The additional item to the agenda to have an additional item of miscellaneous is not possible for legal reasons. There will be a break now, and once I've got the results of the vote, we will continue and I will inform you accordingly. But first, we'll have a short break. Entschuldigung, wie kommt eigentlich das Internet an die Autobahn? Ha, das wird's wohl sein. Damit ihr im Auto telefonieren und surfen könnt, braucht es ein gutes, stabiles Mobilfunknetz entlang der Autobahn. Worauf es beim Ausbau ankommt und was dabei die Herausforderungen sind, das zeigen wir euch heute bei den Netzgeschichten. Mit den Mobilfunkmasten an Autobahnen ist das so eine Sache. Da muss man zunächst mal einen geeigneten Ort finden, von dem aus man möglichst störungsfrei senden kann. Die Topografie spielt da zum Beispiel eine Rolle: Täler, Berge, Wälder, Felder. Hat man ein passendes Grundstück gefunden, muss der Eigentümer mitspielen und es zur Verfügung stellen. Und dann braucht man natürlich noch eine Baugenehmigung. Telekom und Autobahn GmbH arbeiten hierbei jetzt eng zusammen. An rund 400 Standorten wollen beide Partner zusätzliche Mobilfunkmasten errichten. Die Autobahn GmbH stellt die Grundstücke zur Verfügung, und die Telekom baut die Masten. Damit und mit den schon existierenden 6.300 Antennenstandorten wird es an Deutschlands Autobahnen durchgehend 5G geben, mit einer Surfgeschwindigkeit von mindestens 200 Megabit pro Sekunde. Nächster Punkt: die sogenannte Zellübergabe. Seid ihr zu Fuß oder mit dem Fahrrad unterwegs, haben eure Smartphones viel Zeit, sich von der einen in die andere Mobilfunkzelle einzuwählen. Bei fahrenden Objekten wie Zügen oder eben Autos muss diese Zellübergabe viel schneller funktionieren, und von all dem sollt ihr ja nichts mitbekommen. Die Versorgung eines Tunnels mit Mobilfunk ist deutlich komplexer als auf freiem Gelände. Das Signal der Antennen draußen reicht oft nicht bis in den Tunnel hinein. Darum versorgt die Telekom diese Tunnel mit speziellen Anlagen. Zum einen werden sogenannte Schlitzkabel verlegt, die das Mobilfunksignal auch in den tiefsten Tunnel hineinbringen. Zum anderen muss die Systemtechnik im Tunnel untergebracht werden. Das alles erfordert einen hohen Abstimmungs- und Koordinierungsaufwand. Scheiben und Karosserien von Autos dämpfen das Mobilfunksignal. Das Signal entlang der Autobahn muss also stark genug sein, im Inneren des Fahrzeugs einen guten Empfang zu ermöglichen. Und weil wir heute in Geberlaune sind, gibt's hier noch ein bisschen unnützes Wissen zum Thema Autobahn. Die längste deutsche Autobahn ist die A7. Die geht von der dänischen Grenze einmal komplett durch Deutschland bis zur österreichischen Grenze und ist 962 Kilometer lang. Ganze Menge, oder? Auf welchen Autobahnen treibt ihr euch denn vor allem rum? Habt ihr vielleicht sogar eine Lieblingsraststätte? Schreibt's gerne mal unten in die Kommentare, und ansonsten gilt wie immer: Kanal abonnieren nicht vergessen, und dann sehen wir uns das nächste Mal wieder hier bei den Netzgeschichten. Guck hier. Guck jetzt. Guck nochmal. Leere. Jubel. Kein Jubel. Kein Jubel. Jubel. Kein Fußball. Fußball. Kein Glasfaser. Kein Fußball. Als offizieller Telekommunikationspartner verbinden wir alle Stadien der UEFA EURO 2024 mit unserem Glasfasernetz. Hol dir jetzt Telekom Glasfaser nach Hause. Gut, meine Damen und Herren, wir fahren uns vor. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now continue. I have the results of the vote. The annual general meeting adopted all the resolutions proposed by the management on agenda items two to nine with required majorities. The detailed voting results will be shortly displayed on the screen for each resolution separately. All interested shareholders can also obtain the results at the registration desk or view them afterwards on the company's website. If you agree, I will therefore limit my comments on the resolutions to the fact that the required majority for each resolution proposed by the management was achieved. Results of the vote during the shareholders' meeting of Deutsche Telekom AG in Bonn. I will now announce the results, and I will acknowledge the results. The shareholders' meeting has 5,229 votes were based on the adjusted motional resolution proposed by the board of management, which I announced to you at the beginning of the meeting directly after the start of the meeting. On item three on the agenda, the shareholders' meeting accepted the proposal of the management with 99.46% of the votes and gave approval of the actions of the members of the board of management. On item four of the agenda, the shareholders' meeting gave approval at 93.51% of the votes cast, and thus gave the simple majority and gave approval of the actions of the members of the supervisory board for a period under review. Thank you for your trust. On item five on the agenda, there was approval by 98.99% of the votes cast, and Deloitte GmbH, Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft Munich has been elected as an auditor and group auditor for the financial year 2024, as an auditor for review of condensed financial statements and the interim group management report for the financial year 2024, and as an auditor for any review of additional interim financial reports for the financial year 2024 and the first quarter of the financial year 2025. On item six, the shareholders' meeting has approved the election of Lars Hinrichs with 99.26% of the votes cast, reaching the simple majority of votes. On the election of Karl-Heinz Streibich, he achieved 93.93% of the votes cast, also achieving the necessary simple majority of votes, so he was elected as a member of the supervisory board. Congratulations to the two of them. Vielen Dank. Tagesordnungspunkt sieben nach. On item seven of the agenda, the shareholders' meeting with 90.11% of the votes cast, so the necessary qualified majority has granted the resolution on the granting of an authorization to issue bonds with warrants, convertible bonds, profit participation rights, and/or participating bonds or combinations of these instruments, with the option of excluding subscription rights and the cancellation of the contingent capital 2018 and the creation of new contingent capital 2024 based on the statutes. The full content of the resolution can be read under item seven in the invitation. On item eight, the shareholders' meeting approved the resolution by 99.1% of the votes, so there was the necessary number of votes. This was the resolution on the amendment of section 13 of the Articles of Incorporation and Remuneration of the Supervisory Board, as described in the invitation. On item nine of the agenda, the shareholders' meeting approved the resolution with 91.04% of the votes, so the remuneration report was approved. This means that the resolution proposals by management were all accepted with the necessary majority, so it will no longer be necessary to vote on the countermotions or the other proposals for election. Thank you very much for your approval and the trust shown. This leads us to the end of our agenda. I would like to thank you on behalf of the management board and the supervisory board for your participation in this year's shareholders' meeting. I also would like to thank you for your positive comments on the face-to-face meeting, which will probably continue. I would like to now thank all the employees who contributed to the meeting, to the preparation, and the organization of this meeting. Vielen Dank. Auf Wiedersehen. Finally, I would like to point out that the next annual general meeting of Deutsche Telekom AG is expected to take place on April 9th, 2025, in Bonn, and we would be happy to welcome all the shareholders again. I wish you all a safe journey home. See you soon. This concludes today's shareholders' meeting. Thank you.