Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this media Q&A conference call on our full year 2023 results. On this conference call, I would like to welcome Martin Daum, CEO and interim CFO of Daimler Truck, as well as Claus Bässler, Vice President in Treasury and Tax, Acting Head of Finance and Controlling. This morning, we published our press release and all relevant documents on our website. I assume that most of you have followed today's presentation and the analyst conference call just prior to this media Q&A. Martin Daum will now briefly explain the most important facts and figures of this year, 2023, and following this, we will look forward to your questions. So, Martin, please go ahead. Yeah, very briefly, we can summarize it. We had, with 2023, a record year with EUR 5.5 billion in profitability, and which results in 9.9% return on sales. Both numbers absolutely break records for Daimler Trucks historically. And for me, what I'm most pleased of, is that every single unit delivered towards that result. It was not the heroism of one single area, it was everyone participating, and therefore, thanks a lot to all employees who worked diligently to get to that. Second most important message we gave this morning in our press conference, was that we are confident that despite headwinds, we will give a robust results in 2024, meaning we have the confidence to repeat, despite much adverse environment, the 2023. It's not just a one-time event. It should be continuous, what you can expect from Daimler Truck. Okay, thank you, Martin. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin with the Q&A session. I will address the questioners by name, but please be so kind to also introduce yourself and state your media outlet at the beginning. Take your time for your questions and ask them slowly and clearly. Let me just mention a few housekeeping notes. This whole call is conducted in English, so please be so kind to ask your questions in English as well. The operator will now explain the procedure for registering your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q&A session of Daimler Truck Holding AG. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that all participants are in listener status, and that the conference is being recorded. If you would like to ask questions, please press the star and one keys on your touchtone telephone. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star and two on your phone. If you require the assistance of an operator during the Q&A session, please press star and zero on your telephone. We will now start with the question-and-answer round. I would now like to hand over to Jörg Howe. Thank you very much, and there's already the first question, and we start with Robin Wille from DPA, German Press Agency. Go ahead, Robin. Yes, good morning. I hope you can hear me. Robin Wille, Deutsche Presse-Agentur. One question regarding the sales. In view of the difficult economic conditions, you're talking about a normalization of the market in terms of sales in 2024. Just to be clear, is this sales level now the, let's say, new normal over the next few years? Or to what extent can we expect an increase here again, and if so, to what extent? Thank you very much. First of all, Mr. Wille, in my long years in trucking, there was never normal. It was always an up and down. So normal is basically the change is normal. What I meant with normalization is that we had an absolutely abnormal situation in 2022, 2023, out of two reasons. Number one, we had always disruptions on the supply side, therefore couldn't deliver what the customers wanted, therefore had an order backlog far ahead. So we were sometimes, at the time of the year, basically sold out for the full year. That is absolutely abnormal. Now, we are back to normal, and I'll explain normal in a second. I think it's not coming back so fast, so far, and I don't know even if that I want to it to come back. Normal means that a customer orders a truck and expects that he gets a truck about one or two months, then in the future, and that is where we are. That means we sell trucks, sales guys are talking, negotiating, closing it. We give it to the production plan for an efficient production, and then we deliver the truck to the customer, latest three months later. And that is where we are today. We do that on a slightly lower level than last year. Last year was a record level in a lot of markets. Though slightly lower, means, again, normal. And it could be less, and it could be more than in the years to come, but, we have that flexibility built into our business system. We call it resilience when it goes to the downside, and we call it capacity and flexibility when it goes to the upside, and I think we have proven that we can manage the upside. 2024 is now the proof point that we are similarly capable of managing the downside. Okay. Thank you, Martin. The next one with a question is Wilfried Eckl-Dorna from Bloomberg News. Wilfried, go ahead. Yes, hello and good morning. I have a couple of questions. I hope you can hear me all well. I have a couple of questions on the outlook for 2024. I just wanted to know, yeah, a lot of analysts are actually thinking that, especially in the second half of the year, the demand for commercial vehicles will decline sharply. I just wanted to know how far your current order book will actually take you into that year. So when do you actually see really orders going down? The next thing I wanted to know is, as you're trying to hike profitability, you actually wanted to save costs, 15% costs till 2025, with cuts, also with research and development. Is that actually possible right now as you're trying to invest into, or as you're investing into, e-mobility and electric trucks? That would be my two questions. Thanks. Okay, question one, certainly normalization, as I said, means we are not sold out. We are almost sold out for the second quarter in North America. We still have quite a few openings in Europe and in other areas which we can and will fill. Therefore, it's very difficult to have an outlook for the full year. I don't agree necessarily that we will see a sharp decline. I would say it will continue throughout the year, and I feel with our guidance for the entire market, well in line with other players in the market, as well as with institutes that research the trucking markets. So this -10%-15%, yeah, you have seen it. It's always, for us, full world market, individual countries. So you have it in the material, which you find on our website, which we have shown earlier. You see the bandwidth we see during the year. At the moment, there is no reason for us not to believe that the ultimate result will be somewhere in that bandwidth. Secondly, when we talk about cost efficiency, I mean, especially we have to focus on production and SG&A, on the investments we do in product projects, and plant equipment, whether battery or fuel cell or autonomous. We definitely have excluded that from our targets and have to put them on top because we want to prepare our company for the next decade. And yes, then we have to invest, but if you don't save on the one side, you can't invest on the other side. And therefore, both things are true and has to be done. Okay. Next one is Ilona Wissenbach from Thomson Reuters. Go ahead. Yes, good morning. On the fixed cost reduction, I also had a question. I mean, there is still a big gap to bridge. And you mentioned, when you mention SG&A, does that mean headcount, further headcount reduction, or what is... In general, does it mean for headcounts? And the other question was, on the zero emissions vehicles, you mentioned earlier what all has to fall in place to get to cost parity and to make it attractive. And three years ago, you predicted TCO parity for BEV by 25 and for fuel cell vehicles by 27. Is this still achievable? And this was a very interesting example of Holcim. Did I get that right, that they ordered already 1,000 eActros? Is this a fixed order over how many years, or are those including options? Okay, first of all, Mrs. Wissenbach, I never said that cost parity is in 2025. It increased my blood pressure three years ago. It still increases my blood pressure. I tell everyone, if anybody talks about cost parity, I tell everyone, "Look," and I told it to journalists and to politicians and to customers, "Look at the fine print." If there are subsidies, if the price of energy drops below 20 cents per kWh, if we have CO2 costs built into either diesel or oil, then we could see a cost parity. But it's if, if, if, if, and then you... It's a mathematical model, and then it depends how long you drive every year, what loads you are carrying, in which countries you are driving. This is a really complex one. So I warn everyone, Martin Daum stands not... And, and you see my blood pressure is up. It's TCO parity is far too complex to be used in a headline. Electric truck and fuel cell trucks will be more expensive forever than diesel trucks, A.... B, it all depends of the price of energy. An analyst earlier asked me, "What will be the share of fuel cell trucks versus battery trucks?" And I said, "Give me the price of electric energy, and give me the price of hydrogen." And in expanding it now to cost parity with diesel, give me the price of diesel and CO2 in 2025, in 2027, in 2030, and it's very easy then to calculate for your particular truck use case, and there are myriads of use cases out. I can calculate which one is better for you financially. So, so much about the word cost parity, and now I calm down again, and hope I have- Mr. Daum, I'm sorry for your blood pressure - Yeah. Andreas Gorbach presented this three years ago. Then you have- He had this TCO parity for battery- Then that was one thing where- Perhaps it was already cut down. Then if Andreas Gorbach said it, he certainly had a lot of fine print on his slide that he presented. And if you put all fine prints together, I know Andreas Gorbach can calculate extremely well, then for that conditions, the TCO would be there. So, but back to us. We are back here. So, we are back to normal. So sorry for that, but, you know, this is a topic I'm talking so many times about it. It's all about price of energy, availability of energy, and the truck will be more expensive. Now, back to our vehicles. The cost parity is achievable if we have the infrastructure in place, and in my opinion, we have to put a price on CO2. Without that, it's not achievable. The German government has already did a very important step with the toll, road toll for trucks. I see other European countries like Denmark or France copying this principle. I would say with this instrument we can see cost parity as long as we have cheap hydrogen, where we work diligently on it, and as long as we have cheap, green energy. That is still, in my opinion, by the way, the biggest challenge for our society, much bigger than for us producing great e-vehicles. About Holcim, it's not a firm order. There's a huge difference between firm orders and intentions. Holcim has the intention, and we have that letter of intent signed, so it's more than just an idea. And we will deliver the first trucks very early, but then it goes. Certainly, we start in the second half with a start of production of the eActros. So this certainly is an order that will cover a couple of years. And when it's firm, and we only when you see orders from us, we mean always orders that we can deliver in the next 12 months. So the majority of those thousands are not yet in our order book, but will be in the times when they come. By the way, that applies to every, especially on startups, where you see very high numbers. But it shows that Holcim is really willing, on the one side, to go emission-free, and secondly, values great products with high quality and trust our promises. So this is something which really, really energizes and excites us. Headcount reduction? No, that's not a headcount reduction. It's more efficiency. I would say there is. The biggest one is IT. IT is not headcount. IT are costs we pay to service providers, and that is certainly something we have to work hard on it. Continued efficiency on production side means that you do a higher program with the number of people you have today, or that you use natural fluctuation. We are, at the moment, and you see that in other reports, in a situation, especially in Germany, that the socio-demographics help a lot. We have more people going into retirement than people joining the workforce. So it actually helps us to continue our output. Efficiencies alone from that side, a very important part. We are not talking about the releasing of people. Okay, next one in the line is Joachim Herr from Börsen-Zeitung. Joachim, go ahead. Good morning, gentlemen. Three quick questions, please. The first one: Are there still supply bottlenecks? Especially, what is the situation at your Mexican supplier, Maxion in Mazatlán? Have there the problems in the production of essential frame elements been resolved, or will it also have an impact on sales, let's say, in the first quarter or in the first half of this year? The second one: What about the impact of the higher IT costs due to the spin-off from Mercedes-Benz? Will there be also an impact, let's say, in the next few months? And the last one: The share price is rising sharply today and has already risen significantly in recent days, in recent weeks. Do you know if there are investors, for instance, funds, which have recently stepped in? Thank you. ... Mr. Herr, the first one is easy. Yes, the supplier situation in Mexico improved significantly over the fourth quarter. It's always difficult to say the problem is over. Normally, if I say that, I jinx it, and then it comes up again. But it's much better than it was four weeks ago. Four weeks ago, it was much better than it was in October, November. October, November was potentially the worst. So I would say here, the worst is over. The supply situation is still... I mean, it was in the last years, and I hope that we don't see anything coming up. The market softening, everyone reduces slightly. The production program helps, so but you never know what will happen there. But for the moment, first quarter, I don't see any bigger impact as I speak today on March 1st, but we still have 20 work days to go. But I'm positive on that. The IT costs are completely covered in our results. They are covered in our 2023 results, as we have shown, and they are completely accounted for in our 2024 outlook. You can say, without them, our results would have been better, but I hope with them, our company will be better in the future, and we'll have far more efficient end-to-end processes than we had in the past. And then about the share price, I tell you, I always thought in the past that our shares, our... The strengths of our company and the excitement we, inside the company, have, was not reflected correctly. So I'm really glad that the world sees and says congratulations to our efforts. But, you know, I'm neither an analyst nor an investor guide, so I just look at the share price and be happy that the world gets a message that we are a great company. Okay. Thanks, Martin. Next one is Daniel Zwick, Welt am Sonntag. Daniel, go ahead. Hello, good morning. I have another question on the transformation to electric vehicles. You already mentioned the conditions for this transformation, and you also talked about the political decisions and the political framework. That is, of course, very important. If you look to the U.S., in America, there's a certain probability that Donald Trump could return to the White House. If this happens, would that mean that you have to write off all investments in electric vehicles that you did up to now? First of all, I'm no political expert, and who wins the presidential election and what the winner will do next year, you have to ask the respective persons. But regardless what comes, there are, for me, a lot of certainties. Number one, we have a good diesel product. Number two, we strongly believe, and can only recommend to the world, to stick to the Paris Accord. We have to fight climate change. We have to move over. We have a lot of regional regulations in the U.S., like California and so on, that are not so easy to be overturned by federal regulations. So I see a continuous demand for zero-emission vehicles, regardless of what government there is. No, and we don't have to write off. Why? Because we have a very flexible ramp-up in production, then we don't ramp up as much. But I fear more out of the whole thing, the uncertainty on the infrastructure side, where you don't have so much flexibility. Either you have a multi-gigawatt or megawatt, and I don't know in what terawatt, gigawatt, megawatt, high-voltage power lines. You don't build just one, and then you build it down. This is a huge undertaking. You don't build up a liquid hydrogen, electrolyzer and liquefaction, industrial park, which is more like a refinery today for oil. You don't do that just to switch it on and off. It's a little bit more easy here on our truck side, and I can always remind you, and we benefited greatly, especially on the city bus side in Mannheim, with that, that we build our trucks on the same line. I can build Mannheim 100% diesel, or I can build 100% electric, and anything in between. My production guy now gets crazy about me because he needs at least a couple of months to preparation. But those things don't come overnight. They give it up. But we have that built-in flexibility, both in our investments, to come, to react to different political scenarios. But I can only urge, and that is not just the Donald Trump issue in North America, that can happen in Europe. There are parties who negate climate change, who want to turn back the Paris Accord. I can only warn, mankind will pay for that. Therefore, we are completely committed here at Daimler Trucks to support the fight against climate change. Thanks, Martin. And, for the last question, we have Alexander Jungert from Mannheimer Morgen. Alexander, go ahead. ... Jungert, Mannheimer Morgen. Hi, and thank you for having my quick question. You pay a profit sharing of EUR 7,000 for each truck employee. How much money do the bus employees get this time? Thank you. And first of all, a profit sharing, we pay. The profit sharing is part of our agreement we have with the unions for Daimler Truck AG in Germany. Yeah, we have in many other countries, in many other entities, complete different agreements. And the agreements is always a complex bag. I can't pick out just one element and then mimic it and compare it with others. The bus employees in Mannheim are part of the EvoBus group, and I know that the EvoBus management and the representative there are discussing the share for the 2023 results, and I'm not here to announce it. When it's, when it's agreed, then you certainly will read it in the newspaper, or you get it through a press release from our side. But it will be, it will be part of the entire package we initially agreed, over long years, agreed with the workers' representatives of EvoBus. Yes. Yes. Here is a number on the table, but the number is not yet public. Mm. It's not here to announce any profit sharing on EvoBus. I would say as soon as we have it- Okay ... we put it to you at an instant, okay? Yes. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. That was the last question. We've reached the end of our Q&A session. Thank you very much for taking part in this event. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Daimler Truck Communications team, and I wish you all a good day. Thank you very much again. Until next time. Was a pleasure.