The conference will stop being recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Dominik. Please go ahead. Thank you, Ellis. We would like to welcome all of you to our Sustainability Expert Call. We appreciate your interest. As always, I'm happy to begin the call by mentioning our cautionary language that is in our Safe Harbor Statement on slide two of the presentation. For further details concerning risks and uncertainties, please refer to this document as well as to our SEC filings. Our Expert Call series is designed to provide a deeper dive into key topics for Fresenius Medical Care and to give investors and analysts the opportunity to hear directly from the experts leading these initiatives. We have chosen sustainability as the topic for our first Expert Call for the year 2024, as sustainability is an integral part of our strategic development as a company, and we have continually stepped up our sustainability activities and progress. I'm delighted to have Charlotte Stange, our Global Head of Sustainability, here to present today. Charlotte will provide an update on the latest progress of our sustainability agenda and a deeper look at our Climate Action Plan. At the end of Charlotte's presentation, we will open the line for your questions. If you would prefer to submit a question via email, you can send your questions to dominik.heger@freseniusmedicalcare.com. I will now hand over to Charlotte to begin the presentation. Charlotte, the floor is yours. Thank you, Dominik, and welcome to everyone joining on the line. Thank you for your interest in how we progress in our sustainability journey. I will begin my remarks on slide three. Sustainability at Fresenius Medical Care is closely linked to our purpose, to our vision to create a future worth living for our patients every day and worldwide. And what is a future worth living is not sustainable. Our vision centers our entire business on patients, their lives, and the future. It encourages a global perspective, and it applies ownership and responsibility to generate a positive outcome. And that is also how we want to look at our sustainability priorities. Next, on slide four. So what does it mean for our sustainability activities? For us, this means integrating sustainable practices every day into our core operations for the well-being of our patients and also for our people and the planet to pave the way for a future worth living. Let's have a look at the progress in our three strategic progress areas that you see on the slide. These focus areas aim at enhancing quality of care and access to healthcare, building the best team to serve patients, and reducing our environmental footprint. Those focus areas are material to our strategy and to operational performance. All of our global sustainability targets that you can see in details in our non-financial report are all linked to these focus areas. Let's zoom in on some highlights from the last year. When it comes to the focus area enhancing quality of care and access to healthcare, the Patient Net Promoter Score is a relevant key performance indicator for us. It measures the satisfaction of our patients in our more than 3,800 clinics around the world. Last year, the NPS slightly increased from 71 in the previous year to 72. That means we overachieved our target of a consistent score of at least 70 every year. That's considered an excellent result for the industry. It's also important to us to continuously invest in research to advance medical knowledge and progress. And we also continue our efforts to share best practices that are relating to dialysis treatment. To give you an example for that, last year, we published more than 170 scientific documents around the world, including articles in top-renowned scientific journals. These cover topics such as the impact of renal transplantation, health literacy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. We also actively contributed to more than 20 major relevant conferences on dialysis and nephrology. Moving on to the next focus areas, when it comes to our global FME team, it's important for us to cultivate an inclusive workplace and also continuous learning opportunity. It's important to us to empower our employees to grow personally and to contribute to a sustainable future. That's also why we set global targets to increase the share of female leaders in the first two management levels below the management board, but also the overall share of female leaders in the company. As of December last year, the proportion of women in those first two levels below the management board was 34%. That's an increase compared to the 30% in the previous year. Another important indicator is the training for our employees. The reported training was at an average of 38 hours last year. Another example, more than 143,000 employees participated in training courses on our digital learning platforms. Some topics included compliance, leadership, or also health and safety. Moving on to the third focus area, let's focus on the future of our planet. Here, we want to prioritize responsible resource use and also minimizing the environmental impact of our organization and activities. We recognize that a healthy planet is also essential for patient health. At our production sites, we implemented 100 environmental projects last year. That's part of our what we call Green and Lean initiative. Those projects were aiming at saving water and saving energy, also avoiding emissions or resource reuse or recycled waste. We are on track with our global climate targets. Our reported Scope 1 and 2 emission footprint decreased 16% compared to 2020, which is our target baseline year for the global targets. We made significant progress with our Climate Action Plan. Let's have a look at the details. Turning to slide five. We have committed to reducing our CO2 emissions by 50% in our own operations, so the so-called Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030. We are committed to becoming Climate Neutral by 2040. Progress was made specifically with our renewable electricity strategy and energy efficiency measures at our production sites and in our clinic networks. Let's have a look at some details to look into the activities and progress. Moving on with slide six. The development of our sustainability journey over the last decade really reflects the transformation we're also having in our company. From a previously regional setup with individual initiatives, we are transforming to managing a global sustainability agenda and global targets that are aligned with our overall strategy and transformation. We built up a global governance for sustainability with accountability and business units and in global functions, and of course, also in our top management bodies. Our progress is tracked with relevant global key indicators. It's also important for us to share best practices globally. We also work on improving our data systems and data availability to make our progress more transparent and to be sure that we focus on the relevant priorities to improve. Sustainability progress is also linked to senior manager incentives. Our climate action plan reflects this global approach. Turning to slide seven. If we look at the most recent developments, here are some key initiatives. Just recently this year, we just communicated this week, we signed five virtual power purchase agreements with solar and wind farms in Germany and the US. This was achieved based on the work of a truly cross-functional project team in our company with colleagues from the sustainability department, from accounting and controlling, treasury, tax, real estate, and the business unit teams. So what are those so-called VPPAs? They are large-scale renewable electricity energy contracts with a span of 10-15 years. They have a combined value of more than 580 megawatt hours that are expected to be fed into the electricity grid. With this, the projects are predicted to produce enough electricity to cover up to 46% of our current electricity consumption worldwide. For us, this really is a milestone on our way towards our target to becoming climate neutral. Next, on slide eight. Measures for energy efficiency are also a key element of our Climate Action Plan. We brought some highlights today. At our major production sites, we did efficiency workshops. In these workshops, we discovered more than 100 opportunities to reduce energy consumption and emissions. We have already started with implementing those, and most of those projects are planned to be completed by 2026. To give you an example that you see on slide eight, at a major site in Utah in the U.S., which is one of our largest sites, a series of measures were identified in these energy workshops. They are expected to lead to an annual energy saving of 130,000 MWh. To give you a bit more flavor of what we did, those measures included, for example, adjusting temperature of purified water loops and chillers, of recovering heat from steam condensate, or also installing automated control systems. By the way, these also led to expected water savings of around 800,000 cubic meters of water. Directly applied measures are also expected to contribute savings of more than EUR 1 million in 2024. Turning to slide number nine. Having a look at our clinic network. Our energy management project across the U.S. clinic network is a strategic initiative to reduce electricity consumption, lower utility costs, and so contribute to our sustainability goals. The project leverages advanced technology and protocols to optimize heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems and achieve significant energy savings this way. By the end of this year, it's planned to have covered more than 1,400 clinics in the U.S. To give you an idea of what we're talking about here, expected energy savings are around 15 MWh per individual clinic. We also, moving on with slide 10, evaluate our own production of renewable energy, where it is feasible and where we can make a relevant contribution with that. To give you an example here, in Portugal, we plan to install solar panels at half of our clinics by 2024, covering around 20%-30% of the energy needs for each clinic. We started with 10 sites in 2024 and expected to cover another 10 sites by the end of this year. Turning to slide 11. We also look into emissions in our value chain. If you do recall, our targets are so far looking at Scope 1 and 2 emissions, but we're also planning to develop targets related to Scope 3 emissions. The basis for this was a global assessment of Scope 3 Emissions across all 15 categories to create a solid database. We disclosed the results of this assessment in our current non-financial report, and the data was audited. You'll see on this slide and also in the report that Scope 3 Emissions make up to 80% of the overall emission footprint in our value chain. The biggest share of that is from purchased goods and products. Based on the results of this assessment, we are currently in the process of developing and aligning global targets in this area. We also confirmed this goal and this commitment by submitting the so-called commitment letter to the Science-Based Targets Initiative earlier this year, aligning our commitment to contribute to the goals of the Paris Agreement. All these initiatives reflect our approach to understand our global footprint, to also focus on initiatives where we can really make the biggest impact, to work efficiently and also cost-sensitive, and also to be transparent about where we stand today and about what we want to achieve. Always, we have the company purpose in mind to provide the best possible care to our patients. While we looked at our climate action plan today, this approach also applies to our other sustainability priorities. I'm looking forward to discussing those at another meeting. With this, I come to an end of my remarks, and I will hand over to Dominic to open the Q&A. Thank you, Charlotte, for the presentation and the insights, which I think is very helpful following our press release on the VPPAs, which is an interesting topic. So before we open the lines for questions, kindly be reminded that we are focused on the topic of sustainability, which I guess you all got from the presentation, and mainly on our climate initiatives and not on our latest business developments or the financial outlook. So please use the opportunity to ask questions once we have the opportunity to talk to Charlotte on sustainability-related topics. And with that, Ellis, we can open the lines. And I think the first question I see would come from Veronika from Citi. Hello, good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. I have one. Charlotte, really would like to understand how you're thinking about plastic. Obviously, it's a really important input material for you across the business on the manufacturing side. Are there any projects or opportunities that you see either for recycling products after they've been used or to look at potentially using recycled raw materials? I know it's very difficult in the industry, but just curious what you're doing on that front. Thank you. Thank you, Veronika. That's a good question. Certainly, plastic is a very important topic, and it is for us as well. One topic you already mentioned in the industry, of course, we're highly regulated when it comes to what materials we are allowed to use. But we do have a lot of initiatives that look into opportunities to reduce plastic, to reuse or recycle plastic. To give you some examples, when it comes to the production, we do dumpster dives, this is what we call it, looking into what waste we have and how much we have, where we can reduce waste. But of course, we have to be aware a lot of the waste we have is medical waste with a lot of regulation of what you're allowed to do with it. We also had initiatives, and we published them in the non-financial report looking at reducing plastic, looking at reusing, for example, canisters for products and reduce the number of plastic there. And we also looked into packaging some of the initiatives. I'm not sure if you're aware, we do have a target to have a product and services sustainability assessment that we look into also environmental impact, literally across all our product and services value chain where we look, for example, in plastic recycling opportunities and recycling rates, sorry. And that will be the base of developing all the targets and steering our product portfolio going on. So it's, let's say, a combination of different measures, all, of course, in the framework of what you're allowed to do in the initiative, but it's one of our important topics when it comes to environmental management, of course, as well. Not always related to climate protection, but sometimes, of course, too. If you reduce plastic or, for example, also with transport emissions and packaging, that has a link, but we also look into it when it comes to topics of circular economy. Thank you. And I was going to ask that was going to be my second question, if that's okay. Just circularity, how you're thinking about taking back used machines and repurposing them and/or taking them apart on your end versus letting them be in the open market. I don't know if you have any projects around that. Certainly, we've seen that with some of the other equipment manufacturers as a focus. We looked into opportunity in that area as well, again, linked to our product assessment, but we are in the process of developing a strategy around that. So there is no ready answer of what would be the most focus areas. And Dominik, you want to add something? Yeah, I think that is, Veronika, maybe that's also the background of your thoughts is also the question on when we think about HDF introduction in the U.S., right? So this will be part of our project or is part of our project to see if you need to make the decision, you will accelerate the introduction of the new machine. What do you do with the old ones, right? And can you resell, repurpose, reuse in other places or sell into the second market? But that will be a part of it, but we are not there yet in that. Yeah, you got it, Dominic. That's exactly what I was after. Thanks, guys. That's all my questions. Okay. Perfect. Thank you, Veronika. Thank you. Then I think the next question comes from Hugo from Exane. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. First, on the NPS, which you mentioned at the beginning of the presentation on slide four, can you maybe tell us how it has evolved recently? If 72 is what probably the maximum we can expect, or is it at lower peaks, any evolution? And second, there's a lot of focus, obviously, on efforts to drive more sustainable energy. And I guess it also might have an impact on the cost base. Can you remind us what energy represents in terms of total cost for a clinic or for your network of clinics? Thank you. Hugo, I think your first question was about how the NPS has evolved, right? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. Thanks for that. Yeah. So in the last year, it was slightly increased from 71 to 72. And in the year before, it was 71 as well. And again, in the year before, it was 70. So that was also the reason that we said it has to be at least 70 because that's a very high score, and we don't want to be below that. But it was, yeah, slightly increased over the last, I'd say, 3 to 4 years. And significantly above the one or other competitor. And the second question, Hugo, could you repeat that? So that was how much energy? Just in terms of the impact going for a more sustainable sourcing of energy can have on the cost base as well, if you can give us some indications. You mean for the implementation that we presented, or? Not the cost to implement, just the benefits and savings you can drive from that. Okay. Well, that depends on all the I have kind of given you one example from the Ogden site, right? That was EUR 1 million per year. There is no overall number because that is a continuous reduction, and we also always have to look at the opportunities along the way, right? And as you are probably aware, the energy markets are pretty, let's say, volatile. They're moving up and down, so there is not one fixed number. But we do have, yeah, a number of activities where we look in the individual cost savings per initiative, and the Utah site was one example. So I can't give you one number because that might be very different by the end of the year because we continuously work on the, yeah, on the different projects. In general, with the VPPAs, you lock in a fixed price for, I don't know, 10-15 years. And then the costs to you at the end depend on the spot market price, right? Because you sell this at the fixed price into the, well, you have the fixed price, and it's sold at the market price into the grid. So you may earn or lose in that. But it's guaranteed renewable energy that you put into the grid to use. Exactly. And we also, as we have to check it continuously over the year, and we, of course, looked in different scenarios, and we're always aiming to go for also financially more beneficial scenarios, for example, in comparing to just buying energy certificates, which is not a strategy we're going for anyway. But we do compare those prices and aiming always to go for the lower, let's say, price model. And where we can, we will produce, yeah, green energy ourselves, but that's only also if it has a return of investment, for example, the number of years for the solar panels. Yeah. But it is a commitment as a big company to support making the grid greener with the VPPAs. Okay. Makes sense. Thank you very much. Thank you, Hugo. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Star followed by one. Okay. So if there's no questions, I have two questions from one email. The first question is, is the achievement of your emission targets impacted in any way by the ongoing transformation of the business or the current economic challenges? I think that's a very good question. Thank you for that. We do, of course, consider possible changes from the transformation of our company and the footprint we have. And we include that into the continuous advancement of our climate targets implementation roadmap. But as recently mentioned, the energy markets and opportunities are constantly changing. So continuous monitoring of the market conditions and of the opportunities are part of the job to keep the flexibility to decide on the best investments and impacts of the implementation measures. So we are committed and stay committed to our global goals, independent of the footprint we have. But we do work on continuous climate targets implementation measures. But of course, we align the activities and the so-called climate action plan with our company footprint. For example, and to give you a bit more flavor of what that means, we look at all the energy markets around the world to see what activities are feasible and available to us, depending where our sites are. And also, for example, if our clinics are leased or if we own the clinics, and also whether there is direct and physical purchase of green energy is available and not. The VPPAs are a good option for us, but it's really a constant working on advancing that plan and constant monitoring of where we stand in the company and also what activities are feasible and available to us. Thank you. The second question is, why does Fresenius Medical Care consider its climate targets to be ambitious enough? That's a nice question. Thank you for that. I would love to give that to my team, who is working very hard at the measures, but we do give you some examples. When we set up the Scope 1 emissions target, we align that with the ambition of the Paris Agreement. We develop the targets using the latest version of the Science Based Targets initiative target setting tool. Considering our greenhouse gas emission parameters, that tool suggests a minimum reduction of 42% by 2030. So that's like 4.2% per year over the 10 years against the target year of 2020. And we opted for more ambitious goals. We want to reduce 50%, not 40%, based on the emissions. So that's why we're saying we are aligned with that ambition of the SBTi. And yeah, and we will also include the Scope 3 targets. And that was not an easy exercise either because we wanted to do the Scope 3 assessment before that. We're done. And now we look into developing the targets. And of course, we also are very cost-sensitive along the way. And we stay committed, but of course, we have a responsibility to looking at the costs as well. Thank you, Charlotte. The next question comes from Pietro from Kepler Cheuvreux. Yes. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. My My question would be, given the goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2040, how do you plan to deal with the unabated emission? Do you have a strategy for carbon removal or carbon offsetting? How do you approach that topic? And then a second question would be around climate risk assessment, physical risk, I mean, about your facilities across the globe if you plan to do an assessment of that as well. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you, Pietro. I think those are great questions. I think the first one was looking towards our 2040 targets, right? Whether we consider target offset, is that right? Climate offset, CO2 emission offset. Yeah, because I assume it's impossible to go to zero emissions. So how do you plan to deal with your unabated emission even when you have implemented all your efficiency measures and decarbonization strategies? Yeah. That's a good question. Thanks for that. We don't do carbon offset. We don't look into that, but we will have to use the renewable energy certificate for residual emissions. So you're right. That will always be part of the plan to have a very small percentage at the end to cover residual emissions that cannot otherwise be reduced. But it's not a strategy, for example, to cover a big part with it. We have purchased RECs last year, and we will continue to do those. But that number will reduce going forward. Offset projects are not something we look into as part of the Climate Action Plan. And I do believe the second one was around climate risk assessment of physical climate risks, right? Yes. In the report, I don't see, yeah, an assessment of your facilities when it comes to physical risks that they may be exposed to, and how do you plan your resilience plan there? Yeah. Yeah. We actually have an interesting topic going on where we look both at the physical risks but also the transformational risks. The physical risk, we looked at all of our clinics and all of our other locations covering around 50,000 data points to look into the, yeah, potential physical risk, both the acute risks, for example, hurricanes and so on, but also the chronic risks, looking, for example, in drought and water stress, right? You know you can be insured against physical risk. When it comes to acute risk, you cannot so much insure everything around the chronic risk. So that's something we looked, and we also aligned that with the footprint. And that is something that we will regularly update. But we will also look at the transformation risk related, for example, to the external environment. And maybe that's where your question from, that it's something we have to do also for implementing the European Reporting Directive. But it's certainly something that we also are interested in when it comes to making investments for locations and when we plan the business development going forward. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, Pietro. Okay. So I don't see any further questions in the call. With that, I think we will close the Q&A. I want to say thank you, Charlotte, for spending the time and actually updating us on where we stand and the progress that Fresenius Medical Care makes in this. That was extremely helpful, and thank you. And we will be back with another expert call on a different topic. Thank you very much for participating. We enjoyed you listening. Thank you. Take care. Thank you all for your interest and for your good questions. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. 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