Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Hapag-Lloyd Analysts and Investors H1 2021 Results Conference Call. Hapag-Lloyd is represented by Rolf Habben Jansen, CEO, Mark Frese, CFO, and Heiko Hoffmann, Head of Investor Relations. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touch-tone telephone. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rolf Habben Jansen, CEO. Please go ahead. Thank you very much, and thanks everybody for making the time available to join us here at this investor presentation. Mark and I will try to take you through that over the next 20-25 minutes, and then afterwards, we'd be very happy to take your questions. Maybe a couple of opening remarks if I may. I think when you look at the situation today, then if you want to characterize the H1: strong demand, high freight rates, but a lot of operational challenges. We are doing a lot to try and tackle that. We'll talk a bit more about that later on, but we also see that the situation, which has improved in a couple of places actually throughout Q2. I think the industry did quite well on the aftermath of the Suez situation. Of course, we saw Yantian and right now some channels in Ningbo. Certainly not only smooth sailing. For us, it's been a good half year, and of course, closing the acquisition of NileDutch was for us another milestone. On the numbers, earnings very strong, mainly driven by higher freight rates and solid volumes. Costs are going up. Charter rates, probably the most visible one, but certainly also bunker prices have come up significantly compared to several months ago. If you look at the market, I think there we've changed a little bit our perspective. We were initially a little bit more optimistic that the things would go slower in the H2 year. If you look at the situation today, we have to conclude that also the H2 year will very likely be very strong. We do expect that demand growth continues to outpace capacity growth. Looking at the order book, which has come up, and rightfully so. That is going to give some relief midterm, but not so much in 2021 and 2022. That means that until then, the only thing we can do is try to produce as much allocation as we can, and in the meantime, put also effort on improving service and driving up customer satisfaction. When looking at the market and looking at monthly transportation growth, I think we've seen quite a bit of growth. If you look at the last months here, certainly more than capacity has grown, and you also see that when you look specifically at the Transpacific, that's the place that has been driving the growth very much. On the right-hand side, I have two small graphs, which give you an indication about all these operational challenges and what that actually means. If you look at container usage, we need significantly more boxes to move the same amount of cargo as we get them back on average 15%-20% later than normal. Also when you look at ship delays, they have sort of tripled compared to a year ago, which of course means that to produce the same amount of weekly volume, you simply need more ships. Looking at what is it that we have done on that front. Looking at container capacity, the one that we've talked about before, I think right now we're up about 11% compared to the end of the year. I think that's a pretty significant investment, and we will still do more there. We see that turn times have come down, but this should actually help. Vessel capacity, not that much change in fairness, because there are simply no more ships available. Every available ship is sailing. I think when you look at capacity that's in the water, that picture would probably look a little bit better because we have also been moving dry docks and other things out, which means that of the ships that we have, pretty much nothing is not operational. Staff were up a little bit, but actually fairly flat. Looking at things like schedule reliability, still at a very low level. Relatively speaking, I think Hapag's actually been doing a bit better. We've always had in our objectives that we want to be in the top third in terms of schedule reliability, and I think somewhat ironically, we are since the five, six months. Of course, the overall schedule reliability is really too low. A couple of other things worthwhile mentioning when we look at the H1 year. As I already mentioned, we closed the acquisition as expected around mid-year. I think our official closing was on the 8th of July. We opened up a couple of new offices. Here is the one in Senegal mentioned. We did convert the options that we had to take another six large ships that are going to be dual fuel powered. We started vaccination campaigns in multiple countries to find where utmost to help people both at sea and on shore to get vaccinated as quickly as possible. We've launched a number of additional things to create more transparency on where every box and every ship is. Finally, before I hand it over to Mark to talk about the numbers. A few things around sustainability. We'll talk more about that, I think, after Q3. Here are basically the themes that we will address, or that we are addressing in our sustainability strategy, because it's not only about greenhouse gases, it's also about clean air, it's also about sustainable supply chains, it's also about diversity. How do we make sure that we are a good corporate citizen and, of course, the whole element around compliance. How do we deal properly with resources, take good care of the boxes that we travel and watch biodiversity are important elements. I think our sustainability strategy will be built around these three main themes and these eight items underneath. For each and every one of them, we are developing programs, and we'll set ourselves also short- and mid-term targets, and we'll talk more about that, after we close Q3. With that, I will hand it over to Mark, who will take you through the numbers. Yes. Thank you, Rolf, good morning to everyone, also from my side. Some details concerning the financials. Looking at the picture, we can say that while operational situation was very challenging, clearly, we benefited from higher freight rates and from a financial point of view, are looking back to a very good H1 year. We were once again able to improve profitability on that basis, strengthen our balance sheet, and earn our cost of capital. We can see that here, the return on invested capital at 47% is extraordinary. I think we should not forget that for the last decade, the entire industry was struggling to earn and generate positive results. Earning back cost of capital seemed to be a daunting task for most of the players in our industry, just two years ago. Taking a closer look at our P&L, we see that much higher freight rates and somewhat higher transport volumes led to an increase in revenue of around 50% to $10.5 billion US. On that basis, EBITDA more than tripled to EUR 4.2 billion. The EBIT margin jumped to 40%. EBIT was also significantly up on previous year at $3.5 billion US. H1 2021 group profit came in at $3.3 billion US. The transport volume increased in the H1 of 2021 by 4.3% to roughly 6 billion compared with the prior year period. Growth was mainly driven by strong demand from export goods from Asia, and therefore drove volumes, especially on our dominant legs. Transport volumes on that basis on non-dominant legs, however, showed rather soft developments, we can say that. Despite the strong demand on dominant legs, delays at ports and a shortage of additional vessel and boxes to cover the increased demand had negative effects on the overall volume growth in H1 2021. While the higher volume growth was impeded by the continuing supply chain disruptions, our average freight rate increased strongly due to strong demand and due to the capacity of vessels and containers. Bunker prices continued to increase quarter-over-quarter. I think important to say that our average bunker price is in the H1 2021, still slightly below previous year, which was impacted strongly by the introduction of the low sulfur regulation IMO 2020. Transport expenses per unit, including D&A in the first six months of the financial year 2021, increased by 4.8% to EUR 1,081 per TEU as compared to the prior year period. Clearly, lower bunker expenses were more than offset by the negative effects of port congestions and COVID-19 related restrictions. In particular, we can clearly see that here, handling and haulage expenses increased by over 11% or $54 per TEU respectively due to the higher storage and labor cost at ports. In contrast, depreciation and amortization was almost flat as higher volumes offset higher D&A expenses. Due to the very good earning situation, our operating cash flow has been also absolutely strong. You can see that here we used the cash flow to significantly increase our investments in boxes and vessels to cater for our customers demand, and we paid out a dividend of €3.50 per share. On top of the order of 12 new dual-fuel big ships that will be delivered in 2023 and 2024, we have purchased 5 second-hand vessels in H1 2021. Investments in the H2 year are expected to increase even further. We plan to invest more. In total, CapEx in 2021, excluding right-of-use, is likely to be above $1.5 billion US. Looking at the balance sheet ratios, we see also a very pleasant development. As you can see it here, net debt decreased further to $3.9 billion US and net leverage decreased to 0.6 time based on the last 12 months figures. Moreover, liquidity reserve improved nicely to around $3 billion US at the end of June. In addition, we have used the H1 to develop a green financing framework, which is part of our sustainability strategy, and arranged green financings of more than $2 billion in the H1. With that, I would hand it back to Rolf to give a market update and our outlook. Thank you, Mark. Yeah, I think maybe as a market update, in the end, if we look at economic recovery, we've seen good growth this year. I think predictions right now are that demand will grow around 5%-6%, yeah, which I think seems also to materialize when we look at actuals today, and there are certainly still some backlog in the pipeline as well. Also for next year, the outlook right now is fairly healthy. When we then look at the supply side, of course, the order book is coming up. As I've said already, I think three years ago, it had to come out also as well. Of course, you're now going to see a little bit of a spike in deliveries when you look at 2023, 2024. All in all, though, I still think that the order book, and we've also seen that the ordering of new ships has actually slowed down over the last couple of months, is that it's still not out of control. One should also expect some slippage. Let's not forget that with carbon tax coming and new rules for older ships, we also will see scrapping going up, and we'll see that we need some capacity to replace also those older and smaller ships. When we look at deliveries, not a lot expected over the upcoming year. That also means that when you look at the supply and demand balance, that both for 2021, as for 2022, it looks like it's going to be fairly tight. In reality, we probably need some easing of the congestion situation, yeah, to get to a somewhat more normal situation. We also shouldn't forget that when we look at 2023 and 2024, that there will be a large number of ships that will have to go into drydock, because right now everybody postpones that. I think for good reasons, to maximize output. That will have to be caught up, and that will also help a little bit to keep things in balance also when we look beyond 2022. Looking at our earnings momentum, as you have seen from the announcement that we made, we expect that to remain very strong in the H2. That's why we also adjusted our outlook and raised the outlook for both EBITDA and EBIT, yeah, to the numbers that you can read here on this chart. Wrapping things up before we hand it over to you for questions. Looking at our focus for the H2 and beyond. Deliver on our strategy, make sure we improve schedule reliability, improve the quality of service to our customers and also customer satisfaction. Seamlessly complete the integration of NileDutch. We're close on time. The preparation work is ongoing, and we intend to complete that integration before the end of this year. On the financial front, we'll continue to remain prudent. We will consider some selective investment opportunities here and there, mainly to make sure that also in three or four years from today, we are still going to be competitive. Of course, we'll have another look at what more we may be able to do to further reduce our carbon footprint even faster. On that topic, sustainability more after Q3. Finally, let's not forget our people. Everybody's still working under a lot of stress. There's a lot of COVID-related restrictions still in place in many places around the world. We must take good care of our people and in parallel, also develop a good way of working beyond COVID. There's certainly quite a few things that we've learned over the last year and a half about what is and what is not possible. We need to make sure that we keep the good things and combine them with the good things we also had before. With that, I think we wrap it up from our end as a first introduction. With that, we happily hand it over to you for questions. The first question is from the line of Sathish Sivakumar from Citigroup. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thanks again for the presentation. Actually, I got four questions. Firstly, on the vessel utilization, if you could actually give some color how it has actually progressed in Q2, both in the front and back haul, and how does that compare, say, back in Q2 2019? Probably that would be a good comparison. The second one is regarding the EU Fit for 55. What is your initial thought around the implication for the container shipping sector, and how does it actually change your plan towards the further vessel orders in terms of the technology, and would you comply with that? The third one is around the Quick Quotes platform. Obviously, there was a big acceleration in terms of adoption of volumes going through the online booking platform in 2019. Out the last 12 months, what has been the adoption? Has the current disruption kind of altered the adoption rate? I just wanted to understand, are we still looking more like spot booking, online digitalization is still being adopted despite the disruption, or it has kind of pulled back the adoption rate? Finally, the fourth one is on the capital allocation. Given the strong year you have in terms of free cash flow and even that 50% payout ratio, it's actually a significant step up in dividend. Two questions actually on that. Would you consider, say, one-off special dividend? If not, would you look at, say, further M&A opportunities since you are done with the NileDutch integration? Thank you. Thank you. I couldn't completely hear your first question, but I believe that you asked about asset utilization. Yeah? Yeah. The first one is around the vessel utilization levels and how it is actually on front and back haul trades, and how does it compare with 2019? Okay. I think when you look at vessel utilizations on head haul was very high. Pretty much all trades very close to 100%. That's probably a little bit higher than it was in 2019. If we look at back haul, there we have had to prioritize also moving the empty spec every now and then. Their utilization in terms of laden boxes tended to be a little bit lower, particularly, on the Transpacific trade. Your second question was on the Fit for 55 program. That will certainly have an impact on our business. To be honest, it was about 2,000 pages, I think, that were published. We are still sort of studying some of that. It's a little bit early to say what that will exactly mean for our business. I would say that for sure a carbon tax will come. I think that is also, what was to be expected. We'll need to see how quickly that is being scaled up. When you look at fuels and what people are going to ask from us, I think that's also more or less in line with expectations. We'll read it carefully, and yes, it will impact some of our investment decisions going forward. We just need to make sure that we also invest in that type of fuel, whether that's land-based or whether that's at sea, that comply with the rules that people are trying to set. In all honesty, I don't think there was any huge surprises in that program because quite a lot of that, around emissions trading and around what is going to be allowed in terms of fuel was more or less as expected. I also think we haven't seen the latest on it yet because there's still going to be quite a bit of consultation before a final decision will be made on how the program will exactly look. Your third question was on Quick Quotes and how that has developed. Well, I would say it's developed well also last year. I think whereas we initially had an ambition to have about 16% of our volume on that platform by 2023, I think we are right now hovering around 25%. At the moment, we're also going to try and keep it between 20%-25% because we also need to keep sufficient space for other sales channels. There was a question on free cash flow, I believe, if I understood the last question correctly, whether we're going to do a special dividend or not. That is currently not planned. Of course, one should expect a healthy dividend when looking at next year. There was a question on M&A. I wouldn't rule out that there is something that we do. On the other hand, one also has to be realistic. These days, the prices of many of the assets are very inflated, and I think that is generally not a good practice to buy inflated assets. I think also there will still be fairly prudent, and you should not expect any revolution from us on that front. Okay. Thank you. Just a quick follow-up on the utilization level. You mentioned the back haul in Transpacific has been lower. Are we looking at, say, a 10% difference between what we used to see in 2019? Just wanted to understand the delta actually between 2019. It's not a huge difference. It's just a little bit. I think that's where our priority was, of course, to make sure that every ship sails completely full on a TEU basis. Sometimes that meant that we had to prioritize empties a bit. In fairness, it's not a huge difference. It's just a little. Okay, got it. Just on, sorry, on the back haul again, have you seen the proportion between the loaded boxes and empty boxes change? As you pointed out, the priority is now to carry the empty boxes back to East. Have you seen that split change? As I said, I think utilization back haul also out of Europe was a little lower when you look at laden boxes. Not hugely, but a little bit. That's it. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for answering my questions. Next question is from the line of Martin Zinn with Stifel. Please go ahead. Hey, thank you for taking my questions. I guess three questions. One on the situation in the U.S. currently, I guess, ships waiting at L.A. Long Beach, is currently going up again. Do you see any additional issues with the truck and train capacity that is transporting container inland U.S.? Is this rising as well, or is this just the vessels waiting at L.A. Long Beach? Second question related to Europe. Train railway capacity was damaged by flooding most recently. Now we have a strike of the Deutsche Bahn operations. Is this, to some extent, affecting container turnaround times in Europe? If this strike continues for an extended period of time, what would be the breaking point? Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, once train capacity becomes an issue for container turnaround times in Europe? The third question is kind of a follow-up on the question from my colleague on the Fit for 55 E.U. program regarding the applicability of carbon trading for extra-E.U. trades, of which half should go into the program. Does it apply for last ports of, say, from Asia to Europe, you can stop at the U.K. and then just head into the E.U. and just pay half for U.K.-E.U. distance? Does it apply for China-E.U. in total? If you could elaborate on that a bit. Thank you. Maybe start with the last one. I think the way we interpret the rules right now, it is indeed everything outside of the last port of call, outside of the EU. Of course, if you call U.K. first, that's not so far. Certainly a lot closer than China. That's the way we interpret it right now. Whether that's entirely correct, that remains to be seen. To your other points on U.S. situation, terminal situation there is definitely still under pressure, but also because the volume is simply up so much and the number of ships that they need to handle is up a lot more than they probably can cope with at this point in time. Yes, that puts also additional strain on the inland operations, be it rail or truck. Also their capacities are very, very tight. I don't expect that to ease over the upcoming months. You asked about the situation in Germany, around the flooding and now the strikes. Does that have an impact? Well, as long as it remains limited to a few days, that should be manageable. To your point, if this is going to take two or three weeks, yeah, of course, that will start having an impact also on turnaround times in Europe. I don't think we should overrate that, though. If it starts taking a couple of weeks, yes, it's going to have an effect there as well. Right now. Thank you. I don't expect it. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touch tone telephone. The next question is from the line of Sam Bland from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi, morning. I just have a couple of questions, please. The first one is on any thoughts around how your customers, I know it's a little while away, but the new contracting season towards the end of this year. Any initial thoughts on how customers might approach that? Potentially there'll be a normalization in spot rates at some point next year. On the other hand, I guess spot's a lot higher than contracted today. Just any thoughts on that? Second question is, I think you said you don't think the market will be sort of normalizing much between, or until at least the Q1 of next year. Is there anything special about that Q1 of next year that means a normalization could happen then? Is it just sort of six months away and so there's enough time that maybe something could start to normalize in that period of time? Actually, I'll ask a third one. Is there sort of one single cause and root of this current situation, whether it's shortage of containers or port capacity or lack of ships? Is it sort of a combination of everything? Is there one dominant issue, problem, whether it's demand or supply related, that's causing most of this current situation? Thanks. First question in terms of contracting customers, I think those discussions are just starting. It's too early to say anything about that. I think what we see is that there is a little bit of a trend towards longer contracts, yeah, because it seems to be that it could be in everyone's interest to just make firmer contracts where we really commit from our end and so does the shipper, and then to potentially extend the duration beyond the traditional year or so. A bit too early to say how successful that will be, but I think that's certainly a trend that we see in the discussion. Firmer contracts and longer duration, and I think that in the end would be in everybody's interest. The second point about why do you say it will not ease until Q1? Well, we now see, of course, a strong peak season, and then we'll see the pickup towards Chinese New Year, which I think is relatively early next year. Until then, I think we have a fairly high certainty that things will stay strong. Normally, we would then enter into the slack season Post the Chinese New Year. How much of that will come is difficult to say at this point, and that's why we commented on Chinese New Year, because I think that's a period where we have reasonably good visibility. Beyond that, we don't have that. I would still expect that if the situation around COVID eases a bit, that will result in less congestion, and that will mean that we can make more capacity available, and that should help markets to ease a bit. That ties into your third question, saying, what are the main bottlenecks? I think there's not just one single bottleneck, but I would say that the port and inland infrastructure, because they are, of course, always on the receiving end of all these boxes. They are also the hardest hit by all kinds of COVID-related restrictions. They are the ones that probably have the toughest job at this point in time. That then, of course, carries on to the shipping lines, who need more ships to offer the same amount of capacity and who need more boxes to make the same number of boxes available on a daily basis. It is a little bit of a combination of factors, where I do think that the congestion at destination is probably the biggest one, but that certainly has a ripple effect also on box availability and the need to put in more ships. Understood. Thank you very much. As a reminder, if you would like to ask any questions, please press star followed by one on your touch tone telephone. We have a follow-up question from the line of Martin Zinn from Stifel. Please go ahead. Yeah. Apologies for follow-up question. I was just interested regarding charter rates and your current chartered fleet. Could you give us an idea about the average charter duration pre-pandemic and what charter duration you currently lock in for your chartered fleet? Give an idea how much of your charter fleet has seen a renewal of charter rates recently or is about to see a renewal in the next half of the year. Basically, what I want to know is what the cost and duration for the renewal for charter rates will be for the foreseeable future. Thank you. I think duration has definitely gone up. Our policy has always been to go fairly short on chartering ships, especially the smaller ones. I don't know off the top of my head, but I think that the average duration has probably gone up with a year and a half or so. If you compare it to a year ago, because most of the contracts that need to be renewed are now being renewed for two, three years, sometimes even more than that. I think we can be somewhat lucky that certainly last year during the pandemic, we actually renewed quite a lot of our charter contracts then also sometimes for longer periods of time. That means that the number of ships that we need to renew is somewhat manageable when we look at this year, but also when we look ahead into 2022. Of course, when you charter or extend charter fleet days, then the rates tend to go up quite a lot. You can read that in the press that instead of for some vessel classes paying EUR 7,000, EUR 8,000 - EUR 9,000 a day, you now could easily end up paying three or four times that amount. Okay. Thank you. Next question is from the line of Christian Cohrs from Warburg Research. Please go ahead. Yes, hello. Thanks for taking my question. Just two left for me. First, in the U.S., there's a discussion about an Ocean Shipping Reform Act. What is your view on it? Do you think that it is a proper instrument to improve ocean shipping quality for U.S. customers? Second question, in light of the supply chain disruptions, which we are going to see already for roughly one year already, do you fear that customers will actually seek for options to nearshore their supply chain in order to get more resilient, and that this could actually be a harm for your industry mid to longer term? Thank you. Maybe let me start with the second one. I tend to think that when you look at ocean shipping, one of the reasons why container shipping has been so successful over the last 30, 40 years is not only because it was standardized, but also because it was fairly cheap and efficient. I do believe that it's important for us to get back to that type of situation. That's also why I would like markets to normalize, because otherwise, over time, you might indeed start seeing what you are describing. Having said that, if you look at the average freight rate, the average we have these days is, what is it, EUR 400 or EUR 450 more than it was last year around the same time on average. That's not a huge number. The problem is, of course, the excessive spot rates that we see right now. Those are only applied to very few boxes. What I do think is that you will see that people will do less single sourcing, will do more dual or multiple sourcing, simply not to be dependent completely on one specific supply chain, because there you see that if Yantian closes or if you have a problem with Vietnam or Ningbo or wherever, then all of a sudden your entire supply chain is disrupted. I think people will do that. Your other question around regulations and oversight that we see, I think it's perfectly normal that people check and validate and look at are the regulations that we have in place, are they still the right ones? Looking at the extraordinary situation we see in this industry at the moment, I think that's very normal. We're very happy to work with regulators and provide people with the information that they need. My experience on new legislation is that it always takes some time and quite a lot of good debate before something gets changed. On the whole, I think most of the legislation that I have seen over the last 30 years actually makes sense. The fact that legislation evolves and that it gets changed every now and then, I think that's perfectly normal. That's also how it should be. Okay. Thank you. That was the last question for today. If you have any further questions, please direct them to the investor relations team. I would like to hand the conference back to Rolf Habben Jansen for closing remarks. Please go ahead. Well, not much to add. I think we tried to answer the questions that you had. Thank you very much for attending. Hope it was somewhat informative for you and hope to speak to you again soon. Bye-bye. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.