Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining our conference call on behalf of the release of the full-year figures, 2023 preliminaries of Ringmetall SE. I'm happy to see you all on board today. As usual, we have a very quick pre-presentation. This time it's just three slides due to the fact that it's just preliminaries that we released this morning, and after this, we will find sufficient time for a Q&A, of course. And now I'm handing you over to Christoph Petri. Just one quick note, please, be reminded that the entire meeting, including the Q&A, will be recorded. Okay, Christoph, please go ahead. Thank you, Ingo. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our preliminary 2023 figures call. As Ingo says, it's a quick one. We only have three slides. We want to give you a quick overview of what we have achieved in 2023. It was quite a challenging year with a lot of ups, but also a lot of downs. In total, group revenues went down by 15% to EUR 181.4 million. Ingo, I think you need to... Yeah, thank you. Total output went down by close to 17% to EUR 180 million, and EBITDA is on the upper side of our guidance, close to EUR 18 million. That's down 36.6%. The difference between group revenue -15% and EBITDA is an extraordinary effect, which I will explain later on. The extraordinary effect comes due to the sale of HSM, which we have concluded in June 2023. We have adjusted the EBITDA by these effects, so we have taken out HSM and the extraordinary effects in 2022, the bargain purchase effect from Rhein-Plast. Comparing these figures, then we are coming up to EUR 22 million in 2023, and that's down from 2022 by 15.5% only. So you see quite well that, group revenues went down as the EBITDA went down, which shows that we really were able to withstand the situation, that lower volumes didn't cause any major turbulence on the profit side. So we were able to withstand and to adjust our production, production facilities, and we were able to occupy our machines in the way that we were able to hold our margins quite well. The EBITDA, the adjusted EBITDA margin is 12.8%. I think we can move on to the sale of HSM. Thank you, Ingo. Yes, the sale of HSM. In the past, Ringmetall was acquiring companies during the years. In total, it was more than 15 companies which we have acquired, and now, this time, it was the first time that we were on the sales side. HSM was the company which formed our segment, Industrial Handling, and for quite a while, we realized that the management attention of this segment distracts us from focusing purely on Industrial Packaging and also from a capital allocation point of view. It didn't really make sense to keep this segment over a longer period into our group. That's why we decided to sell HSM and close down the whole segment of Industrial Handling. It was quite a tricky M&A process due to the size and the structure of HSM. HSM is about, is a company which makes about EUR 15 million in revenues. Three segments: it is land machines, it is forklifts, and it is trucks, and therefore, it was not so easy to find the right partner for us. After all, we were able to sell HSM to an investor, and this was concluded per 13th of June 2023. In total, we had a hit of EUR 4.6 million in extraordinary write-offs and consolidation effects, which obviously affected our EBITDA quite heavily. Revenue-wise, we are consolidating HSM on up to the 13th of June, so the H2 of the year, HSM is fully excluded. With the sale of HSM, as I mentioned it earlier, we have shut down Industrial Handling fully and are purely focusing now on Industrial Packaging. The outlook for 2024, the month December, and also the beginning now in January, gave us quite a promising view on 2024. However, we don't want to take that for granted too much now, and therefore, we have decided we extend the range on the group revenues and the group EBITDA guidance slightly, which brings us to a group revenue guidance of EUR 170 million-EUR 195 million, and group EBITDA of EUR 20 million-EUR 27 million. Again, it looks quite promising right now, but we don't know yet if that's only a small and tiny fire, which is going down quickly, or if it really lasts for a longer period. In total, we can recognize that especially in the Ring segment, which is the early cyclical segment of Ringmetall, we see that Germany and Europe in general is slowly stabilizing and improving, while our Liner segment in this area is only consolidating. In the U.S., we see also only a consolidating business currently. The market environment remains very attractive, however, for further acquisitions, and that's what it's all about in the year 2024 for us. We remain in a very well financial position, with a net debt of roughly EUR 13 million, despite the fact that we had two major acquisitions also in 2023. We have acquired the company, Protective Lining, in January, and we have acquired Liner Factory or SVD in Ahaus, this year, that was in June. So basically, the cash flow remains very strong and solid, and therefore, we look quite, quite well into a future of 2024, with a clear focus on further expanding our business and our footprint, especially in the Liner segment. With this, I would hand over to Ingo. Thank you for your time and your attention, and I would hand over to you for the Q&A session. Great. Thank you, Christoph. So, as usual, we're now jumping into the Q&A. If you joined our meetings before, you know the procedure. Please, raise your hand or just unmute yourself and ask your question, or feel free to ask a question via the chat. So do we have a question? Yes, we have Holger Steffen. Please unmute yourself, Holger. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, now it works. Okay, fine. Hi, Holger. Good morning. Yes, did I understand it right, that your U.S. business is in a consolidation at the moment? Yes. What I mean by this is, the volumes are consolidating. The volumes are not going up, despite, our European business, where, where volumes, slightly go up already. So the U.S. business is currently consolidating on the same level, basically, as we have seen in the H2 of 2023. Okay. The U.S. economy developed very well in the H2 of 2023. Why is your business consolidating in this framework? We are, especially in the U.S., depending on the chemical industry and, the chemical industry also in the U.S., didn't develop very well in the whole of 2023, and especially, in the H2. So what we have seen in 2023 is basically a constant, drop in volumes, in the U.S. Not significantly, I mean, we are not talking about double digits. We are talking about something between 0% and maybe 3% decline in volumes, but at least it's not a growth rate, and that's the difference between the U.S. and our, European business currently. Mm-hmm. Okay. The steel price maybe has found its bottom in the last month. What are the effects on your pricing at the moment? Maybe, maybe you should lend me your glass or if you know that the steel prices found their bottom, I would be very happy to have a look at it. We see... Well, basically, what we have seen, first of all, in 2023 is that steel prices dropped over the course of the year. There were no major fluctuations. It was quite a constant drop over the course of the full year. And currently, we see that maybe in December it started already slightly, that steel prices have come up again a little bit. And we are, as always, guiding on the level of the last quarter of 2023. That's our basis. If steel prices go up again, this will, of course, have an impact on our revenue stream as well. Currently, we are guiding on the levels of two thirds of Q4 2023. Okay, fine. According to your outlook, you want to acquire further companies this year. Can you give us an idea, which targets would really improve your market position now? ... Yeah, there are different targets which would definitely benefit our market position. We are predominantly talking about the liner segment, which obviously is quite a broad segment. We are currently focusing on companies size-wise, somewhere between EUR 5 million in revenues and around EUR 40 million in revenues. All the companies we are targeting are either benefiting us from a regional aspect, or from a product range aspect, or from, let's say, one company is even expanding not only our product range, but also our scope. Therefore, we will see that the liner segment of Ringmetall will definitely grow in 2024. Most of our capital allocation will be done in this area. Do you expect any further acquisition in the ring business? Well, we are also looking at some smaller businesses in the ring segment. However, this is very small. It's only as a regional adjustment, let's say this way, or a regional add-on, which could bring us further revenue stream in areas where we are maybe not that well presented yet. But it's very difficult in the ring area because we are nearly everywhere, and we are quite dominant already. So the plan in the ring business is looking, as I say, for some regions where we are underrepresented, and in some regions where we are not present at all, and we don't find a potential acquisition target, we would even consider building up another location, which could be, for example, in Southeast Asia or in south of China. Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Thanks, Holger. So we got one more question from the chat here, and it's, Christoph: Could you please outline our general dividend policy again and maybe give us an idea of where the dividend for 2023 might be? Well, this is, of course, too premature to tell you what the dividend will look like in 2024. However, the dividend policy hasn't changed. The dividend policy remains untouched, and it is 20%-25% of our net profits we would like to distribute to our shareholders. Now, for 2023, we obviously have extraordinary effects, and these extraordinary effects, in my point of view, should be adjusted for, because it's only book effects. From a cash flow perspective, that hasn't changed dramatically over the course of the year. Therefore, I would actually calculate in more or less a similar region where we are currently with the dividend. Maybe- Yeah. - Give or take EUR 0.01, maybe, yeah, something like this, back or forth. But I wouldn't maybe necessarily calculate with a higher dividend. I think that wouldn't be very wise. Profit-wise, we are down. Revenue-wise, we are down. Volumes are down in 2023, so there's no real reason to increase. But on the other hand, there are also not significant reasons why we should drop it significantly. Great. I think that gives a good idea. Are there any further questions? Oh, there is one more question from this chat. Multiplying Q4 sales of some EUR 38 million by four will leave a quite substantial gap to even the lower end of the sales guidance. So the scenario would lead to the upper end of the guidance. Well, Q4 is- Basically, if we could multiply Q4, what's your view on that? No, you cannot simply multiply this. We have not a big seasonality in our business. However, what we have is still a slight seasonality. And especially Q4 is always, has always been our worst quarter. We close down most of our European production plants already mid of December. That has obviously a major impact on our top line and also on the profitability. So therefore, you cannot just take Q4 and multiply this by four. But the question, I think, from Mr. Friedman is: What would lead to the upper end of our guidance, and what are the reasons why we only would achieve the lower end? Basically, the guidance we have taken is our budget is somewhere in the midpoint or in the mid-range of our guidance. That's our expectation. If we would like to reach the upper end, steel prices would need to come up slightly, and also volumes have to come back, which means that especially the chemical industry, which slightly need to recover. Also on the liner segment, we would need to see that the technical chemical industry, which is predominantly the glue industry, would need to recover as well. And maybe an outlook also on the lower end of the guidance, if we see that the developments in December and January, in the ring business especially, have only been a one-time effect and volumes continue to drop, we will definitely not reach the upper or the mid-end of our guidance, and we will come up to the lower end of our guidance. That's pretty much the situation. Thank you. So are there any further questions for the meantime? That doesn't seem to be the case. So maybe then, a further heads up from my side. I will be jumping right on the plane to Hamburg in a couple of minutes and join Christoph on the Hamburg Investment Talk from Montega. So we will have a meeting with a lot of investors on Wednesday. The day is fully packed, but if you're there and would like to have a chat, then please, please just drop by. We will always find time for a coffee or maybe at the evening event. Thanks for joining the call again and talk to you next time. Thank you, everyone. All the best. Bye.