Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to our virtual six months press conference, financial press conference in Essen. Several other companies based in Essen are going to publish their figures today, and we are delighted that you are with us here this morning. Next to us, here is Leonhard Birnbaum, the CEO, and our new CFO, Nadia Jakobi. Good morning to both of you. As every year, Mr. Birnbaum and Ms. Jakobi will give a report on the first six months, and then be available for any questions that you may have. I pass the floor to Leonhard Birnbaum. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, from me as well. Welcome from me to the presentation of half-year financial results. I'm delighted to be here today with Nadia, who, as you know, is with us for the first time in her new role as CFO. She's been around for ages, so I'm very happy to have you at my side. So, ladies and gentlemen, our half-year earnings performance was in line with our expectations, an Adjusted group EBITDA of EUR 4.9 billion, and that puts us right on track to achieve our target for fiscal year 2024. Nadia Jakobi will provide you with more details in a moment. And what's also important to me, we just didn't only deliver our results, but we also overcame challenging situations. Our teams in Brandenburg, for example, restored the network connection to Tesla's factory in Grünheide in a record time of just 5 days after the attack. I'm not gonna go into detail here, but it wasn't clear at all that we could manage that in that speed. The first estimates were much longer than that, and during the flood disaster in southern Germany, and I think we have a few pictures of that as well, our colleagues worked day and night to restore our customers' electricity supply. So many thanks to all of our employees here, especially those who were on the ground and were working day and night and pushed themselves to the limit. But I would also like to reiterate that, it's even more important than the restoration of supplies is the, the... that all of our employees come home safe and sound every evening at the end of their shift and are not involved in any accidents. Particularly in these situations, work safety must come first. So, ladies and gentlemen, as Europe's largest network operator and provider of intelligent customer solutions for the energy transition, we want to be the company that makes new energy work in Europe. And that's why it's important to us that we do not just deliver on our numbers, but at the same time, also invest in the future. Up until 2028, as you know, we want to invest EUR 42 billion, EUR 34 billion of which will go towards our network, energy network business, and this is all based on the financial headroom that our own balance sheet offers us. In the first half year alone, we already invested EUR 2.9 billion, that's up 20% on the prior year. Of the EUR 2.9 billion investments in the first half of 2024, about EUR 2.1 billion went towards the expansion, modernization, and digitization of our energy networks. It is easy to see why this is necessary. E.ON, in the first six months alone, E.ON added about 250,000 new network connections, with the record level of the prior years is being continued. We're also connecting future industries. For example, our Avacon subsidiary is currently preparing the network connection for Intel's planned semiconductor mega factory in Magdeburg. That is a connection with a maximum capacity of 1,600 MW, which is roughly equal to the peak demand of the city of Hamburg during the year. Electricity networks are also a growth sector that is practically independent of the economy as a whole, in Germany and in Europe as well. As President of Eurelectric, the trade association of Europe's power industry, I presented the new Grids for Speed study in May. It points out that in the future, electrical applications will have to be doubled. So from EUR 33 billion to about EUR 55 billion-EUR 60 billion a year. I'm not going to go into the details or the reasons why. So these will roughly double, and that's because decarbonization of the society is an electrification of society. According to this study, we have to reach, achieve an electrification rate of 60% for primary energy. Today, it's 20% only, so we need to triple that, and that alone makes clear why we have to invest so much more in the future. And insufficient or underinvestment in infrastructure has always proved to be an even more costly failure, which is difficult then to catch up on. Particularly, we in Germany know that extremely well. And networks investments, if they're made in time, secure economic power and prosperity, and they create jobs. Our Grids for Speed study shows that they could create around 2 million additional jobs in the EU, and E.ON is feeling this effect, too, by the way. We added more than 2,000 employees in the first half of 2024, most of them at our Energy Networks business. So, ladies and gentlemen, our growth strategy also includes a consistent digitization strategy... We've always said that we want to grow, driven by the drive for sustainability, and we can only achieve that by digitization all of our processes and systems. Here, too, we have made progress. We are currently in our German customer business. We are introducing a uniform digital process, data, and system landscape for our customer service and metering unit. That sounds a little abstract at the beginning, but it means that on a single weekend in June, we migrated about half of German customers in Germany with 12 billion data sets or data records. Half of our data customers, 12 billion data records from a Friday to a Monday. A great achievement of the team. We've also made further progress in the expansion of digital transformer stations. We reported on that in the past. They increase the visibility about the condition of the networks, and they allow us to control the network much better, and that is something we need in catastrophe situations like the flooding, or something we need to cope with the increasing inflow of solar. So we've made progress there as well. We installed about 2,000 digital transformer stations of this kind, and we are at 10%. We have doubled that compared to what we had a few years ago, and the smart meter rollout in Germany has been increased by 60% compared to the previous year. And this, despite the fact that the operational and economic conditions for the smart meter rollout need to be greatly improved. The spectrum of improvements is still wide. What we need, in particular, higher price caps, the joint installation of smart metering system and control boxes or regulatory reimbursement of the costs of additional services. As you can see, private investment on an unprecedented scale is absolutely essential for the energy transition. This will require, Europe, and in particular Germany, to become more attractive for international investors. Without competitive returns, it will not be possible to finance the enormous investments to expand network infrastructure. It will not be, possible to attract enough private capital. So returns on network investment, particularly in Germany, lag significant behind those countries with comparable investment risks, such as the United States. The regulatory authorities must act now for that reason, because other models that are currently being discussed, such as the Energy Transition Fund, which in turn would depend on state funds and therefore tax revenue, unfortunately, will not help to attract international investors either. So quite the opposite, and also in terms of its magnitude, the problem cannot be solved that way. What network operators need is a long-term framework with an appropriate return on grid investments, both, for new and existing assets. And this needs to take effect swiftly. And the same applies to investments to digitize energy infrastructure. Otherwise, the energy transition and its many millions of decentralized systems and players are at risk of failing. And it's also important that the overall regulatory scheme is sound. Improvements in one area must not be counteracted by excessive demands elsewhere, such as inappropriate, productivity targets. After all, this isn't just about the economic environment for networks. Investments in distribution networks are what makes it possible to decarbonize the electricity systems in the first place, and as I said, they create jobs as well. Ladies and gentlemen, our customer solutions business, with its two segments, Energy Retail and Energy Infrastructure Solutions, also delivered in the first six months of the year. In total, we invested around EUR 700 million, thereof, around EUR 400 million in our EIS business, as we call it, which is heat, mainly. We invested particularly in projects that help reduce CO2 emissions. What's important here are sectors in which decarbonization is a challenge, and that's heat suppliers, I just said, but also transport. Two examples. One example is the establishment of a low-carbon energy network in East London. That's an area that's being developed. We're using our ectogrid technology there. It's a very innovative approach. It's based on smart heating pumps, low temperature heating network, which, when completed, will save around 4,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. That's 80%-88% fewer emissions than the heat generated from conventional gas boilers. We're also driving forward the expansion of charging infrastructure in collaboration with MAN Truck and Bus. We have signed a contract cooperation agreement, according to which 170 locations across Europe will be supplied with 500 public charging points in Germany, 125 of those in Germany alone, and half of them by 2025 already, which, by the way, will create the biggest public charging network for heavy-duty vehicles, which will also be usable eventually for vehicles as well. So these kinds of investments demonstrate we are making sure that new energy actually works. And when it comes to new energy, I firmly believe that we need more Europe. My second point is, a few weeks ago, I had the privilege of meeting Enrico Letta, Italy's former Prime Minister, to discuss his ideas about Europe's future. He presented them a few weeks ago. In September 2023, he presented a report for the EU Commission on the future of the single energy market, and for the energy sector, he states that the EU's single market proved to be a safeguard during the crisis. Leveraging the benefits of a single market will require a further leap in interconnectivity and massive investments in Europe's energy infrastructure. That is, report also calls for the completion of the EU's Capital Market Union, turning it into a true financing unit that mobilizes capital for infrastructure. I very much welcome the fact that Commission President von der Leyen, the new Commission President von der Leyen, has announced that and the new commission will take Letta's's recommendations into consideration and implement them. Less bureaucracy, more speed, more innovation, and more capital to implement the Green Deal, and also to deepen the single market, both of which I believe are steps in the right direction. I'm firmly convinced that this will improve the economic viability of the energy transition, and that's good for acceptance among our fellow citizens, because we must win people over when it comes to the energy transition. The energy transition only works with and not against the people, and one of the prerequisites is that the new energy world is economically viable for everyone or even attractive for them. This is true for households, businesses, and also industry. It's a shared task and a shared responsibility to keep system costs down within reasonable limits and ensuring affordability. Even if it makes these huge investments necessary, as I've pointed out in the past. Let me explain the three highlights to limit the cost of the new energy system. First, renewable expansion should be managed regionally. I've said it several times: new wind and solar farms should only be built where it makes sense from a network perspective and where they can be integrated. Solar farms at the wrong place, which cannot be integrated into the overall system and whose output we cannot transmit, don't help. They only make the overall system more expensive. The regional imbalances between generation and consumption increase every year, and that's costing a lot of money and is a waste of money from a customer perspective and system perspective. We spent EUR 10 billion on to manage network congestion in the last few years alone. Here's an example from within our group. In the service area of our E.DIS subsidiary in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, consumers with an annual peak load of around 2 GW are currently connected, so 2,000 MW. On the other side, we already see within E.DIS an installed capacity of 14 GW. At the moment, we have requests for additional renewable energy systems with a capacity of another 190 GW of capacity. Of course, they will not all be built, but only if a fraction of this 190 GW is built, then we will produce 25 times as much electricity in the E.DIS area as we need in during peak hours a year. To make it less abstract, then we produce so much electricity in the E.DIS area, enough to supply 45 million homes. That's more than we have in Germany. So you, you don't have to be an engineer to realize that such huge amounts of electricity will never be transported out of the area. So, if operators build this, nevertheless, in these areas, they should no longer be supported by public subsidies. Second, funding needs to be targeted instead of scattershot, or to put it another way, less planned economy and more market. Let's stick with E.DIS for a moment. You may ask yourself whether the flood of inquiries, which we're seeing at the moment, should not be a sign to think about an end of subsidies now. Yes, in the press, there have been other voices, but they are the ones that would profit from the subsidies, of course. But the decisions themselves need to be made by those who pay for it at the end of the day. That's the customers. So now is the time to think about a real paradigm shift. That's why I welcome the plan in the German government's growth package to switch to investment cost subsidies for new renewable energy systems. Here, too, a lot of money can be saved, I believe, but the devil's in the detail, of course. And thirdly, flexibility needs to come first. Wind and sun cannot be controlled. A predominantly wind and solar-based energy system must therefore be a highly flexible system. We need flexibility on both the supply and the demand side by means of energy storage capacity, for example, or by incentives to use electricity when it's cheaper because the wind's blowing. And being a network operator, we welcome an incentive system for large and small scale grid-friendly facilities that can thus help relieve network congestion. That, too, is something the German government has picked up in its report on the power market design. Again, the devil is in the detail, but we need to systematically make sure that unnecessary increases in system costs are avoided. So, ladies and gentlemen, if we tackle these and other issues, then public acceptance of the energy transition will increase again. And with that, I hand things over to Nadia Jakobi for the details of the first half year. ...Thank you very much, Leo, and good morning to everyone from me as well. I'm very pleased to speak to you today, for the first time in my new role as CFO of E.ON. As the playmaker of the energy transition, we need to deliver, and so I'll turn directly to our half-year financial results. E.ON delivered in the first half of 2024, according to plan. We recorded Adjusted group EBITDA of about EUR 4.9 billion, and this puts us on course for the fiscal year as we continue to expect Adjusted EBITDA of EUR 8.8-9 billion. The same applies to adjusted group net income, which amounted to roughly EUR 1.8 billion in the first half of the year. Here, too, we're well on track to reaching our full year guidance of EUR 2.8-3 billion. Now, if you compare our current year with our prior year results, you'll see the impact of the already familiar one-off effects, which had an unusually strong effect on our earnings in fiscal 2023. This year, we see the anticipated normalization of our earnings, and the key message for this half year is that our business is growing and our earnings are growing as well. The increase of our underlying group EBITDA is in the low triple-digit EUR million range, and we want to continue this growth, particularly based on our ambitious investment program, which we're implementing systematically. I'll turn now to our earnings in our business divisions. Energy Networks Adjusted EBITDA of roughly EUR 3.3 billion accounted for the majority of our first-half group earnings. This business division's earnings were thus slightly below the prior year figure of EUR 3.4 billion. The last year's result was positively influenced, in particular, by lower redispatch costs in Germany as a result of falling electricity prices. Then over time, E.ON will return these effects to its customers through network fees in line with regulatory requirements. In addition, milder weather in the first half of 2024 led to a reduction in wheeling volumes. Higher costs from upstream networks also had a temporary adverse impact on 2024 earnings. Our investments in the energy transition continue to bolster Energy Networks' first-half earnings. Based on our growth program, we continue to expect this business division's full-year earnings to increase to EUR 6.7 billion-EUR 6.9 billion. Energy Retail's first-half Adjusted EBITDA declined by just under EUR 600 million to roughly EUR 1.4 billion. This reflects the anticipated normalization of earnings, which we also expect for the full year. This includes, for example, non-recurring regulatory effects in the United Kingdom, recorded in the prior year. At the same time, the partly milder weather in the first half of the year led to lower sales volumes. Despite a challenging market environment, we succeeded in keeping customer numbers in energy sales stable in the first half of the year. The Energy Infrastructure Solutions business, EIS, posted first-half Adjusted EBITDA of roughly EUR 250 million. An investment-driven increase in underlying EBITDA is apparent at EIS as well. This operational growth is overshadowed by one-off effects in the prior year figure, as well as lower sales volume due to milder temperatures and maintenance work on combined heat and power plants, which was moved forward. We currently expect earnings of our EIS segment for the full year to be in the lower half of our guidance range of EUR 550 million-EUR 650 million. In the mid to long term, these temporary burdens will have no impact, meaning that we are sticking to our communicated targets for 2028. The demand for solutions to decarbonize industries, cities, and city districts continues unabated, and our project pipeline is well filled. Ladies and gentlemen, we're on track to achieve our group guidance for 2024, and our increased investments have again laid the foundation for additional growth. We plan to invest a total of EUR 42 billion in the European energy transition through 2028. In the first six months of fiscal 2024 alone, E.ON invested around EUR 2.9 billion, which is a +20% year-on-year. Most of our investments went toward our energy networks business. Here, first-half investments of roughly EUR 2.1 billion were 260 million above the prior year period. The current year figure consists of many individual projects. Just one example among many is the construction of a new high-voltage line, which connects Hessen state capital, Wiesbaden, to the high-voltage grid of Süwag. In future, Wiesbaden will be supplied entirely via the Süwag grid. Energy Retail's first-half investments rose by a total of more than EUR 260 million, in particular, to further digitalize energy sales and to expand e-mobility. EIS's investments increased to about EUR 410 million. This primarily reflects projects at customers' premises and the acquisition of a stake in a large-scale battery storage project in the UK. These investments will not only propel the energy transition, but will also lead to earnings growth in the years ahead. Finally, I'll take a brief look at our financial position. As anticipated, our economic net debt rose from EUR 37.7 billion at year-end 2023, to EUR 40.8 billion due to our investment activities. Overall, our financial position remains good. We successfully issued bonds totaling EUR 3.4 billion in the first half of the year alone, of which EUR 2.6 billion were green bonds. E.ON's nearly 13 billion outstanding volume in green bonds already makes it the second largest issuer of green bonds among German companies. Ladies and gentlemen, we're well on track for this year and for the midterm. We fully reaffirm our guidance for 2024 for our business divisions and for the group as a whole, and we also reaffirm all of our targets for 2028. With this, I'll give the floor back to Lars Rosumek for your questions. Thank you, Nadia. Thank you, Leo, for your presentations, and I'd now like to open the Q&As. As always, we'd like to switch on your camera when you join us. This is being broadcast on social media channels, so if you don't want that, your face to be seen, you can leave your camera off. So your questions, please. We have the first question from Handelsblatt, Catiana Krapp. Mrs. Krapp, please go ahead. Good morning. Thank you for the very interesting presentation. I have one question, and you mentioned it earlier, this options package by the Ministry of Economics on the EEG reform of the electricity market. What do you think of that, particularly when it comes to the hybrid capacity market? Maybe you can comment on that briefly. Yes, indeed, we try and understand what that document actually says. It's three topics. One, a system serving network tariffs, so regional incentives, and the second is a focus on flexibility, and the third one is a capacity market. In principle, we believe all three are the right topics. It's important for us to find solutions for all of these three topics. When it comes to the capacity market, I mean, this is an answer which also applies to the other areas in that paper as well. It is important at the end of the day to not just know what the theoretically optimum system is, but also how complex is it to deliver it. So this would be a system which we have... don't have in Europe anywhere, so we, we need to learn, from the start how it works. Theoretically, it could be the best one. Whether it's practically the best one or not, we will have to see at, at the end of the day. What I want to avoid is, to, deliver, many good solutions at too many places, which at the end, like smart meters, lead to a path which cannot be managed or administered. So apart from the three topics, we should focus on easy implementation. This focus seems to be lacking at this point in time. Okay, thank you. Any further questions? That's not the case, apparently, maybe due to, the, clash of events today. Now, Vera Eckert from Reuters. Good morning. You hired 2,000 people in the first half of this year. What are you planning to do in terms of staff for the second half, and where do you stand at the moment? And then, for the smart meters, you wanted better framework conditions. How could this be achieved, better framework conditions? So to be honest, we always have gross and net numbers, so, when we've hired 2,000 people, also, when we had a staff build of 2,000, we probably hired 5,000-6,000. So, I mean, there have been more people joining than leaving us, so the churn is much higher than the 2,000. What we want to achieve is a net figure of 3,200 for the whole year, so 1,200 is still missing. So we're on track as far as this number is concerned for this year. And secondly, smart meters. The main point here is that we would wish that the rollout isn't totally arbitrary. What we have at the moment is a law that allows everyone to raise their hand within a short space of time and receive an intelligent measurement system. We'd like to have a systematic rollout, which would be more efficient to implement, which would not be connected to the intelligent measuring system, but also with the control aspects. That would give us control over the increasingly uncontrolled feed into the grids. So these are different approaches, all of which has been addressed in the regulatory discussions. Thank you. There are two further questions. One, F- Ms. Wagner from dpa-AFX and then Artem Maksim enko from ZfK. Mr. Maksim enko, you were first. Good morning. ... I've got two questions. The first question is, for Mr. Birnbaum, about the basic supply tariffs. I think, Rhein last reduced the prices in September 2023. So, the commodity charges are EUR 0.40. Will there be some movement there? That would be my first question. And EIS, your EIS division, isn't on the transparency platform for district heat prices. Is there a reason why you're not on that platform yet? Okay, first one, the tariff. We reduced them at a very early point in time, the earliest possible time, and we were an early mover in that respect. And of course, I mean, we cannot make a blanket statement. We have various tariffs in the different companies, so we reduced tariffs early, and here and there, we still have prices, the kind of prices you mentioned. There will be a number of changes, but there will not be a blanket adjustment, because we still have a number of customers with special contracts, and for these special contracts, we have customers who, throughout the last few years, were protected from the ripples in the market, and there could actually be increases from the tariffs they have at the moment, so I can't give you a blanket answer at this moment. There will still be a few adjustments, some up, some down, depending on the contractual situation. But the basic statement was that, in the basic tariffs, we were the first movers and EIS, the transparency platform. The question is, of course, what kind of transparency is to be created here? We find it difficult to compare apples and oranges here. The risk of this transparency platform is that there is some sort of transparency that isn't transparency, so written-off plants versus not plants that are not written off. And for that reason, we're kind of reserved about this about adding proactively all kinds of numbers before we have a clear regulatory definition for this platform. Once the regulator or the legislator has provided the framework, then we will deliver everything that's been requested. Thank you, Mr. Maksim enko, then Leonie Wagner from dpa-A FX. Ms. Wagner, good morning to you. Thank you. I hope you can hear me. Great. A question to Mr. Jakobi. You just mentioned it for EIS, that you are at the bottom end of the forecast scale. Maybe you can give an estimate on the other business segments as well. Thank you, Ms. Wagner, for your question. In total, we go to the average of our forecast range, so that's still our best guess from the EUR 9.8 billion-EUR 9.9 billion. So in total, all the three other segments, Energy Retail, Energy Networks, and corporate headquarters, other, will set off the slight decline in EIS. So the medium figure is still what we are going for. Thank you, Ms. Wagner. We don't have any further questions at this point in the system. Let me check again. Oh, no, there is another one from Mr. Heinen, from energ ate. Mr. Heinen, please. You are on mute. We can't hear you at the moment. You have to switch on your microphone. Sorry, now you should be able to hear me. Yes, great. We had the Oranienburg case network congestion there in spring. What I'd like to know is how... what your take on the situation was at that time, and whether you can expect this to happen again and cause problems going forward. This is in the E.DIS area, and you mentioned that there are many network connection requests. I'd simply like to hear your take on this situation. Well, first of all, again, we, we need to be clear here. Oranienburg, this case was not an E.DIS problem. E.DIS solved the problem. It was a problem of the municipal utility of Oranienburg, just to make that clear. And secondly, what was kind of spectacular in this case was the announcement that household customers would not get a connection until 2026, a new connection. So the congestion was perceived to be so big that they believed it was not possible to connect household customers. That should not have happened to that extent, but if you look at whether we will, in future, see congestion for commercial customers going forward, then the answer is: we are already seeing these kind of connection, or congestion today, and we will increasingly do so in future. So network congestion is a problem that can occur when the system is under full load conditions. So the third point I want to make is, generally- ...The energy transition is posing increasing requirements for infrastructure. So, particularly the distribution system operators have to deal with a volatile feed-in conditions, and the increasingly volatile demand as well. This will cause technical process and system requirements that will have to be made, met, and that will pose a problem for network operators, including E.ON. Therefore, my answer there is, E.ON has always been the solution to the problem in the past. We were that in the case of Oranienburg as well, and we will continue to be that as well. But it will become increasingly difficult to provide solutions, and here and there, particularly, when it comes to smaller operators who have less resources, this can lead to capacity limits, all the way to the capacity limits that are available. We have one further question from Cor Schulte Brancs. Yes, hello, Teyssen. I have a brief question. In the press release, I read that 47 million customers are supplied by E.ON, and as far as I recall, after the takeover of Innogy, you were at about 50 million customers. Is that a new calculation, or did you lose customers? Why do you have fewer customers than you previously had? Well, very off, this is a result of rounding calculations. We have customers in Slovakia, which have been deconsolidated. In the past, we had consolidated these customers, so this is only an accounting issue, and that's how we lost some customers. But overall, our customer figures have remained constant over the past 4-5 years. Thank you very much, Mr. Schulte Brancs. With this, we do not see any further questions in the system. Are there any other requests? There is a question from Mr. Heinen from Energate. Thank you very much. You mentioned that the... you could imagine the end of subsidies for renewables, and now Mr. Lindner, the Minister of Finance, demanded the end of solar subsidies. What could you imagine? Are you thinking of any time frames? Could you provide us with some more details, and what is your opinion on the statement of Mr. Lindner? I do not know what Mr. Lindner said, so and I don't want to comment that, and in general, I do not want to comment on the current political debate. But what I wanted to make clear that is that when do we really want to start thinking about an adjustment of the subsidy scheme? If we do not do that now, well, when will we have a better timing? We should be open for discussions and not stifle discussions from the start. Thank you very much. I don't see any further questions in the chat, and with this, I would like to close the press conference for the first six months. I would like to thank you, Nadia, and you, Leo, and of course, thank you to all the journalists who have joined us. Thank you for being with us again, and I hope that you will have a successful day with the other press releases and reports in, from Essen-based companies. Thank you very much.