Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome, thank you for joining the Hapag-Lloyd analyst and investor annual report full year 2022 results conference call. Hapag-Lloyd is represented by Rolf Habben Jansen, CEO, Mark Frese, CFO, and Heiko Hoffmann, head of IR. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participant 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. Press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. It's my pleasure, I would now like to turn the conference over to Rolf Habben Jansen, CEO. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you very much, and thanks everybody for joining, either via call or the webcast, for the investor presentation from our end, where we'd like to talk a little bit about 2022, of course also look a little bit ahead into 2023. Maybe a couple of opening remarks from my end. I think when looking at the year 2022, it was essentially a year of two halves, where in the first half of the year we still had congestion, strong demand and high rates. In the second half, congestion eased, on the back of all the things that are happening around the globe. Demand weakened. We saw restocking and as such rates also came down to more or less pre-pandemic levels. What we did in this year is to try to continue to follow our plan, which means we continue to implement a number of initiatives in the context of our Prepare for Tomorrow program to simplify, strengthen, and invest. I also believe we made good progress in building up our terminals and infrastructure portfolio. Financially, of course, on the back of the high freight rates, we had a tremendous financial performance with an EBITDA of over EUR 20 billion at a net profit of around EUR 18 billion, and in the end, a net cash position at the end of the year of EUR 13 billion. That also means that we propose a large dividend of EUR 33 per share. Mark will talk later a little bit more about the numbers. In terms of market, I think we've seen a subdued market for the last number of months, and we actually expect that to continue for a little bit longer as the destocking cycle is being completed. We would expect a bit of a rebound, though, in the course of the year. When exactly, I think that always remains very difficult to estimate, but certainly somewhere in the course of this year. Market-wise, we also see quite a lot of new ships coming, even if a little bit less as originally anticipated because we have quite a bit of slippage, nevertheless we do expect that for 2023 and 2024 the supply growth will outpace demand growth. That means, you can expect normalization of our earnings throughout this year. We will continue to do what we have been doing before. In addition to that, we'll start working on our strategy towards 2030. A little bit deeper on market, I think these two graphs pretty much tell it all. When you look at volumes, pretty solid until mid of the year, July. After that, clearly weakening demand. As we said, you know, high stock levels in many places after two years of COVID and as congestion then eased, of course these inventories built up even further, and we don't see that going away completely in the upcoming couple of weeks. Certainly a recovery to be expected in the course of the year. When you look at SCFI, pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels. That is a problem, because when we look at unit costs these days, that is definitely at an elevated level for everybody, which means that over time, freight rates will have to bounce back somewhat, because they won't stay below unit cost for a very long time. Quick look on the numbers before Mark talks a bit more about that later on. EBIT margins, of course, extremely healthy, and also a return on invested capital, probably never seen before, at least not in the 175 years of Hapag-Lloyd. Absolute records result. I don't think we're gonna see any of that back anytime soon. What did we do this year? Already said we continue to work on simplifying our business, invest there where needed, and also strengthen a number of things where we believe we could still do better. A couple of highlights when we look at quality. It's been at the heart of our strategy and will remain so probably also going forward. Very significant improvement in all the customer-related KPIs and also feedback from customers. A lot better at the moment than what it was, say two years ago. We have been growing in attractive markets, be it on the back of the acquisitions that we did in Africa with now NileDutch in 2021 and Deutsche Afrika-Linien in 2022, or also organically in a number of other markets because we opened up additional services. We continue to invest in sustainability and decarbonization. We launched a big fleet upgrade program, which in the end will result in about 150 ships being upgraded, which means that In many cases, we will improve the loadability, but we'll especially work on fuel consumption, which of course makes us, which helps to decarbonize. Done quite a bit on biofuel as well last year, where we will step up our efforts most likely this year even more. On the network and equipment side, a focus there to simplify our network. In essence, less services with bigger ships. We announced early last year that we are going to put tracking devices not only on our reefer boxes but also on the dry boxes. That process has started after the first devices have been delivered towards the end of December. Now this year we need to make a big step forward to get hopefully to 80% or 90% of our fleet covered before the end of the year. On the digital front, ongoing investment there as well. We launched the Quick Quote Spot product. We launched another bunch of digital tools to help with all kinds of self-service elements, and we invested in two companies that will help us to boost our innovation capacity and also specifically some of the payment and document processing processes. Going to the investments that we have done on the terminal side. As you know, we have been in Hamburg here in CTA for a very long time. We committed ourselves to Wilhelmshaven in 2021. That was closed, that was actually closed last year. Apart from that, in Europe, we also have Tangier and Damietta, which are the two hubs that we have for the west and east Med. Last year, we signed an agreement with Spinelli Group to take 49% there. That certainly gives us a much better entry into the Italian market, and that transaction closed in the month of January. We also signed a binding agreement with SAAM Ports and Logistics to reinforce our position in the Latin American market. Latin America for us, absolutely critical, also post the merger we had with CSAV. We have a strong market position there and believe it is important to also their secure access to key infrastructure, and that's why we decided to invest in SAAM. We do believe that Hapag over time is a, is a better owner of SAAM than the previous ownership because we can bring synergies. That project is currently going through the regulatory approvals. We would expect that to close towards the end of Q2 or the beginning of Q3. Then finally, in January this year, we signed a binding agreement to acquire 40% of JM Baxi, which is a port and logistics company in India with a presence around the continent. As you can see on the map, port operations in Kandla, Nhava Sheva, new concession, Tuticorin, Vizag, and Haldia. In addition to that, capabilities on the rail side and also when it's around inland depots. For us, an important step into that market as we do believe that India is going to continue to grow over the next 10- 20 years, most likely faster than many other markets. Also given the sheer size of the market, now is a good moment to get in there and to ensure that we have a strong position there. Hopefully when we look back on that investment in 5 or 10 years of today, we will say, "Okay, that has been another enabler for us to retain our top three position there or maybe even make it stronger." When you look at the entire map and look at what we have been doing on the infrastructure side, I think that's actually been a good success story over the last couple of years. If you would go two and a half years back, we would have been able to show Hamburg, CTA on that, as Tangier opened up in 2021. We signed Wilhelmshaven in 2021. Now of course, we have SAAM and JM Baxi coming on top of that. Why do we do that? Because we believe that it helps us to further improve our ocean product and also the relevance that we have for the terminal operators allows them to further grow. Finally, of course, I think we at some point showed you the map where we said these are the 12 or 14 locations around the globe, which we call hubs and where we do most of the transshipment. Also there, it will definitely help. That is an introduction from my side, and now I'll happily hand it over, Mark, to you on the numbers. Yes. Thank you, Rolf. Also from my side, welcome and a very good day. We are looking back, so to say, at outstanding year for Hapag-Lloyd, 2022, where we were able to achieve really exceptional financial results and further strengthened our balance sheet. While transport volumes remained flat, the tight transport capacity at the beginning of the year led to a further increase in freight rates, which in turn had a very positive effect on our financials. EBITDA, as said, increased to $20.5 billion, and our net cash position grew to $13.4 billion at the end of the year. For this reason, the executive and supervisory board jointly proposed to the AGM to pay out a dividend of EUR 63 per share. Now taking a closer look on our financial performance, we see that the revenue grew by 38%- $36.4 billion, and EBIT increased even by 66%- $18.5 billion. The operating profit was in the middle of our updated outlook range from July 2022. Return on invested capital, as Rolf already mentioned, over 110%. Strongly believe these figures perfectly show the exceptional nature of profitability level in 2022. At the same time, it's clear that returns of this magnitude are unfortunately not sustainable. As a result of the changing market environment we experience right now, profitability started to decline in the last quarter of last year, although still being on an exceptional h igh level. Despite the market being almost -4% in 2022, we have managed to keep our transport volumes at prior year level, particularly due to the strong growth in Africa, where we benefited from the acquisitions, NYK and NileDutch Afrika-Linien. On the other trades, we look at the demand on the Atlantic which remained resilient while on the Transpacific and Far East were initially impacted by congestion, but followed by weaker bookings at the second half, especially fourth quarter of the year. Our average freight rate increased clearly by 43% to over $2,800 per TEU. As these climbing spot rates were more than compensated by our contract rates that support it. However, despite our high share of contracted business, we are for sure not immune to market downturns. Our average freight rate declined clearly in Q4 as compared to the previous quarter, as you see here on the right far, right side of that chart. Average bunker price was also up quite considerably, even though bunker market prices fell gradually in the second half of the year. We see also that there is always a time lag between purchase and consumption. Jumping to our unit costs, three reasons for a continued increase. We saw a set significantly higher bunker prices, congestion-related higher storage and handling costs and driving vessel charter rates. Now following the unwinding of congestion in the fourth quarter, related cost items, such as storage, have started to decrease and we expect this trend to continue. On the other hand, we have to bear in mind the persistently high inflation rates globally, which will surely have a negative impact on our cost base. Therefore, we have already initiated additional measures to counterbalance that. Looking at our liquidity and free cash flow situation. Due to that described strong earnings performance, the operating cash flow amounted to $20.6 billion, and the free cash flow came in at $16.3 billion. You have to bear in mind that, in the investment cash flow, you see that there was an outflow of $3 billion, which is attributed to time deposits with a duration longer than three months and therefore are recognized under other financial assets in the balance sheet. If you would adjust for this accounting effect, free cash flow would be at 19.3% for that period. Investments we made, invested in container fleets were around $1.5 billion. We received the first pair of new builds, vessels already. They have a size of 13,000 TEUs. The remaining three 13,000 TEU ships and the 12 megamax vessels will be delivered in the course of 2023 and 2025. Closer look on our balance sheets. Balance sheet and credit ratio improved further to a very healthy level due to that performance. Equity at $29.8 billion, which results in an equity ratio of around 72%. Net liquidity increased to 13.4%. The figure includes now the mentioned time deficits number of $3 billion. Based on that performance asset, we propose together with the supervisory board to the AGM in May, a dividend of EUR 63 per share. That amounts to a total payment of EUR 11.1 billion. I think it's good and important to say that even after that dividend payment in May, we assume to retain a net cash position, a positive net cash position. Before I hand over back to Rolf, I would like to just conclude with some more general remarks on our financial priorities. Based on that result, we for sure improved our financial resilience. Going forward, we will remain prudent and keep our prudent financial policy in place and try to balance the interest of all stakeholders. With rates approaching now pre-COVID levels, again, cost control will become again a very strong key success driver. We will therefore again step up our continuous efforts to maintain competitive cost basis. We already launched beginning of the year, a program which we call Profit Focus program to work on that. As part of our efforts to become climate neutral by 2045, all financing as they were already the last, more than the last two years, financings will have a green component. For sure we will, and Rolf indicated that we will sustainably invest in our core liner and into our infrastructure business. To make the ocean product stickier and increase quality. Having said that, I hand it back now to Rolf for the market view and the outlook. Thank you, Mark. Just a few words on market as I think most people are familiar with this picture. Here we see the two charts on the supply and demand situation. First of all, if you look at the global order book, that is sort of stabilizing at the moment at around 27%-28%, which of course is a bit on the high side if you purely look at replacing existing ships, but not unexpected, after what happened in the last couple of years. When we look at ships that are supposed to be delivered, we do expect to see quite a lot of deliveries in 2023 and 2024. We also see some slippage though, because in quite a few of the yards there have been delays, because of the aftermath of COVID or less progress during the last months of COVID. Idle fleet's still relatively low, but I would expect that to creep up a bit further in the months to come. When we look at the fundamentals of the market, when you look at the official forecast, that seems to signal that there is a reasonable balance. I would say though that also If we look at all the factors that play a role, whether that's the inflow of new ships or the easing of congestion on the one hand and on the other hand, the additional need for capacity because of CII and of course increased scrapping, then on the whole, I think there is a bit of a... then one should expect that the supply growth outpaces demand growth, even if it's not entirely possible to estimate to what extent, if there are simply more uncertain factors these days than normally. Again, because of CII, but also because there's quite a lot of dry docking that needs to be caught up. When we look at our outlook, before we come to the wrap up, I would say that we would expect to see a gradual normalization of earnings in the course of the year. Transportation volume, I think the year has not been off to a great start, but we would still say that when looking at the complete year, we expect to see volumes growing slightly. Bunker consumption going down, freight rate going down, and the outlook for EBITDA being between EUR 4 billion-6 billion or $4.3 billion-$6.5 billion and EBIT EUR 2 billion-4 billion, which equals $2.1 billion-$4.3 billion. What does that mean going forward? Going forward, that means that we will continue to be quick on our feet. The last years we have learned that the market can change very rapidly and we need to be prepared for that and sufficiently agile to move things around. We'll continue to focus on simplifying our business, strengthening where needed and invest where we get the right opportunities. Quality remains at the center of the things that we are doing, and we would also like to drive our customer satisfaction further. Sustainability and decarbonization, good progress in 2022, but still more to be done, as we would like to stay ahead of the targets that we have set ourselves. We'll continue to work on building up the terminal portfolio on the one hand by integrating the businesses that still need to be closed, but there may also be one or the other opportunity that pops up throughout the year. Of course, in this process, we need to ensure that we take care of our people because keeping, retaining and developing talent is probably one of the most important long-term success factors for any business. As we said earlier, we are going to start, or we have started the project to work on our strategy towards 2030, yeah, and we hope to conclude that process before the end of this year. With that, I think we'll wrap it up from our end. Be happy to take any questions you may have. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wants to ask a question may press star followed by one. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. We have the first question from Sam Bland from JP Morgan. Your question please. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for taking the question. They're all really on this slippage data that's in the presentation. You've got sort of roughly 1 million in 2023 and 2 million in 2024. Can you talk about sort of has that actually happened? So we can see that, okay, these orders have slipped, or is it things, you know, slippage that could happen, if the market doesn't improve? I don't know if you've got data on sort of how much slipping there has definitely already been. I suppose the sort of follow on is what's the cause of it? Is it that the shipyards aren't capable of delivering on time or is it sort of the carriers are saying, "Yeah, we'd like to delay if we could please." Thank you. I think the slippage is an estimate from our end based on, you know, on information that we have. I think what we see is that there are quite a few yards where one simply sees that for them to scale up the activity from a very low period to a now a very busy period simply takes a little bit longer than some people would have hoped. There are certainly some issues also around availability of materials here and there, though most of that has meantime been resolved. If you look back over the last year and a half, there were all kinds of COVID-related restrictions still in a number of places and yards also around the globe, which has also caused some delay. I think on the whole, you're not gonna be talking about, you're not gonna be talking about delays of years, but even if everything moves backwards just three or six months, that has a material impact on the number of ships that's gonna be delivered. Yep, understood. That's fine. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Anders Carlsson from Kepler. Your question, please. Yes. Good afternoon. I was wondering, in terms of your ability to manage your fleet size, how many ships can you redeliver this year under charter agreements and also into next year, if you see that, you know, demand is keeping up at very low levels? I don't know that exactly off the top of my head. I think it's around 10% or so of our overall capacity that we could redeliver this year. I don't expect any real difficulties there, though, because apart from redelivery, when we look a little bit further out, we will also have some ships that need to be recycled, yeah, which certainly has an effect as well if you look at the next two or three years. Okay. Thank you. The next question is from Sam Toto from Ca. Your question, please. Yes. Hi. It's actually Ben Toto from Carnegie. In terms of how you view 2023, you say a normalization or gradual normalization here. How should we view the earnings level here in 2023? Is that where you see this business also going forward, or does it still includes some, you can say windfall contracts rolling in to 2023? Hence, in that respect, could we expect maybe 2024 to be lower? Do you also see 2023 as a very, so say, front-ended, front-end loaded in terms of profitability? Some flavor on that. Thanks. I think what you will see is that I think you are right in saying that, you know, profitability in 2023 will be somewhat front-loaded. Yeah. One would expect that because you still have some tailwind from the contracts that were closed last year. I think it's way too early to say anything sensible about 2024. That depends very much on what's going to happen in the second half of the year. Right now, we of course went into this year with, you know, volumes being somewhat under pressure, but I think our volumes were actually holding up reasonably well throughout Q4. We went into this year with a fair, with a reasonable momentum. Now we need to see how that momentum comes back after the summer. It's difficult to judge, yeah, where things will land. That's also why we've come up with a reasonably broad range, yeah, in our outlook. Can you also, one follow-up here? Can you, can you also give some color maybe on the cost base, which costs will be sticky and stay elevated, and which costs you expect to then quickly adapt to, so say, the market situation, where things are easing up? How should we view the various costs? Thanks. I think if you look at the two main cost categories where I would expect to see a normalization fairly soon, one is on the storage cost on the, on the terminals, which was a considerable burden in over the last two years. The other one where I would expect things to normalize relatively quickly is on the feeder side, yeah. Third-party feeders have gone up a lot when capacity was scarce. Also that market is easing, I would expect those rates to normalize. Some other costs that are related to regular inflation, increased bunker costs because of the IMO rules or... Yeah. Time charter, bunker, yeah, terminal costs are probably a bit more sticky. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I repeat, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1. We have a follow-up question from Mr. Bland. Your question please. Hey, thanks for taking the follow-up. I was gonna ask, we know that sort of rates are maybe not that good on the Transpacific, but they seem like they're staying quite high on other lanes, you know, Atlantic and volume to the Med. Any sort of obvious reasons why the rates aren't being, you know, capacity not being moved around and the rate to bid down the rates on those regions faster than it's happening? I mean, I think the Transpacific has been the front runner. I think that's right. We also see rates in pretty much all other trades eroding. I mean, if we look at Asia-Europe rates have been down significantly as well. Asia-LATAM has been down. Rates into the Middle East have been down. I think it's certainly not isolated to one or two trades. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from Christian Cohrs from Warburg Research. Please go ahead. Yes. Hello. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I actually would like to know your thoughts about the sector environment also with regards to the alliance landscape, given that the 2M alliance is going to discontinue. Do you fear increased competition going forward? How do you judge actually the ties and partnership within your alliance and the alliance? Second question relates to the risk of regulatory headwind. The FMC in the US recently was quoted quite aggressively on the container shipping sector. In the EU, if I'm not mistaken, there will be soon some statements regarding the block exemption regulation. Do you see some risk materializing on that front? Thank you. Well, maybe first on the alliances. I think the fact that Maersk and MSC were not continuing after the end of 2024, I think is not a huge surprise, as the company said, vastly different strategies. I think that was somehow to be expected. I think they both also have the scale to go alone and maybe selectively still work together here and there. I don't expect that to have a massive effect on the other alliances. I think the relationship within our alliance is good. We have also a contract that lasts until 2030. I see no reason why that would materially change. On regulatory front, yes, there's been a lot of activity over the last years. I think rules tend to develop over the years, I believe that's also good. Personally, I think some of the rules that in the U.S., the FMC is some of the rulemaking they are doing, I would actually say that almost as being quite positive. Some of it, a little bit depending on how it shapes out. In itself, to have clearer rules for everybody is usually not a bad thing, because then everybody knows what they need to do. And I welcome that because that hopefully going forward gives less debate. I think in Europe we have the discussion on the block exemption. You know, we believe that it would be wise to extend that because over the last 20 years we have seen that, with that type of regulation in place, efficiency has gone up tremendously. I don't think we should get ourselves distracted by two very extraordinary years. Having said that, maybe there are going to be some modifications here and there, and if that is the case, then we will just adjust to that and deal with it. That's clear. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I repeat again. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one. We have a follow-up question from Mr. Carlsson. Mr. Carlsson, please go ahead. Thank you. I was wondering a little bit in terms of slow steaming. What kind of speeds are you currently running at, compared to earlier? You know, how much of it has been implemented and, you know, what is the lag between when you can, you know, when you start implementing and when it starts to take effect? I think the main effect we see right now is because of the CII. Yeah. 'Cause in a number of cases, you have to slow down in order to comply with those regulations. If I would have to estimate how much of an effect that has on the speed of the overall network, I would say we're probably at one knot difference or something like that. Okay. What is the achievable, reduction in speed compared to where you're currently at? I mean, so far, I think at the moment for this year, I think it's gonna remain round about that one knot. Whether there's going to be more of that going forward, I don't know. There's not a tremendous amount of further potential in there. There's probably another 1 knot in there if that's, yeah, what is needed. At some point in time you have to take other measures, which is replace the older ships by newer ships and start to take them out of the fleet. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from Lars Heindorff for Nordea. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you for taking my question. Question regarding the volume. That you, I think, mentioned in the presentation that you expect very significant growth throughout this year. You said that the volume has started off a bit soft. There's inventory correction going on. Just wanted to sort of try to test you a little bit on the assumptions, particularly for the second half of this year. Do you expect a rebound this year? Is that caused by just a correction following volumes following the inventory that we see now? Do you see consumer demand picking up? What we see at the moment is still subdued demand because we see destocking, yeah, in quite a few places. That means that today, if you would look at regular demand, is actually a little bit higher than what we see on a day-to-day basis. Of course, we also have the normal seasonality. I would expect indeed that volume is going to pick up in the second half of the year. How much and how strong, I think that is always very, very difficult to predict. Yes, you are right, we've been off to a, you know, to a somewhat slow or like you could also argue a normal start of the year. As in the last couple of years we saw that there was barely a dip after Chinese New Year, and this year there has been a dip as we used to see it, which means that you've had a couple of weeks with slow volume. Now we are actually back to the levels we saw pre-Chinese New Year. We didn't have a pre-Chinese New Year rush, but we did have a usual weak period after Chinese New Year. I think that's the difference with what we saw in the last couple of years, where volumes were extraordinarily strong before Chinese New Year and we barely saw a dip because there was so much pressure on all the supply chains. All right. Thank you. This was the last question today. Please direct any further question to the Investor Relations team. I hand back to Mr. Jansen for closing comments. Yeah, not so much. Yeah, thank you very much for making the time and for joining us today. We hope it was informative and hope to speak to you again soon. Thanks for your questions and take care. Bye-bye. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you very much for joining and bye-bye.