Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's Q3 2022 conference of Klöckner & Co SE. For your information, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Felix Schmitz. Please go ahead, sir. Yes. Thanks, and welcome everyone to our Q3 call. With me today are our CEO, Guido Kerkhoff, our CFO, Oliver Falk, our CEO Europe, Bernhard Weiß, and our CEO for the Americas, John Ganem. They will, as always, guide you through the presentation. Afterwards, we are happy to answer your questions. With that, I would like to hand over to you, Guido. Thanks, Felix. Welcome also from my side to our Q3 call. Let's directly start with the highlights of this quarter. Shipments were slightly down year-on-year. This is due to very muted demand, especially during the summer months and background of the negative macro environment. Sales are considerably up year-on-year as a result of a higher average price level compared to previous year. Gross profit came in at EUR 305 million, down year-on-year due to the exceptionally high steel price decline. We generated an EBITDA before material special effects of EUR 16 million, and this has to be seen in context. Despite the already mentioned very negative macro environment and unprecedented steel price corrections, our operating result was still positive. It was shaped by the inventory writedown as a result of the significant correction of steel prices, but also by our actively and intentionally enforced inventory reduction. I also want to point out that following our analysis, our significantly improved normalized underlying margin that is based on replacement costs, excluding writedowns, is intact. As anticipated, we generated a strong operating cash flow of EUR 163 million in Q3 2022. Our inventories are already now significantly reduced. We will later come to our current initiatives to mitigate our risk exposure for the coming months. Net debt was higher year on year as a result of a higher average price level, but came down quarter on quarter due to the actively enforced inventory reduction. Digital sales share at a strong level of 43%, slightly down 3 percentage points. Klöckner Assistant successfully implemented a new core feature. Let's go to the next slide. Despite the difficult environment or precisely because of these developments, we're encouragingly pressing ahead with our strategic initiatives. As we explained before, we perceive the sustainability transformation of the steel industry as a huge opportunity to grow our business to improve margins. We've just begun to enable our customers to build CO2-reduced value chain. We now launched Nexigen. Under Nexigen, we bundle all sustainable business solutions at Klöckner. These solutions not only comprise CO2-reduced products, as we also offer CO2-reduced logistics and circularity solutions. Furthermore, we already trained more than 700 salespeople, the first green steel sales force globally to advise and sell sustainable products and services. We were pleased to see that our categorization for CO2 reduced and green steel that we introduced beginning of the year was gradually adopted by market participants and proved to be an important tool in comparing greenish products. Through our subsidiary, Becker, we recently delivered the first quantities of CO2 reduced steel in our product category to our long-standing customer, Mercedes-Benz. Cradle-to-gate CO2 emissions total less than 500 kg of carbon per ton of steel. We will soon inform you about next steps. Let's go to the next slide. Digitalization and value chain automation is one important lever for our Klöckner & Co. 2025: Leveraging Strengths strategy, and we work hard to achieve our goals of Zero Touch. Here comes the update on what was achieved during the quarter. Our self-developed AI solution, Klöckner Assistant, processed more than EUR 1 billion of sales volume year to date in 2022. Thanks to the commitment and hard work of all employees involved, we recently successfully implemented the new core feature of the Klöckner Assistant. In addition to PDF files, our proprietary AI solution is now able to automatically extract all relevant information from unstructured text emails. This will replace time-consuming processes of manually reviewing emails and therefore further increase efficiency. This new core feature was already rolled out in Germany. Further country organizations will follow soon. In Q3, we saw a decline of three percentage points of our digital sales share year-on-year. The decline is mainly driven by relatively stronger processing business in the United States, which is more related to offline channels. Despite the decline in digital sales share, the 43% in this quarter still represents a strong level. With that, I hand over to Oliver for the financials. Thank you. Before we dive right in, I'd like to briefly show you, just as I did last quarter, our consistent and smart net working capital management. This is to be seen in context to the significant correction of steel prices during the last month. Generally, we commit ourselves to a strong through the cycle performance. That means fostering opportunities, but also mitigating to the downside. Under this concept, we have different initiatives at hand, and for instance, in a down cycle situation. We don't always follow the same initiatives. Initiatives will always be linked to the market environment and the demand and supply data that we read out of the tools. During the last quarter, we could translate the positive price dynamics of 2021 and early 2022 immediately into record operating results with industry-leading quarter-over-quarter performances. However, our sensitive Net Working Capital management also mitigated negative windfall effects in downward cycles, such as in Q4 2021. Now, in this very challenging macro environment, we took action again, and we are actively driving down our inventories to mitigate the risk for the upcoming winter months, where we do not expect any positive opportunities to occur, in contrast to recent cycles. Our inventories in tons are already today on the level of the pandemic peak. While this has an impact on the profitability of this quarter and also the two ones to follow, we make sure to bring in strong cash flows, which was already visible in Q2 and now in Q3. With that mitigating move against the background that we are currently observing rather a stabilization in prices and the fact that the period of price decline was short, we will reset our exposure towards spring to be ready when opportunities might come back again. Despite the macro headwinds, our normalized underlying margin, excluding write-downs and windfall losses, is clearly intact and on good levels. Despite the negative environment and thanks to our Net Working Capital management strategy, we can expect a high profitability and in addition on exceptionally positive cash flows from operating activities for the full year 2022. Let's take a look into shipments, sales, gross profit, and gross profit margin for the third quarter. Shipments were 3.5% below the previous year's level. Sales considerably increased by 16% year-on-year from EUR 2 billion in quarter three, 2021 to EUR 2.4 billion in quarter three, 2022 due to the higher average price level in all operating segments. Gross profit was at EUR 305 million after the record gross profit of EUR 542 million in quarter three, 2021. Gross profit margin went down year-on-year from 26.6% to 12.9%. Quarter-on-quarter, down from 19.7% to 12.9%. We will now focus on the EBITDA for the group. EBITDA came in at EUR 16 million after EUR 277 million in the previous year. Despite the exceptionally negative market environment, significant price correction, and weak demand, the operating result was still positive. This number is considerably down year-over-year due to the significant steel price decline, the inventory write-down, and actively enforced inventory reduction to mitigate risk exposures as outlined before. Year-over-year, we saw a negative volume effect of EUR 19 million due to the exceptionally negative macro environment and the weak demand, especially during the summer months, July and August. The negative price effect of EUR 249 million year-over-year resulted from the significant steel price correction. OpEx was up by EUR 2 million, driven by higher expenses for shipments and operating supplies and tools due to the higher cost per ton. Moreover, we had EUR 9 million of positive FX effects. We are now coming to cash flow and net debt. Q3 already saw a net working capital release of EUR 134 million, fully aligned with our net working capital management initiatives. Taking into consideration interest and tax payments of in total EUR 33 million, cash flow from operating activities came in strong at EUR 162.3 million in quarter three 2022. Including net CapEx of EUR 36 million, free cash flow was at EUR 128 million. Therefore, our net financial debt decreased from EUR 903 million at the end of quarter two 2022 to EUR 806 million, despite FX and swaps of in total EUR 24 million. Let's jump to the next slide. Our balance sheet remains very strong and rock solid. Our equity is up, and the equity ratio remains solid at 46% as well as gearing 38% and the leverage at 1.3 times. Overall, this very strong balance sheet enables us to manage our inventories dynamically, also going forward and will support us to further grow the business according to our strategy. With this, I hand back to Guido. Thanks. Before we come to the business outlook of the region, allow me a few sentences on what we have achieved during this year and what we expect for the remainder of the year. We're not just committed to the profitability of a single quarter. We are clearly focused on a high performance through the entire cycle. After the positive pricing dynamics at the beginning of this year, our strong profitability in the first half of 2022, the entire market observed an unprecedented correction in prices. We cannot just participate to the upside, but will certainly have to digest also the negative price effect. However, it is on us to decide how to manage this, and like in the last 24 months, we're actively steering our inventories to the best position for the now very often changing market dynamics. We're actively reducing our risk exposure for the winter months. Inventories are already now on pandemic levels. They will go further down. Due to the short-term decline in inventories, we'll be more or less reset when opportunities might be visible again towards early next. The uncertainty in the market will remain, but it should not be approached with inactivity. Recent stabilization of prices is also supporting our approach. Moreover, we're seeing two things. Firstly, our improved underlying margin, excluding write-downs, is intact. Secondly, markets are not fully falling apart like one could get the impression when reading the media or seeing capital markets volatilities. We're experiencing broad-based headwinds and challenging macro environments, but no massive destruction of demand so far. Due to our net working capital strategy, we are now set to deliver still a very strong profitability with an expected EBITDA before material special effects of around EUR 400 million for the year and a very strong operating cash flow. With that, I'd like to hand over to Bernhard. Yeah. Thank you, Guido. For Europe, we are currently in a challenging business environment due to the price decreases. However, mills have already taken out capacity from the market. In this context, we have started early to take short positions to stringently manage our net working capital and to push our volumes. We therefore aim to reposition our inventory at lower cost level rather sooner than later. We continue to implement measures to decouple more and more from price cyclicity and to reduce earnings volatility and reduce risk exposure, starting on the procurement side with our strategic supplier approach, and continue to invest in higher value at businesses equipment at our sites in Velten, Kaufungen, and Bremen. We are also driving our post-merger integration of Hernandez and RSC into Becker Stainless, implementing synergies with the other product lines and our distribution business, both on the market approach and footprint optimization. Coming to our sectors, overall apparent demand is muted, as Guido said, but not fully destroyed due to customers' fear of recession and energy cost increase despite their order books being full. The construction sector, increasing interest rates are of course affecting the residential sector. However, infrastructure projects are stable and compensate, especially due to the energy distribution swap. In machinery and mechanical engineering, we have no change compared to the last call. We see strong order books and no negative trends so far. For automotive, supply chain is recovering from shortages on critical materials such as chips. This topic is fading more and more. Call-offs are increased as expected. Shipbuilding, however, no major change compared to the last report. This sector aims to be under pressure. With that, I would like to hand over to John. Thank you, Bernhard. For the US overall, we are seeing underlying real demand up a modest 1%-2% in 2022, with solid year-over-year gains in transportation, energy, heavy equipment, and residential construction leading the way. Supply chain and labor constraints remain a factor, but appear to be mitigating to some degree. Most large OEM customers continue to report significant production backlogs. Heavy destocking in the second half of the year will likely cause apparent consumption to turn negative in 2022, as we expect transactional buyers to remain cautious in the face of weaker seasonal demand and downward to moderating market prices. Similar trends are reflected in Klöckner shipping levels, where contractual business is generally stable at close to pre-pandemic levels, while our spot transactional business has been negatively impacted by the destocking effect, as well as our own aggressive inventory reduction strategy. Regarding pricing, our general sense is that prices for most products are now stable or will find a cyclical bottom by the end of the year. This view is supported by mill production capacity reductions, falling inventories across the supply chain, and what has been a significant drop in finished imports over the past three months. Turning to the specific sectors, construction spending in the U.S. year-to-date is up 10% year-over-year. Residential has been the main driver, but growth has begun moderating in the face of declining affordability due to the record high home prices and increasing mortgage rates. Expect headwinds to increase as we move into next year, but overall housing starts still expected to remain at reasonable levels, albeit lower than 2022. Activity in the non-residential construction sector has remained steady, with actual spending levels increasing in recent months as non-res square footage put in place usually lags housing starts by 12-18 months. Activity in this segment should also get a further boost in 2023 from the infrastructure spending bill. Manufacturing and mechanical engineering. We see our appliance and electrical segments currently steady as manufacturers continue to deal with production constraints and still significant backlogs. Other than normal Q4 seasonal effects, we expect demand to remain stable into early 2023, with some clear downside risk for a slowdown due to weaker housing starts and falling consumer spending. Heavy equipment segments, on the other hand, are also steady with low inventories and large backlogs. We do expect this segment to see positive growth again in 2023 as non-res and infrastructure projects will be positive demand drivers. Energy markets are also expected to continue expanding next year as high oil prices support increased drilling activity and as investment in renewables continue to accelerate. North American automotive production is up 13% year-over-year as supply chain constraints are slowly addressed. October sales reached 14.9 million annualized in October, which was the highest rate since January. While consumer demand may pull back slightly in 2023 due to affordability issues, current sales remain well below equilibrium rate of 17 million. With still low dealer inventories and strong fleet demand, auto production is expected to rise again in 2023. Shipbuilding remains stable, with expected growth for Klöckner in 2023 as some new naval programs begin to ramp up. In summary, we see Q4 demand stable with normal seasonal effects in November and December. Prices should be generally range bound as we enter 2023, with limited further downside risk depending on product line. Falling imports, low inventories, and continued mill production discipline should combine to create a more balanced supply-demand dynamic as we head into the new year. While demand-side risks are real for housing, appliance, and consumer goods manufacturing, there remains some unique and positive tailwinds in less consumer sensitive segments that make us cautiously optimistic for 2023. Additionally, the end to the current destocking cycle should provide some further year-over-year upside potential for apparent consumption. With that, I turn it back over to Guido. Thanks, John. Let's come to the outlook for the full year 2022. Despite the headwinds laid out earlier, we continue to expect strong full-year results. Sales are expected to increase significantly compared to the previous year. Shipments slightly below prior year level. EBITDA before material special effects is anticipated to come in at around EUR 400 million, despite the slowdown in earnings momentum Q3 and Q4 2022 due to the significant correction in steel prices. In addition, we expect an exceptionally positive cash flow from operating activities. We're now looking forward to your questions. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Once again, please press star one and one on your telephone if you would like to ask a question. We will go to our first question. One moment, please. Your first question comes from the line of Alan Spence from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thank you, and good afternoon, guys. I've got two questions. I'll take them one by one. Just first one, if you could give any early thoughts on Q1, and I'm not asking you to give us a guidance here, but just more so if we do have a stabilization in prices from today onwards, would those windfall losses be digested before the end of the year, or would you expect those to continue into Q1? No, Alan. I think, assuming that demand stays where it is and prices stay stable, we would still see some windfalls, going through in Q1 because, look, the contractual business that we do have, has some delay, and you've seen there were some write-downs we had on our inventories, but still, compared to the price decline we saw, that is rather limited in effect. Again, let me state, the current underlying business that we find is margin-wise intact compared to our replacement cost. Yes, digestion will still be there in Q1, but the outlook, if things stay stable, is not that bad. Okay, got it. Second one, would you be able to help us with even a rough range about what you think the Net Working Capital release could be in Q4? Then also just speak a little bit about how you're thinking of the, you know, what to do with such a strong cash flow in Q4. Is it just pay down more debt, or have you had any discussions with your large shareholder about whether they would be able or willing to participate in a buyback that would allow you to scoop up some cheap shares? First of all, no. On Net Working Capital, we want to further in tonnages, reduce where we are and then see what the outcome will be and how it go and how far we will come there. Our replacement costs are lower, so therefore it should be a strong cash flow. What we will do with all of that is to be seen then. First of all, it's clearly reducing our debts. That's the priority right now. Everything else is too early to speculate. Okay. Thanks, Guido. Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone keypad. That is star one and one to ask a question. There are currently no further questions. I will hand the call back to you. Well, I mean, as we had an ad hoc before, another question? No. Yes. Sorry, sir. Yeah. Alan came back into the queue. I'll just open his line for you. Fine. One moment, please. Alan, your line is open. Yes, thanks. I thought I would jump in with another one. Can you speak a little bit more around automotive demand in both U.S. and Europe? I mean, there was a quick comment about improved call-offs in Europe. In U.S., how are we seeing that demand recover post-summer? If you had to kind of put an estimate on where the demand relative normalized rates in both regions, what would you estimate that to be? Well, I think maybe John, you start with the U.S. Sure. Yep, sure. Yeah, I think in the U.S., we're currently producing at a 14 million unit rate. I think the feeling is we should see another 7%-8% increase next year. Of course, in the U.S., the auto sector is not quite as large for us as it is in Europe. We certainly see, you know, strength across the board, but really more so in Mexico. Mexico has really been quite positive. Bernhard, for Europe. Well, for Europe, we see actually a steady take off of materials for the Q4, after, let's say, the seasonal lower levels before, also triggered by supply chain constraints, so that looks good. For next year, the overall question is how much of the consumption demand will be staggered due to, let's say, recession fears in the consumption behavior. Overall, we see no growth, but we see a steady offtake for the Q4. Okay. Thanks again, guys. Thank you. There are currently no further questions. I will hand the call back. Let's try to finalize it then, as we have the ad hoc statement already beforehand. I think there was not so many news and not too many questions to be expected. I hope we could clarify the situation a little bit, how we see it going forward. Thanks for the questions and for listening. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thanks for participating. You may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.