Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the quarterly earnings call of Ringmetall SE. Thanks again for joining today on behalf of the release of our H1 2024 results. As usual, we will now present to you our latest figures as released Friday morning. In the next 15 minutes, we will talk about the most important events in the first half of 2024 from an operational and financial perspective. Following this, there will be a Q&A session. Please note that the entire call, as usual, including the Q&A session, will be recorded and made available publicly in the course of the day. And now I'm handing you over to our Spokesman of the Board, Christoph Petri, who will, as usual, lead you through today's call. Christoph, please go ahead. Thank you, Ingo. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the quarter calls of Ringmetall, also from my side. Maybe it will not even take fifteen minutes, Ingo. Maybe it's a bit quicker. We only prepared a few slides for you to give you an overview, and I think, the most important part is then if you have any questions, we could dive deeper into that afterwards. So the first half of 2024 was especially covered by a certain stabilization in end markets, especially in the drum ring segment. We see group revenues going down by close to 10% compared to prior year. If we take out the HSM part, which we have sold last year in June, it is an adjusted decrease of 1.6%. The main driver of this slowdown in revenues is the steel price. As you all know, steel prices affect directly our top line, and especially on the ring segment, we see a decline in revenues, but not in volumes. I will talk about that a little bit more, later on. The gross profit stays pretty much stable, and the EBITDA increased by more than 60%. Again, if we take out the HSM effect and the deconsolidation effect from last year, it is still, a respectable, adjusted increase of close to 4%, which, again, underlines, the profitability of the group on the one-hand side, but also the stabilization in the markets on the other hand, and of course, we have done our utmost to keep the margins high. The EBITDA margin increased by adjusted 0.8%. In total, it is 6.6 percentage points to close to 15% EBITDA margin. This is the top margin which we would like to achieve in our long-term guidance. It is, of course, also a certain mathematical effect, I have to admit. Since steel prices have dropped and therefore the top line reduced, the total profit stays pretty much the same. In this case, it even increased slightly, and therefore it is a mathematical effect then that the EBITDA margin increases. Therefore, we always give a certain range, which usually lies between 12.5% and 15% in EBITDA margin. The guidance we have specified just recently, I will talk about that, as well later on, and we have based it on the first half year figures of 2024. If we dive a little bit deeper, what we can see is, again, the raw material price effect is quite significant. Especially the steel prices have dropped, and this is now for the sixth consecutive quarter. This obviously has a major impact on our top line, and therefore, revenues go down. The inorganic growth effect is because of our acquisitions of SVD in the last year and also Protective Lining and IDF. Therefore, we have a certain effect on that. In total, we are talking about roughly five million additional revenues in the first half of 2024. And then we also see an organic, a certain organic growth effect. If we divide it a little bit into the product segments which we have, we see that the volume effect in the ring segment is above 2%-5%. And we see within the liner segment, however, a certain decline due to the fact that especially technical liners for the glue industry and also round bottom liners are still not on the growth path yet. However, in total, we see a stabilization of businesses and volumes which help us and support us in our approach to have a continuous production process. We see less volatility, and that makes it significantly easier for us in our planning of production capacities. The guidance, again, we have updated it just recently, and we have now a group revenue guidance of EUR 170 million-EUR 185 million. The reason why we are now looking on the lower part of the original guidance is the decline in steel prices. Volume effect is not really visible, and therefore, we are quite confident to achieve this guidance on the revenue part. Again, with the steel prices, it is not possible to achieve the higher end of this guidance. Also, the granulate and film prices actually have dropped, so also the liner part does not contribute positively to achieving the upper end of the revenue guidance, and therefore, we reduced it slightly. The group's EBITDA is now EUR 22 million-EUR 27 million, and there you see that, the volumes are there, the profitability is high, and, we see ourselves in a good position. And, we're able to reduce the lowest part of the guidance. Markets remain challenging, but, it is a certain sign of normalization and again, less volatility, which help us in our production planning. We see a certain organic growth trend in the chemical industry. It is, let's say, a small plant or a small seed, which is, now growing, and, we have to be careful not to break it down. But again, it's a certain sign, and, that motivates us. Another part, of course, is further acquisitions, and, we are currently working heavily on, certain acquisitions. Nothing is materializing for now, but we are quite confident to close at least one, maybe two, maybe even more deals within the remainder of this year. The market is very attractive. We have done our homework in the past, and now the lineup of companies and acquisition targets is quite significant for us, and we're looking forward to, again, close maybe one, two, or maybe even more transactions in the remainder of this year. That's it from my side, and again, it's only 10 minutes, so we have maybe a little bit more time for Q&A. If you have any questions, I would hand over to Ingo to moderate. Great. Thanks, Christoph. So as usual, if you want to place a question, please just unmute yourself and go ahead. If you don't feel comfortable with asking your question directly, of course, you can also ask your question in the chat, and we will put it in the queue. So then please go ahead. Any questions this morning? Hi, Bernard Friedman. Hello to Mr. Petri and Mr. Middelmenne. Just one question on how did you react to all of this outlook in terms of your planning for your staff? Did you increase your staff in the first half also including temps? And maybe what did you do there? We are currently actually in the process of trying to get leased workers transferred into permanent workers. It's a challenge, and I would say it's one of the biggest challenges we are facing in the group to really attract good people in the production sites. That's the most challenging part, and we are not talking only about Germany. This is a worldwide phenomenon. What we have done so far is we have increased our leased worker part in the first half, slightly. Not too much, but slightly. The permanent workers, we haven't done much about that yet. It's something which will come up in the second half, maybe. One thing I would like to add to that as well is we have flexibilized our production, and we have invested into automation as well. So it's not necessarily a situation where we need to hire new people or increase our personnel costs if we have slightly increased turnover or volumes. So basically, for now, I can say nothing has been done so far on the permanent side. Leased workers slightly increased. Now comes the situation that we move or try to move leased workers into permanent workers. Great. Thank you. So we have one question in the chat from Alexander Jagode. He would like to know if you could say something on the combined revenue of the upcoming targets, on the M&A side. I know the answer already, but I'm also curious to your answer, Christoph. Yes. I mean, we cannot talk much in detail about that. We are now really in a process where we are not allowed to talk much about that. But I can give you maybe some light on that. We are talking about, in total, four to five targets, which we are very deeply looking at, and the targets range from smaller, single-digit revenues to revenues up to somewhere around the EUR 30 million. And the combined revenues is then maybe somewhere between 30 and 60, something like that, for the full year. And I cannot tell you anything about the real likelihood that these acquisitions materialize. We are quite confident, but I mean, again, we have quite strict rules and regulations to ourselves in that respect, and therefore, a transaction by itself has to contribute positively and has to fulfill our, our requirements as well. Great. Very open answer. So any further questions here? So that doesn't seem to be the case for the time being. So that was a rather short call today, but as usual, if any further questions should arise, please always feel free to email us or call me directly, and we'll give you some more information as far as we can do that. So then, thank you very much for joining this morning and hope to talk to you soon and meet you at the Eigenkapitalf orum in November in person for a one-on-one. And I'm handing to you, Christoph, for the last words. Also from my side, thank you very much for joining. Thank you for your interest in Ringmetall, and we're looking forward to meeting you very soon on the Eigenkapitalf orum then. Have a great week. Bye-bye.