Hello everyone, welcome to our Capital Market Day. It's a pleasure for me to be welcoming you today to this completely virtual event from wherever you are attending. Today, we are going to present our growth strategy to you. We are going to show you how we will connect everyone to good energy. For that, I have the whole management board of E.ON with me today. Let's take a brief look at the agenda. We will kick it all off with our CEO, Leonhard Birnbaum, who will provide you further details on his three core strategic pillars: growth, sustainability, and digitization. This will be followed by three business deep dives from our COOs, Thomas König, Patrick Lammers, and Victoria Ossadnik, who will provide you further details on energy networks, customer solutions, and digital. We will finish it all off with our CFO, Marc Spieker, who will give you further details on our new financial framework. Let me now briefly introduce Leo to you. Leo became our CEO in April this year. You probably already know him given his significant industry experience, both from RWE and E.ON. Leo led the energy integration project before he became our CEO. The energy integration laid a foundation of our new E.ON as we are going to present it to you today. Leo has a significant track record of delivering profitable growth. He's now going to show you how we will be achieving that in the future. Leo, let's get it started. Thank you, Verena. Ladies and gentlemen, investors, analysts, journalists, friends of E.ON, welcome from my side as well. It's really a pleasure to have you here this morning. I'm proud to present to you, as Verena just said, the growth strategy for E.ON today, together with my board colleagues. As E.ON, we will benefit from the ongoing energy transition. This transition, for us, creates massive growth opportunities over the coming decades. It's the moment in time for a utility like E.ON. The result that you will see today is an even more aspirational E.ON that grows much faster than before. You will see an E.ON that has a significantly higher visibility for our investors. You will see an E.ON that is a truly green investment proposition. The result from that strategy I will also show you in our revised financial framework. I'm committed to grow earnings per share and dividend per share despite the nuclear phase out and despite regulatory cycles going forward. Earnings per share will grow 8%-10% until 2026. Dividend per share will grow up to 5% annually until 2026. We'll keep on growing beyond that. For the fiscal year 2021, we start with a dividend commitment of EUR 0.49 per share. This makes us an attractive investment proposition. We combine the low-risk profile of a largely regulated business with attractive dividends and a 5% long-term earnings growth until 2030. Why do I feel so at ease to present you this strategy and this financial framework? The answer is quite simple. There are three reasons. All three are opportunities for us. They are the ones that I've been mentioning since I started in my new role. It's opportunities from unprecedented growth in our industry. It's opportunities from the quest for sustainability in our whole business environment. It's opportunities from digitization to improve efficiency and to drive growth even outside our own customer and our own asset base. Again, these are the three themes that have been on the agenda all the time this year. My board colleagues and I will share the whole story behind these topics. Let me start with growth. In the next 2 decades, we will see growth for all our businesses. Unprecedented growth, especially if you compare it with the growth that we have seen or not seen over the last 2 decades. We at E.ON, we will benefit from that growth. That's true for both, for energy networks and for customer solutions. Where is this growth coming from? First, it's the obvious one. We need to integrate a large number of new renewables into our energy system to make the energy transition a reality. There's even more. Not only more renewables, we have also complete industries moving our way. Complete industries are converging with the energy system. The best-known example is e-mobility, where mobility converges with the power sector. The same is true for all energy-intensive industries. Just take steel. We have more industries coming into our system. There's even more. We see a huge amount of new energy-intensive customers coming to us, data centers, the new mega fabs, battery factories, and so on. Finally, we need much smarter grids. We have even the need to modernize and smartify our grids. The bottom line is, it's a huge growth opportunity in networks. A huge growth opportunity is driven by all these four factors. I can put that also into numbers, what that means. We will ramp up our investments into networks by gradually increasing our annual CapEx by EUR 1 billion up to 2026. This will translate into higher power RAB growth of at least 6% annually, and it will deliver 3%-4% EBITDA growth per year until 2026. Thomas König will present this in much more detail in his presentation directly afterwards. To be clear, to make the energy transition a reality does not only drive growth in networks, it also drives growth in customer solutions. Why is that? Because every one of our customers is looking for his or her own way to decarbonize. We have 50 million B2C customers that eventually have to decarbonize their personal carbon footprint. That means more business for our Future Energy Home, more business for our e-mobility business. We have cities and municipalities that need to decarbonize the heat supply, and that means more business for our Energy Infrastructure Solutions. We have energy-intensive industries that need to move towards net zero, and that offers optionality, for example, in hydrogen. The bottom line is the same in customer solutions as in network. It's a huge growth opportunity. Again, also for customer solutions, I can put that into numbers and specific commitments. We will grow in customer solutions, our EBITDA, with a CAGR of 5%-8% until 2026. In Energy Infrastructure Solutions, we will ramp up our growth investments to EUR 500 million or EUR 600 million annually in our decentral infrastructure. To achieve the ambitions in our customer business, digitization is and will be the key. Only digitization allows for the necessary efficiencies, and therefore, we will migrate all our customers to state-of-the-art digital platforms by 2026. Regarding our solutions in the hydrogen sector, we are uniquely positioned to take over a crucial part of the hydrogen value chain. This is driven by our experience in operating the infrastructure and supplying the customers, especially the medium-sized customers, that are looking for their decarbonization solutions. Again, this opens additional growth potential for us. We have not yet included this in our numbers, which we will show you today. There's more to come, and Patrick will give you details on that when he speaks later on customer solutions. Much for growth. Let me move on to sustainability. The story on sustainability for E.ON is quite simple. What you need to remember is that for us, the quest for sustainability is an opportunity. Why is that an opportunity? Because we are sustainable by definition. We heard it in the video in the intro. We at E.ON, we do not need to replace our products and services which we have today by new products and services. The faster the society moves towards net zero, the more we will need every part of our today's business, and the more sustainable we will be. That means that for us, sustainability translates into growth in all our existing businesses, and this is what I just talked about when I talked about growth in networks and customer solutions. It's not only the businesses that will be sustainable. We as E.ON, as a company, want to be sustainable. We want to be a sustainable company ourselves, and this is where I could basically stop. Again, also on sustainability, let me give you some quantitative targets and commitments. What are our commitments on sustainability? First, regarding the sustainable business. We will develop our business towards even more sustainability. 85%-90% of our investments in eligible activities are and will be aligned with the EU Taxonomy in the planning period. We have also ambitious carbon reduction targets. They will finally lead to full carbon neutrality, including Scope 3 by 2050. Regarding Scope-1 and 2, we will be there already in 2040. Thomas König and Patrick Lammers will explain the specific business targets, how to get there in their speeches. Now it's obvious that our targets are consistent with the 1.5 degrees centigrade aspiration, and we are in the process of getting them also scientifically certified according to SBTi. On the sustainable company, E.ON, I want to make sure that sustainability is enrooted in everything we do day by day, because sustainability happens in all functions, in all areas, day by day. What have we done? We have broken down the sustainability targets on our operation units as part of the planning process. We have integrated ESG into our risk management processes. We have established green financing as the new normal. By our green bond framework, we issue large debt volumes. We have even integrated the most important ESG targets into our compensation scheme for executives. I can summarize. E.ON means sustainability in our whole setup, in the things we do, and in the targets we pursue. Let me now move on to our last topic, to digitization. Digitization, it's pretty straightforward. If you are not fully digital in the future, you will not be around in the future. The future energy system will be much more complex than in the past. We will have millions, but really millions of prosumers that interact with each other on a constant basis. Flexibility will become a key topic every second, in every second, and in every location on a regional basis. The demand to be able to observe the status of our systems and to control it, again in every second, in every location, will explode. Customers will expect a full digital service as they know it from other industries, and that again drives the need for digitization. Our systems, processes, and structures work today, but they will have to be transformed to match the needs of the future that I just described. We need new processes, structures, and systems. Only, as I'm deeply convinced, only as an all-digital companies can we master the challenges of this future energy world. In this sense, digitization is an enabler. You need to do it. Only as an all-digital company will we be competitive in the future. Only digitization allows for the necessary efficiencies. Last but not least, digitization also supports growth as we can develop completely new value proposition for our customers. This is our chance to tap this potential, and this is why we will become an all-digital company. That you understand better what we really mean, let me share with you our definition of digitization. We want to use digital technologies to radically change our products and services, and the emphasis in the sentence is on radically change, not incrementally change. We want to transform our products and services into data-driven and connected solutions. The emphasis here is on transforming into something new, not just digitizing the old stuff. We want to monetize these solutions via efficiencies and completely new value proposition. The emphasis here is on two ways of monetizing. Much for our definition and aspiration, and it shows you how fundamental we want to attack this topic. Victoria will detail later how we will make digitization work for us, how we will make it a reality. She will also show how digitization will create value by driving efficiencies and growth, both for our network and solutions business. Digitization, by the way, is obviously also an opportunity to make us more efficient, which Patrick and Thomas will explain. Before I conclude with summarizing, I have one last point to cover: efficiency. I personally believe that any company, but also E.ON, needs to earn its right to grow. The way to earn that is to be efficient. We'll continue to be efficient. It's hard work. It's hard work to grow earnings in energy networks despite shrinking regulatory returns. It's hard work to grow EBITDA in our competitive customer solution business. We will not shy away from that. We will strive for excellence in everything we do. Hence, we have incorporated in our new financial framework also additional efficiency gains. Until 2026, these efficiencies will gradually ramp up to around EUR 500 million per year from 2026 onwards. On top of the synergies from the innogy transaction, which we are still ramping up, Marc will show you some details later. On top, we strive to realize the CapEx growth without a parallel OpEx growth. That means an additional productivity increase, which Thomas will explore in some detail. Let me just conclude with the three reasons why I really believe that this is the moment in time, this is the industry to be in, and why I'm so excited about the future of our E.ON. E.ON benefits from the necessity to decarbonize. We are really facing unprecedented growth opportunities. They are stable and robust, and we will make this growth work in our favor. We are sustainable by definition in our business. We are a truly green investment because we are connecting everyone to good energy, and we will make sure that we are sustainable ourselves as well. We will be an all-digital company, which will provide us with many opportunities for efficiency and growth, even beyond our own business, our own customer and asset base. This will pay off for you as shareholders. As you heard in the beginning, as Marc will detail in the end, this means three commitment. We deliver continuous growing EPS and DPS despite the nuclear phase-out and despite regulatory cycles. We will grow our earnings per share by 8%-10% until 2026, and we will grow dividend per share by up to 5% annually until 2026. We will make sure DPS keeps on growing beyond that. Again, that makes us an attractive value proposition. Low risk of a largely regulated business, attractive dividends, 5% long-term earnings growth. Stay tuned. I see you at the end of the session. Verena, I hand over back to you. Many thanks, Leo, for these great insights. Many thanks, actually, for sharing with us your optimism, for highlighting our growth opportunities, and for delivering your commitments that we will deliver on these growth opportunities. Let me now move to the business section, kicking it all off with our COO Energy Networks, Thomas König. Thomas is a real networks expert. He has more than 25 years of experience in the field, having served as both CEO and CFO of E.ON subsidiaries before becoming our COO Energy Networks in 2018. Thomas has a significant track record of delivering large-scale CapEx projects as well as significant efficiency projects. He's very well known to us of delivering to his promises. Thomas, we are very much looking forward to hear about the grids of tomorrow from you today. The floor is yours. Thank you, Verena. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Warm welcome also from my side. It's my pleasure to share our strategic ambitions in energy networks with you. I have three key messages for you. First, fueled by the energy transition, we will accelerate our power RAB growth to at least 6% per year until 2026. Second, we will leverage digitization to increase our efficiency and to capture regulatory outperformance. Third, we will sustainably grow our EBITDA by 3%-4% per year until 2026. Take this as my personal commitment to you, we will deliver. Let me now explain how we get there. With 1.2 million kilometers of power lines and a regulated asset base of EUR 35 billion, we are the largest power distribution network operator in Europe, with strong footprints in Germany, in Sweden, and Central Eastern Europe. Germany represents around two-thirds of our RAB. The remainder is a diversified portfolio of economically robust and attractive regions with established regulatory regimes. E.ON's networks are the backbone for Europe's green energy transition. We are connecting renewables and enable our customers to participate in the energy transition. Our networks actively contribute to Europe's net zero targets. With every new connection of a renewable energy source, we replace a fuel, fossil fuel, and get closer to the Paris Agreement goals. So far, E.ON has already connected nearly a million renewables to its grids in Europe with a capacity of around 80 GW. That represents a European market share of more than 20%. This renewable capacity is increasing day by day. In the next five years, we expect to connect additional 40 GW. Renewable energy and energy networks are two sides of the same coin. The energy transition will only succeed if we expand renewables and networks synchronously. In the coming years, we will not only integrate a huge number of additional renewables, we will also connect millions of new customer-friendly consumers to our networks, such as electric vehicles, heat pumps, and energy storage. With the connection of every new electric vehicle, we replace a fossil-fueled car. With the connection of every new heat pump, we replace a fossil-fueled gas or oil heater. A recent Eurelectric study assumes that 70 million electric vehicles and 50 million heat pumps will be connected to the distribution grid in Europe by 2030. What a great outlook for us. Furthermore, we are connecting large industrial customers in key technologies such as e-mobility, battery production, and data centers to our distribution networks. In Germany, for example, in the area of Frankfurt, we recently confirmed new connections for data centers with a capacity of more than 1 GW, and we have additional requests for more than 2 GW for data centers in total. To give you another example, our German DSO, E.DIS, in the northeastern part of Germany, has requests for six times renewables capacity than currently installed. To sum it up, we have more than enough requests for connections to support our growth targets. As Leo already flagged, we not only empower our customers to reduce their CO2 emissions, we also make our own contribution. We have committed ourselves to carbon neutrality for our biggest network operators. In Germany and in Sweden, we will be carbon neutral already by 2030. We have clearly defined the path and measures how to achieve our targets. We will technically enhance our networks to avoid grid losses to the highest extent possible. In addition, we will make our own buildings and our car fleet completely CO2 neutral within the next couple of years. We are committed to creating and maintaining healthy ecosystems and increasing biodiversity. Across Europe, we manage our grid corridors in an ecological way and will turn around 70,000 hectares along 13,000 km of high voltage power lines into valuable biotopes and habitats. With the ecological corridor management, we make an important contribution to protecting ecosystems. At the same time, we increase the security of supply for our customers by an enhanced monitoring of our power lines. For us, sustainability is the core of everything we do. This holds also true when it comes to gas, as there will be no energy transition without green molecules. Thus, E.ON's assets will also play an important role in the decarbonization of gas. We see a high potential for the conversion of our existing gas networks to hydrogen from the second half of the decade onwards. My colleague Patrick will tell you more about that in a moment. Sustainability creates a multitude of long-term business opportunities for us. To capture these opportunities, we increase our annual networks CapEx gradually by EUR 1 billion per year from EUR 3.5 billion in 2021 to EUR 4.5 billion in 2026. More than 90% of that CapEx is aligned with EU Taxonomy. With these upgraded investments targets, our regulated asset base will grow sustainably for many, many years. We accelerate our Power RAB growth outlook to at least 6% until 2026, and we plan for a similar growth even for the years beyond. The Power RAB growth will drive an attractive earnings trajectory. Despite the challenges from lower allowed returns, we will grow our EBITDA by 3%-4% per year. This translates into EUR 6 billion-EUR 6.2 billion EBITDA for energy networks in 2026 across Europe. To deliver attractive growth, of course, we need regulatory schemes that ensure an adequate level of allowed returns. This is especially true for the return on equity in Germany. The announcement of the final return on equity of 5.07% is disappointing. We appreciate the roughly 450 basis points increase compared to the initial proposal, but the uplift is well below expectations. The market risk premium calculation is full of errors. The premium itself, it's way too low in international comparison. We therefore decided to pursue legal proceedings against the decision of the German regulator. Please keep in mind, allowed returns are only one element of the total regulatory package. Outperformance opportunities, especially on OpEx, can and are substantial. In Germany, we have a long-standing track record of being the cost efficiency leader in our industry. E.ON is prepared to take a big step forward and to support the energy transition by increasing our investment significantly. We trust and expect that the regulator will reward this effort. Let me come to the third pillar of our strategy. This is digitization. The future energy world will be extremely complex, as Leo already explained. The number of network participants is exploding with millions of connected renewables, new electric applications, and new grid assets. Only with digitization it will be possible to keep the system stable. With digitization, we are managing the increasing complexity, we are optimizing the utilization of our networks, and we are increasing efficiency. All for the benefit of our customers and the environment. We are building one digital ecosystem for energy networks with a focus on standardization and scaling. In Germany, we operate one of the most complex distribution networks with a high amount of volatile renewable feed-in and a high number of connected customers. Despite these complex challenges, our network operators were confirmed by the regulator having world-class security of supply. We can only master this complexity because we are continuously investing in the modernization and the digitization of our grids. We digitally interconnect all our physical assets like power lines, transformers, substations, or smart meters with the control centers. That allows us to react faster and master the challenge of volatile grid loads much easier. For example, in case of an outage, we can easily check where exactly the problem occurs and potentially fix it purely remotely without sending technicians to the site. We have set ourselves ambitious targets for digitization. In Germany, we will make a medium voltage grid 100% observable and 20% controllable by 2026. On the low voltage grid layer, we will increase the observability to 30% from basically zero today. Based on mathematical models, our low voltage system operations have good controllability already with 30% observability. To achieve these targets, we will install more than 4,000 smart substations every year. We will operate one single data platform for our international energy networks by 2026. This single data platform will be the centerpiece to manage complex power flows, realize efficiencies, and scale solutions. My colleague Victoria will explain that in more detail later. Our digitization efforts are an important building block for our performance to ensure operational excellence and cost efficiency. It is embedded deeply in our DNA to strive for the highest cost efficiency in every market we operate. Eight of our nine German power DSOs obtained the highest possible efficiency score of 100%. Three of them have been even awarded with a so-called super efficiency bonus, which grants additional revenues for an exceptionally strong performance. To further improve operational excellence and cost efficiency, we established a highly sophisticated benchmarking system for all our network operators across Europe. In this exercise, we analyze a total cost base of more than EUR 5 billion via more than 200 KPIs, and we benchmark more than 60 grid processes. Thus, we are very confident regarding the expected efficiency scores of the upcoming regulatory benchmarking in Germany. We expect to permanently increase our productivity. We measure productivity by the total OpEx that we need to operate a significantly growing RAB. We expect to continuously increase our productivity by improving OpEx over RAB by 4%-5% per year until 2026. Ladies and gentlemen, let me summarize. We will significantly accelerate our Power RAB growth to at least 6% per year until 2026. We will increase EBITDA by 3%-4% per year throughout regulatory cycles. We will set the benchmark for efficiency through digitization. Our networks will actively contribute to the success of the energy transition in Europe and, at the same time, deliver solid, profitable growth for E.ON and for you. You can rely on us. We will deliver. Thank you for your attention, and back to Verena. Many thanks, Thomas. Energy networks are clearly the backbone for E.ON. Many thanks for highlighting to us how you will accelerate our investments into the grids and digitization to deliver the energy transition and attractive returns. Let me now introduce Patrick Lammers to you, thinking about how we are all connected and how this affects our customers. Patrick Lammers, our COO for Customer Solutions, has a truly diverse professional background. He started his career at Shell, successfully scaled a startup, became CEO of Dyson Group before moving to RWE in 2012. Since 2017, he has served as CEO for Essent, our Dutch subsidiary, and since 2019, he in personal union led our Western European Customer Solutions activities. Patrick, the floor is yours. Many thanks, Verena. Good morning to you all, ladies and gentlemen. A warm welcome from my side as well. I am very proud to present to you today how Customer Solutions will capture the tremendous opportunity Leo was talking about and also Thomas was talking about in the energy transition across Europe. Just to make sure everybody understands what is Customer Solutions, let me give you an overview what we mean when we are talking about E.ON Customer Solutions. We are a truly European player with 50 million customers, our biggest asset base. These customers trust us and our operations to deliver to them their daily energy needs. We are their reliable energy supplier. We have earned their trust by delivering on our promises every year to connect everyone to good energy. Now our customer relationships span over three main business areas. Three, each of these will make a significant contribution to the overall growth of E.ON. First, energy retail. This includes the energy sales business, the capital light Future Energy Home, and our eMobility solutions. We will grow our capital light energy retail EBITDA by 3%-6% per year until 2026. Second, Energy Infrastructure Solutions. These are infrastructure-based, decentral energy solutions to enable municipalities and industries to participate in the energy transition. We will significantly grow our decentral Energy Infrastructure Solutions EBITDA by 9%-12% until 2026. Third, we will capture enormous growth opportunities in two rapidly accelerating fields, eMobility infrastructure and very exciting hydrogen market. Let me explain where these unprecedented opportunities come from and how we take more than our fair share of the market. Our strategy fully reflects our claim to connect everyone to good energy, enabling households, commercial and industrial customers, as well as cities and municipalities, to shift from fossil fuels to green energy. A shift that is no longer a nice-to-have, or it is in a distant future. A shift that is really part of our lives. How we use electricity, how we move around, how we produce and make our things, and how we heat, like today, or cool in the summer. A shift is nothing less than a global transition from a fossil-based equilibrium to really a green energy equilibrium, that is a huge movement. Our customers are fully aware of this development, and with their commitment, the demand for green electrons and green molecules in mobility, buildings, and industry will grow exponentially over the coming years. In our view, the transition towards a green equilibrium will take approximately 15 years, this period opens up tremendous opportunity for us to capture the sustainable value, this is where we will make a difference. This is really our ability to deliver. Our portfolio of both capital light and infrastructure-based models is best positioned to benefit from these opportunities. Let me give you some more detail on how we will deliver the growth and share some proof points, starting with the energy retail business. Across our footprint in Europe, we have experienced unprecedented developments in the recent weeks and months, with all-time high prices, but also extreme volatility in those markets. It is especially in these situations when we are all reminded of how essential energy is to all our lives. These are also times when we are reminded of a resilient business model. Our retail excellence, our robust risk management principles, and long-term hedge policies we enable players like us to weather such environments, even strengthen our position going forward. Enabled by our E.ON Business System, we are keeping pace with every market and deliver excellence in our operations. We will be able to increase our Energy Retail EBITDA over the next five years to an EBITDA level of EUR 1.2 billion to EUR 1.4 billion in 2026. We will achieve this through operating a healthy and stable customer base. We are continuously looking for additional value in our customer portfolio. That means more focus on the higher margin end and reducing exposure to market volatility and low margin segments. Our plan for the B2B commodity business is an important proof point. Already last year, we took a proactive decision to halve our supplier volumes from 300 terawatt-hours to 150 terawatt-hours by 2024, whilst increasing our overall earnings and reducing our risk exposure. Another driver for increasing Retail EBITDA is digitization. It's a key enabler to achieve maximum efficiencies, we will have an upgraded digital platform in all markets in 2026 and serve our mass market customer digitally. Proof point is, in the U.K., we are reducing the cost per customer by 50% through the introduction of E.ON Next for 8 million customers. My colleague, Victoria, will tell you more about our group wide digital transformation and go into more detail for that. Let me highlight how we will capture value from the other two units in our Retail Energy business, Future Energy Home and E-Mobility Solutions. Our capital light Future Energy Home business strongly benefits from the energy transitions around the home, the house of our customers. With our zero emission products and solutions like solar, battery, heat pumps, cooling, and insulation, we already gained market leading positions in several markets with strong acceleration in 2021. Our revenues were increased by 20% and we are already profitable with an expected EBITDA of above EUR 50 million, it's growing further. We see this market size doubling by 2030, fueled by increased customer demand and government support, we will capture these opportunities and grow our business substantially. How will we do that? How will we deliver? First, we use the access to 50 million customers by leveraging our strong brand across Europe. This is our really earning capacity. Second, we use our proven focus of standardization, industrialization, and to rapidly scale every solution we do. Third, we will continuously develop new and digital propositions like E.ON Home or gridX ecosystem. These three drivers allow us more than double our Future Energy Home revenues for the current EUR 800 million to EUR 1.7 billion by 2026. Moving to the third unit of our Retail business, E-Mobility. Here we see an even faster development of E-Mobility in the coming years as electric vehicles will grow. People will not be longer able to buy a combustion engine car by 2030. Already today, we see strong customer awareness and commitment to the mobility transition, which is also supported through significant government incentives. E.ON will strongly benefit from this development because we are the partner for charging solutions. We show this already today how strong partnership help us towards this ambition. With another proof point being our recent ventures with BMW and the ADAC. Another very recent example is the E.ON Drive Booster, which we just launched together with Volkswagen. This plug-and-play fast charger solution works with a storage battery and no civil engineering work is required. All of this enables us to grow our revenues from double-digit million EUR level today to EUR 1 billion by 2026, in line with strongly growing market. All together, we see strong growth in Energy Retail, both from our core business and from our new initiatives. Not only Retail Energy is driving energy transition and our earnings. Let me shed some more light on how we capture the opportunities from helping municipalities and industries to enable the energy transition with our Energy Infrastructure Solutions business. Our customers, cities, municipalities, commercial and industrial customers, are facing unprecedented challenges in how to decarbonize all their processes, their services, and their solutions. We are supporting them to reduce their carbon footprint with decarbonization solutions for district heating and cooling systems, city quarters, and industrial and commercial customers. With our broad solutions portfolio, we are taking market leading positions across Europe, a market that we see growing at least 6% per year and, again, is accelerating. How do we capture the value of this development? We have a multitude of innovative solutions to help our customers. Just to give you one proof point, our E.ON patented ectogrid, a unique low-temperature solutions that delivers both heating and cooling in a two-pipe system, balancing as much energy between buildings as possible, and therefore reducing the overall energy demand. It's the cloud-based solutions with a unique proposition that was developed in-house, which is decentral, modular, and 100% utilized from day one. We have applied this already. For example, the Medicon Village in Sweden, and we will deploy and multiply this across Europe, exactly like we do with other successful projects, like in London and Berlin. Through scaling our business model across the regions, we will take more than a fair share of the market. To capture the growth, we will see EUR 500 million to EUR 600 million of growth investments annually in Energy Infrastructure Solutions at a target IRR of 7%-10%. This will lead to an increase of Infrastructure Solutions business EBITDA to a level of EUR 700 million to EUR 800 million by 2026. Last but not least, we will capture enormous growth opportunities, two business fields that are rapidly accelerating. First one, eMobility infrastructure. In addition to charging at home or at work, an area-wide charging infrastructure is key to the transition of eMobility. Far, it's lagging behind the EV car sales. Here, eMobility infrastructure will take an instrumental role in closing this gap. In our view, now is the time to act. We intend to enter into partnerships to help accelerate the growth of an ultra-fast charging network. Over the coming decade, more than 1,000 charging points per year will be added to reach top three network position across E.ON regions. We will deliver this by partnering our business to further increase value and to accelerate growth. The second rapidly growing area we will capture growth is hydrogen. Thomas mentioned it, Leo mentioned it. Hydrogen will play an essential role in energy mix. It will be the major energy carrier for decarbonization on the way to net zero. Actively, we are already pursuing 50 projects in development in infrastructure and solutions in relevant demand clusters. One example is our partnership with Salzgitter AG, where the switch to wind-generated hydrogen will result up to 95% reduction in CO2 emission from steel production. Additionally, as a European CEO Alliance member, we will recently announce the H2.Ruhr project. Here we will supply our customers in industrial Ruhr region with green hydrogen, and actually will make a difference also there in the future to go to net zero. Mainly based on strong customer demand, we will use the next 12 to 18 months to scale up and to establish E.ON as a trusted player in the hydrogen market. One last important point that offers a true advantage. Our complementary geographic footprint across Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., and Sweden gives us a real ideal match for the rapidly evolving hydrogen play centered around the North Sea region. This is where we believe it all will start. This perfectly positions us to shape the hydrogen economy and our place in it. We are therefore very excited to add hydrogen to our business portfolio and to enable our customers to shift from gray to green molecules. Let me finish my presentation with a short summary. First, we will grow our capital light energy retail business by 3%-6% per year until 2026. Second, we will be partner of choice for cities and industries in their decarbonization journey, leading to a significant EBITDA growth of 9%-12% per year in our Energy Infrastructure Solutions business until 2026. Third, we will capture enormous growth opportunities in eMobility infrastructure and hydrogen. In total, we will grow our Customer Solutions EBITDA from EUR 1.4 billion to EUR 1.6 billion to a range of EUR 1.9 billion and EUR 2.2 billion by 2026. This is how we make sure we deliver on our promises to our customers, our employees, and to you as shareholders. Thank you very much for your attention, back to you, Verena. Many thanks, Patrick, for highlighting our growth opportunities in the Customer Solutions business to us. I'm very much looking forward for us to deliver on that growth and to connect our customers to green energy. As Leo already pointed out, digitization is a key enabler for our growth ambitions and will be at the heart of everything we do. That's why I'm very much looking forward to introducing Victoria Ossadnik now to you, our COO Digital. Victoria is a true digital expert. She has been serving in management positions at Oracle and Microsoft before she started leading our German energy sales activities in 2018. She successfully digitized our German energy sales business, and she will be now applying her full experience to the whole of E.ON. Victoria, I'm excited to hear from you. The floor is yours. Thank you, Verena, and welcome. Digital is key for E.ON, and this digital transformation actually is key because it is driving efficiencies and profitable growth. This means for us, and actually for somebody who loves technology, this is super exciting to share that. This means for us. The better we are in digitization, the more we can profit from the transition in our energy world. This means we are becoming a truly all digital company. Already today, we have a good technology base, which gives us a good starting point, and we have already demonstrated how we significantly can improve efficiencies by digital transformation. We have done this and are doing this in our retail business, both in Germany and U.K. There is much more, and this much more is complexity. You heard about the rapidly rising complexity, and we can only manage this complexity if we do a really good digital transformation. Digitalization enables us to manage and to benefit from this complexity. Given where we are, this is giving us a great opportunity. Looking a little bit into the complexity, you heard this complexity actually comes from two sides, and we are sitting in the middle. The one side is the generation side. The other side is the end customer side. From the generation side, you heard from Thomas that we are moving towards a feed-in, which is decentral, volatile, and even sometimes local weather dependent. Only smart energy networks and digital standardized platforms can deal efficiently and reliably with this. Patrick explained how the demand side is growing, which gives us a great growth opportunity if we can handle this. It is growing in the electrification of transport, heating, and production. We only will retain and win our customers there if we have an attractive customer interface. For this, we need intelligent retail systems. Then we will profit from this growth and develop into new markets. We operate one of the largest energy grids in Europe. We are serving 50 million customers. We are in a good starting place on digital, and actually complexity is helping us. This is why we are in the right place to use digitalization as a lever for both growth and profitability. To get this right, we are taking a very structured approach to digitization. Our transformation is following a plan. We are delivering on it. As Leo shared, we have our definition of digital transformation. For us, and this is something we always remind each other of, for us, it means applying technologies to radically change traditional processes, products, and services into data-driven, highly connected solutions. We do this consciously. Having a structured approach, we are following a strategy based on four main pillars. These four main pillars are we optimize our operations, and you heard quite something about this, and I am going deeper into this. We are transforming our products. We grow into new businesses. We engage with our customers and partners. We empower our employees. Let me go to our first strategic pillar, optimizing our operations. Our operations are the foundation of everything we do. This means the more efficient and the more flexible we are here, the better the business can grow and adapt, especially in fast-changing circumstances, which we are currently seeing. We are moving our technology foundation towards modern and modular systems, and we are changing our operations to benefit from modern technology. Doing all this, we are taking a big step. We are cloudifying all our applications until the end of 2023. We are doing this in a very conscious way. We want to do it fast because we need it. We also are doing it smoothly with a highly regard of to really operationalize this for our business in the best way to gain efficiencies and to sustain the growth. We are working together with Microsoft and Wipro to get this done within 2 years to be able to close our data centers and to move the hosted applications into the cloud. We are doing this for very solid reasons. It reduces our costs, it increases security, it enables standardization on modern technology, and it reduces our carbon footprint. Based on this technology foundation, we are digitally transforming our energy networks. We are smartifying large parts of our grids over the next years. For this smartification, we are spending EUR 300 million to EUR 400 million each year into our Regulated Asset Base. Doing this, our digital CapEx is directly enhancing the earnings of our regulated network activities. The smartification gives us the opportunity to make grid planning, management, and the maintenance more efficient, and it will support efficient growth. That way, digital technologies improve our cost efficiency. As Thomas highlighted, this is key for network performance, and it supports our ambition to improve our productivity, which we measure on OpEx on RAB by 4%-5% annually. In the retail business, we are optimizing by implementing digital sales platforms, and you've seen us starting this already in U.K. and in Germany. The platforms cover the entire customer journey end to end, and they allow us to use data to optimize and to grow our business. Moving on from there, we look into how can we achieve that. Now I am going to spend some time on technology, and I am spending this time because it is so essential for us. Technology is the link. Digital technology is the link between all our different businesses, and we need to use it like that. This is what we are doing. We are using one strong platform architecture across the company. You've seen this in the presentations of Thomas, and Leo mentioned it. One architecture for the company, one data platform. This enables us to save cost, to drive process excellence, and to set high security standards for everybody in our company. It also allows us to develop our own digital energy solutions, which we can leverage across our company. Establishing this standard architecture as a groupwide common technology platform is a big step forward for us, and it is actually changing the way we operate towards more efficiency and towards us leveraging more chances for growth. This is a massive improvement to where we come from: from a locally driven architecture approach which was optimized for local use. Now we are using our size in digital as a strength. We have a highly standardized data and service architecture, and our common technology platform is driving harmonization and standardization across our entire company. From this, I would move on to our second pillar. Here, we are focusing on developing new products to drive revenue and profitable growth. I described our digital solutions. In addition to using them for ourselves, we will offer a targeted selection of digital solutions to our customers. We are creating a portfolio of energy-centric digital solutions that will, step by step, grow into an ecosystem called eHub. eHub will provide external customers with digital energy services. Examples for this are B2C retail platforms, electric vehicle load management, and connection services for energy networks. eHub gives us a chance to combine something where we are historically best, our deep industry knowledge, and our common technology platform, which is optimized for energy. Every solution we built for E.ON is based on our common technology platform, and we're designing it for external customers. We will generate revenues with this approach starting next year. An early proof for the demand of such products is our digital sales platform in Germany, which we already started to sell as a service to municipalities. Besides developing our own products, for some functionalities, we will make targeted acquisitions. An example is a recent acquisition which we made of a Germany-based startup, GridX. GridX has developed best-in-class technology to steer decentral energy production, storage, and consumption assets. Using GridX, you can intelligently steer photovoltaics, batteries, wall boxes, and many more assets. From this, I'm coming to our third pillar. Everything we do at E.ON is centered around our customers. This is so important for us because we can drive customer growth, upsell at customers, and customer value through the way we connect with customers. Via our upgraded sales platforms in all our retail markets, we will not only, and this is very important, gain efficiencies, but we ensure great customer experience. Examples why we would do this come from upselling and come from customer value. Looking into upselling, we are aiming to upsell if somebody in their home is having their electricity home tariff, we want to sell them photovoltaics, or we want to sell them electric vehicle loading. If somebody is buying a car, by just selling them the electricity for the car, we also want to win them as customers for other parts of our solutions. An example for raising the margin per customer is using data analytics and artificial intelligence to create optimized and personalized bonus schemes for potential and our new customers. We are creating a better customer proximity to continue improving our efficiencies. We are doing this on our digital platforms by digitized customer interfaces, automation of tasks on the platforms, and standardization across all retail business units. Now I'm moving to the last strategic pillar. This is actually one which is really close to my heart because I deeply believe if you don't get this right, the rest is nice, but it's not bringing us towards the growth we are planning and we want to exceed. This is about people. Digital transformation is not just that we transform what we do, but how we do it. If you look at it, how we are driving our business, everything we do is done by our people. Our people, our teams, need to design, believe, and pave the way for our E.ON's best digital transformation. For this, we empower our people. We empower our people to get this right, to really grasp this big opportunity we have. We are convinced we can train our employees in all roles to make the best use of their role-specific digital technology. Let me give you a few examples what we mean by this. If you look into a call center agent taking calls, a call center agent working for us will now start to train chatbots. An energy network designer who's designing the networks will use digital twins for optimization of current and of future networks. Our management teams are learning and already using collaboration tools to work more efficiently and more focused on their management problems. We have started a digital academy for fostering employee development journeys, and all our employees will be involved by 2024. We are supporting growing number of learning paths for different careers, we will measure the skill development of the organization. In addition to this, what is true for the entire company, we are significantly strengthening the digital and IT capabilities within E.ON. We upskill our people, we hire highly qualified experts. We will increase our digital capabilities and double the experts in data science, application development, and automation to 500 employees by 2024. We are already successful in attracting top IT talent in the market. Now let me summarize the key takeaways. The growing complexity of the energy systems can only be handled with modern technology. This is a great opportunity for us. We are on our way to build and own the digital technology platform, the skilled workforce, and the digital mindset to lead the energy transition. Digital transformation will support significant growth and deliver digitally enabled efficiencies in energy networks and customer solutions. Ladies and gentlemen, our digital transformation is driven by our people enables us to connect everyone to good energy. This makes E.ON one of the most exciting and rewarding places to be. Thank you very much for your attention, back to you, Verena. Many thanks, Victoria, for highlighting to us how E.ON will become an all-digital company with our own technology and with our own know-how. This concludes our business section for today. Many thanks to our COOs, Thomas, Patrick, and Victoria, for highlighting the growth opportunities in the respective business fields to us to show us how they are working together to achieve our goals. Let's now move on to the numbers and to our CFO, Marc Spieker. Marc Spieker is already probably well-known to most of you, I'm not going to deeply introduce him here to you now. Just one thing. Since Marc became our CFO in 2017, he made reliability the cornerstone of our financial framework. Marc, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Verena. Dear analysts and investors, ladies and gentlemen, good morning and a warm welcome also from my side. My colleagues have presented exciting strategic and operational ambitions. My part of the presentation is now to show you how and why it will pay off to connect everyone to good energy, how good energy will turn into great returns for you as our investors. I want to highlight three things right from the start. First, we confirm and extend our existing dividend commitment to annually grow the dividend per share by up to 5% for the next 5 years and promise further growth beyond. Second, we upgrade our investment budget and earmark a total of EUR 27 billion for the next 5 years. With this, we will accelerate the speed at which we realize the unique opportunities from decarbonizing and electrifying European energy systems. Third, efficient use of capital and the relentless focus on operational efficiency will stay high on the agenda and result in strong organic earnings growth. Our earnings per share will grow by 8%-10% per year on average until 2026. We have consistently delivered against our financial frameworks in the past. We will continue to deliver against it in the future. Our updated financial framework remains the compass for our decision-making as a management team. We have extended the time horizon of our framework to cover the next 5 instead of, as previously, just 3 years. This underscores how confident we are to execute against our targets. Going forward, we will focus on EBITDA as our key metric for operating profitability. You already have seen this in the targets highlighted by my colleagues. Looking at EBITDA instead of EBIT will give you a much more adequate view on the earnings momentum resulting from our growing asset base. We will continue to manage for bottom-line results. Earnings per share stay a pivotal part of our financial framework. Earnings per share also remain a cornerstone of our management incentive scheme. All our accumulated average growth rates and related commitments will only focus on our core segments, that is energy networks and customer solutions and corporate functions. This gives you a clean template on which to assess the long-term growth potential of our company, even beyond 2026. We introduce CapEx and return on capital employed targets as new KPIs to the framework. Next to the relentless focus on operational efficiency, our capital expenditure will be the key engine for earnings growth. We therefore add a return on capital metric to our framework to underline that capital efficiency will remain our key attention point when spending more CapEx. The ROCE metric is also part of our long-term incentive scheme for management remuneration. Last but not least, we keep our strong focus on managing our capital structure in a sound and sustainable way. Let's now move to the numbers and our concrete pledges for each of the mentioned KPIs. The most important and overarching element of our financial framework remains the dividend. We commit to annually increase our dividend per share by up to 5% until 2026. For the fiscal year 2021, we commit already today to a dividend of EUR 0.49 per share. Our dividend pledge is very solidly backed up by our earnings development. Based on core earnings, we commit to around 4% annual growth in EBITDA, leading to EUR 7.8 billion EBITDA by 2026. Bottom line, this translates into 8%-10% annual growth of earnings per share, leading to roughly EUR 0.90 earnings per share by 2026. Within the next five years, we will invest a total of EUR 27 billion. This is a sizable uplift compared to our previous plan. With an unchanged debt factor of around 4.8 to 5.2 times, we reiterate our capital structure commitment to a strong BBB/Baa rating. In terms of capital efficiency, we target for a ROCE between 7%-8% for the next five years. Our long-term earnings growth is fueled by investments. We continue to apply a strict capital allocation framework. We allocate EUR 22 billion of CapEx to regulated networks. This will drive our rough growth of at least 6% for power networks. Regulated returns in our markets vary between 3%-6% post-tax nominal WACC. In addition, these regulated returns are meaningfully enhanced by varying our performance incentives. Thomas has demonstrated how well we have performed in the past and will continue to perform in this respect. The remaining EUR 5 billion investments will be allocated to our customer solutions segment. The main share of this CapEx is reserved for highly efficient decentral energy projects as part of our growing Energy Infrastructure Solutions business. Our return requirements for projects in this area vary between 5%-7% post-tax WACC. CapEx towards B2C retail business is mainly targeted for renewing our core IT platforms, as well as helping our B2C customers to decarbonize as well. Our return requirements for capital employed in this area vary between 7%-10% post-tax WACC. 85%-90% of our CapEx plan is aligned with EU Taxonomy. You should expect that we will continually increase this share even further in the future. Let's now move on to how our investment strategy translates into continually growing operating earnings. During the past years, we have built a strong track record of delivering on each of our financial ambitions. We will continue to do so. Until 2026, our group EBITDA will grow to roughly EUR 7.8 billion. This target implies that our core EBITDA, so excluding the earnings from PreussenElektra, will grow by 4% per year on average until 2026. In energy networks, we expect sustainable organic growth in all our countries. This results in earnings to increase by 3%-4% for the period up until 2026. We will achieve an EBITDA of EUR 6 billion-EUR 6.2 billion by 2026 in that segment. With these targets for energy networks, we will have fully absorbed the impact of the low interest rate environment in all our regulatory regimes. With those targets, we also see ourselves only positively geared to rising inflation rates in the mid or long term. We expect continued strong earnings growth also in our customer solutions segment. A growth rate of 5%-8% for the segment will lead to EUR 1.9 billion-EUR 2.2 billion EBITDA by 2026. Until 2026, our Energy Infrastructure Solutions business will grow by 9%-12% per annum, driven by EUR 500 million-EUR 600 million of annual growth CapEx. With this, we target to achieve EUR 700 million-EUR 800 million EBITDA by 2026 in Energy Infrastructure Solutions. Retail earnings will grow by 3%-6% per year until 2026 to reach EUR 1.2 billion-EUR 1.4 billion. The increase is driven by relentless digitization, efficiency measures, and the substantial increase of our retail solutions business. All these earnings growth targets imply that the delivery of the Innogy takeover synergies remains fully on track. 2021 synergies in the magnitude of EUR 300 million are already locked in. For 2022, we will realize more than EUR 400 million additional annual synergies fully in line with our communicated integration plan. Beyond the realization of synergies, we will naturally strive to further increase our efficiency year-over-year. Thomas and Patrick have demonstrated how much efficiency and performance are embedded in our culture. In addition, Victoria and our far-reaching digital transformation will lay the ground for additional improvements. Until 2026, the numerous optimization measures embedded in our business plans will gradually add up to another EUR 500 million of annual efficiency gains on top of our communicated transaction synergies. On top of those EUR 500 million efficiencies, we will increase the effectiveness and with that, the productivity of our cost base year-over-year, while increasing our asset base. Thomas and Victoria have extensively elaborated on this. On an income level, our strong EBITDA growth will be further accelerated by lower financing costs. Over the next five years, we have bond maturities of roughly EUR 2 billion to EUR 3 billion annually. These still include several historical bonds with high coupons of more than 5%. We plan to issue EUR 2 billion to EUR 4 billion of bonds per year. More than half of this amount will be covered by our successful green bond program. On this basis, we expect our net interest line to further improve by EUR 100 million during the next five years. Assuming a constant tax rate of 25%, we expect our earnings per share to grow significantly over the next five years by 8%-10%, and we guide for an absolute level of around EUR 0.90 by 2026. The average annual growth rates of 8%-10% during the next five-year period mean three things in particular. First, we will deliver a step change in earnings in 2022 already. This reflects our successful implementation of Innogy-related synergies, which will boost our core earnings. Second, we will successfully mitigate the negative impact of new regulatory periods, and we do so by implementing additional efficiency measures on top of our communicated synergy targets. Third, we will deliver an underlying earnings per share growth of at least 5% annually, reflecting our organic investment activity. Actually, we will deliver this minimum of 5% earnings per share growth for the rest of this decade at least. For 2021, at the very near end of our financial horizon, we expect to reach the upper end of our communicated guidance range. This kind of performance, in line or at the top end of our guidance, is what you are used to from us, and this is what you can rely upon in the future as well. Finally, our commitment to a strong BBB/Baa rating remains of utmost importance to us. A solid rating guarantees access to debt markets at any time at reasonable levels. It is also a testimonial to the solidity and reliability of our financial pledges. We continue to translate our rating target into a debt factor corridor of 4.8 to 5.2. This target is unchanged compared to the past. We will continue to optimize our portfolio and foresee proceeds of about EUR 2 billion to EUR 4 billion during the next five years. You should expect that we will specifically earmark assets which contribute the least to our strategic agenda of growth, sustainability, and digitization. Portfolio optimization will involve both straight disposals as well as selective partnerships. The net earnings impact from portfolio optimization is already fully reflected in our earnings outlook for the group. All in all, our financial framework sets out a consistent set of targets, combining an attractive dividend policy, strong organic growth, and a solid balance sheet. We, the management board of E.ON, are committed to delivering on our five-year financial plan. We will execute, and we will deliver. E.ON stands for a unique opportunity to invest into the decarbonization and electrification of the distributed European energy system. E.ON stands for strong organic earnings growth, with EPS growing 8%-10% per year on average until 2026, and continued growth of at least 5% per year thereafter. E.ON stands for an attractive annual dividend growth of up to 5% for the next five years and further growth beyond. Thank you very much for your attention, and over to Verena. Many thanks, Marc, for highlighting our long-term financial ambitions and targets to us and for reconfirming our attractive dividend commitment. Before we close off this session, I would now like to hand over to Leo again for some closing remarks. Verena, thank you, and thanks to you for listening. My colleagues and myself, we have really enjoyed sharing our vision with you today. Why? As you've heard, the energy transition is creating massive opportunities for E.ON, and we as E.ON, we are ready for this energy transition. We will turn these opportunities into growth for all our businesses, networks, and customer solution. As we grow, we will also grow sustainability. We will digitize all our businesses to drive efficiency and, again, growth. This will really make us a winner of the ongoing energy transition. Finally, we will translate all of that into strong financial performance for E.ON and in the end, for you, our shareholders. Thank you again, and I look forward to the Q&A sessions later today. Many thanks, Leo, and many thanks to the whole management board for this insightful session. This concludes our main session for today. I hope you feel energized and connected. We will now take a short break until 10 past 12 before we continue with our Q&A session. See you in a bit. [Foreign language] Alles gut. Letzte Prüfung. Ich müsste einmal den Marc sehen können. Den sehe ich jetzt gar nicht, weil der mit dem Crewman spricht. This is English. I am talking into English. [Foreign language] Whatever you do, it's all good. Whatever you say, it's all right. Summer's not the way. We need to talk about it. Heaven is on the way. Heaven is on the way. You and the sea on a decline. Breaking the waves. Watching the lights go down. Let me get more sleep. Whatever you say, it's all right. Whatever you do, it's all good. Whatever you say, it's all right. Summer's not the way. We need to talk about it. Heaven is on the way. We'll wrap the world around it. Heaven is on the way. Heaven is on the way. I'm a stranger in this town. I'm a stranger in this town. I'm a stranger in this town. Heaven is on the way. Heaven is on the way. I'm a stranger in this town. I'm a stranger in this town. Now I took what I want. You find out everything I've got. One step forwards to my shadow. You won't follow in my pattern. I look into the sky. You try to catch me. I follow into the sky. You were once there. Now you're not there. I want to feel, please. Do you feel me when you swallow? Catch me down when I am breathing. Breathing. As I swallow, you catch my eye. I see you in places far behind. In your city, it fills me up. Clouds are falling to our end. I couldn't stop falling. I couldn't stop. I couldn't. I find my shadows hide behind. Fill me up. Fill me up. Oh, no. Fill me up. Fill me up. Breathe in. Breathe in. I couldn't stop. No, I couldn't stop. When we drift through the space between night and day. When the trees are like mountains waiting. When the sun casts its shadow on the ground. The daylight drowns it out. Take me inside. Take me inside. When the daylight won't come take me. Turn off the lights and lock the door. Take me inside. Take me inside. Take me inside. Take me inside. Dear analysts and investors. Welcome back for our Q&A session. Again, I'm joined here with the whole management board of E.ON, and we are very much looking forward to your questions. Before we actually kick it all off, just one brief administrative remark from my side, just to let you know that we are both all vaccinated and tested as we are actually sitting quite closely together here, as health is important to us at E.ON. Let's now move over to our Teams session. Please use your Raise Your Hand function to place a question. It would actually be very great of you if you could turn on your camera whilst placing a question so that we can see you here, and please put yourself on mute if you are not talking, just to avoid background noise. Again, a reminder to you, the two questions per person rule also applies today to give everybody the chance to ask a question. With that, I'm looking forward to the first question, which comes from Wanda from Credit Suisse. Wanda, go ahead. Hi. Good afternoon. I hope you can hear me. Two questions from me. The first one is on networks. Does your 2026 guidance include an uplift in the regulatory returns in Sweden and Germany? The second question is on the dividend. Under what circumstances would you go for a flat dividend or a growth below 5%? Especially given that the implied payout ratio on your 2026 guidance is below the regulated peers. Thank you very much. Thomas. This is pretty straightforward. Yeah. Thomas. Yeah, Wanda, I can make this answer short. Both in Germany and in Sweden, we kept in 2026, the current regulated returns flat. No deviation from today's regulated returns. Marc? The DKS. Look, Wanda, you can imagine that we run a comprehensive risk management system, look at our long-term plans also, including chances and risks. In that context of the chances and risks which we see, currently, we do not see a scenario where we would keep the dividend flat. Thank you very much. A very quick follow-up. If there is a favorable decision in the court on the returns in Germany, there is upside to your guidance in 2026? Thomas. I think I didn't get the beginning. The upside in court. Yeah. That's, of course, Wanda, too early to say it now. Of course, if we wouldn't see an upside, we wouldn't go to court then. It's too early to give an estimate today. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Wanda. Next question comes from Vincent from J.P. Morgan. Vincent, over to you. Yes. Hi, good morning, everyone. Thank you for the presentation. I'd like to dive very quickly on the EUR 2 billion-EUR 4 billion of disposals. In your presentation, retail remain quite an area of focus for you, even if most of the CapEx will go in district heating and everything. How do you look at retail in U.K., would be one of the elements. Do you foresee any sort of disposal in the retail space? Or should we consider non-core specific geographies like Turkey or some countries in Eastern Europe? How do you look at that? Thank you very much. Yeah. Let me take that question. Generally, on our portfolio optimization measures, the EUR 2 billion-EUR 4 billion will be a combination of things. It will be straight disposals of fully consolidated. It can be straight disposals of minorities, which we have in the portfolio, and it can also be financial partnerships. What we can give you as a guidance is that obviously it will have to match our strategic triangle of sustainability, digitization, and growth. That is what you should expect, where we'll focus on in terms of portfolio optimization. When it comes to the U.K., we're actually quite happy about the progress which our management team is doing. You have seen that we have been delivering a very nice restructuring success so far, and we'll continue actually next year in migrating also all of our legacy E.ON customers onto the new platform. I also think that in the current market environment, it demonstrates that it pays off to be a reliable long-term-oriented player in that market. We are focusing on actually making both the self-serve measures, making us robust, but we are also looking forward that Ofgem will have to work on the market design, and actually improve it materially because it's quite obvious it's not working right now in the market context in which we are. All right. Thank you very much. Okay, moving on to the next question, which comes from Deepa from Bernstein. Deepa, please go ahead. Hi. Thank you. I have two questions, one nitty-gritty and one bigger picture. Let me start with the bigger picture. You've outlined a step up in CapEx of EUR 1 billion in networks. I just wanted to understand what would be the cadence in the later half of this decade be. Do you sort of see that as being stable, or do you actually see some of the opportunities you outlined on new customers or EVs, et cetera, probably getting even more accelerated in the second half? That's the first question. A second question, apologies, Marc, just to clarify some numbers because you've given the segmental guidance, and I believe that those don't include the disposals. Just wanted to clarify the EUR 7.8, that includes the divestment, but can you just clarify overall maybe what haircut you've taken due to divestments? What happens to the corporate function? This year, the guidance is minus EUR 200 million. In 2026, is that basically zero? Which I think it should be for synergies, but what's the assumption for corporate? Then I believe even after closing all the nuclear, you will still have the Urenco stake, and there's also the Turkish hydro. I think together that's EUR 80 million of EBITDA. Just want to know where that figures in this EUR 7.8. Is it included or is that outside? Maybe it fits in the disposal camp, but I know you've been trying to sell Urenco for a number of years, so not sure if it will happen in the next two years. If you can just clarify the numbers and the mismatch between the segmental guidance and the overall number. Thank you. Deepa. Let me just take the big picture question first, then Marc will clarify the details around the numbers as requested. You are asking what exactly is driving the growth in post-2026. We have broken down in the chart pack, which we have given to you, how much of our investment is driven by more renewables, more industries coming into play, modernization, and more connections. We see all these trends to be fundamentally robust. You have seen that we have presented, for example, on the renewable side, an addition of 80 GW, and we have said in the next five years, roughly 40, so half of it. We see absolutely the need to continue to invest into renewable at the same pace, if not higher, if you really want to make the green transition a success. We do not foresee that, for example, to slow down. We do not foresee actually EV penetration to slow down. Actually, we are seeing a more exponential curve accelerating versus the second half of the decade. On smartification, we do not see that smartification and modernization of the grid is going to slow down in five years, and we are done with it because there's nothing that we need to invest anymore. In that sense, all the drivers that we have described and which are underlying the 2026 growth are also driving growth afterwards. I would not expect a slowdown afterwards, actually quite the opposite. It might be that modernization is 5% less or 5% more, but in the end, that doesn't really matter. The growth is fundamentally robust, that's our personal underlying assumption for the whole decade also, even though we are giving numbers guideline in detail, which Marc will do right now, only until 2026. Marc? Deepa, on the numbers point, it's actually pretty straightforward. There is no miracle between. If you add up the segments, indeed, you come up to a difference of about EUR 300 million. This is what we simply have taken out as a net earnings impact for any portfolio optimization measure. For you, the message here is that if you look at our group numbers, you don't need to worry. We will make sure we build and deliver that, including any kind of portfolio measure, which we will then take during the next five years while implementing our strategic plans. On corporate headquarters specifically, we actually made series with efficiency also in corporate functions. That's actually the functions which Leo and myself are most responsible for. After realizing the synergies, we have a pretty simple plan there. Every department, every year needs to cut costs by 2%. No discussion, no reasoning why any burden comes on top, which needs to be covered by more FTE or more expense. It's every year, 2%. Everyone knows that's a pretty simple template, on which we will run our functions in the corporate headquarter in a very lean way. They will become leaner and leaner every year. Yet that will not explain the EUR 300 million. That's the net earnings effect from portfolio optimization. I don't want to come across defensive, we will not make it within the next five years to a zero corporate headquarter line. Leo and I, we are working hard on it. Okay, thank you. The EUR 300 million is at the EBITDA, but also similar at the net income level? Did I hear that, or is EUR 300 at the EBITDA? No, that's the impact on the EBITDA side. You said net income. Did I say net income? Sorry. If I said net income, I want to correct myself here. Because the EUR 300 million is the impact on EBITDA level. Okay. Thank you. All right. Many thanks, Deepa. The next questions come from Peter from Bank of America. Peter? Yeah. Hi. Verena, guess so. Thanks for taking my questions. First one on German regulations. You mentioned that you're going to launch legal proceedings against the 5.7% ROE. You said that you trust the regulator to reward the extra CapEx that you've announced today, which seems a bit of a contradiction. I'm not quite sure I understand what the message there is. Could you elaborate why you feel comfortable ramping CapEx up by EUR 1 billion a year against what you think is an inadequate return? A sort of second related question. I'm just wondering what assumptions you've made about the next regulatory review in your guidance for 2026. Obviously you're using the 5.07% return, but have you made any assumptions about what additional incentives you might be able to earn in the next regulatory framework? Have you assumed any kind of offset against that cut in ROE? Those are my questions. Thank you. Thomas. Obviously these are questions for me. Thank you very much, Peter. The first one, why am I optimistic? As I told you already in my speech, this return on equity is only one part of the complete regulatory package. If you look back, for example, 2019, we had a rate cut there as well, and it was higher than 2%. At the end of the day, we managed to keep earnings flat and then steadily rising again. We have the cost audit in front of us. We have many open parameters like the Xgen, the individual efficiency rate. Therefore, I'm really optimistic because the experience of the past that we come to a good solution for everyone. Because the regulator and all the politicians know without adequate returns and adequate regulatory environment, this money will not flow to Germany. This is clear for everyone, and therefore I'm optimistic given the experience in the past. For me, there is no contradiction at all. With the second question, 2026, our main assumption is that the whole system is more or less stable. Of course, otherwise we couldn't give you such an earnings expectation of 3%-4% a year despite the lower earnings. We have assumed additional efficiency measures there. I ask for your understanding as we are really in the midst of the cost audit, both in gas and in power, that I can't be more precise today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. The next question comes from John Musk from RBC. John, over to you. Yes, morning or afternoon to everyone. Could I come back to the networks business? There was a lot of information really around the electricity side, but very little on gas. The 6% CAGR in power, what is the relevant number for gas? Perhaps also if you could split the CapEx between gas and power, the EUR 22 billion. Secondly, on the retail business or the customers business, you mentioned it briefly there, but can you give a bit more color on what you would like to see in terms of the regulatory reforms on the price cap in the U.K. and how that might impact your business? Let's just start with customer solutions for a change. Before you go on. Good idea, Leo. Okay, that's fine. Yeah. John, obviously we would like to see a functional market, really, with a market master from the Ofgem. We've seen recently, obviously, by the wholesale price impact and the SVT, that that doesn't match. That is where we would see a new equilibrium. Now we can see also a lot of parties going really bust, which is, on one hand, also an upside for us because we are now able to take them without acquisition, consolidating the market. What we would like to see is a more, let's say, regulated towards normal wholesale and normal retail market. Also to be very precise, I think we have the consultation, which Ofgem has started, which is going to conclude over the next month. Certainly, we're going to insert our asks in the proper way on a very detailed level. I think it is important that we come to a long-term stable system that doesn't try to fudge around to somehow solve a short-term issue with market design issues, which then are going to explode in our face later on. Actually, the price cap is something that we see very critically. We see now the downsides of the price cap after two or three years. Yeah. Dysfunctional market. Yeah. Dysfunctional market. Please, Thomas. Back to networks and to gas. Our gas investments are pretty stable, and you can estimate EUR 400 million a year. Therefore, the Regulated Asset Base in gas is more or less stable as well. We will see only a very slight increase there, but not comparable with the 6% I explained for the power networks. Okay. Thank you. All right. Many thanks, John. Now, who's actually next one in the Q&A section? We have no questions left. No questions. It was very clear. I'm happy to volunteer, Verena. Alberto. I know this voice. I cannot see you, but I can hear you. I lost the connection from my mobile, so to get back during the break. Sorry, I also lost connection here, that's why. Hi, Alberto. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone, and congratulations on the presentations. Two questions on my side as well. The first one is, trying to talk about the EUR 500 million efficiency you put through, is there any chance you could give us a bit more details in terms of how much is Customer Solutions, how much is networks, how much is maybe corporate function? I was mostly curious to see what does EUR 500 million do in your long-term journey towards achieving optimal efficiency, if we can call them. If you can't answer that, maybe can you tell us how many employees do you think you will have by 2026? The second question is on the bottom line. Could you help us find a little bit more in detail what could be the dilution on net income from optimization? Should we take a typical 30% ratio of the EBITDA impact, or is there more maybe below the line items we should be thinking about? I mean, is it EUR 100 million or more? Along these lines, cost savings impact on the bottom line. Basically, those two items on the bottom line would be very helpful to understand. Thank you. I guess, Marc, the breakdown of the EUR 500 million you take? Alberto, it's roughly, as you saw it in the synergy package, a third will come from the networks business, a third will come directly from the Customer Solutions business, and a third will be stemming from our group wide support function. Obviously what comes from the support functions largely is a service for our two operational segments. At the end, probably you can take those EUR 500 and they will be split roughly equally between our two segments. Those efficiency measures are embedded in our business plans. As an efficiency measure, they would actually flow through to our net income line, just deducting taxes. Take off the 25%. This is about the impact. Usually there's no depreciation or anything in between, which is affected by that. keep in mind, this is something which is embedded in the segment specific guidances, which we have given today, both for Energy Networks and Customer Solutions. When it comes to the disposal and portfolio optimization impact on the bottom line. Here, I would assume that this is 30% of the EBITDA package, the number which you refer to is a good estimate. If you take around 100, you will not be far off. Again, it's going to be a mixture of different things, the ultimate impact of it can vary. What we have done is a pruned assumption that you can, or investors can be sure that from implementing that program, there will not be any distraction or negative deviation on our group guidance numbers. maybe on FTE, we don't give it a guidance on the 26 FTE numbers. We will actually see that we do whatever we have just laid out, if we can successfully grow in the different businesses, maybe even with some upside, we would have more, if we would have detrimental effect somewhere, we'd have probably less. It's not a steering measure for us. It's a result of our success on other target dimensions, which we have defined. Our framework includes the numbers which we have seen this morning, but it doesn't include a target number for FTEs. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alberto. The next question comes from James Brand. James, please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thanks for the Well, good afternoon to you, I guess, and thank you for the presentation. The first question is just on trying to square a bit the guidance with some of the comments on the German regulatory review, because we had Thomas earlier saying that he was very optimistic that you wouldn't see a big negative impact from the German regulatory review in 2024 from the returns being cut. On the other hand, your guidance for 2026 is in line with consensus for 2023, in spite of very high levels of investment and EUR 500 million of cost cutting. I just wanted to ask, are you in your guidance assuming that there's not going to be an impact from the German regulatory review? Or maybe your guidance is more conservative, but you're optimistic that it could be better than that? Maybe there's something else I'm missing. Maybe you could just help square the circle between these dynamics and the 2026 guidance. When it doesn't- The second question I have is on disposals. Clearly, you haven't said what you might be looking to dispose of. Is there any guidance in terms of maybe what assets might be more likely to be disposed of than others? When should we expect the disposals? Is that likely to be soon or any time in the 5 years it could happen? Thank you. I guess we expected it from the beginning that German regulation would attract lots of attention. Thomas, again to you. To be clear on that, the more or less 200 basis point lower return will definitely hit us and will lead to lower earnings. We are quite optimistic that with internal efficiency measures, we will compensate that. This is the key message. On the disposals, that one I can make very short. We're not going to comment on specific targets or speculate on anything. You'll have to wait and see. Okay. Thank you. Next question comes from Manuel Palomo from Exane. Manuel, please go ahead. Hello. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the presentation, also for taking my questions. I am sorry to insist on the two key topics, looks like everyone's interested in disposals, everyone's interested in the German regulations. I'll try to phrase it in a different way. Conceptually, it looks like your disposals will be looking to make the company more ESG eligible in the future. My understanding is that part of those disposals could be in the supply business. I wonder whether you could share with us what markets are, let's say, for you, less attractive from risk-return perspective on that point. Secondly, it's just about the a bit of sense about the timing of these regulatory changes and the legal actions that you've launched. Whether you would tell us when do you expect or when we could expect those court rulings to take place, and whether this could lead, to some extent, to you to backload the CapEx throughout the period. Thank you. Yeah, same sequence. Thomas again first. I take it on the disposals. Thank you very much, Leo. We estimate that we have to wait for round about two years for legal decision. Until that, the old regulatory returns are in place, we will invest according to our plans. As I explained this morning, we will gradually increase CapEx, we are very cautious. The full 1 billion EUR you will only see if the regulatory environment really is okay as a package. Yeah, on the disposals, I was obviously not clear enough, I give it to Marc for another try. Look, actually, Manuel, it was a very elegant way to address the same topic again. We can now play the balls back and forth. No, pretty straightforward on that. I think we are clear with the magnitude, 2 billion-4 billion EUR during the next five years. We included a net earnings impact on group guidance so that you do not have to worry about that any things will kind of detour the picture. Otherwise, we will then execute and communicate once we come to a signing as usual. Yeah. Thank you. Next question comes from Rob from Morgan Stanley. Rob, the floor is yours. We can't hear you, Rob, nor see you. Oh, is that better? Yeah. Yeah. Now we can hear you. Excellent. Wonderful. Okay. Well, I'll reiterate saying thank you for the presentation. Lots to digest. If I can ask two questions. The first one is, in your 2026 net income, could you give us a bit of a steer as to what you assume the financing cost would be, given the ongoing successful refinancing of legacy bonds and something you talk about in the presentation? The second one, also on 2026, which I believe is a photo year, for the German power system. Can we expect a similar quantum or proportion of costs in 2026 as to what you're seeing in 2021, as we try and think about how earnings progress post 2026 and into the end of the decade? Thank you. Yeah. Marc. Rob, hi. Let me take the net interest line question up front. That's pretty straightforward. I mentioned a EUR 100 million net improvement due to refinancing the higher-yielding legacy bonds. That will bring our net interest line to about EUR 850 million going forward. Actually, already by 2024, as if you look at our bond maturity profile, the high-yielding bonds actually come during the next two years. That'll be digested within the next two years. EUR 100 million benefit, EUR 850 is about the net interest line, which you should assume. Yeah. On the photo year, do you want to take that, whether this is included in numbers as well? With regard to the photo year assumptions, at this stage, this is kind of five years out, you should assume that we applied a consistent set of assumptions around how we manage the regulatory framework. It's still quite some time to go, and our focus actually now is very much on the front end, as Thomas laid out. It's on the allowed return on equity, which must be approved from our point of view, and we go to court with it. There's a very important part of cost efficiency with all the factors which Thomas already alluded to. That's where we are now fully focused on. Otherwise, you can trust that we present a consistent framework also over time. Okay. I think I understand that. If I may, just add a follow-up, given you raised it, Marc. On the process for contesting this final determination ROE, could you give us an indication on when we could hear the outcome of that? Thank you. Yeah, I think Thomas you just said it. Yeah, I already gave an estimate. It will take us at least two years. The last final decision we got took even three and a half years. We should not expect anything concrete within the next two years. You better calculate with two to four years. Okay. Apologies, I didn't hear that before. Thank you very much for clarifying. I'll hand it over. Many thanks, Rob, for your questions. The next one is Peter Crampton from Barclays. Peter, go ahead. Peter? Peter, we still can't hear you. Maybe you unmute. We can't hear Peter. Okay, yeah. Given that there seems to be some technical issues here with Peter, I bet you can place your question later. Let's now move on to Lüder Schumacher from SocGen. Lüder. Yes, good afternoon. Let me stick to the script and ask the first question to Thomas. Why does compound REP growth of 6% only lead to EBITDA growth of 3%-4%? If you are saying that you expect the regulatory pressure to be offset by efficiency measures. That's my first question. The second one goes in the direction of what James was asking earlier. Bearing in mind that 2023 consensus estimates seem to be roughly where your 2026 targets are, is the consensus too optimistic for 2023, or could there be room for upside in your 2026 targets? Or rather, would you describe them as quite conservative? Thomas? Let me start, Lüder, thank you for that question. Let me try to explain that. Our REP, our power RAB, will growth around about EUR 2 billion a year. You should expect a higher REP in 2026 by EUR 10 and a half billion. We have assumed an EBITDA return on that EUR 10.5 billion of round about 8%. That makes EUR 850 million return on that. Why does that not fit with the compound average growth rates in EBITDA? This is purely a basis effect. If you look in our slide deck on page, I think it's 54, there you can see a breakdown of the different EBITDA components. You can see there that the return of the depreciation, and these are the most important components that really drive this EUR 850 million, are only 55%-60% of the whole EBITDA composition. We have, for example, income from participations in there. We have other businesses there, like water and so on, which has nothing to do with the RAB growth and which is more or less stable over the period of time. Therefore, you have a deviation between the compound average growth rate in RAB and in EBITDA. If you take out the more or less stable components in the EBITDA, then the EBITDA grows more or less in line with the 6% I explained for the Regulated Asset Base. Marc on the net income. Lüder, may we just add, you can rest assured that wherever we invest growth CapEx, you will also see then the incremental earnings from that flowing into our EBITDA and our net income. A good example is how Thomas explained how our growing RAB base will one to one then also be earnings accretive initially quite nicely because it's pretty instantaneously in many markets and maximum two-year delay before we see then additional earnings flowing into our P&L from those investments. On your question on 2023 earnings, you can be assured, and I can confirm here, that all the numbers which we have presented today are fully in line with guidances which we have given in the past with regard to 2022 and 2023 on a like-for-like basis. Like-for-like basis means obviously that if in any given year we would implement part of the portfolio optimization measures that can have then a temporary impact, but that would only be temporary in a year. On a like-for-like basis, our guidance is fully in line with 2022, 2023, and between 2023 and 2026. What you indeed see is growing asset base, but also obviously an unavoidable impact on earnings from lower returns against which we will then gradually work against with increasing efficiency. Thank you. Many thanks, Lüder. Let's give it another try with Peter now from Barclays. Peter? We are very much looking forward to your questions, but we still cannot hear you nor see you. Otherwise, I would suggest maybe that you pick up the question differently, then we can answer them. As this still doesn't work, I would now like to hand over to Sam Arie from UBS. Sam? Sam, also, we cannot hear you nor see you. European networks. Internet. Any sign? Signs of life? Sam, any sign of life or Peter? Yeah. We continue the session with Piotr from Citi. Piotr? Hi. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yes. Wonderful. Okay. Networks now. Polish networks are better. Thank you very much for opportunity to ask questions. I have two, please. The first one I wanted to ask your opinion on the supply market in Germany. We've seen the crisis across Europe in number of markets like the U.K. and so on. Do you think this crisis can also change landscape for Germany? How do you see this changing? Can we see a consolidation maybe over the next five years? One is energy crisis, but also digitalization effort upfront to the smaller players. Second question I wanted to ask you about how much of the EUR 27 billion CapEx you want to spend on digitalization and innovation, as a figure, and how do you think about the returns just on this type of activities when you think about innovation? Okay, Patrick, on Germany, then Victoria on the digitalization CapEx. Okay, Piotr, thanks for the question. Obviously, the German market is an open market as well. All sorts of thing can happen in the market. What we do see now is that the suppliers in Germany are more conservatively financed, also their path forward doesn't hurt them so bad as it is in the U.K., where people have taken other risk profiles. We've seen small pockets happening in Germany. On your question of does it really consolidate in a different way, we don't see those signs yet, we're not through the winter yet, the things could be coming. We don't know. We don't have the crystal ball. I can tell you that we are very well positioned, conservatively hedged forward, we can actually serve all our customers. We have taken on board new customers that didn't have a supplier anymore, not in the extent that we've seen in the U.K. or other markets on that. Yeah. Can I just maybe say one thing, I said it also earlier. It is important that across Europe, we get a better understanding that our markets have to function for the long term. Short-term interventions to sort out distortions, temporary distortions, are always detrimental in our markets. Therefore, what we are really trying to do is to work with regulators and with politics to put in positions into place, conditions and rules into place, which work over the long periods of time. Now, mostly we have been successful. Actually, I'm optimistic for Germany. We have not seen any signs of short-term interventions. I'm also very grateful to European Commission that has a very clear line on that one, we applaud the efforts of the European Commission to prevent actually implementing now short-term actions for this winter. The temptation is always there because it's so crucial for our populations. Energy is so important, that this will be a constant debate, but you said it perfectly right, there might be even an upside in the long run from the current distortions. Exactly. Moving on to investment into digitization and innovation. The biggest chunk of investments into digitization goes into our networks. In our networks, you've seen both Thomas and me talking about smartification of our grids, which is around EUR 2 billion. We are also investing into having sustainable platforms across all regions to work for our grids, which amounts to EUR 3 billion-EUR 3.5 billion just on grid. We are adding up another EUR 1 billion for customer solutions, which goes into our retail platforms, artificial intelligence and data analytics to make sure we serve our customers right. In combination, we are coming to EUR 4 billion-EUR 4.5 billion investment into digitization and innovation inside digitization. If I may add, when it comes then to the return profiles of that business, obviously that then very much follows the businesses where the money is allocated. With the EUR 2 billion in smartification, that's pretty much the return numbers which Thomas alluded to. When it goes into energy retail, and I mentioned that their return post-tax WACC requirements are between 7%-10%. In that bandwidth, you're going to find then also the returns on that investment, which is for us pretty much it is business. It's not something on top and or at the side or anything. It's at the core of what we do, and it will therefore also provide the returns for the core as any other business activity. Marc, I think it's an excellent point. Victoria is a Chief Operating Officer. She's not an IT support function officer. She is part of the business, this is the way we think also about digitizing investments. All right. Let's try again with Sam now. That- Sam? -didn't look good. Still no sign from your side. Otherwise, let's move on to Louis from Oddo, please. Yes. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes, we can. Sorry for the safety question, but. Yeah, no. It's deserved. That was your first one. Maybe a follow-up question on the one that has just been asked regarding indeed the digitalization and the process. I see that you've mentioned EUR 500 million of OpEx efficiency. In the meantime, you mentioned as well that you have an OpEx on RAB target of -4% to -5% per year that is expected on the energy network. Shall we consider it to comes from the digitalization investment first? Also, shall we consider this -4% to -5% target OpEx on a RAB to be part of the EUR 500 million OpEx efficiency total package that you mentioned? This is, if you don't mind, and if you agree, my first question. The second question, sorry to come back to this one, but maybe to understand a bit better what would be your reaction on the evolution of the market. You mentioned indeed at least 6% per year RAB growth in the next few years on the energy and network divisions. We understand that you could indeed go further, the question would be, what would prevent you going further? Do you have any financial constraint as of today to go above this 6%, is it only the regulated environment? Thank you. Victoria, do you want to start? I'm starting with the question on digitization. What we see in our energy networks, and this is why both Thomas and I picked this up, it's actually digitizing the way we operate our grids, we plan our grids, and our ability to get the information from our smart assets around our grids, which is helping us coming to this efficiency gains of 4%-5% OpEx to RAB ratio. It's a combination. It wouldn't be possible without the consistent digitization we are driving. On the other hand, we also need to have the right people. We need to have our networks in place, et cetera. Without digitization, it wouldn't happen. It's caused by digitization. Thomas is nodding. Looking into the further efficiencies, especially in sales, we are operating in a highly competitive market in sales. The first thing on digitalization and sales, this is our license to operate, because otherwise we will lose our customers. Everything which is now happening in these markets, and we are seeing a lot of market dynamics, we can only react to and win customers and keep customers if we are highly digitized. Number 1, license to operate. Number 2, a couple of options to create efficiencies with digitalization. I alluded to a few of them. Higher customer value, optimization of call centers. All of this adds up together to the EUR 500 million. The Rob question was really a finance question, so I give it to Marc. The 6% is an average for the next five years. When we say at least, keep in mind that Thomas explained earlier that we will gradually now increase our investments into our Regulated Asset Base. This expresses a certain optimism that over time, it may be more, and we will see, but that's also the question of how the regulators will honor that. At what speed we will ultimately then increase those investments. What in any case you should keep in mind is that we invest in a way that we have an eye on our customers and affordability question, and our focus on digitization and productivity is also a focus on keeping electricity affordable, and that's our big contribution to that. Secondly, we want to make sure that it pays off financially. That's why we also make sure that we gradually invest our investment, that with that, we will not jeopardize our efficiency scores. Thomas has also explained to you how important specifically for Germany, performance efficiency incentives are. Don't think investments too simplistically. It is an optimization of multiple elements, and that is what you can trust, which we will be doing, so that the financial returns for what we invest will be optimized. Yeah. All right. We now have a follow-up question from Rob, from Morgan Stanley. Rob, please go ahead. It worked previously, so I'm pretty confident. Hopefully, yeah, that's working now. Here you are. Now got the technology. Excellent. Sorry. I just wanted to follow up with the answer from Marc earlier, because it sounds from some of the conversations on the sidelines that we all heard a slightly different answer regarding the photo year. The question, again, to be maybe more explicit in the question is, does the guidance include the photo year impact in 2026 of enhanced costs? Is that not included? That was the follow-up, just to clarify. Thank you so much. Rob, I can only repeat what I said, that we apply a consistent framework. Apart from that, I cannot now provide you any further reference of what that, in terms of photo year, may mean for 2026 or not. What you should keep in mind is that we manage efficiency and provide guidance in a consistent way. Okay. Thank you. I will hand it over. Many thanks, Rob. Next question comes from Martin Tessier. Martin? Yes. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes. Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. Great. One question from me regarding the networks guidance for 2026. Could you tell us what are the assumptions that you take for investments in the grid business in terms of average periods for permitting processes? The underlying idea of my question is that if we have, with the new coalition, strong measures to cut red tape for the development of energy projects, be it grid projects or production projects, would you be in a position to increase your guidance of annual investments into the grid? Many thanks. Thomas. Martin, thank you so much for this question, because as Marc already said, financially, we are not constrained. Our whole team is really prepared to accelerate growth in CapEx. What you mentioned, the permission processes, they are definitely too long, and we clearly expect the new government that they speed up the processes in the same way that we speed up our capital expenditures. Here's still a long way to go. There are many concrete proposals on the table, especially from the BDEW. More or less 25 concrete examples how to accelerate the processes. Let me be very clear on that. We need this acceleration in processes to really speed up CapEx. That goes hand in hand. Thomas, if I may add. We have been as E.ON, I myself also in my function at BDEW, I've been very explicit. We need to at least reduce by a factor of two. We need to halve permit times, if not more. We have seen that the new coalition or potential new government or likely new government, whatever you call it, is actually very willing to claim that they're going to accelerate it, yet we have not seen specific measures that would really make the processes as they stand today faster. This is yet an open issue that the new government has to sort out. On the other hand, I'm optimistic because if this government can't sort it out, which one would ever? This government cannot afford to not get this right. I'm actually quite optimistic that we will really see a change here, even though right now we don't see the measures yet, and certainly not to a sufficient extent. Martin, the big chunk of the investment I explained will go into the medium and in the low voltage grid levels. Here the permission time is much, much shorter than in the 110 kV or even the 380 kV level. We are pretty optimistic that we can really realize, especially with the ramp-up that I explained, the higher CapEx over the next five years. All right. There is definitely no downside. Thank you. Thank you, Martin. We take a follow-up question from Deepa. Thank you. My follow-up question was on the e-mobility infrastructure. I think in the past, both Innogy and E.ON have talked about it, and then there wasn't much talk of it, and it was my understanding that these charging networks were not really making money. I know, Marc, you've outlined that you want to make 7%-10% post-tax returns. I just want to understand what is behind the now more bullish statement. Do you now see the situation changing, maybe because utilizations or rates are different, or these are ultra-fast chargers? Is there a level of utilization you need to hit to make sure that these investments basically deliver the returns you want? Thank you. Patrick. Yes, Deepa, thank you for the question. It is indeed a timing question. In the past, Innogy and E.ON, I think they have been going in and out, and in and out, and mainly because obviously, the returns have been volatile as well because this market is emergent. Now it's very clear that the underlying market dynamics really bring us onto the forefront of doing this, and also we believe, also in working together with Thomas' departments, we, especially in the core markets, can deliver an infrastructure, which is also then be connected. Proof point, as I said, is really the partnerships we have with BMW, ADAC, but also with Volkswagen. More to come, I believe. Equally, we don't want to actually go into this all alone. We're going to carve out a lot of the stuff we have now in our companies and make it into a unit, then look for partners to really excel this forward and exacerbate our impact for the customer. The projections of the cars coming will be more in 2022, 2023, and then accelerating 2024, 2025, where we believe we can really make a difference, and then actually also can be bullish on it because we have the vehicles to deliver. Okay. This concludes our Q&A session for today. Many thanks for your questions. We obviously, especially for Sam and for Peter, make sure that we answer your question as soon as possible now. Sorry for the inconvenience that we could not hear you here. Apart from that, we are obviously very much looking forward to any other questions, and the IR team is available to you for anything that you are still missing. Many thanks again. We are looking forward to seeing you all on road shows and hearing from you. Thank you, and stay healthy. Thank you very much. Qué bonito cuando te veo. Qué bonito cuando te siento. Qué bonito pensar que estás aquí, junto a mí. Qué bonito cuando me hablas. Qué bonito cuando te callas. Qué bonito sentir que estás aquí, junto a mí. Qué bonito sería poder volar y a tu lado ponerme ya a cantar, como siempre lo hacíamos los dos. Que mi cuerpo no para de notar que tu alma conmigo siempre está y que nunca de mí se apartará. Qué bonito tu pelo negro. Qué bonito tu cuerpo entero. Qué bonito, mi amor, todo tú ser. Sí, tú ser. Qué bonito sería poder volar y a tu lado ponerme ya a cantar, como siempre lo hacíamos los dos. Que mi cuerpo no para de notar que tu alma conmigo siempre está y que nunca de mí se apartará. Qué bonito con cariño ubicarte siempre en mis manos. [Foreign language] Qué bonito poder sentirte así, siempre así. Qué bonito, mi amor, todo tú ser. Sí, tú ser. They all want to get high. Like we all getting high. They all feel in their dreams. Like we all in our dreams. They all feeling. The vibe of this night. They all freedom. In the moon and the light. A very warm welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the press call on the occasion of the Capital Markets Day of E.ON. This morning, we presented our growth strategy reaching to 2026, we're very happy to see that many of you have made use of the opportunity to join us on that occasion. Our CEO, Leonhard Birnbaum, and our CFO, Marc Spieker, will now be available for any questions that you might have for approximately 45 minutes or so. Before I hand over to Leo Birnbaum, a few housekeeping remarks from me. It's quite important in this day and age for all those who are working here in front and behind the scenes have been tested and have had two shots. If you want to ask a question, please raise your hand in MS Teams. You'll be familiar with how that works from other conferences, I'll call you one after the other. The event will be broadcast live on the internet. It will also be recorded. If you object, if you don't want to be recorded, please leave the session, which we don't hope you will. There will be simultaneous translation into English for the English-speaking journalists. All questions will be answered in German on stage, they will be translated simultaneously for your benefit into English. For the English-speaking journalists, everything that is being said here on the stage will be translated simultaneously into English. That's it. On that note, I'd like to hand over to our CEO. Leo, you have the floor. Thank you very much, Lars. A warm welcome from me, ladies and gentlemen. Many of you, perhaps all of you, may have listened to our call this morning. You may have read the documents. There should be plenty of time for your questions, which is why I'm not going to repeat this morning's presentation that we can get through the questions as quickly as possible. Just very briefly, a few upfront remarks from me. This morning, we presented a growth strategy. A growth strategy towards a sustainable and a digital energy world. Why is that? Well, it's quite simple. We are facing a decade, perhaps a key decade of growth. What we've done at E.ON over the past few months is work out in a detailed fashion how this growth can be put to good use for us, for our customers, for our shareholders. We are confident, and we are convinced that E.ON is rightly positioned to benefit from this growth, both in terms of energy networks and in terms of customer solutions. The energy networks benefit from the energy transition because they form the very backbone of a successful energy transition. Customer solutions give our customers the option to do their own decarbonization. We need to tackle the energy transition more aggressively, which will lead to more opportunities for us, and we want E.ON to emerge as a winner of the transformation that lies ahead of us. What are we going to do in more concrete terms? At E.ON, we want to build a platform, perhaps the sustainability platform for the green energy transition in Europe. On this platform, all the millions of participants, which will make up the energy world in the future, they will be networked to form one sustainable ecosystem. More concretely, we presented it this morning, this means that we will launch one of the biggest innovation initiatives over the past few years. EUR 27 billion are to be invested by 2026, EUR 22 billion in networks and EUR 5 billion in customer solutions. This growth, we showed that, it's sustainable, it is driven by fundamental drivers, which will remain stable over the next decade. We also told you this morning that we have an uncompromising focus on sustainability. Our business is sustainable per definition. More of an energy transition requires more energy. As a company, per se, we are going to put ourselves on a more sustainable footing. A sustainable business from a sustainable E.ON. Third, we are going to become a fully digital company in our products and services, because only if you do full digitization can you supply the services that society expects from you, and the same goes for efficiencies and growth that is part and parcel of our plans going forward. We do not simply want to grow for the sake of growing. We want to become more profitable at the same time, improving our efficiency. That's why we presented a plan to continuously improve our productivity and efficiency. It's a program worth EUR 500 million, which is already part of our figures on top of the synergies that we are also going to realize. This is what we are going to deliver. Last but not least, we said that whenever it makes sense, we would be open for partnerships, of course. I'd like to leave it at that, ladies and gentlemen. I cannot think that there would be a better prospect for a new CEO because I moved to this position where the whole industry is facing huge growth perspectives. This is what we can expect. It's a point in time where entire industries are converging with us. E-mobility is coming towards us. Industries are coming to us. Heat is coming to us. This is a great starting point for a company as E.ON, which is as well-positioned as E.ON. Looking forward to the next decade. Looking forward to your questions. Thank you very much, Leo. A decade of growth. We've already received three questions. Christoph Steitz from Reuters, there's Antje Höning from Rheinische Post, Tom Käckenhoff from Reuters once again. Christoph, why don't you start? Good afternoon. We can hear and see you. I've got two questions. First question, Mr. Birnbaum, is as follows. Your predecessor, Mr. Teyssen, when he became the CEO, the company looked completely differently. Now you are taking over a company which has been completely revamped, also in its structure. Where do you see the company in five years down the road? Will it be mostly the same as today? Perhaps you can tell us what might potential structural changes under your aegis. Second question, when it comes to the asset disposals and portfolio adjustments, you already shared with the analysts that you're not going to comment on that. I'm going to ask you nevertheless, because I would like to find out more about these EUR 2 billion-EUR 4 billion. What is this all about? I know this is a topic that you're not so happy with for many years now, is it safe to assume that this is already included in that? Okay. I'd like to start with the second question. I would like to repeat what I said this morning when I spoke to the analysts. You're not going to get an answer. Now coming back to your first question. It's a good question. Thank you. Does this mean that nothing's going to change except for a number of additions, acquisitions? I think that's not the right answer. Of course, there are still going to be networks in 10 years down the road. We're going to be offering customer solutions still. Let me also tell you that E.ON will look completely differently in five years down the road. E.ON will have fully digitized its networks by then. The networks will be fully digitally operated. There will be visibility at all levels of the network, and they will be controllable locally. The network business will look completely differently from today. I said it in my speech this morning. The very fact that we continue to operate the grid does not mean that the systems, processes, and structures shouldn't change. They will be changed fundamentally. You can believe me. Honestly speaking, if you compare our networks and the way they operated 10 years ago and the way we do it today, you will come to the conclusion that the network business is a completely different story compared to 2010. The answer is we're going to have the same kind of business, but the way we go about the business will be very much different from today. The same goes for customer solutions. Energy retail will only be available if you do it digitally. As I said, our customers will be migrated to digital platforms, and this will be completely different from the business, the way it looked like five years ago, et cetera. Massive changes lie ahead. The headline, however, remains unchanged seemingly. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Steitz. Then there's Ms. Höning from Rheinische Post, and then there's Tom Käckenhoff, and another new question by Ruben Bethke from Energate. First, Ms. Höning, please. Thank you very much. I have two questions really. The shareholders are not so convinced because the share price is down. What's your explanation and how are you going to change that? You also announced another efficiency program worth EUR 500 million. What does this mean in terms of job cuts or in additional jobs? How many jobs were cut in the context of the energy integration? Up to 5,000? Have you taken care of that already, or how many redundancies are to be expected still? Thank you. This morning we presented a program which would describe the next decade. We also issued a guidance up until 2026. What we want to do is over the next decade to convince our external stakeholders and convince you over the next five years and deliver the figures we are committed to. Currently, we are going through the energy transition, a restructuring of the customer business. New customer business will be added. It's a marathon that's going to last years, and it won't be decided in a matter of hours or on a given day. The answer I'd like to give you is we will convince you, hopefully, that we will continue to deliver on our promises. Hopefully, we will be impressive by our consistency in our performance. That would be the answer I'd like to give to your first question. In terms of job cuts, we made it clear this morning that we don't issue any guidance in terms of FTE. I'd like to answer your question as follows. We should do everything we can to grow successfully. This is exactly what society expects from us. Let's try and deliver what the energy transition is calling for. If we do so, there's going to be prospects for our members of staff too. That's not an answer. Will there be further job cuts? No. The answer is we don't have any specific job cutting plans in terms of concrete headcount figures, if this is what you're after. Thank you very much, Ms. Höning. Thanks for your follow-up question. On that note, over to Tom Käckenhoff from Reuters. Mr. Käckenhoff, you have the floor. Unfortunately, we cannot hear you, Mr. Käckenhoff. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you now. Great. Thank you very much for giving me the floor. Good afternoon. Here's my question. The hydrogen business, what are your future plans? What's the next milestones? Are you planning a dedicated hydrogen division? When are you going to be able to actually make money based on hydrogen? Here is the answer, says Leo Birnbaum. It's a three-pronged answer. We never said that we would set up a hydrogen unit that would look into that. Second, the next milestones, as far as we are concerned, would mean that the projects which are already in the pipeline, that they will be turned into profitable projects. We are going to come up with a business case for hydrogen. The boundary conditions have to be right, subsidies, European subsidies, national subsidies. Once we are there, the next step would be to try and bundle individual activities to form a critical mass, perhaps in the Ruhr region or along the North Sea coast. We would start with individual projects, turning them into profitable business cases, changing them into profitable clusters, leading to solutions for industrial regions, ultimately. Once we get there, we're also going to be able to generate the economies of scale so as to be competitive. That's the sequence of events that we are going to pursue. Let me also point out how good our starting position is. We are very well presented in a number of markets, and we are very strong in the regions. We're deeply anchored in the municipalities. If you look at where the hydrogen demand will come from going forward, you will see that in a country such as Germany, it will be the medium-sized companies, and they cannot build their own electrolysis plants. They need companies such as E.ON who are in a position to link different companies and players with one another. This is exactly the great starting position that we currently have. We are so present in almost everywhere in our markets, and this comes with an excellent value proposition in terms of hydrogen. What about profitability? When is this to be achieved? The investment cycles for this kind of infrastructure, let me tell you, we're talking about 3 to 4 years. This is the minimum amount of time that is going to be required from the letter of intent until the termination of the plant. 3 to 4 years as a rule of thumb. This is not something that you should expect to happen next year. It won't come up on our profit and loss statement next year. It's going to take a couple of years. Perhaps over a period of 5 years, we're going to have to do a lot of work, identifying potential customers, entering into partnerships. Profitability may only be expected later than that, towards the end of the decade. Thank you very much, Marc. There's a whole string of questions that we've received. First question from Ruben Bethke from Energate. Thank you very much for the explanation. I would like to ask the following question. I've heard a number of things already, Mr. Birnbaum. In your initial statement, you spoke about the role of partnerships. These may be manifold. Perhaps you can tell us what's the direction that you are thinking of. What kind of companies are you thinking of when you think of partnerships? Perhaps you can be a little more concrete. Let me answer as follows. There's at least three ways to think about partnerships. First, partnerships which would allow transformation, by which you would acquire capabilities which you couldn't develop on your own. In terms of digitization, I can tell you that we cannot do everything in-house. We're going to have to acquire state-of-the-art from external partners, of course. We are an interesting partner for external partners too, because we come with a broad base upon which they can apply their technology. Then there's partnerships for investment purposes. There's partners who would like to invest funds in businesses which come with special characteristics, thereby helping us ramping up a business than we could do with our own funds. These would be partnerships that I would find interesting from a point of view of economies of scale. There's partnerships that we have traditionally had in industry with customers when it comes to the reconfiguration of networks, when it comes to setting up a hydrogen industry. In this context, not everybody should reinvent the wheel themselves. That's why it would make sense to team up with others, with partners, to do so in a more efficient fashion. There's partnerships for financing, for competencies, and for driving the energy transition. If you think about it, there might even be a fourth or fifth category for partnerships. The takeaway message is partnerships are part of the solution, and we can think of most varied partnerships for a whole number of different purposes. There's a whole range of questions I'd like to take now. Vanessa Dezem from Bloomberg, then there's Julia Dymitruk from Montel, Mr. Kurich from Börsen-Zeitung, Eckert from Reuters, and Stefan Schulte from WAZ. A whole range of questions. Let's start with Ms. Dezem from Bloomberg. Ms. Dezem, what's your question? I hope you can hear us, because unfortunately, we cannot hear you yet. We can see you. We cannot hear you, even though we can see you. Perhaps you are still on mute. Otherwise, we would try again in one minute. Welcome back to you, Ms. Dezem. Let's continue with Ms. Dymitruk from Montel. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you great. I looked at your interesting presentation. There was a lot of information on retail and hedging, et cetera. You've got a dedicated trading team, if I've understood correctly. In the gas market, there's a lot happening these days. There was a chart on the gas volume risk for 2020, 2022. Risk would be medium in 2022. Perhaps you could elaborate on that a little bit, the risk situation with regard to gas. There was also the new contracts. What was the situation like this year, and what are you expecting for the rest of the winter in terms of the gas market and procurement? Why is there such a huge risk for gas? I guess you know that better than we do, or just as well. You just need to look at the development in the markets, and there's not a lot that I could add. I guess you know that volatility is very high, nervousness is rife. There's all sorts of speculation as to what market participants might do, and this explains the risk in terms of gas much more so than for power. That's the way it is presented on that chart. The future course of the upcoming winter is like reading in a crystal ball. We've taken out hedges for winter as we know it from the past. It'll very much depend on the weather of the winter. How cold will it be? That's the key question that might ultimately affect the price changes. Prices are still going down. We are still assuming a normalization for next year. Whether or not it's going to happen, we don't know. That remains to be seen in February or March. Thank you very much, Leo. What about Ms. Dezem? Do you want to try again? Perhaps we can try again, Ms. Dezem. Would you like to give it another go? Can you hear me now, Ms. Dezem? It seems like Ms. Dezem cannot hear us still. Ms. Dezem, you won't be forgotten. We're going to come back to you after the end of the event separately. On that note, over to Mr. Kurich from the Börsen-Zeitung. You have the floor. Thank you very much. I have a question. Question for Mr. Spiecker. What about a few details on how to fund this huge investment program? You already shared a number of things this morning. I'd like to know whether a capital increase might potentially be a part of these funding activities, or whether you can rule out a capital increase altogether. Answer. Well, Ms. Kurich. We've presented a financial framework which is very much consistent in itself. That's the way it should be. The funds that we are going to use have to be adequately accounted for. The bulk of our investment from the dividend will be covered by our internal funding power. The biggest share, more than EUR 13 billion, will come from the cash flow that we are going to be generating based on our operating business over the next 5 years. You may also remember that we pointed out that we still have to work on the portfolio in a number of areas. Basically, we still expect revenues between 2 to EUR 4 billion, both in terms of financing and portfolio optimization. This will cover the investment requirements and the funds necessary for our dividend story, and the associated growth rates over the next few years. Ms. Eckert from Reuters, I'd like to give the floor to you. Thank you very much. I'd like to come back to the winter issue, if I may. It's everybody's guess when the announced gas amounts from Russia will come. In the past, you've managed to join forces with Gazprom, the shareholders committee of Nord Stream 1. You may have information that you can share with the market, Mr. Spieker, don't you? What do you expect? How are you going to cut through this Gordian knot over the next few years? What about supplies from Russia? Could that perhaps take out some of the nervousness? Of course, you cannot predict what the weather's going to be like, but what is your assessment of how the protagonists are going to position themselves? I think Russia's strategy of leaving people out in the cold is not a very good strategy at all. Ms. Eckert, we can certainly understand where you're coming from, but please bear with us that we cannot engage in speculation. If we were to answer, this would amount to speculation, even though you may assume that we could do more than speculate. It would still belong in the realm of speculation and wouldn't benefit anybody. The answer is, we're none the wiser than you are. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks, Ms. Eckert. I'd like to move on to Mr. Schulte from WAZ Newspaper. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. You've presented the first 5-year plan, if I may call it that way. You are promising a high level of stability and an increasing dividend. Here is what I'm interested in, and a number of questions have already been asked. I am interested in the political ramifications because there's going to be a so-called traffic light coalition in Germany governing before too long. How much dependent are you on the results of the coalition talks? They're entering the final stretch as we speak. Climate and energy questions, energy transition. This might be the biggest bone of contention. What do you need to see coming out of the coalition talks, and will you be able to deliver on your promises towards the shareholders, if the results aren't in your favor? I'd like to give you a two-pronged response. First of all, we are not very much dependent, and still we are very much dependent. Let me explain to you how that makes sense. Fundamentally speaking, all parties and the potential governing parties, they all agree that the energy transition should be driven in the known direction. You may remember from when I spoke this morning, if the energy transition accelerates, there will be more requirements. I cannot see anybody on the horizon that were to stop the energy transition altogether. We are not that much dependent on them, and we were not that much dependent even before September. We knew all along that the energy transition would continue, innovation would be successful, that's why our business will still be called for going forward, allowing us to grow. It's a matter of how much the impact will be, it's not so important what the objective is for 2030. Is it 76% or 80% or 85%? It's not so important what the objective is, but what this requires in terms of concrete measures. We are not dependent on the outcome because the trend is so much in our favor. Nevertheless, that's the second part to my answer, when it comes to the details, the new traffic light coalition could make our life so much easier and increase the likelihood of the energy transition to be successful if necessary measures are taken. Let's take the permitting scenarios. We need to cut the permitting time by half, generally speaking, for grid expansions, for grid infrastructure measures. Second, we need a framework within which we can do digitization and innovation. We need to be able to access data to control our networks. You may remember that I've spoken that I wasn't exactly happy about smart meters. You could read about that in the press. When it comes to a new coalition government in Berlin, I hope that they would be as good as any other coalition when it comes to promoting the energy transition. That's why I believe it's fair to assume that we are not so much dependent on the outcome. On the other hand, we are hoping that the new government will make our life so much easier so as to allow for a more effective energy transition for everybody's benefit. Thank you very much. One follow-up question from me, if I may. You are saying that in terms of your figures, you're not dependent on the outcome. You're going to reach these targets anyway, come what may. The new coalition could still help you to achieve and exceed your forecast. For such a scenario, wouldn't you need a green traffic light coalition, as it were? Well, one more time, Mr. König will explain that the biggest part of investment which is dependent on permits is to do with renewables, where the 110 and 380 kV grids are concerned. Distribution networks, not so much of a problem. Most of the increase can be done, I'm optimistic as regards to the rest. We're going to be able to deliver on our promised figures. It's not so much about the shade of green in the upcoming governing coalition, but what counts is for the upcoming government to be operational. I want the new government to come up with concrete measures. There's no point in promising green targets. I want to see concrete measures, such as accelerating the rollout of smart meters, accelerating permit procedures. What about cutting red tape in the context of the Renewable Energy Sources Act, if it is to continue to exist to begin with. My answer is, I'm not after a specific color. I'm after a new government which delivers hands-on and concrete measures instead of lofty goals which are not going to be achieved anyway. Thank you very much for not mincing your words. Leo, we've got one more question from Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Mr. Torben. Before we come to you, Mr. Torben, I'd like to hand over to Ms. Dezem because she submitted her question via the chat function. Thank you very much. Let's try and do it that way. Let's try and translate it. Question is to Leo, I think. From this morning, I remember that you mentioned that to date, European networks have been able to keep up with the expansion of renewable energies. Sooner or later, now actually, they are reaching their limits. Perhaps you can briefly comment on the associated risks. Also, what do you think is the further prospect for grid development? Okay, there's two aspects. In terms of renewables, I'd like to tell you that they have been implemented and integrated rather smoothly. I'd like to focus on wind for a minute because, from a network point of view, it comes with the biggest challenge because we have to transport it over great distances. We've said we've used up the reserves, and this has two consequences. You may remember Mr. König's example from this morning, E.DIS, which is operating in the northeast of Germany, as you may know. If E.DIS receives six times the amount of requests it can actually deliver, which is what they're currently receiving, this goes to show that the amount of renewable energy is so much higher than the peak than what the network is designed for. Six times the number of requests they can accommodate. If you add to that renewable energies to be rolled out going forward, you will understand that the network will be out of its depth. It will be overtaxed, which means that we're going to have to scale it down. There's going to be many more hours during the year when we cannot take up the wind from the Uckermark region to Berlin, which means the electricity will get stuck in Uckermark. Either it's not going to be generated to begin with, or you might as well heat the ground. Once the net grid capacity is utilized, you're not going to be able to transport electricity. First effect. Second effect is as follows. The existing power motorways for the 380 kV and 110 are fully utilized. You have to conceive of it as a motorway. All lanes are blocked by traffic. The smallest interruption will call a traffic jam, and this is exactly what happens to the networks. Every lane is full of congestion. This means that it's going to be so much more difficult for us to allow smooth operations. If there were a disruption to the system today, if something were to break down, if a power pole were to topple over for whatsoever reason, or if we had to switch off a source, there would be massive difficulties out of the blue because this would lead to all sort of blockages. Technically speaking, we could manage, but nevertheless, we would soon be reaching our limits. We cannot simply double our expansion speed and trust in the networks to be able to cope because they won't. We're going to have to protect them by keeping the renewables out of the network, which is not the purpose after all. Mr. Torben, I'm going to call you in a minute, but I'd like to briefly let Ms. Dezem in. She spoke about the European perspective. Leo, could you perhaps comment on the European network situation? Let's look at the expansion objectives all across Europe. We want to be climate neutral by 2045, we're going to have to see similar problems going forward in most of the European countries. I think that's a fair assessment. Mr. Torben from German Press Agency, dpa, you have the floor. Thank you very much. Hope you can hear me. It's about the EUR 27 billion total in CapEx. What share will go to the German markets? Perhaps you can give us a breakdown for customer solutions and network expansion. Second, expansion. I'd like to come back to that. Could you perhaps elaborate on that? What do we have to understand by the term expansion? Is it about upgrading existing power lines, or would that also mean building additional new lines? Perhaps you can even give us concrete figures as to that. Mr. Torben. As regards the investment plans, the EUR 27 billion, they can be broken down as follows. EUR 22 billion for the European energy network, EUR 5 billion will be spent on the customer solutions, of which a large part will go into distributed energy infrastructure, CO2-neutral solutions, et cetera. The EUR 22 billion, how much will go to Germany? I'm going to give you this figure later on. I can't give it to you off the top of my head. It'll be more than 50%, which will end up in Germany, more reliable figures I'd like to give you later on. What do you mean by upgrading the network? Let me tell you. It's not always about building a new 110 kV power line with the large poles. Take a standard village road where you have to install such a line and wherein 10 years from now, 40 wall boxes might be installed to charge e-vehicles. Difficult situation. Perhaps there's going to be PV systems, solar power in the same road. In such a scenario, perhaps the substation might have to be replaced, or we might have to change the control approach to the substation so as to allow for power supply to such a road. I said it this morning. Our challenge is not so much to keep the balance between supply and demand going forward. In every second, we're going to be required to guarantee an adequate balance in every single road in Germany. That's going to be so much more ambitious because we will have to feed in so many more participants into the network than today. Part of the solution will be building new power lines, new substations. Every wind turbine generator will have to come with a substation and a transformer. This goes to show that a whole lot of new assets will need to be built. Take thermal generation. When it comes to the details, the transformation is truly daunting. It's not like it's good enough to add a couple of kilometers new power lines. Everything will be changed fundamentally. There's a last question on the chat, Klaus Hinkel from ZfK. Mr. Hinkel, you have the floor. Okay, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Question on the network, the returns. If I understood you correctly, you intend to take legal action against the German regulator, Federal Network Agency. Perhaps you can briefly explain what your objectives are, and what about a timeline of such legal action. Perhaps you can also point out what the German regulator's decision to reduce returns. What does this mean for you economically speaking over the next couple of years? Well, it's true. Mr. König said that we would take legal action against that because we believe that the decision-making process and the reasoning for this decision is very open to legal challenges. We're not the only ones. Similar markets or other market participants announced that they would appeal against this decision for a number of reasons. It's important to keep our legal position also, regardless of the potential outcome. We have to do so by principle. The timeline, well, you're talking about two to three and a half years. Last time around, it took two and a half years. This time around, it's going to be three years, give or take, lower court of appeal, higher court of appeal, et cetera. Economically speaking, we said there's two factors. You have to look at the overall regulatory package. We've got the cost review for gas, cost review for power, and we have to look at the overall package to be able to assess the impact of the new regulatory regime. When it comes to the sensitivity, I like to tell you that there's one factor that we don't really want to highlight because we've maintained all along that regulations should come as a joined-up package. We also assume that the Federal Network Agency, German regulator, even though the decision is not exactly popular with us, I believe that they understand that they have to make sure that we are able to make the required investment. Hopefully, the overall package will be acceptable. That's what we believe. Currently, there's no further questions. Thank you very much for the questions so far. We are almost at the end of our press call. Perhaps, a last call to you out there. Are there any further questions, ladies and gentlemen? Counting down. Five, four, three, two, one, zero. No further questions. Okay. On that note, I'd like to thank you for participating. I guess it's going to take some more time before we'll get together in a real-life setting. At the last press call, many of you came to see us in Essen. It's working pretty well even though you are not here. Hopefully, we can welcome you back in person. Thank you very much for your participation from this stage today.