Good morning, everybody. There's one further person. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the nine months 2023 management call of Ringmetall SE. I'm Ingo Middelmenne from Investor Relations. Thanks for joining again today. As usual, we will now present to you our latest results as released this morning. Following this, there will be a Q&A session. Please note that the entire call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded. And now I'm handing you over to our spokesman of the board, Christoph Petri, who will, as usual, lead you through this call. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Ringmetall's presentation of the Q3 2023 figures. The year 2023 is a very challenging and disruptive year for Ringmetall so far. With the divestiture of HSM, we are now able to purely focus on our core business, industrial packaging. Parallel to that, we have acquired and integrated further companies to our group. The macroeconomic situation, however, has hit us, and that's what makes it challenging for us in the course of the year. While our industrial packaging ring business already suffered from a significant decline, especially in the chemical industry from the very beginning of this year, our industrial packaging liner segment was running still comparably strong. This has changed now in Q3 and will continue most probably for the rest of the year. As the general economic downturn broadens, the industrial packaging liner segment, with its focus on the food and beverage and the pharmaceutical industry, is coping with a declining order intake and weaker demand in almost all product groups. However, within our industrial packaging ring segment, we already see early signs of a stabilization, admittedly on lower demand levels, but at least it's a certain light at the end of the tunnel. Overall, our revenues declined by 15.6% to EUR 144 million. The EBITDA development is heavily impacted by the divestiture of our industrial handling segment and one-off deconsolidation effects deriving from it. Hence, the EBITDA declined by 44% to EUR 13.5 million, and the margin dropped to 9.5%. Adjusted by these one-off effects, which sum up to nearly EUR 5 million, our EBITDA margin is at a satisfactory 12.7% still. This clearly underlines our ability to maintain our margins even in economic downturns, thanks to a newly developed pricing structure implemented over the last two years. Also, additional cost-saving measures and the latest acquisitions from this year and their quick integration into our group contributed nicely to this success. The next page, please. Continued price decreases, both in plastics and steel, pulled our revenues down by 6.4%. This effectively reflects a raw material price decline of more than 15%. The inorganic growth as a result of the divestiture of HSM on the one hand side, and the acquisitions of Protective Lining and Liner Factory on the other hand side, had a positive contribution to the revenues of 3%. The volume decline resulted in a negative effect on the revenues of 12%, while the liner segment was comparably robust up to the end of Q2. We now see a general decline in the volume there as well. The decline in volume in the industrial packaging rings peaked at around 18% at the end of Q2. In the meantime, we see a certain stabilization. Next page, please. With the divestiture of HSM, Ringmetall terminated its segment, industrial handling. Hence, we will now solely focus on industrial packaging in the future. Within the industrial packaging segment, we can now see that revenues came down as the group revenues did. However, on EBITDA level, we clearly see that the EBITDA margin is still very robust, with 15.4%. The one-off deconsolidation effects appear only on group level. Next page. Despite the challenging macroeconomic situation, Ringmetall sees itself well-prepared. Intensified measures have been taken to ensure the company's competitiveness and profitability. Therefore, we feel very comfortable to fulfill our year-end guidance of EUR 175-195 million in revenues and EUR 13-18 million in EBITDA. These disruptive times, on the other hand, provide us very interesting opportunities on the mergers and acquisitions field. After our successful acquisitions of Protective Lining and Liner Factory earlier this year, Ringmetall has also completed a third transaction within the last days. We have successfully acquired all substantial assets of the containment business segment of IDF GmbH & Co. KG, based in Niefern, Germany. We can go to the next page to give more details on IDF. IDF's containment business segment is one of the leading suppliers of containment solutions for the filling lines, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. With this acquisition, Ringmetall steps into the highly attractive market of containment solutions, and has now its own clean room facilities on site. Containment solutions are being used in the filling process of mostly powdery products, especially in the pharmaceutical, but also the chemical industry. An endless sleeve protects the product of external influences on the one hand side, while it also protects the workers on the filling line of hazardous dust developments caused by the filling process. The acquisition is fairly small, with a yearly revenue contribution in the low single-digit range and a slightly above average EBITDA margin. However, it provides another highly attractive growth market for Ringmetall, with great development opportunities. Last, but definitely not least, Ringmetall has proudly achieved the silver status in the current EcoVadis ranking. This underlines our attempt on professionalizing our group further and giving a clear commitment to sustainability. Thank you very much for your attention, and I will now hand over again to Ingo for the Q&A. Great. Thanks, Christoph, for your update on Q3 and the first nine months. As usual, we're now coming to the Q&A. Please just raise your hand or unmute yourself. I'm just seeing already the first question comes from Olga Steffen. Olga, please go ahead. Good morning, all together. Thank you for your report about the third quarter. We saw in your core business a little bit higher revenue in the third quarter than in the second quarter. Is this mostly an effect of the acquisitions, or is the ring business now went up a little bit? As mentioned, yes, first of all, the ring business saw a certain stabilization. And don't forget, Q3 is usually not a very good quarter, since we have the summer holiday seasons, especially in Southern Europe, also in Germany. So usually Q3 is not a very good quarter revenue-wise, and therefore we are quite happy to really see a clear stabilization in volumes and therefore also on the revenue side. And yes, of course, the acquisition of Liner Factory was actually very beneficial to that as well. And it definitely surpassed also our expectations in that respect. So both effects contribute positively to the revenues. As far as I could see, you were able to improve your EBITDA margin a little bit in the third quarter. You've said the recessionary trend has intensified. Now, maybe you can give us a margin outlook for the fourth quarter and the beginning of 2024. Do you see further price pressure? We are very cautious with outlooks, actually. First of all, again, the acquisition of Liner Factory contributed nicely also to the, increase in EBITDA margin, because Liner Factory achieved really substantially good figures, which we did not expect to see already that soon. To give you an outlook, I would say, I mean, for the guidance for this year, you see that already we have achieved the lower end of the EBITDA range. Most probably, we will be able to add something to the EBITDA until the end of the year, and we are not giving a higher guidance currently. So more or less, I guess you can, you can, calculate for yourself. Then an outlook for 2024, we don't give an outlook now, but what we see is we see a certain cautious, well, cautiously optimistic, I would say it, or call it. We see it cautiously optimistic. Because it could be that it is only a very short effect now on the ring side, where we see a stabilization and maybe a certain increase even. But it could also be that at the beginning of next year we see that volumes drop again. It's something which is very, very unpredictable, and therefore, I really refuse to comment on that in too much detail, please. Okay, fine. My last question. We saw a big interest rate hike this year. Can you give us some information about your actual conditions for the financing of acquisitions, if you need debt? Mm-hmm. Well, first of all, we are very happy because we were able to decrease our net financial position, despite the fact that we have acquired these three companies now. So this is a great success, and it gives another proof that our cash flow is absolutely intact and... And yeah, that's a big effort for the whole group. For further acquisitions or well, basically, first of all, the interest rate, which we are paying, is around 5% currently. And it would be the same if we do further acquisitions, which are financed through debt. We have long-term commitments with our banks, and we have so-called hunting lines, which we can draw from to finance further acquisitions. Of course, if we talk about acquisitions, let's say, north of EUR 30 million-EUR 40 million in value, we would need to renegotiate with the banks, I guess, and maybe, interest rates would change from that. But, up to that, we don't, we don't expect any changes in interest rates. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. Mm-hmm. Thanks, Olga. Any further questions, please? Please just raise your hand. You can also ask your questions via the chat. Yes, hello. This is Georg Geiger from Value Holdings. Can you hear me? Yes. Great. Just one question, please, about your dividend policy. After the deconsolidation losses of HSM, your earnings per share in 2023 could fall on a level not much higher than your dividend of EUR 0.10 of last year. So in this case, do you prefer stable-paying stable dividends, even in this case, or must we be aware of a dividend cut for 2023? Well, first of all, I don't hope that our EPS will drop to such a low level. I would expect it to be at least a bit higher. We have the dividend policy, which says 20%-25% of the EPS we want to pay out. In the past, we did not reach this figure because we had lower EPS due to consolidation effects, and we still paid around 20%-25% of the operative cash flow then. So I would expect that more or less the same dividend policy will be valid for 2023. Again, I don't think that we will come down to 9 or 10 cents EPS. That would be a bad figure. Okay. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Any further questions? Hello. Yes, this is Simon Scholes. Can you hear me? Hi, Simon. Yeah. Hi. Yes, I've just got a couple of questions. First of all, I mean, in the H1 report, you were talking about the negative effect of inventory reductions in the chemical industry on your sales. I mean, is that, I assume, that in Q3, that effect has now become significantly weaker? I mean, is that correct? Yes, I would say so as well. The destocking effect in general has come to a certain... Not, well, not to a stop, maybe, but we, we don't, we don't see that, that much anymore. Absolutely. And what you, what you see as well is, of course, with a decline in raw material prices, values have come down as well. Okay. And then just another question on pipe connectors, which I think is a business that you're currently entering. And I was just wondering if you could update us on that, and also if you could give us an idea of how large you expect this business for you to become over the next in the medium term. This market is definitely of big interest and is, let's say, maybe the only real organic growth driver in the ring field, which we are currently seeing. And therefore, we do a lot to get more insights in this market and to slowly step into that as well. However, it's a market which is not that easy to enter into. The market itself is comparably big, I would say, and big means we are talking in Europe about revenue potentials of the whole market, somewhere between EUR 20 million and maybe EUR 50 million. However, currently, many of the pipe producers produce also their own pipe connections, and that's something where we try to step in and, let's say, educate them that it's not worth to do it by themselves because it's a lot of investment, and a lot of CapEx for them, and basically, we can do that much more efficiently and, quality-wise, also in a way which is more than appropriate. Therefore, the market is still in development. We have customers already existing, and we are now slowly increasing our footprint in this market. But generally, the share which we have in this market is still quite small. Okay, thanks very much. That's very helpful. Thanks, Simon. So any further questions for the moment? Then please just unmute your microphone or raise your hand or ask a question via the chat. No, that doesn't seem to be the case. So, Christoph, is there anything you would like to add? No, there's nothing, I think, we have to add. We will participate in the Hamburg Investorentag in February. Maybe that's something what we can inform about. And apart from that, no, nothing to add. Thank you, Ingo. Thanks, Christoph. So then I think we've reached the end of today's call. Thanks for your time and participating again. If you have any further questions, then, of course, just feel free to call us, Christoph or me, we will always be there to answer your questions. And until that happens, see you again, or hear you again at the next call. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.