Ladies and gentlemen, this is Christian Herrmann speaking. On behalf of Daimler Truck, I'd like to welcome you on both telephone and the Internet to our Q1 results global conference call. We are very happy to have with us today Jochen Goetz, our CFO. Jochen will begin with an introduction directly followed by a Q&A session. I would like to tell you today that Jochen was tested positive for COVID-19. For that reason, he does this session from home. The sound might be affected a bit by these circumstances. Apologies for any inconvenience. The respective presentation can be found on the Daimler Truck IR website. On our request, this conference will be recorded. The replay of the conference call will also be available as an on-demand audio webcast in the investor relations sections of the Daimler Truck website. I would like to remind you that this telephone conference is governed by the Safe Harbor wording you will find in our published results documents. Please note, our presentations contains forward-looking statements that reflect management's current views with respect to future events. Such statements are subject to many risks and uncertainties. If the assumptions underlying any of these statements prove incorrect, then actual results may be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements speak only to the date on which they are made. Now, I would like to hand over to Jochen. Thanks, Christian. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to our results call for the first quarter of 2022. Thank you all for joining us today. Before I share with you the details of our financial results, I want to give you an overview of the key highlights of the quarter. We finished the first quarter of 2022 with an adjusted EBIT of EUR 651 million, with an adjusted return on sales of 5.9% for the industrial business. EBIT came in with EUR 461 million. Our earnings per share amounted to 0.31 EUR. Despite the challenging supply chain situation creating high unanticipated stock, free cash flow was positive, leading to a slightly higher net industrial liquidity of EUR 6.1 billion. We see a continued strong demand environment with a high level of incoming orders. The supply chain situation remained challenging. Besides the ongoing semiconductor shortage, which again caused significant constraint costs, especially in the United States, the further increase of raw material energy prices burdened our financial performance. We are working constantly to offset these increases of raw material prices by pricing increases or surcharges on both existing and new orders. However, most of the price increases, especially in the United States, will only fully impact the P&L from Q2 on. We expect the raw material price increase to continue to be a headwind in the next quarters, particularly in Europe and Asia, which I will provide more details on later. At Financial Services, we were live in seven out of 16 markets per Q1. The ramp-up of the new markets is well underway, with further nine markets to be added in 2022. We are continuously working on our self-help measures and are on track to achieve the targets. On fixed cost reduction, we continue to expect to achieve our targeted 15% reduction versus 2019 in 2023, two years earlier than initially anticipated. As highlighted at our last call, we are a member of the DAX community since March 21. Besides that, we had another debut on the capital market. We issued EUR 1.75 billion of euro bond under the newly established EMTN program. Additionally, we accessed the U.S. bond market with a $1.8 billion issue. This was the second issuance for Daimler Truck in U.S. market after the inaugural bond offering in December 2021. Both have seen strong demand from investors. These fundings are purely used for our financial services business. Mid of April, we did a deep dive on our autonomous driving activities at a test center for our subsidiaries, Torc Robotics in New Mexico. I must say that I was very impressed by the demonstration of what our Daimler Truck team together with Torc is capable of bringing on the road. This really underlines our innovation power in sustainable technologies, driving safety, and enabling our customers in making their businesses future-proof. As mentioned in our full year 2021 call, we decided to suspend our operations in Russia and wrote off our Russia-related assets, which had a negative one-time impact in Q1 of EUR 170 million. The remainder of the anticipated total impact of roughly EUR 200 million will be written off at a later point of time. Given the strong demand in other regions, the volume we lost in these markets was reallocated and absorbed quickly by other markets. Because we are receiving some questions on this topic at the moment, let me once again clarify the size and scope of our defense business at Daimler Truck. Our sales share of defense vehicle was far below 1% in 2021. These are vehicles for logistic purposes without weapons or mountings for weapons on the outside. This is in line with previous years, as frequently mentioned at the AGM of the former Daimler AG. In sum, Q1 of 2022 remained a challenging business environment as we were already used to from last year. Despite these challenges, we still finished the first quarter in line with our expectations, and we reconfirm our return on sales full year guidance. At this point, a big thank you to all our Daimler Truck employees worldwide, also for my colleagues of the entire board. Thank you for dedication, hard work, and accomplishments in these exceptionally challenging times. I'm very proud to be part of this great team. Now, let's take a short glimpse at the key market development in Q1. We are able to maintain a strong market-leading position in North America. This underlines the appreciation of our customers, and it also reflects the efforts we are putting in produce as many trucks as possible and deliver them to our customers, even if the semiconductor shortage require us to accept additional costs. In this challenging time, we are prioritizing our long-term customer relationships. In the EU30 region, we have increased our market share from 17.1% in Q4 of last year to 19.3% in Q1. For both regions, North America and Europe, all since Q1, the limiting factor remains supply. With the supply chain constraints for the entire trucking industry, market volume would have been noticeably higher and sales at Daimler Truck as well. Looking at other major truck markets worldwide, we see very weak markets in Asia. Japan is showing a significant decrease of total market volume with only 38,000 units in Q1 compared to 50,000 units one year ago. Also, China came in this year with only 98,000 units for the heavy-duty truck market in Q1, compared to 513,000 units in Q1 of 2021, mainly driven by pre-buys in 2021. The overall market development confirms to us that our market guidance for 2022 seems to be still appropriate. Looking at unit sales and orders, overall group sales at Daimler Truck increased by 8% compared to Q1 of 2021, despite the continuing supply chain constraints. Main contributions are coming from Daimler Truck North America and Mercedes-Benz. Flat sales development at Daimler Buses and a significant decline at Trucks Asia due to constrained parts supply and active reallocation of semiconductors to higher margin markets. Contrary to last year, when very specific chips for European and U.S. heavy-duty products were missing, we now have the opportunity to reallocate chips which are used in Asia and our other regions to Europe and North America. We are intentionally doing this, accepting a negative impact on our sales and financial performance in Japan. Just as we saw in the second half of 2021, the global supply chain challenges are depressing our sales. Demand continues to remain well above production levels. Cancellation rates remain very low. We are monitoring this issue extremely closely and so far not seen any step up in cancellation rates in any of our markets. The order intake in Q1 shows a slight decrease of 8% compared to last year's Q1, but remains on a high level. Keep in mind that we are more or less sold out for 2022 and are very careful with accepting orders for 2023, or have not even opened the order book. Given the strong demand, order intake is currently still more dependent on our willingness to accept orders and to free up production slots than on demand. Respectively, the order backlog at the end of the first quarter of this year is at a record high. Also, on fuel emission vehicle side positive momentum is strong. In the first quarter of 2022, we sold 163 battery electric trucks and buses compared to 61 one year ago. CDV orders also increased significantly from 169 units of last year Q1 to 619 units in the recent Q1. Still, infrastructure and the framework for cost parity with conventional vehicles remain the limiting factor here. At Daimler Truck, we are therefore in constant discussion with policymakers and energy companies to get the right momentum in that respect. We are also engaging in partnerships with other companies from the energy and trucking sectors to set up initial infrastructure projects in Europe and North America. We are ready and we are serious about it. We now also have the eActros in addition to eCascadia in serious production, and we are producing our E-vehicles at the same line as our conventional vehicles. We are not making headlines with prototypes, but can quickly ramp up CDV production according to our customer needs. Now, let's move ahead to take a closer look at our earnings performance in the first quarter of 2022. Year-over-year revenue for the group increased by more than 70% to EUR 10.5 billion for the first quarter of 2022. Adjusted for FX effects, revenue increased by 13%. Adjusted EBIT increased nearly 11% to EUR 0.9 billion, while reported EBIT declined from 1.7 to EUR 0.5 billion due to the Q1 2021, including the one-time positive impact of cellcentric. Free cash flow of the industrial business decreased from EUR 931 million in Q1 2021 to EUR 73 million in Q1 2022. The reduction is mainly attributed to the negative working capital caused by the ongoing global impact of the semiconductor bottlenecks and elevated inventory levels, increased investments in cellcentric, and higher tax payments. In our business, we face seasonality so that Q1 is normally on the low side in terms of cash contribution. The fact that we are positive in terms of free cash flow, despite its mentioned negative effects, gives me confidence for the full year. Free cash flow adjusted stood at EUR 0.2 billion. The delta is mainly related to the payouts for restructuring. Net industrial liquidity is strong and stood at EUR 6.1 billion at the end of Q1 2022, more or less the same level at the end of 2021. Industrial revenue increased to EUR 10.3 billion, mainly driven by a significant increase in Europe sales, positive currency translation effects from U.S. dollar, and first visible effects of better pricing. EBIT adjusted increased to EUR 600 million with a corresponding return on sales of just 5.9%, which is in line with the company-compiled consensus of 5.8%. Performance at Trucks North America was adversely affected by the 4,000 lower unit sales and ongoing supply constraints, cost pressures, leading to adjusted EBIT margins below Q1 2021. Our first priority remains to fulfill the commitments we gave to our customers, with customer loyalty being our primary goal. This means that we are not optimizing our business on the back of our customers. We are always the last man standing for them. We are not optimizing a single quarter by slowing down production at the expense of our customers, since we believe customers will remember that. Instead, we are trying to minimize delays, and as soon as we get the required chips for the ordered trucks that are sitting in our very high offline inventory, we get them out to our customers who are eagerly waiting for them. In North America, we are continuing to apply price surcharges for our trucks. In Q1, 30% of our sales were covered by the price increase done in Q1. This does not yet fully offset the material cost increases. In Q2, we will see a significantly higher realization of the price surcharges. However, raw material and inflationary costs are still further increasing. Therefore, it will be necessary for us to implement further significant price increases this year, with visible effects in our P&L from Q3 on. The performance of our aftermarket business remained strong in Q1. We achieved another new record level of average daily parts sales. Used truck business was significantly stronger last year. Given the shortage of new vehicles in the first three months of the year, we had almost no used truck volume to sell, and therefore less tailwind from used truck revenue. To sum up, the start into the year at Trucks North America was the opposite of last year. In 2021, we started strong without major headwinds on the production and supply side, and ended rather on the low side with major headwinds in Q3 and especially Q4. In 2022, we'll bottom up during the year, driven by the price surcharges becoming effective with Q1 as of what we see today being the low water mark. With Q1 adjusted margin of 7.9%, Mercedes-Benz achieved a significant improvement versus last year. Despite ongoing supply constraints and inflationary pressure. We achieved a good price realization in Q1 that was initiated last year. A restrictive order intake also helped us here. Moreover, we have adjusted pricing further upwards for all vehicles. However, we expect the full impact of the inflationary raw material price increase in Europe only in Q2, while these additional price increases will support the P&L only in the second half of the year. In Brazil, we continued our efforts to turn the business around. Brazil contributed positively, and in addition, we are able to sell part of the real estate of the plant in Três de Maio. On the used truck side, our results benefited from the constrained new truck market. Overall mix in Q1 was stronger than in Q1 and Q4 of 2021. While we are proud of the operational progress we made, it's important to keep in mind that we had significant positive one-time effects from increased interest rates and pension obligations in Europe, and the mentioned positive effect of the real estate sale in Brazil. The overall one-time effects amounted to approximately 1.5% in RoS. Each item is not large enough to be treated as exceptional and hence included in the adjusted EBIT. Important to highlight, at Mercedes-Benz, Q1 showed once again continued strict cost control and execution of restructuring on track to secure sustainable profitability towards our margin goals and our guidance for the full year. Our business at Trucks Asia saw a return on sales of 2.2%, significantly below the performance of last year. Main reason here was the low level of Q1 sales. The worst group sales since financial crisis 10 years ago. Especially our sales in Japan were affected by parts supply and relocation of semiconductors to North America and Europe. As mentioned, we are doing this intentionally to support a higher margin business in Europe and North America, something we were not able to do last year because of the nature of the chips and new technical solutions now in place. Moreover, cost headwinds from raw material could not be fully compensated by positive pricing development in Indonesia and India. In Japan, retrospective pricing is legally not possible, so price increase already actioned will only meaningfully impact our sales from Q4 on. Another weakening factor was the at-equity participation result of our Chinese joint venture, BFDA. That came in negative and significantly below Q1 of 2021 due to the pre-buy effect in China and the respective market weakening in 2022, which was anticipated in our guidance. Don't forget that the participation result of our at-equity investments are included in our EBIT. For the remaining year, BFDA is expected to remain a burden for the performance of Trucks Asia, also due to the expected launch cost of the soon-to-be-introduced Mercedes-Benz Actros for the Chinese market. On the positive side, ongoing disciplined fixed cost spending helped to partially compensate the mentioned headwinds. Daimler Buses was and still is affected by COVID-19, with the tourism segment in Europe remains weak as expected. In the weak market, supply constraint costs and significant raw material headwinds could not be compensated via price increases. A better aftermarket business, improved mix, and an ongoing restructuring activity, cost management led to a return on sales of -7.1%, half of the losses we recorded the same period last year. Now let's have a closer look at the individual EBIT drivers for the first quarter of 2022 compared with last year's Q1. Main driver of the Q1 results were volume mix and pricing. Total positive contribution of EUR 473 million year-over-year. After-sales and with a slight positive result, the used truck business also contributed to the increase. FX impact was positive with EUR 46 million, mainly translation effects from the U.S. dollar. Regarding our industrial performance, Q1 was mainly burdened by, attributed to raw material cost increase. Manufacturing constrained costs were still a burden, although a lot smaller than the headwinds from the material side. Warranty costs had the smallest negative impact. As already mentioned, the price increases that we initiated at the end of last year could only partially offset these headwinds, especially the continuing raw material cost inflation. Selling and G&A expenses combined were more or less flat year-over-year, although our sales activities are clearly picking up again, and as highlighted before, the volumes are steadily increasing. This clearly proves our strong fixed cost control and working out. In others, you can see the negative contribution from our BFDA at the equity results, which makes up the main part of the negative effect. Financial services supported group performance with EUR 11 million, with positive effects from higher interest margin in North America and improved cost of credit risk. This leads to adjusted group EBIT of EUR 0.7 billion. Including the adjustments for restructuring and M&A, EBIT reported came in at EUR 0.5 billion. Filling up the EBIT performance of our industrial business in the individual segment contributions, Q1 shows a mixed picture. Mercedes-Benz and Daimler Buses contributed positively to the industrial business performance versus Q1 of last year. As mentioned, please keep in mind that the Mercedes-Benz impact here is affected by the mentioned positive one-time effects. Trucks North America and Trucks Asia had a negative contribution each, both still heavily impacted by high supply chain constraints, including higher manufacturing and significantly increased material costs. The reconciliation packet mainly contains our co-participation like cellcentric and Proterra, autonomous activity and elimination. I want to underline again that within our reporting logic, the recon is part of the industrial business result. In total, EBIT-adjusted industrial business came in with EUR 0.6 billion, with return on sales adjusted of 5.9%. At financial services, we are making good progress in ramping up the business and adding new markets. Contract volume increased to EUR 80 billion due to significantly increased new business and improved penetration rates. However, the main positive effect came from the FX side from North and South America, especially from the U.S dollar. EBIT adjusted in Q1 increased to EUR 47 million. Return on equity came in with 11.3%, a little bit above last year's quarter. Main drivers on the positive side were high interest margin North America and improved cost of credit risk. On a negative side, we saw a normalization of the cost situation. Please be aware that European markets have not yet been consolidated in Q1 results. Seven out of the nine phase two countries were shifted only in early Q2, and we expect ramp-up costs for these entities to impact to the downside for the rest of the year. Our full-year guidance reflects this. Detailed walks and further information on the financial performance of each segment are included in the appendix of this presentation, as well as in our fact book. Cash flow for the industrial business is still facing high inventory through the supply chain constraints, which amount in Q1 to a negative working capital impact of EUR 137 million compared to last year's Q1 and even Q4 to a further significant increase in offline inventory, mainly at Trucks North America and Trucks Asia. The net investment packet includes a negative effect of EUR 50 million from financial investments, mainly driven by our fuel cell joint venture cellcentric, with the main part of the minus EUR 260 million coming from net investments in PP&E and intangible assets. Depreciation and amortization of EUR 260 million once again exceeded the net investments in PP&E and intangible assets, all in Q1 for 2022, underlying our strict CapEx management based on our active portfolio management approach. The provision and others bucket contains, on the one side, attributed to the negative effect from the mentioned reversal of personnel provisions due to increased interest rates and Mercedes-Benz, and on the other side, also a positive effect in the cash walk from the impairment of our Russian operations. This leads to an adjusted EBIT of the industrial business of EUR 0.2 billion and adjusted for restructuring measures and M&A transactions to adjusted EBIT on the industrial business of EUR 0.3 billion. Down the way to free cash flow, cash taxes came in at negative EUR 147 million. Free cash flow of the industrial business, excluding the adjustments for M&A transactions and restructuring measures, came in at EUR 73 million. This leads to EUR 0.2 billion free cash flow adjusted of the industrial business. Net industrial liquidity rose a bit to EUR 6.1 billion at the end of Q1. Regarding the outlook for full year 2022, please allow for the following remark. Obviously, the following outlook of Daimler Truck is subject to further development in the Russian war against Ukraine and its impacts on the global economy. It currently also looks as if the market distortions caused by the semiconductor and COVID-19 related supply bottlenecks will continue to impact the market. Daimler Truck assumes that it will continue to face strained supply chains for the key upstream products. The further geopolitical as well as the COVID-19 pandemic development also harbor uncertainties. While the global market outlook remains opaque, we are laser focused on our strategy and self-help measures. We continue to make great progress on fixed cost savings, and our pricing actions will address the inflationary headwinds. Given that, and based on the current information, we currently feel confident to achieve our targets for 2022. All of the following guidance is made with the following assumptions. We currently assume that economic conditions on our most important markets continue to normalize, and that neither the COVID-19 pandemic nor the Russian war against Ukraine will have an adverse additional impact on the general market development. Despite strong demand, bottlenecks in semiconductor industry and ongoing supply constraints will continue to impact sales, mainly in the first half. The market guidance for the full year 2022 we gave back in March at our annual press conference is still valid. For the heavy-duty market in North America, a range of 255,000-995,000 units. For European heavy-duty truck market, a range of 240,000-280,000 units. For its industrial business, Daimler Truck continue to anticipate an increase in unit sales to a range between 500 and 520,000 in 2022. We are also continuing to expect a significant increase in revenue on group level in 2022. We update the revenue forecast in terms of range to between EUR 48-50 billion, from the previous forecast of EUR 45.5-47.5 billion. The increase in our revenue forecast is caused by favorable pricing in Europe and North America, and improved after-sales business and positive impacts from exchange rate developments. For the industrial business revenue guidance, this leads to an increase in the guidance range from EUR 44-46 billion to now EUR 46-48 billion. Consequently, the EBIT guidance for the group is also adjusted from slight decrease to on prior year levels. Regarding EBIT adjusted on group level, we continue to expect a significant increase. Regarding the return on sales adjusted for the industrial business, Daimler Truck is expecting to come out unchanged between 7% and 9%. Investments in PP&E and R&D costs are still expected to slightly increase coming from a low level in 2021. Our guidance for free cash flow reported is also unchanged and still expect on prior year level. What's the outlook for 2022 on a segment level? Simple answer, it's the same that we gave you at our full year 2021 disclosure conference back in March. Because of that, I'm not going to read it all out again, but rather make use of the time to provide you with the main drivers of the outlook for the upcoming second quarter. For Daimler Truck North America, we expect the second half of the year to be materially stronger than the upcoming second quarter. As Q1 had been spent on only minor material cost increases versus Q4 of 2021. In addition, we had the mentioned one-time effect of around 1.5 return on sales percentage points. These segment material cost headwinds is expected to significantly increase in Q2, when we expect to see the next major negative inflationary impacts coming into effect. With regard to price actions that were already initiated to compensate these material cost increases, the majority of that will come into effect only after Q2. At Trucks Asia, I already mentioned that the at equity result of our Chinese joint venture, BFDA, for the full year 2021 is expected to be negative. If necessary, we are going to further reallocate semiconductors from our Asian business to higher margin segments in North America and Europe. If this should drag on for all of the upcoming three quarters for 2022, this could have an impact on today's confirmed segment guidance of Trucks Asia. At Daimler Buses, we expect a weak quarterly performance not only for the second but also for the third quarter of the year, as we have very specific semiconductor shortages here. From today's view, we expect a very strong fourth quarter. At Financial Services, we see significantly increasing operating costs in the remaining quarters of the year, especially related to adding the European countries. Much on the financial outlook for the full year 2022. Let me conclude by looking at our strategic priorities for this year and beyond. You know our two strategic goals. We want to unlock our profit potential and to lead sustainable transformational transportation. With respect to profit potential, several things are on the top of our list. Let me highlight the following measures to manage our environment. To take maximum advantage of the strong market environment, we will allocate available parts and components and semiconductors in a deliberate way. This means we will consistently prioritize products and regions with high contribution margins. At the same time, we will continue to adjust our net pricing to pass on increased raw material costs to our customers. Of course, we are in intense dialogue with our customers on that, and so far, reactions are very positive. Apart from that, we also continue to increase our resilience. It is a priority for us to keep working on our self-help measures and continue our strict fixed cost control to achieve our cost reduction targets. On services, we are fully ramping up our financial services business all around the globe, and we are further strengthening our after-sales business. Let's now switch to our second strategic priority, leading sustainable transportation. First of all, we are pushing hard to further accelerate zero emissions. Two weeks ago, we hosted our Daimler Buses E-Mobility Days to lay out to our bus customers how we see the way forward and to get their feedback on that. Key highlights can be summarized as follows. By 2030, we will only offer CO2 neutral city buses in Europe, and only CO2 neutral new vehicles will be on offer in the core European markets by 2039. In addition, we are clearly committed to offer an all-electric intercity bus from 2025. Just last week, we launched our Freightliner eCascadia, an all-electric heavy-duty truck with a range of 370 km. There are more premieres coming up in the next months. We intend to launch our refuse collection specialist in the Philippines. Econic, the next generation of our light truck, FUSO eCanter, and an electric bus chassis in Latin America. We are accelerating battery trials, and we are doing the very same for our hydrogen trials by intensively testing our GenH2 truck on public roads. That much for zero emissions. Let's now quickly look at autonomous trucking. Here we have two great partners, Waymo and our independent subsidiary, Torc Robotics. Both partnerships are making great progress. We are delivering autonomous-ready Freightliner Cascadia trucks to Waymo. Torc Robotics now further intensifies its collaboration with leading logistics companies. All this is backed by our strong corporate culture with its key pillars of trust and entrepreneurship. With that, I'd like to thank you very much, and I'm looking very much forward to your questions. Thank you very much, Jochen. Ladies and gentlemen, you may ask your questions now. The operator will identify the questioners by name, but please also introduce yourself with your name and the name of the organization you are representing. A few practical points. Please ask your questions in English, and always, as a matter of fairness, please limit the amount of questions to a maximum of two. Now, before we start, the operator will explain the procedure. Thank you very much. If you want to raise a question, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. If you want to withdraw your question, please dial zero and two on your telephone keypad. Once your name has been announced, you can ask the question. The first question is from Nicolai Kempf of Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. Yeah, good morning. Nicolai Kempf here from Deutsche Bank. First of all the best for you, Manfred. Hope you get well soon. My first question would be on your current lead times. Can you just give some color on it, how much they currently are? Yeah. Thanks a lot. Also for the good wishes. As we said several times, given the very strong order backlog, the lead times are very long. It always depends on which region and which product we are talking about. Generally speaking, if you want to have one of our flagship products, the Cascadia or an Actros, the likelihood that you'd get it this year, if you have not placed the order right now, is basically zero. Even if somebody would step back from an order, which we don't see at the moment, there are so many in the waiting room basically and saying, "Hey, we would take that immediately." They are longer than normal. You have to wait, as I said, if you look at the end of the year, eight to nine months for a truck like that. Are the customers happy with that? No, obviously not, because they need it. On the other hand, they understand that given the overall situation with the semiconductor, that's what happens, not only on our side, but on the whole industry. With that, the customer accept that it's not a bigger problem. As I said, we are continuously in discussions with our customers to optimize the situation, but also openly sharing the circumstances we are operating in. Okay. Makes sense. Thank you. Maybe just to follow up on the supply chain production. Do you see any improvement in the supply chain in the same quarter or more regarding the second half of the year that you see a strong improvement of the same supply? I would answer twofold. If you look on semiconductors, which was the major topic basically for the last year since summer last year, we see improvements. Two kind of. The one is, while we had intense discussions with our customers, with our suppliers, and they were basically not able to give firm commitments because they simply didn't know when they get their pre-material. That has changed, and meanwhile, for all of the main suppliers, we have firm commitments. That means they have more confidence to get the parts, and that helps us to stabilize our business. There will be improvement already in Q2, but it will be significantly better in the second half. The second thing what also happened is that we worked on the technical side of the problem, meaning, there were chips which were restricted in the past. Our engineers were looking for alternatives, and now we have cases where we have more than one chip we can do the job. That helps us to be more flexible. We have also one real-life case where in the past for the same model, had to use two chips, same kind. Now, we were able to reduce the number of chips to one, which immediately doubles the outcome. On the semiconductor, still challenging as I described. However, there's really improvement and again, as I said, especially in the second half of the year. The other one is supply chain related to everything getting out of China. Here we have to be very clear. We are early stage. We are watching that very carefully. But given the COVID situation, with a lot of shutdowns in major Chinese cities and then obviously the harbors, there is a risk that something happens here. We don't see concrete problems at the moment, but as I said, it's early stage, so that's a clear watch item. Here we have a level of uncertainty. Understood. Thank you. All the best. Thank you. The next question is from Michael Jacks of Bank of America. Your line is now open. Hi. Good morning. Michael Jacks from Bank of America. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is on price increases. It's possibly a bit premature to be asking this, but do you see the new pricing levels as a watermark, or can they come down again if raw material costs decline? Let me start there. Well, what we clearly communicated to our customers that we are not increasing prices just for the sake of profit, but basically a pure necessity given the higher raw material and energy costs. Customers, well, obviously, they don't like price increases for obvious reasons, but they understand, and they accept it. They see it also. You can look basically on all indices here. It also means, just for the sake of argument, if you would assume for a moment that raw material would fall back to the level we had, call it, one and a half years ago, that would obviously have impact on the pricing itself. It would go down again because there's a big portion which is really raw material related. I think that's the way we communicated with the customer, and that's also the way the customer will communicate with us if the market for raw material price will go down, that we also have to adjust our pricing accordingly. Okay, that's fair. Perhaps just related to that, could you give us some kind of a breakdown for the major cost inflation drivers for you in raw mats and manufacturing? And what you see the incremental impact being for Q2 versus Q1? Yeah. From an overall perspective, when we talk about the cost increases, and I mentioned that in the past, for us, the most important material is steel. A little bit of aluminum in the US, but steel is the important one. What we said already is that, year over year, we expect a high double-digit million impact on raw material compared to 2021. Always keep in mind, also in 2021, we had a similar impact compared to the year 2020. That's the major thing. On the manufacturing side, we have two effects. On the one hand, especially in the US, we have still inefficiencies because of these permanent interruptions caused by the supply constraint, and still some COVID measures. There is room for improvement, and especially on the first one, we expect an improvement as soon as the supply chain is more stable. Then on the other side, we have the energy costs, which increased. Overall, that could balance out in the quarters to come, so I don't see an additional burden here if we compare it to Q1. On the raw material side, it's different region by region. India was hit very fast, very high numbers. In U.S., it's more of a continuous increase. In Europe, and I mentioned that, we haven't seen that much of an increase at the moment, but it's also fair to say that we are in constant negotiation with our suppliers. They want to shorten the contracts because of the uncertainty, and there we expect a significant increase. Just to give you one number, in Europe, quarter-over-quarter, it's nearly a double-digit million EUR, which we expect on raw material. That's clear. Thanks, Jochen. Get well soon. Thank you. Thank you very much. The next question is from José Azurmendi of JP Morgan. The line is now open. Hi, Jochen. It's José Azurmendi, JP Morgan. I hope you are wishing you all the best there. Just a couple of questions, please. Can you talk a bit more about the margin in Europe, the margin cadence for the year? How do you expect that to evolve? And talk a little bit about those cost savings measures that are coming to the P&L. Second, if we think about the guidance you are providing, and the return on sales range you are providing, are you thinking it around maybe the lower end or the upper end of the range at this stage of the year? Thank you. Thanks, José. Let me start with the second one on the guidance. Well, at the moment, we feel that the guidance is for a range exactly where it should be. There is an upside scenario, and that means the problem on the semiconductor side would be solved fully in the second half, and that would give us upside potential on the volume side. Especially in Europe, we are prepared for that. If that happens, there's a clear upside potential, and that would definitely lead us to the upper range on the guidance. On the other side, I think the big unknown is China. I touched on that. If the impact of the war and the impact of the supply chain would further worsening, then we are on the lower side. From today's perspective, I feel very confident with the range, and we are exactly where we should be in the middle. On the margin in Europe, well, as I said, we had a real strong quarter one with the 7.9%, take out 1.5, which are non-operational. I would say so the starting point is 6.5, and that continues or shows a continuous improvement over the last quarters, also Q4 to Q1. What we will see in the second quarter, that will be the most challenging quarter for us. Why? On the one hand, we see further increase in raw material. As I just said, we are in constant negotiation with suppliers, especially in Europe. There will be a hit in Q2, and pricing action will come towards the end of the quarter. That will be the most challenging one, and then starting the second half, we see then the price increases, and then we are balanced when it comes to price and cost. From a cost improvement perspective, I mentioned that also in the event call, we have basically, especially in Europe, two developments. On the one hand, we are continuously working on our structural measures, reducing personnel cost, so that's well on the way. We said that half of the reduction when it comes to personnel cost reduction was already included in 2021. A big portion will come in 2022 and the rest in 2023. On the other side, also keep in mind, and I also share that we still have some related costs out of the spin-off. We have to adjust IT systems for long-term benefits. There will be structural cost improvements, but also focus related costs, so that they'll balance out basically on Europe. The big driver in the second half will then be the price increase on Europe. All right. Thank you. That's all. Welcome. The next question is from Klas Bergelind of Citi. Your line is now open. Yeah. Thank you. Hi. Hi, Jochen. So I wanna come back on pricings. We know that pricing in North America, it was mid-single digit in first one-third only this quarter, more to come in the second quarter. Did you say there how much we should model for Mercedes-Benz? You're talking about phasing more into the second half. It would be really good to have some sort of guide as well on price realization with Benz and the phasing, please. I will start there. Yeah. Thanks, Klas, for that question. Well, let me just start with North America, and I come to Europe as well. You rightly said, we do the first price increase, which has already had an effect in March, but now full impact in Q2. We already announced also to our customer second increase, which then will be effective starting of July because of the increased pricing. If you compare it year-over-year, it's more than a double-digit price increase. If you go back to Europe, it's a little bit different, and took a bit longer because we have different customer structure than in the United States. If you look from a year-over-year perspective, with all the initial price increases, you end up at a similar level. It's just basically one quarter delayed compared to North America. From a procedure, we do exactly the same. We go back to the customer, and we look raw material, energy price, see that it's seen in the transport prices, transport prices, and have similar price increases than in North America. It's just one quarter late. Maybe one sentence because that's also a question, what happens with order in 2023, if we take any? We also changed our procedures here and have what we call a flexible pricing component in the order, which means, we take the order, but we take the liberty to adjust raw material price parts of that order depending on the market level at the point of time. Which gives us flexibility, but still the customer has the security to get trucks. Okay. Thank you. My second one is on the reconciliation line, which came in higher than I thought. Obviously, it's good trading at sort of the operating level. I'm just thinking what kind of level we should model here going forward. Because here you have group part participation, you have the autonomous solutions, et cetera. Just so we get that right for the outer quarters, that would be very helpful. I would say in the Q1, there were two effects which, in quotation marks, you could call extraordinary. The one effect is that we had the participation in Proterra, and they are seen as a tech company, and we see it as a tech company. But you all have seen what happens with tech companies in the United States. We had a burden here when it comes to our participation simply because their stock price dropped. The second one is the elimination I talked about is mainly elimination between the segments. Delivering parts from Asia or trucks from Asia to Europe, but also parts for engine production in North America. Basically, these are free material we delivered from one segment to the other, which was not sold to the customer, therefore, we had to eliminate the inter-segment profit. Sorry for the technical answer, but that was a big portion. No. That's a one-time portion. You do have it at the beginning when you ramp up, and then in the course of the year, then it's more stabilized, and normally you have a positive impact in Q4. If you take the two extraordinary effects out, you can basically deduct, call it EUR 40 million out of the recon, and then you have the normal run rate. Got it. Now that makes sense. My very final one is on the industrial performance, the EUR 377 million in the bridge on slide 10. You obviously show this also when you report with the full year stage. I think it's the majority is the raw material negative versus inefficiencies on the production from the semi shortages. Was that the same last quarter? I'm just trying to understand the raw mats impact in the bridge, so we can annualize this, think about it for the year. Yeah. You're, first of all, you're right. It will go up in the second quarter, of course. Yeah. You're right. The majority of that is material. You're also right, it's efficiency as well as raw materials are the negative effect as the raw material increase. As I said on a question earlier, on the U.S., we see more constantly changing raw material price for more linear development. While in Europe, we had quite a positive as well, a less negative development on the raw material than expected, but we see some catch up in Q2. As I said, you can for Europe take EUR 100 million as an effect quarter-over-quarter for raw material. Then it's very much depending on what happens on the raw material price, but then it's more flattish towards the end of the year. Thank you. Yep, you're welcome. The next question is from Miguel Borrega of BNP Paribas. Your line is now open. Hi, good morning everyone. Just have two questions. The first one, apologies for coming back to the price increases in Europe. Can you maybe talk about how that compares to the U.S? I think you talked about $4,000 of surcharges, of price surcharge, in the U.S. So how much are we talking about in Europe? I believe you said also there's a second price increase in the middle of the year. Then just to follow up on your margin guidance, I think you mentioned that at this stage you expect the midpoint of the margin guidance to be achieved, and only disruptions to the supply chain would lead you to the low end. I mean, how much confidence do you have on this guidance, given the disruption as of now of cost inflation? Do you have all your cost inflation headwinds secured up until now? Are you thinking on taking additional measures, maybe some more restructuring to offset cost inflation in Europe? Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Miguel Borrega, for the questions. Let me start with the later one and to clarify. Well, what's based in our guidance is an outlook on semiconductors. As I said earlier, it's getting better. We get more firm confirmations by our suppliers, and we are also working on technical solutions. Some are already in production, some are still to come. There we see a normalization. I'm not saying that all the problems are solved in the second quarter. That's based in our underlying planning. Same is true for raw material and energy as we see them today and what the expectation is we have for the course of the year. The point I wanna make is if now something happens, which we don't know right now, let's assume, we will figure out that due to the COVID crisis in China, important raw materials could not be delivered anymore. That's not baked in the guidance because we simply don't know at that point of time. Everything which we know we have included. That's important. Therefore, we feel confident when it comes to the guidance. I only wanna say there is uncertainty in the market, and that's nothing new since we talked the last time, but there are also opportunities, and I talked on the volume side as well. That's the one piece on the guidance. On the pricing, as I said earlier, the pricing in Europe is very similar to the U.S. If you take year-over-year, it depends a little bit on products and markets, but roughly, we increase prices to double-digit. Just the cadence is a different one. The U.S started earlier with the price increase, therefore we see a price increase already in Q2, a major one, while in Europe we see it one quarter later. Given the fact that the majority of that is driven by raw material, and we have very much global raw material commodity prices meanwhile, it's also logical that we have a similar pricing strategy. The last comment I wanna make, what happens if raw material gets even worse, meaning even higher cost? Well, what we did so far, and I would say successfully, is getting in touch with our customers and saying, "Look, that's what happens." Now we see another spike, and we have to talk how to improve that. To be honest, given the structure of our contracts, we are now in May, we have always a kind of a time delay in raw material prices. It's not a spike, if you will. If that really happens, that will be a bigger challenge for 2023 and not that much for 2022 because somehow we are already secured for the rest of the year. That's very clear. Thank you. Welcome. The next question is from Tom Narayan of RBC. Your line is now open. Hi. Yes, Tom Narayan, RBC. Thanks for taking the questions. Jochen, best wishes from our end as well on getting better. Yeah. Thank you. On Mercedes-Benz in Q1, I was wondering if you could comment on the positive effects from valuation measures you mentioned on slide 25, on the bridge there. You know, was that significant? That's my first question. If you look on the valuation measures, there are basically three effects we have to mention for the Q1. The one, it's not a valuation effect, but it had an impact. We sold a part of our plant in Torsby. That was a part we haven't used for years. There was an interest for an industrial company to take over that piece of land, and we sold it. That's one thing. Not a valuation, but kind of a non-operational effect. The second one is, yeah, unfortunately, and you've seen it, our share price dropped significantly. And with that, we had to adjust our phantom share programs positively, from the EBIT perspective, negatively obviously from the overall development. That was in part this contribution, which we hope will go away in the course of the year. We will see. Why does it hit Europe much harder than others? Because the majority of the white collars are sitting here in Europe. All the powertrain operations are part of the Mercedes-Benz segment, therefore it was a significant higher impact. That's one example in North America. There was a second one. The third one is, if you look on long-term liabilities, we always discount them according to accounting rules, and it very much depends on what's the interest rate. What we have seen in Europe is an adjustment on the interest rate upwards, already, with a maybe potential in the course of the year as well. If you want, we have seen a major step upwards, and that reduced basically our liabilities and gave a positive impact on the EBIT. These are the three impacts which in total account for the 1.5% I mentioned in the speech. Okay, thank you. My second question is on the headcount reduction that you guys have achieved. I think it was, I believe it was something like, it was like EUR 280 million is your total plan, and you got half of it. It was around EUR 140 million. Yep By the end of 2021. If I look at the annual report, I have the headcount there. I think it implied something like a reduction of 1,400 employees or something, and I know most of them are white collar. It implies a kind of average salary of around EUR 100,000. I just wanna make sure the math is right. Is that, are those the right numbers? You know, like a 1,400 kind of headcount that you achieved, and that goes to the EUR 140 million savings? Well, there are definitely two questions. First of all, well, not a surprise, it very much depends on which level you are talking. EUR 100,000 per employee is the annual salary for Europe on average is not a bad number. That's a good number. Okay. On the headcount, we never disclose any headcount numbers, and we are also saying we are not aiming for a specific number of headcount reduction. We are aiming, and you said the number rightfully, the 280, which are confirmed in the aim for 300 overall. Keep in mind, if you look on headcount numbers, especially at the moment, there are still a lot of changes which are related to focus activities. We're still taking over companies which at the starting point of the December were on the Mercedes side. Now there are changes here. That's true for financial services. That's true, but also for the sales organization at Mercedes-Benz. We also have taken over functions. One example, April first, we started with indirect purchasing department, which was still a mandate from old Daimler AG or now Mercedes-Benz Group. Now we take that over. I just wanna say, be a little bit careful. Mm-hmm If you look on the numbers because there are so many effects included in that. I think therefore we are focusing on the euro number, and there you are absolutely right. We are at EUR 140. Half of it was baked in the EBIT of 2021. We see a big portion this year, and then the remainder will come in 2023. Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome. The next question is from Himanshu Agarwal of Jefferies. Your line is now open. Hi. Himanshu from Jefferies. Best wishes from my side as well. Thank you. Just have two questions. One is on the supply chain constraints. We've just talked about the semi shortages, but are you seeing constraints in other areas as well, and especially around labor shortages in the U.S.? Yeah, and then I have a second one. As I said, the major thing still is the semiconductor one. If you look on everything else, we don't have any shortages on raw material. We have the price topic, but we don't have a quantity topic, so that's not a problem. The one where Russia was one of the main suppliers, we could find alternatives like on palladium. That's not an issue. If you look on everything else, I would say you have the normal noise. There's always parts missing, but nothing I would write home about. It's really the semiconductor. On the labor side, the labor market is challenging, but so far we have no constraints on labor, not in the U.S., not in Europe. As I said, we wanna ramp up production in the second half, given a more stable supply on the semiconductors, and we are prepared for that from a capacity perspective as well as from the headcount. Challenging, but not a problem at the moment. Understood. Thanks. Secondly, I wanted to ask about the recent announcement where Daimler Truck North America has partnered with Cummins on fuel cells. Can you just give us more color on that, and how does that impact cellcentric? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for that question. Basically you have to think in two phases on the fuel cell. Well, when we decided to join forces with Volvo, that was clearly a decision for the long term. We wanna develop a state-of-the-art fuel cell, which fits to our standards and fits to our purpose principle we need with the long fuel. We start with Europe, but both companies, Volvo and also we have a strong U.S. business, and therefore we always have an eye on U.S., and we make sure that from sound factors, from technical requirements, this fuel cell fits in the future also in our truck. That's our long-term plan and long-term goal. On the other hand, we have good experience in the United States with having two suppliers. We have that for ages basically on the engines. Sometimes time is of the essence, so therefore we decided to join forces with Cummins, have an earlier point of time, fuel cell trucks up and running, gain knowledge with that, and then we have basically for the U.S. market two options. It does not mean. The question basically, that does not mean we go with Cummins only in the U.S. and cellcentric is for Europe only. That's not our plan. Mm-hmm. Understood. Thank you. You're welcome. The next question is from Jonathan Day of HSBC. Your line is now open. Thanks. Good morning. It's Jonathan from HSBC. Jochen, hope you feel better soon. I just wanted to ask a little bit about the switching of parts from Asia to the US. I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the impact of that on your Asian customer base. That's my sort of first question. Yeah. Yeah, you might remember that, in the past, we were saying, well, we are missing very specific chips, and that hit us in 2021 quite hard, especially on the Actros, especially on the Cascadia. It was also a burden for the overall profitability last year. Now, the world changed a little bit that the specific chips are available. Now it's more, call it the incoming chips which are missing. That gave us the opportunity to move away parts or to optimize the allocation of chips positively. That affected especially India, and it will affect India in the second quarter very strongly because we have really common chips here, and it also affects Japan. So that's the one. Hard to judge what it would mean if we would allocate everything with the same amount or percentage points. I could easily see, and we have seen high stocks. We have a lot of unfinished sitting in Japan. Could easily sell 3,000-5,000 more, and it's high-margin trucks. one to two percentage points on return on sales, if we would do the allocation a different way, would be possible. Okay. Great. Thanks. My second question was really more on buses. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the longer-term outlook there, whether you can see at some point a recovery, or do you think there are sort of structural challenges now for buses and coaches or I suppose coaches post-COVID? Just curious to get your thoughts on that. Yeah. Well, that's obviously the most important question, if the coach business basically returns to the levels before. We have intense discussions with that. We have intense discussions with our customers. We believe it will come back because the purpose of driving buses will be the same. What are the big drivers? Well, it's the cruise ships. They are up and running now. Now, that's a big demand. It's. That's important to understand. It's not only the older generation who uses coach buses. It's more and more also the younger generation who use that to come to point to point and have a more flexible alternative basically to taking the rail and then and cheaper as well. That's a huge demand. We see no structural change on that. Will it take some years? Yes, it will take some years. Two things are positive, I would say. The one is what we see is a much higher demand in parts. In other words, that means the trucks are now not sitting on the lot, but really are used. So that's the first sign of recovery. The second one, and that was a concern, to be honest, because on that segment, you don't have these mega fleets who are buying thousands of buses. It's more mid-sized companies. It was quite hard and still is hard for them to survive. What we see at the moment, especially in Germany, but also in countries like France, that these mid-sized companies, they really survive. They managed to survive. They used the coach buses to transport kids to schools and things like that. That's very important for the long term that the customer base was not hurt, but majorly hurt by that crisis. Therefore, our answer is structurally, we believe coach segment comes back. As I mentioned, several times, we really use the time to significantly decrease the level of costs in our bus businesses. With that, I think we are very well prepared when the time of a stronger coach might come back, and we'll see nice return on sales there. Great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. The next question is from Anthony Dick of ODDO BHF. Your line is now open. Yes. Hi. Thank you for taking my question, and best wishes to you. I had a question on the U.S. market. We're witnessing a sequential slowdown in freight indicators in the US, and at the same time, you're passing on price increases, and operators themselves are facing higher operating costs. To what extent do you think this can translate into demand for your products in the short and medium term? Thank you. Yeah. Very good question. Thank you. I think it's important to understand that at the moment, the market size is not defined by demand, but by supply. What we said, at the moment, if you look on the range of the guidance we have given, that already includes basically a significant impact, negative impact by supply. Without that, the market would be easily 50, 60, 80 thousand higher than what we see. What basically happens or could happen is that, even if the demand is not that strong any longer, but the customers were not able to get the trucks for this high demand, it's still in line. Therefore, we see our market guidance still okay, rather with upside potential. The other one I wanna mention, and it's important to understand. In 2021, the U.S. market, without a restriction on the supply chain, would be a spike market, very, very strong market. What happened? Supply chain constraints limited the market, and demand was postponed to 2022. Now the postponed demand in 2022 meets a still very strong demand in 2022, but still cannot fulfill because of the limitation of semi-conductor. Basically, a portion of 2021 is moved to 2023, and the not fulfilled demand of 2022 is moved to 2023. At the same time, you see more efficient truck, and you see an aging fleet. Basically, what we see at the moment, and that could be, call it a positive side effect of the crisis, instead of what we have seen in the past, spike in U.S. and then lower markets for a couple of years, we are seeing more a stabilization in 2021, 2022, 2023. After that it's hard to judge, where you have a couple of years with a strong good market. We are not concerned at the moment that the demand is not strong enough. Thank you very much. Welcome. We have time for one more question, and the question comes from George Galliers of Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open. Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Appreciate it. The first thing I wanted to ask was just on the increase in sales that you saw in the quarter and understanding a bit better the balance of that was driven by the kind of easing supply chain and the reallocation of resources, for example, towards North America and Europe. How much was driven by the supply chain side versus positive trends in demand? I would say it's only driven by the supply chain side. Because you're referring to Q1 last year. Yeah, basically the supply chain was not a big issue. We had already a strong demand in the course of the year, so the demand would be even much higher than what we could sell in Q1. The limiting factor was the supply chain that we are able to sell more trucks than last year has another effect. You might remember that we said at the end of the year, we were producing full steam, and had a problem at the year-end that a lot of trucks were sitting in our lot, especially in the United States, with just one or two chips missing. We really decided to make a conscious decision. We accepted the higher cost that burdened our profitability in North America in Q4, and we had a higher inventory. That gave us the opportunity to, as soon as the chips came in in the beginning of the year, to immediately finish the trucks and then hand it over to our customers. Especially in January, we had a much stronger January than last year, and that was mainly driven by a different approach at the year-end. Again, that was really a conscious decision because customer eagerly were waiting for the trucks. That was the main driver. Okay. Yeah, understood. The last thing I wanted to ask, and apologies if this was already mentioned earlier, my line did cut out for a moment, which is if you could clarify what are your net pricing assumptions and the margin guidance for the full year. How do you like, within the different segments, are you expecting to become sort of price cost positive overall? Yeah. What I said earlier, for the two major markets, if you take year-over-year overall, we see double-digit price increase. That's true for U.S. and for Europe. From a balance perspective, as mentioned in Q1, we were not able to fully recover what we see on the cost side. That will change in the U.S. in the quarters to come, already in Q2. While in Europe, we have a more difficult quarter ahead of us with expected significant increases in raw material quarter-over-quarter and pricing kicking in in the second half. From a full year perspective, in our guidance, we assume that we can cover the cost increases based on the current spot price, including our anticipations for the rest of the year with pricing. That's what's baked in our guidance. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your questions and for being with us today. Jochen Goetz, thank you very much for answering all the questions. Now, as always, the IR team remains at your disposal to answer any further questions you might have. To all of you, have a great day. Thank you for participating today, and talk to you soon. Goodbye and take care.