Hello everybody, and welcome to our Daimler Truck Capital Market Day. Let me start by saying that I really like the film we just saw. I like it because it does a great job of bringing across the ambition we all share at Daimler Truck, the ambition to deliver great products for our customers and great value for our shareholders. There's a lot of support for that ambition, which we want to share with you today. Today's event is a follow-up to our Strategy Day in May. Back then, we laid out the big picture of our way forward and explained how we plan to unlock the full potential of our company, and we made clear our commitment to two overarching goals, to raise our profitability and to lead the transformation of our industry. Today, we want to build on that and to explain in detail our plans and our financial goals. We want to lay out that one month ahead of our planned public listing, we are ready for the next era of our company, and we are ready to maximize shareholder value. In short, we are ready for our independence, organization-wise and business-wise. We believe we have all the things in place we need to be successful right from the start. Let me assure you, at Daimler Truck, we can't wait to take our future in our own hands as entrepreneurs. We can't wait to step into the spotlight and to show the world what we are capable of. It's not just me and our board of management, it's our entire management team and thousands of employees around the globe. We are all excited to become an even stronger Daimler Truck AG. Finally, Daimler shareholders, as you know, are in full support of our independence as well. At the extraordinary general meeting in October, 99.9% voted in favor of our spin-off. With that, let's jump right into today's presentation, and let's look at the major reasons why we consider ourselves fully ready for independence. The first reason is we are absolutely convinced that Daimler Truck has everything to become the benchmark global truck company. We've got all the ingredients. A stake of 65% will be spun off, and we will have an independent governance. Only two members of the Daimler Board of Management will be members of our Supervisory Board. We are all so proud that our Supervisory Board is high caliber, diverse, and international. It's a good basis for getting all the perspectives we need to help drive our company forward. We will not only be truly independent, we also have an attractive financial profile. With EUR 46 billion in revenue in 2019, we will rank among Germany's top 20 companies. We've got a rock-solid balance sheet and an investment-grade rating of BBB+. Moreover, we have set ambitious targets for our company that we will pursue with laser focus. Let me round up that slide by strengthening that we are right on track for our planned listing. Our listing in Frankfurt is targeted for December 10, and we are well on our way to meet all deadlines and to make it happen. As a next step, we expect our company to qualify for the DAX in the Q1 of 2022. Again, we are ready for independence, and we are convinced that we will be much stronger as an independent company. Our independence will allow us to increase our agility and our focus on the things that really matter to our customers that will lead to faster decision-making. It will also increase our focus on profitability, and that means we plan to pivot towards heavy duty. We are well positioned to execute our truck-specific strategic plans 100% without the need to find a compromise with passenger car goals. In concrete terms, this means we can direct our investments to innovations that are key for the truck industry. Just think of fuel cell vehicles and autonomous hub-to-hub solutions that we consider absolutely crucial for our industry going forward, and that, as a pure play company, we can now pursue much more easily. To successfully address the shift in technology, we're engaging in dedicated partnerships. Joining forces helps us to achieve more with less own investment. Finally, to conclude the slide, we will have direct access to the capital markets, and we will also be directly accountable to the capital markets. This dynamic will make us stronger. Accountability means responsibility and entrepreneurship, and that's what we want to drive our company forward. We aim to raise our performance and to unlock our true value. Our overarching goals are to strengthen profitability and to lead the way to zero emissions. To reach these goals, we will tackle six important fields of action. Let me walk you through them and let's start with clear financial targets. This was one of our key slides at our Strategy Day in May, and since it is absolutely crucial for us and for our financial ambitions, I want to do a brief recap. Core is that we are shooting for ambitious returns latest by 2025 in different environments. We are working to prepare a floor where we can achieve at least an adjusted 6% return on sales, even in a rainy scenario. In an average market environment, we want to aim for 8%-9%, and in sunny conditions, we aim to deliver more than 10%. We believe we will achieve these goals through focus on our strengths, financial discipline, and hard-nosed decision-making on our weaknesses. We, for example, aim to reduce our fixed costs, our capital expenditure, and our R&D spending by 15% compared to 2019. Let me make one thing very clear, every single member of our board of management is 100% committed to these targets. We are fully committed because we believe they will make Daimler Truck a much stronger company, and that's what we are all striving for. We aim to make Daimler Truck a structurally more profitable business. We aim to lower our break-even point with lower fixed costs and a higher service revenue share. We aim to be prepared to rainier conditions and market headwinds, and we want to make full use of sunny market conditions to uplift margins. When looking at these targets, I'm sure one thing becomes very clear. At Daimler Truck, we are fully focused on value creation. We are fully committed to deliver strong shareholder returns, and I'd like to highlight a few important examples of this here. First, there is a strong cash conversion rate. We are targeting a higher return on capital and being a very strong free cash flow business. Next is the attractive dividend we are aiming for. Our target is a payout ratio of 40%. In addition, there is our rock-solid balance sheet and our solid investment-grade credit rating. Rounding out the list is our focused capital allocation. R&D and CapEx will be prioritized for the largest profit pools. We will invest in the build-up of our dedicated world-class financial services business. Now, after presenting all our financial ambitions at our overall company level, we are ready to provide the next step in terms of transparency. We are ready to share our profitability ambitions with an unparalleled transparency at the segment level. These are the return ambitions we set for all our business segments for the sunny 2025 scenario. Trucks North America, 12%. Mercedes-Benz, 10%. Trucks Asia, 9%. Daimler Buses, 7.5%. Financial services, 14%. In that case, not adjusted return on sales, but adjusted return on equity. As you can see, the target figures differ in absolute terms, but I can assure you the degree of commitment is the very same for all these figures. Each figure represents the respective regional or segment benchmark, so striving for their target means each of our business segments is striving for a best-in-class position. Now when looking at our ambitious targets, the question obviously is, how do we plan to deliver on them? We are a company with unique strengths. We've got leading market positions around the globe. In 2019, we were the clear number one in North America. We were the number one brand in Europe and in Brazil, in the medium and heavy-duty segment. We were number three in the Japanese truck market, and we were number one in the European bus business. We intend to tap into the benefits of scale and technology. Global platforms across brands and regions allow for clear engineering savings and procurement synergies. Plus, we can establish tech hubs in the optimal location for a given technology. One prime example is autonomous driving. The perfect region to pioneer that technology is North America, where we have an extremely strong presence. We are in the perfect position to lead this technology that has such a great business potential. If this technology spreads to other regions, we believe our common technology DNA will allow us for a fast global rollout. Same with emission-free drives. We started to work on that technology where the momentum set in first. In Japan, for example, with our eCanter or in Europe with our eCitaro city bus. Or think of our fuel cell technology. We are pioneering it in Europe, but we can easily transfer it to any other region at the right point in time. We believe we've got all levers in place to lead the way to zero emissions. For starters, that includes a resource push towards our in-house development of zero emission technologies, and it includes a resource shift away from conventional powertrains. The exciting thing is we've got battery vehicles in serious production already. We are now working on the next generation of ultimate dedicated emission free vehicles. We are pursuing a dual-track strategy of battery cell and fuel cell. We are convinced both have a place in the market. One reason is that fuel cell vehicles have a clear advantage with respect to rapid refueling and demanding long-haul applications. Let me add, we are convinced it is not a bet to develop both battery and fuel cell. The really risky bet, we think, would be to fully focus on battery and to then have no product in the fuel cell game if the fuel cell game gains momentum in the marketplace. Now there's another aspect. As demanding as it is to make battery and fuel cell vehicles ready for serious production, it is not enough to make zero emissions work technology-wise. We also need to make it work business-wise. We also have a clear business roadmap for zero-emission vehicles in place, and that roadmap includes ambitious cost targets for our next generation vehicles. We are convinced that going full speed to win the race to zero emissions will translate into clear benefits at various levels. First of all, we do our part to contribute to a greener, better planet and to help fight climate change. With respect to customers and business, we believe we are on track to achieve leading costs of ownership in the zero-emission area. This will give us an important competitive advantage. Next to that, zero-emission vehicles should enable new revenue models to drive our service targets. Finally, we are convinced that leading the way to zero emissions will also help to improve our financial performance. There is an important strategic lever we use for our transformation, and that is partnerships. Let me give you a brief overview on our partnership strategy before Andreas Gorbach goes into more detail later on. My first message is, joining forces with the right partners help us to speed up, reduce our own investment, and gain access to know-how. These are decisive benefits, and we want to take advantage of them in several important fields going forward, be it internal combustion engine, battery and fuel cell vehicles, charging or autonomous driving. You see, we are engaging in multiple partnerships, and we are proud of each and every one, because our partners are best in class in their respective fields. Let me also point out, these leading companies have very deliberately joined forces with us. They have chosen to partner with Daimler Truck because they know how much we bring to the table regarding scale, technology leadership, and customer relationships. Next topic, service. Services are highly relevant to our industry. They help to translate customer relationships into recurring revenues, and that reduces cyclicality, drives higher margins and higher return on capital employed. At our May event, we told you that we set ambitious targets for our service business. Our after-sales and financial services currently account for about 30% of our revenue, and we want to increase that share to around 50% by 2030. Today, we want to give you an update on how we intend to do that. Fundamental to our service growth initiatives is what makes us already strong today, a deep understanding of our customers' needs and businesses, and our ability to address them with industry-leading offerings. Today, we focus on offering the best trucks and buses in the industry to optimize the total cost of ownership for our customers. Tomorrow, we will offer specific solutions that make our customers more successful in a zero-emission and autonomous era. Our mission is clear. We will support our customers along their journey during the transformation, and we truly believe that we can jointly emerge stronger. To give you just three examples, right now, we are kickstarting the setup of an EU-wide charging network with our partners. We are developing digital services that are designed to make the operation of our e-trucks more seamless. We are thinking of solutions with partners to capture the remaining value of batteries beyond their life in the vehicle. Let us now switch over to our next and final topic, leadership and culture. I deliberately conclude with this very fundamental subject. I'm sure we all agree, strategies and plan of actions only work with the right leadership and with the right culture. That is the basis to make it all happen. That is the basis to succeed. Many of you were introduced to the team at our event in May. We had one addition since then, Karl Deppen. Karl did a great job in leading our business in Brazil, which is why he is now getting even more responsibility. Starting on December 1, he will lead our Asia business in China. We are glad to have him on the team, and I'm also glad you can get to know him right away in the course of today's presentations. Let me add on a personal note, I feel really good when I think of these faces. I feel really proud to work with that amazing management team, and I'm sure you will share my assessment. We have assembled a board of Daimler Truck that has the skills, the perspective, and the energy to take our company to the next level regarding our performance, our transformation, and our culture. Let me elaborate a little bit more on the cultural change this board is standing for. Our overall commitment is to create value for our customers and our shareholders and to be a great place to work for our employees. To achieve that, there are decisive cultural aspects we are working on. Number one is a generational change you have seen in our board of management with Karin Rådström, Andreas Gorbach, Stefan Buchner, and Karl Deppen coming in. I think it's fair to say that our board of management has extensive international experience and a wide range of expertise, be it customer focus, finance or engineering. Those skills complement each other extremely well. Let me assure you that we will continue to focus on talent development. We aim to continue to have a great pool of talented people across the company. Next important aspect is entrepreneurship. With our independence, we have got the great opportunity to further strengthen our entrepreneurship, and that's exactly what we intend to do. We intend to speed up decision-making and put an even greater emphasis on performance, culture, and accountability. In line with that, we are fully committed to ESG because let me say very clearly, performance and ESG do not contradict. They are not conflicting goals. Quite the opposite. I'm fully convinced that only if companies do things right with respect to ESG, they will be able to perform and to create shareholder value in the long term. We'll do a deep dive on ESG later on. For now, let me round up pointing out one thing. When I say that our management team is fully focused on delivering strong shareholder returns, you don't just have to take my word on it. Because, as the saying goes, we put our money where our mouth is. The incentives of our management board are fully aligned with shareholder interests. In concrete terms, that means the base salary just accounts for a third of total compensation. That is to say that two-thirds, the major part of compensation, is directly linked to our performance. With that, I'd like to conclude, and I want to do so by strengthening again. At Daimler Truck, we are fully committed to making our company even stronger. We are committed to achieving higher profitability, and we can't wait to take our future in our own hands. One month ahead of our planned public listing, we are ready for independence. We are fully ready, 100%. Now handing over to Andreas to talk more about technology. The world is in transformation towards a sustainable future, and we are ready to play our part. We are committed to meeting the Paris Agreement and intend to lead the way in our industry. For us, the goal of CO2-neutral transportation is non-negotiable. We are committed to achieving it through battery, electric and hydrogen powertrains. With an increasing number of our battery electric trucks entering series production, we are also readying hydrogen-fueled versions, and soon we will bring them to the road as well. Tests of our GenH2 Truck started successfully in April 2021, and we are on track with our goals. Electrification and hydrogen trucking will also require entirely new infrastructure. For this, we're collaborating with strong partners to move into a new era of transportation. Our future trucks are also going digital, offering significant untapped potential to extend our business. The operating system we are working on is key to unlocking new revenue streams, improving customer loyalty, and accelerating our business development. We are also pushing the development of the autonomous truck while engaging in powerful partnerships for the driving software. Here, we are following a dual-track strategy, conducting intensive testing with our partners, Waymo and Torc Robotics, our majority-owned subsidiary. We believe level four autonomous driving will be safer and more profitable for our customers. We're heading for new shores with a clear technology strategy and the right partners at our side. Thank you, Martin, and welcome also from my side. At our Daimler Truck Strategy Day in May, we provided a comprehensive technology deep dive. Today's focus is more on the financials, so I'll be a bit briefer today and give you a quick update on how we have progressed with implementing our technology strategy. To me, technology in a truck has always been an enabler, an enabler to maximize the benefit for the customer in terms of maximizing his return on investment in an asset called a truck. An enabler to maximize the benefit for society as well, when I look at safety or efficiency, for example. The two key technologies that do make the biggest difference in that context are the propulsion system and the operating system, the power to drive and the intelligence to drive a truck. Our technology strategy is based on three pillars related exactly to these key technologies. First, we plan to ramp down current diesel powertrain with the necessary diligence and care as we have to stay competitive, but at the same time, fast in execution. Second, as for zero-emission vehicles, we are both committed to battery-electric and hydrogen-powered fuel cell solutions, as we are convinced they are complementary. Third, we believe that the truck of the future is a programmable device. Therefore, we will push the next evolution of the mechatronic architecture and develop a truck-dedicated software operating system. Our technology strategy is clear. Now let me guide you through the three pillars and show how we progress. For us, rapid ramp up and speed when it comes to our transition to ZEV is an imperative. We are fully committed to comply with the Paris Agreement and therefore aim to see 100% of our new vehicles sold in Europe, Japan and the U.S. to being locally CO2 neutral by 2039. However, in certain regions, it can also be much earlier than that, as we are already working on a full range of zero-emission series vehicles. Globally, the full transition might take longer. Why? Well, we see a huge variety in use cases and transportation tasks, and highly differing regulations. The necessary infrastructure is expected to develop at different speed in different regions, and is still mostly in early stages. Now, how are we planning to manage this transition? How are we planning to deal with this uncertainty? With a clear partnering strategy in two stages. First stage, we are planning with Cummins for medium-duty engines, and plan to disinvest our own captive business completely during this decade. Second, we are also seeking for partnerships on the heavy-duty side to share the investment which will be necessary to overcome the upcoming legislative hurdles. Now, let's come to the second pillar of our technology strategy. In order to deliver the best fitting products for our customers' use cases, we have to offer more than just one zero-emission technology. There is a huge variety in use cases and transportation tasks. That's why we are working on the electrification of our portfolio based on a dual-track strategy with battery electric vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles. Both have their sweet spots to maximize customer benefit. In a CO2 neutral society, we believe both green electricity and hydrogen will be required anyhow, independent of the trucking and automotive sector, as many other sectors will need them for their decarbonization strategy as well. Battery electric vehicles will cover a lot of use cases. For instance, many customers have routes less than 500 km per day, and for those customers, battery electric drive can make perfect sense. On the other hand, for customers with heavier loads and longer ranges needing high flexibility, we believe fuel cell trucks will do the job better. When it comes to battery electric, we already presented our eActros just a few months ago, a heavy-duty distribution truck for daily interurban transportation tasks, like delivering food to a supermarket, for example. We are now working hard to develop our eActros LongHaul for longer distances of about 500 km with one battery charge, and we aim to be ready for serious production in 2024. Regarding hydrogen-powered vehicles, we are working on our Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck, which is already collecting miles on public roads. We target a range of 1,000 km and more with just one tank filling, and you can refuel fast and easily. It is not an unlikely scenario that up to 60% of our new vehicles in Europe will be locally CO2 neutral already in 2030. Especially in regions where diesel will ramp down fast, we believe CO2 neutral drives will accelerate fast, and we are prepared for that. What is necessary to successfully establish CO2 neutral trucks in the mass market? Aside from the right products, two things in addition are decisive, infrastructure and parity and total cost of ownership, TCO, in relation to today's diesel trucks. TCO parity is in fact the most important catalyst to speed up the transition. In that very moment, as that EV truck adds more value to our customer than a diesel truck does, we reach the tipping point from which we won't need the CO2 legislation as a pushing factor anymore. What does it take to reach TCO parity? Three things. First, we as an OEM need to reduce product cost, and we are actively working on that by both leveraging our global scale and partnerships at the same time. Two examples regarding batteries, we are already together with CATL in order to develop dedicated truck cells. Regarding fuel cell, second example, we develop, produce, and commercialize fuel cell systems for heavy-duty trucks in our joint venture, cellcentric, together with Volvo Group. Second important point as for TCO parity, we are significantly growing our in-house know-how on long-term differentiating technologies. The right component and system know-how will be decisive, just like with diesel today. The third part involves external factors, like energy and toll prices, which we cannot influence directly, but we are in close dialogue with all involved stakeholders. Our forecast shows why we believe that TCO parity can be reached during this decade for each of our core ZEV technologies, and that is the year 2025 for battery electric vehicles and the year 2027 for fuel cell electric vehicles. However, the exact timing is likely to vary significantly from one region to another. Whenever the tipping point will ultimately be reached, we plan to be ready with the right product at the right cost level with the right performance. Now back to the products. Take a look at our current e-portfolio and the vehicles to come. What a great starting point. For years, we have been handing over more and more electric vehicles to our customers. In sum, more than 100 customers have already driven more than an estimated 10 million kilometers. The latest example is our eActros, which entered serious production last month. Next year, a few more trucks will follow. Take our Freightliner eCascadia, the eM2, our Mercedes-Benz eEconic, and our next generation FUSO eCanter, which is operating in daily use since 2017. We have more projects running at full speed to increase the portfolio one after the other. I talked about the two beauties in the middle already. We have a clear path for rolling out a comprehensive global ePortfolio. Now, besides right TCO and right vehicles, let's look into the third part of the equation I mentioned, and that is infrastructure. To support our customers in early stages and to kickstart charging infrastructure in their respective depots, we have partnered with different industry leaders in our core markets of North America and Europe. In North America, we partner with Power Electronics. In Europe, we partner with Siemens and ENGIE. Aside from depot charging, we are focusing on public road charging as well. In terms of battery electric drives, we are planning a high performance public charging network with TRATON GROUP and Volvo Group, with EUR 500 million overall investment by all joint venture partners. Plus, we strive to kickstart a comprehensive hydrogen infrastructure in Europe. Together with Shell, we aim to create a hydrogen corridor in Germany and the Netherlands between the green hydrogen production hubs at the Port of Rotterdam as well as Cologne and Hamburg. Our target is to have 150 stations and 5,000 trucks out there by 2030. I'm super happy to announce additionally two more partnerships. Together with BP, we aim to speed up the creation of hydrogen infrastructure in the U.K., and we want to do the same in France and Benelux together with Total. In addition, we are also working on hydrogen refueling technology and this is what we do together with Linde. We take concrete steps towards solving the chicken egg problem. We provide the trucks, our partners provide the infrastructure. Despite that, significantly more infrastructure projects are needed. A recent ACEA study is calling for up to 15,000 high-performance charging points no later than 2025 and up to 50,000 no later than 2030. We do need governments and other stakeholders to also take action. This is a key to making transport sustainable and emission-free. The final pillar of our technology strategy concentrates on what we call truck operating system. It comprises a significant technology shift from today's hardware-based architecture of a truck to a more software-defined architecture. This is a major evolution and will be crucial to add more value for our customers and to differentiate from the competition in the future. What are we doing here? We bundle the intelligence in fewer computing units and reduce thereby the hardware in the truck. Also by that, we delink hardware and software cycles and thus accelerate software releases. We build the core elements of software architecture in-house. Already today, we have more than 600 software engineers in Bangalore, and this is just the beginning. Why are we doing this? Well, of course, to add significant value for our customers. First and foremost, we can increase the uptime of the truck and ensure fewer and more efficient workshop visits for our customers by over-the-air updates. Over-the-air, we also continuously add new features. For example, bringing digital services, active safety, HMI or predictive maintenance and more to the next level. At the end, we strive to enable seamless end-to-end integration of vehicle data in the system landscape of our customers. What's in for us? Surely it builds the foundation for growing service revenues and customer loyalty in the future, and we believe we can significantly speed up our development pace. This was a quick overview on our technology strategy and how we plan to progress. Let me emphasize one more thing. We do not focus on technology leadership alone. Global scale is the second key ingredient to win, meaning consistent focus on maximum commonality across all regions and brands. Regarding our conventional product portfolio, we have been already very successful here for a long time with our platforms, and we stick to our global commonality strategy right from the start when it comes to our new ZEV propulsion and software platforms. Once developed, we provide our regional brands with these key differentiating technologies to optimize them for their customer needs. That's what we call smart scale, develop one time, deploy many times. Thank you for your attention and listening to how we are planning to win in the future when it comes to technology leadership. With that, let me close the cycle and hand it over to Jochen. Thanks, Andreas, and a warm welcome to everyone. I am Jochen Goetz, CFO of Daimler Truck. We promised you in May that we will give you a more detailed overview on our financials for Daimler Truck as well as the individual segments. Here we go. Let's first have a look at our historical financials. Our profitability in the last years has not been where it should be, but still, we believe we always had solid financials. In 2018 and 2019, we had a stable 6% adjusted return on sales. In 2020, the sharp decline of demand driven by the pandemic led to a significant negative impact on adjusted return on sales. Thanks to our ability to flex the business and control working capital and CapEx, we have historically been able to convert our profit into free cash flow. Going forward, we aim to raise our financial performance significantly. To make it very clear, we are laser focused on delivering shareholder value. We will be obsessive on sustainably improving our profitability while being strategic with our CapEx spend, enhancing our free cash flow. Combined with our balance sheet strength, this is the basis for our dividend policy. I will explain our plan in more detail in the following minutes. First, let's have a look at our ambitions. As a short recap, we already introduced you to our ambitions, depending on the three weather scenarios, meaning different sales scenarios. You are all experts in this industry, so you know that the truck business is a very cyclical one. Most importantly, we changed our mindset in a way that we always prepare for tough conditions. We are working on a floor for not less than 6% adjusted return on sales in a downturn. To achieve our ambitions in all scenarios, the most important challenge is to lower our break-even point. What are the main levers to achieve this? We aim to reduce our fixed costs as well as our capital expenditures and R&D by 15% compared to 2019. In order to stay with the given CapEx and R&D budget, it is key to significantly shift spending from ICE technology towards zero emissions and autonomous. To enhance our global commonality, especially for new technologies, and to increase our portfolio of tech and service partnerships, as well as to focus on the biggest profit pools of the future. In terms of profitability, we aim to deliver in sunny conditions more than 10% adjusted return on sales. We are prepared for tough conditions, but ready to benefit from upcycles. One of our strengths in the past has been converting our EBIT into strong cash flow with the help of tight working capital management and a strict control of CapEx. We are committed to attaining a high operational cash conversion rate of 80%-100% in all scenarios. Now, let's focus on how we aim to achieve our profitability ambition. We use 2019 as a starting year. Why? The year 2020 is hard to draw comparison with due to the pandemic, resulting in lower volumes and extraordinary high cost savings. 2019 is a more relevant baseline, but please realize that for the truck industry, 2019 was a very strong year. We had a favorable market mix, North America was very strong, and we had overall high volume. Excluding this volume and mix effect, profitability would have been slightly lower in 2019, but we are not satisfied with profitability of roughly 6%. Our solid 10% return on sales ambition is primarily based on self-help measures that we have control over, contribution margin improvement, fixed cost reduction, and benefiting from new products. First, we see significant upside potential in our contribution margins. We intend to improve our after-sales and service business and reset our used truck operations. We also aim for a richer product mix as we continue to pivot towards heavy duty products. Second, and most important, we aim to lower the break-even point significantly by reducing fixed costs, as well as by increasing our share of recurring service revenues. We have established structural cost reduction programs across our group, and we are seeing significant progress already. Therefore, we feel very confident that we will accomplish our fixed cost ambitions. Third, we plan to grow, driven by the introduction of new products. We invested over the previous year in our first heavy-duty Mercedes-Benz product in China for China, as well as in a new factory in Beijing. In North America, we introduced our first dedicated vocational truck, and the customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Additionally, we launched our all-new Tourrider, the Mercedes-Benz Coach Bus for North America. We have already undertaken the investments in all of these projects. We believe now it's time to harvest the benefits of these investments. With these levers, we aim to achieve a double-digit adjusted return on sales in sunny conditions. Now, let's have a look at our segment ambitions. As already announced, we have the segments Trucks North America, Mercedes-Benz, Trucks Asia, and Daimler Buses on the industrial side, as well as Daimler Truck Financial Services. The industrial business also includes reconciliation items, like eliminations and some of our partnerships. Let's start with the industrial business. Given market size and respective product mix, we have different ambitions for each segment under sunny, fair, and tough conditions. The following statements all relate to a sunny scenario. We are already strong and intend to become even stronger at Trucks North America, aiming for a 12% adjusted return on sales. We aim for a recovery at Mercedes-Benz with the ambition for an adjusted return on sales of 10%. Trucks Asia aims for an adjusted 9% return on sales, and Daimler Buses aims for adjusted 7.5% return on sales. We have our new financial services business, where we are on the way to ramping up. Our ambition for this business is an adjusted 14% pre-tax return on equity after full ramp up. Like on the group level, we have defined the tough, fair, and sunny ambition for every segment. We have a clear plan for what is necessary to achieve the ambitions I just laid out. What have we already achieved so far? Let's start with good news. The customer demand has been, and still is very strong. The challenge of the industry is currently the supply chain, given the worldwide impact from the semiconductor shortage. This has constrained volumes, and we expect that to continue for the rest of the year. We were able to manage the semiconductor shortage in the first half fairly well. However, shortages have intensified, meaning heavier impact in the second half. This volume shortfall leads additionally to higher constraint and freight costs, and has been amplified by increasing raw material prices, especially for steel. We are not able to change prices real time due to the order process with our fleet customers. Near term, raw material inflation cannot be fully offset in 2021. On a positive note, we were able to lower our fixed costs in Europe and in Asia. We fixed the used truck business in Europe, and we are able to achieve the break-even point in Brazil as planned. All in all, we were able to slightly uplift the profitability despite the weaker markets in North America and Europe this year compared to 2019. My colleagues will give you much more details during their segment presentation, but here are some high-level facts. Trucks North America achieved in 2019 an impressive 11.5% adjusted return on sales. The year to date, 2021 adjusted return on sales is slightly lower due to the semiconductor shortage. At Mercedes-Benz, we barely achieved a break even in 2019, which is far away from our ambitions. One of the major challenges for us is to restructure our Mercedes-Benz operations in Europe and Brazil. The measures were started in 2019 are bearing fruit, and we significantly improved the business in 2021. One major milestone is that we achieved break even in 2021 in Brazil, in line with our plan. There are more improvement measures already defined and in execution. The profitability at Trucks Asia improved significantly from 2019 to 2021. We further enlarged our strong aftermarket business, which we believe will generate even greater recurring revenues in the years to come. In addition, we are seeing the benefits coming from ongoing fixed cost discipline and improvement on material cost. As I mentioned on Daimler Group Q3 result call, we saw positive impacts from the revaluation of our joint venture in China, but also an improvement in our ongoing Chinese operation. Excluding the revaluation, the operational performance is about 5% return on sales adjusted. In 2019, Daimler Buses achieved a 6% adjusted return on sales in a good sales environment. Due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently confronted with a nonexistent coach business, which is the most profitable segment within the bus industry. Given the overall low market volume and mix, we are currently experiencing losses. However, good progress is made on fixed costs, and with that, we believe the business is ready for the expected rebound in travel. At Daimler Truck Financial Services, our focus is on establishing the business and working collaboratively with our sales forces to offer tailor-made solution for our customer. Due to the separation from the Daimler Group, financial services is in a ramp-up phase, therefore we so far see relatively low numbers. As mentioned already before, reducing fixed cost is the key opportunity in our business, especially for trucks and buses in Europe, but also in Brazil and Asia. We announced back in May that we want to lower our fixed cost by 15% compared to 2019, and our aim is to achieve this latest in 2025. Good news is, given our progress, we aim to deliver on this ambition already in 2023. We aim to lower our break-even point by about 20% by 2025 compared to 2019. This is an essential step towards becoming more resilient in our volatile business. On top, it gives us the ability to generate more sustainable cash flow. A very important instrument to optimize our capital expenditures and uplift our profitability is active portfolio management. This approach will dictate our capital allocation. We aim to prioritize investments in the units that are most strategically important and present the biggest profit pools of the future. We have defined 50 business units, which we evaluate on a regular basis. We believe this portfolio approach ensures that we will identify our strong businesses, but also businesses that face today or tomorrow strategic or financial challenges. For those with challenges, the business units establish an improvement plan which we strive to relentlessly execute. If we are not confident in our ability to improve financial performance or the units no longer has strategic relevance, we will make the tough decision and we will consider all strategic options. We already decided to adjust our portfolio by exiting our medium duties business in Mexico and the light duty diesel market for Fuso in North America. At the same time, we are pursuing investments in new business models like infrastructure in Europe and in North America. While Martin has already set out the strategic long-term opportunity of the service business, I want to draw your attention to the nearer term opportunities. We have very good service offerings helping our customers keep their fleet running efficiently. These service offerings are a major contributor to our bottom line. We aim to increase our recurrent revenue midterm by additional 5% with the initiatives set up in the different regions. First, our new captive financial services organization is expected to allow us to customize the financial offerings even more towards commercial vehicle customers. Moreover, the segments are driving many initiatives to boost our penetration rate for service contracts and work on innovations such as our new digital platform that makes it easier and faster to procure parts. We see potential in expanding the reach of our existing offerings even further beyond the first owner of the vehicles targeting the used vehicles. We aim to capture this additional value by focusing on service contracts targeted at used vehicles, growing our remanufacturing business, as well as offering financial services for used trucks. We believe that there is significant value in combining our services into customer segment specific bundles. The segments will talk about the respective initiatives in detail. Daimler Truck starts its independent public market life with a solid balance sheet, which gives us the confidence to invest in our business and to navigate through the current headwinds from semiconductor shortage. The rating agency have recognized our financial strength, and we have received strong ratings from both Standard & Poor's and Moody's for Daimler Truck. We believe this endorsement from the rating agency will underpin the profitable growth of Daimler Truck Financial Services. The group reported a net industrial liquidity of EUR 1 billion at the end of September. Adjusting for effects of the spin-off process, which are expected to have materialized by the time the spin-off becomes effective, we estimate that our net industrial liquidity will be much stronger at approximately EUR 5 billion. Of this expected amount, we have committed a low triple-digit million EUR amount for assets relating to the financial services business as part of the wave two transfer. Our pension funding status has improved during 2021 and stood at a solid 73% at the end of September 2021. We plan to contribute a low triple-digit million EUR amount to our pensions before the end of Q1 2022. For the year to date, we believe our free cash flow has been held back by the volume shortfall due to the challenges in delivering trucks, hence the working capital build of unfinished goods. We expect this will unwind as the semiconductor issue improves. As I said earlier, we aim to maintain our robust track record of converting profit into free cash flow. We will have four priorities for using this cash. First, we will adopt a 40% dividend payout policy. We think this is appropriate and puts us in line with best in class industry peers. Second, over the next couple of years, we plan to provide equity injections to our financial services business. Today, we anticipate significant investments before the Daimler Truck Financial Services business becomes self-funding. We believe this is an important and worthwhile investment that will pay dividends in the future. Third, we aim to continue to strengthen our balance sheet. In the years ahead, we will come back to this topic, but we won't run a lazy balance sheet. Fourth, we are prepared for strategic options on new technologies and services. To wrap up, what are the key messages to keep in mind? First of all, it is utmost important to achieve in the years with downturn a minimum adjusted return on sales of 6% for the industrial business. Moreover, we confirm that we are aiming for more than 10% adjusted return on sales for the industrial business in sunny conditions. To enable that, I will repeat, every segment must deliver. Therefore, each and every segment has a detailed plan for what has to be achieved. The main points are. We aim to achieve product-led growth via new high margin products. We aim to meet our fixed cost reduction targets early, and we aim to considerably lower the break-even point. We aim to have a more dedicated and stringent approach on how we allocate capital via active portfolio management. Last but not least, we aim to continue to generate a strong free cash flow in the future. We believe the combined benefit of higher profitability and higher free cash flow is expected to result in attractive shareholder returns. With that, we expect to be able to offer strong dividends, which obviously will benefit the shareholders. Now, together with Martin and Andreas, I am looking forward to your questions in our first Q&A session. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our first Q&A session. I am Christian Herrmann, Head of Investor Relations and M&A of Daimler Truck AG. In this first Q&A session, you will have the chance to raise questions concerning topics that the gentlemen just presented. Please focus on group strategy, group performance, and technology. In the second Q&A session, at the end of today's event, you can address specific questions on the performance of the segments, ESG, and our financial guidance. As always, a recording of the event will be made available in the investor relations section on daimler.com. Before we start with Q&As, a few practical points. In case you want to ask a question, you will have to dial in individually by telephone and register. The dial-in numbers have been shared within our invite that we sent out two weeks ago. We will identify the questioner by name, but please also introduce yourself with your name and the name of the organization that you are representing before asking your question. As a matter of fairness, please limit yourself to two questions. Please mute the live stream while raising your question and listening to the answers. Now, before we start, the operator will explain the procedure for dialing in. Thank you. We will now begin our question and answer session. At our customer's request, this Q&A session will be recorded. If you want to raise a question, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you want to withdraw your question, please dial zero and two on your telephone keypad. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press the star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. If you are using speaker equipment, please lift the handset before making your selection. I would like to remind you that this teleconference is governed by the disclaimer wording that you find in our published Capital Market Day documents. Please note that our presentations contain forward-looking statements that reflect management's current views with respect to future events. Such statements are subject to many risks and uncertainty. If the assumptions underlying any of these statements prove incorrect, then actual results may be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements speak only to the date on which they are made. One moment please for the first question. Thank you for the explanation. I see a lot of callers already in the line. The first question would go to Horst Schneider from Bank of America. Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I hope you can hear me. The first question that I have that's basically a big picture question. It strikes me when I look at your press release, you are stressing more the sunny side of your scenario. I don't know. Am I reading too much into that, or has the view developed more positively towards 2025? I mean, you are now on a book-to-bill ratio of something like 1.4. Great visibility, great demand, and there seems to be no end to that. Therefore, I don't know what is the path towards 2025? That's basically the main question. We see first strong acceleration, 2022, 2023, and then it gets more cloudy. How should we think about that? The second question that I have relates to the issue around heavy-duty truck engine partnerships that you mentioned in the beginning. Because you have already the JV with Cummins, I just want to know if you want to be rather in the junior position in these heavy-duty truck engine partnerships or you aim for a senior role in that. Thank you. Thank you, Horst. I think that is a question for Martin and then perhaps Jochen on the sunny scenario, if you would like to add. Jochen, please start. Okay. Horst, thanks a lot for your question. Let me start with the market question. Well, you said it rightfully. At the moment, the demand is super strong. We see for a while very strong order intake in North America but also in Europe, obviously the two most important markets for us, and there is no indication that it will change in 2022. That's very strong and it continues to be strong. Everything after that, and you are well aware of the cyclicity of our business, it's hard to predict. But for the months and the next couple of years we can see we have the strong demand. That's the one piece. That's strong. That helps us. You mentioned the book-to-bill ratio, which is super strong. The problem at the moment is not the market demand. The problem at the moment is on the supply chain. That will define the market size of 2021 and the market size of 2022. We are very satisfied with what we receive from a customer. From an order backlog perspective, we are very strong. We are looking very optimistic towards the year 2022. Mr. Schneider, about position on the heavy duty. On any heavy-duty partnership we do, I could see us more on the senior partner side because it all, it's all about the volume of a platform. Today, our heavy-duty platform has the largest volume in the Western world, given our market share in Europe and North America combined, and using that engine in other parts of the world as well and in off-highway business. Partnership, I would say senior and junior in a partnership is always a little bit difficult. The two partnerships are on eye level and equally. Let's see how that shakes out. Can I maybe sneak in another one for Jochen? Since you were referring to 2022, it strikes me when I look at your unit sales guidance for 2021 that you are going for a quite strong increase Q4 versus Q3. I think it's something like 30% sequential increase when I look at the midpoint of the range. Is it right to assume that the chip shortage has eased somewhat for you? Yeah. I think we mentioned it also in the Q3 call. The Q3 for us was hopefully the worst point from semiconductor perspective. We had a lot of unfinished goods sitting on our lots, and we expect an ease in the Q4. With that, we expect stronger sales towards the end of the year. Your assumption is right. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Horst. The next question would be for Nicolai Kempf from Deutsche Bank. Yeah. Nicolai Kempf from Deutsche Bank. Thank you for taking my question. My question would be also on the CapEx and the different environments. I would be interested in how you define a sunny environment. Would supply like three and four units in North America and Europe. By what kind of criteria would you describe a sunny environment? Jochen, I think that is something. Yeah. for you to take. I was just waiting. Normally, I always get two questions. Okay, well, that's an easy one. I think we even disclosed back in our strategy day back in May that we are saying more than 500,000 trucks. That's sales number. That's the area we would say the overall situation outside is what we call sunny. That's the number to remember. Then obviously, it plays a major role how the structure of these 500,000 trucks looks like. Heavy-duty in North America and Europe, as I mentioned before, are the most important markets for us. Overall, the 500,000 is a good number to remember. Okay. Thank you. Just to sneak one in more. If we look at the higher raw material prices, can you provide more color on your pricing strategy for next year? I mean, just mentioned the demand is so high, inventories are low. I think you should be in a good position to raise prices. If so, how many times do you plan to raise price next year, and by what steps? Oh, so Martin, please. Yeah. We are already raising our prices for all orders for next year. Normally for us, it's a model year type, calendar year type pricing. We have many customers where we have long-term contracts, so then you do those on an annual basis. For example, if you followed our order intake over the months in the past, you see exactly when we opened up the order book for next year, and at that moment, we had decided what the pricing for next year is. We certainly will do a catch-up of the raw material increases this year, and we provide some slack for anything which is going to happen in next year. I think it's a pretty good and solid price increase. Understood. Thank you. Next in line is José Asumendi from JP Morgan. Thank you very much. José Asumendi from JP Morgan. Hello, Martin, Jochen, Andreas. Congrats to the first step forward and the presentation. A couple of questions, please. The first one, Martin, in the old world, we used to talk about vertical integration of engines and transmissions to improve the profitability across some of the regions and improve the share of aftermarket. How does this work in the electric truck? If you could comment a little bit on the electric motor transmission side of the business and capturing that the aftermarket. That'll be question one. And question two, also coming back to aftermarket and as we think about the truck on a three, five sort of seven-year view and the ability to monetize those over-the-air software updates, how quickly can you roll out this business model? Is it somehow embedded in your financial forecast or would this be some kind of a, you know, very uplift we could consider going forward? Thank you. I mean, Jose, when I look at the future of the zero-emission truck, there are so many components that are going to change. Some of the components like today, we are going to purchase from the outside, other components we do inside. What are the criteria for us doing those components in-house? It's first of all, when we have the feeling that we can add value to the company, to the shareholders, when the investment and the return on the investment has the right connection, and we have the size globally to do those things. The most important item is, can we differentiate our product from competitor products? We did that, completely different segment in the past when it comes to security systems. There are good safety systems in the market to purchase, but we have the feeling if we develop globally a safety system that we can put in trucks in North America and Europe, we can differentiate. Yes, today our customers reflect back to us, we have the best safety systems in it. I can see that easily in the future, these components of the electric truck. That's not, that does not mean we do everything. There are certain things we are going to buy. Jose, on your second question, you were referring to the business model on autonomous trucks? Yes, please. Yeah. Perhaps also something for you, Martin. Go ahead. Jose, the autonomous trucks, I can't see it for the next two years as a significant contributor. We are doing great progress. I could see it after three years, it starts, depending on how mature the technology is, and we only go to market if it's absolutely safe, and we increase safety on the roads. We definitely don't want to be a hazard. I would say in three years, it starts becoming interesting. Seven years from now, I could see it as a significant player in our financial results. Thank you very much. Next in line is Miguel Borrega from Exane BNP. Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. I've got a couple of questions, if I may. The first one on autonomous. I would be interested in understanding the reason for having two different partnerships with Waymo and Torc. Is this because you are splitting your bet on a winning technology, or is there an actual difference for the application of each technology to your business? And then perhaps on a more long-term view, you talked about coming in three years with this technology. How are you thinking on pricing the autonomous add-on to your customers? Is this going to be charged on a per ton basis or where you keep the technology and your client basically rents out the vehicle? Or is this gonna be embedded in the initial cost of the vehicle? Miguel, very good questions. First of all, I don't see, on the first one, with two partnerships, there is not a contradiction. They are two completely different things. There's one is the hardware, which we call the redundant chassis. If you go autonomous without a driver, you have much more requirements towards steering, braking, safety, and it's all in this chassis. We develop the chassis for Waymo and for Torc. Both will be customers of us or customers of Waymo and Torc taking that chassis. Then there is what we call the virtual driver. You can say like the brain of the truck, which gets downloaded into the installed system of the truck. There, Waymo is a complete competitor to our subsidiary Torc. On the one side, we split investments on the hardware. On the software side, we are fierce competitors or could be running parallel in the market, and one is going with the one virtual driver, the other one is going with the other virtual driver, and we don't care because we give the chassis to both. That links directly to the business model afterwards. The chassis business model is pretty easy. Freightliner will continue to sell Trucks, whether with a driver or whether autonomous, what we call the redundant chassis. We won't keep those trucks in our balance sheet and become an extremely asset-heavy business. Those trucks are sold. Then there are the operators. Those operators of those trucks, they purchase the trucks and they pay, either to Aim or to Torc or anyone else in the market. I don't know what the fee structure will be, a monthly fee most likely, because you need to update always the autonomous virtual driver. I could see here monthly fees that the operator pays. You can say it's a little bit like your mobile phone. There's the hardware of the phone, and then there's the contract, you pay on a monthly basis with the network provider on the phone. Thank you, Martin. That's great. Thank you. On your electrification strategy, when you introduced the eActros, you talked about pricing being three times comparable with ICE vehicles. I presume there's also gonna be a much better margin profile. As you ramp up production, is there a positive mix benefit already embedded in your margin targets that you presented today? Can you maybe share an update on how orders of the eActros have evolved since you launched and any relevant feedback from clients? Thank you. Thank you. Perhaps that's something, Andreas and Jochen. Yeah. You could take. Yeah. Sure, Miguel. Yes, the cost of the propulsion system today in a zero emission truck is significantly more costly than a conventional powertrain. Important though, if you talk about cost, is more total cost of ownership. There are two, besides product cost, significantly important factors in the game, and that is efficiency of the propulsion system, and that is energy price. As for product cost and energy efficiency in the truck, I am very optimistic as we have it in our control. Obviously that will, from the cost side, significantly decrease over the next years. When it comes to energy price, we will see a very heterogeneous landscape on around the globe. Very much dependent on the market, on the region, on the legislation. We do see also for battery electric vehicles, TCO parity with the respective margins and prices in reach for our customers in certain regions of the world. Maybe, Jochen, you can elaborate a little bit more on the margin side. Yeah. Thanks, Andreas. Thanks for the question. Well, you asked also about the business plan. Well, if you look in the midterm business plan, which we're also doing as part of this spin-off, obviously there's an increasing number of electric vehicles included. For the short term, which is the focus of today, for 2021 and 2022, there is minor impact. There is no reason at the moment that we see that the margins for e-truck are lower than a comparable diesel truck. That's our underlying premise, and that's baked into the business plan. Thank you very much. Thanks, Miguel. Next question would be for Kai Müller from Barclays. Thank you very much for taking my question. The first one really is, with regards to your battery technology. You mentioned you're looking potentially working with CATL on specific ones for trucks. Can you give us a bit of sense what is different for them and what are the different requirements? Then maybe, I don't know if it's maybe for a session later, but when we think about the different market environments, and you of course outlined how profitable your North American business is, you and Volvo have gained quite a lot of market share over the past years, due to one of the competitors struggling. That competitor has now found a new partner. Do you see a risk that they are coming back and trying to fight for market share and therefore could put pressure on your profitability? Thank you, Kai. Question on batteries for Andreas, and then Martin on the North American market. Yeah. Thank you, Kai. This is a very relevant question. We are convinced, in order to be competitive or to differentiate long term also with zero-emission technologies in the truck, upscaling passenger car technologies is not sufficient. We need truckified genes in the e-powertrain, and the battery is a very relevant part of it. In a truck, obviously, durability, longevity, efficiency, safety is much more relevant than, for example, energy density. This is why a truckified cell for long-term differentiation will look different than most of the passenger car applications. This is why the partnership with CATL is relevant. We wanna increase our own captive know-how for these relevant e-components, and partnering is a very good option to speed up this development. When it comes to the North American market, I can only refer, potentially John later will pick that one up as well. I can refer in the days when I was, the many years I was in North America, we took share from everyone. We didn't just took share from someone who was struggling. That would be lame. We just have a great product. We have an absolutely outstanding and amazing service network, and we have an extremely great customer relationship, and we are leading on the TCO field. We are never arrogant and say we will have that position forever. We are working hard because we know we have to earn that every single year, now in the future, regardless who our competitors are. We're not just playing defense. You'll see in John's presentation, we have a lot of in our portfolio that we play offense regardless where the competitors are. Okay, maybe one follow-up question. Just on the FinCO again, as you mentioned that you're planning to fund it partially to grow over the next years. Can you remind us again what sort of level of funding do you talk about? It's right that we are ramping up that business over a step plan over the next three years. You can think about a mid- to high three-digit million EUR of capital injection, which is needed to run this company then globally. Then after that, it would be self-funded. Perfect. That comes from your funds that you have received as part of the spin. That comes from what we have received from the spin, and it comes from the cash flow we earn on the industrial side. Perfect. Thank you very much. Next in line is Tom Narayan from RBC. Hi. Yes. Thanks. Tom Narayan, RBC. Thanks for taking the question. Apologies, this might be better answered in the other session. Maybe I'll ask at a high level. You know, thank you for all the financial data by segment. That's great that that's finally there. Just wondering if you could give us a little more clarity on fixed cost reductions. What exactly is inside that? I'd love to ask about specifically Mercedes-Benz, 'cause there's a lot of it there implied in the guidance, but I understand that might be for later. You know, just be interested in understanding what the main buckets are. You know, how much is head count. I've noticed the year-to-date numbers, and again, apologies for the segment in Mercedes-Benz. The margins are so much better than they were in 2019. Just wondering how much of that improvement is sustainable. Yeah, any clarity on fixed costs and where that's coming from would be great. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Yeah. Jochen, most likely for you, and then perhaps Karin can add later. Yeah. Tom, I think you gave somehow your answer to yourself. My colleagues will talk in detail about what they are doing, what we are doing to achieve the fixed cost target. Overall, I think I laid it out, we wanna achieve a 15%. Basically, every unit is contributing to that. I could also say on all levers, personnel and non-personnel cost reductions, we are well on the way to achieve that. That's also the reason why we even pulled forward our target to achieve our overall target until 2023 instead of 2025. It's really basically we're looking in each and every area where we have costs. As I said, it's on the HR side, it's on the investment side, it's on the expense side. Basically all of that is part. You will hear a lot more detail, especially on the Mercedes side, later in the presentation of Karin Rådström. Tom, just on a very high level general thing, and you're absolutely right in your observations. We started. It's not that we noticed something this year in the wake of the spin-off, and now we said, "Okay, and we will change the future. Please trust us." We started fairly early changing that ship around, and we see the first fruits. We are by far not where we want to be, but it's, I appreciate that you see the first benefits out of that in our numbers, and you will see more, as Jochen said, in the hours to come today. It's maybe just a quick follow-up on that R&D. I guess with the investment that you guys have to make for all the innovation, how are you able to reduce R&D spend? We have basically several levers on that. First of all, we really focus. We invest in the big profit pools. Secondly, wherever the profit pools are not big enough, we look for the chance to partner. Or we look to partner where the risks are high or where other parallel path is like on the fuel cell trucks. Partnership, focus, and then on the other side, doing purchasing from the outside, are the three levers we do and still have a great technology position, but with less money spent. Okay. On that, are there dis-synergies at all of separating from the cars business with respect to maybe R&D and things of that nature, or do you feel like that's not an issue? No, I don't see that as an issue because wherever we had in the past partnered with Mercedes-Benz Trucks, we paid our fair share of the development. Wherever that makes sense, we continue with that. We have pretty good and close relationship to this company, and we do that on an arm's length basis like we did that in the past. No, I don't see any kind of dis-synergies at the moment on R&D. Okay. Thank you. Now we have time for one more question in this first Q&A session. As a reminder, you can ask additional questions in the second session. Last, for this session would be Daniel Schwarz from Stifel. Yes. Thank you for taking my question. Based on your approach that every segment needs to deliver, would you consider divestments in case you would find yourself not on track for the 2025 targets? Because it's the least profitable business right now, could you say how integrated the bus business is and how complex it would be to separate the business? My second question is on the management compensation. Will the system be similar to Daimler today, or will the KPIs be any different? How much of the compensation will be linked to the Daimler Truck's share price? Thank you. Every region has to deliver. I am absolutely convinced that every region will deliver. We go for that business-specific benchmark. No business can hide behind a more successful other business, and you just get a mixed up average. For that, for me, failure at the moment is not an option. We go forward. Then we can always readjust our strategy going forward in the sense, does it make sense to partner? There are many different ways how to improve the profitability of a business. The bus business itself is very integrated. We share the same brand. In many cases, we share the same plants. We share the same powertrain yesterday on the combustion engine, tomorrow on electric or fuel cell powertrain. I would say that we share the same sales network across the planet. There are a lot of things that it makes absolute sense that the bus business is part of Daimler Trucks and Buses. On the compensation, perhaps, Jochen, a few words, and then Jürgen, head of HR, can add later in the second session. Well, for the moment, the compensation for the management is very similar to what we have today on the Daimler side. On the long-term incentive, the stock price development plays a major role as it is today. There will be one component in the future which is even more important for us. We will include an ESG portion in that as well. You will also hear more about ESG later, but these basically the main questions to answer. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Martin, Jochen, and Andreas. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your questions in this first Q&A session. We will be back at 3:35 P.M. to continue with the presentation of the segments. The second Q&A session will then begin right after the end of today's presentation. One world, diverse markets, and seven strong brands that drive unparalleled global scale. This is Daimler Truck, one of the world's largest truck and bus manufacturers. Our European business is under new management and progress is becoming evident. Fixed cost reductions and clear measures intended to raise margins are aimed at making the famous three-pointed star shine again. In North America, we are going from strong to stronger. Freightliner is the undisputed industry leader, and Western Star is accelerating fast in the vocational segment. In Asia, we have Fuso, successful across the region, BharatBenz, our brand dedicated to India. In China, where we have a decade-long partnership with Foton, we will commence the local production of Mercedes-Benz heavy-duty trucks from 2022 onwards. As a truly global manufacturer, we are strong in the bus market as well. At every moment, people across the planet can rely on the safety and comfort of Daimler Buses and coaches, and we aim to raise synergies and efficiencies further, and we are ready for the post-pandemic recovery in travel and transportation. Daimler Truck Financial Services ties our global business together, building enduring customer relationships. It's a further important pillar that will also contribute to generating strong returns for our shareholders. Daimler Truck. Strong brands, strong technology, and strong positions across the globe. Now it's time to unlock the potential and raise performance. Because every region must deliver. Hi, and welcome. My name is Karin Rådström, and I'm the Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks. I'm gonna spend the next minutes explaining how we plan to improve our performance. We're actually really making good progress already, so I feel optimistic about our future. I hope that after this presentation, you will, too. I'm gonna start by telling you where we are today in terms of markets and financials, and then give an outlook on what we're planning to do next. We have a strong position in the market, a full product portfolio, and of course, equally important, a full range of services. In terms of market share and brand recognition, we're one of the biggest and most important players in all of our major markets. Our challenge is that we do not yet deliver benchmark financial results. As you can see in this slide, our trend hasn't been great over the last few years, but this year, despite not so great volumes, we are improving our performance. We believe it's because of the actions that were started during last year and that were accelerated during this year. I see this improvement as one small but important step on our journey to get Mercedes-Benz Trucks back to benchmark profitability in Europe, in Latin America, and in the rest of the world. Our ambition by 2025 is double-digit profitability in a sunny scenario. That means we need to lift our margins by about 10 percentage points compared to 2019. We see four major levers to close this gap, four levers that we can address and that we can work on actively. Before giving you more details on those levers, let me add that we believe that almost two percentage points will come from volume. We do expect to grow sales volume when our markets recover, and obviously, this growth in volume is helpful, but our long-term financial success will not and cannot rely on that, but rather on how we deliver on our four self-help levers that you see here on the right. Let's go through them one by one. Firstly, we have to get our fixed costs down. Being cost conscious and lean must become part of our daily routine. We will focus both on personnel and non-personnel cost reductions, and we're already halfway through our personnel cost reduction programs in Europe and in Brazil. We've reduced our personnel costs by about EUR 120 million net compared to 2019, and we aim to achieve another EUR 160 million by the end of next year. We also aim to become leaner by reducing the number of management positions by more than 20% across the organization. All this is intended to improve our fixed cost ratio and to lower our break-even point significantly, which would allow us to also be better prepared for a cloudy or a rainy weather scenario. We also have ambitious non-personnel cost targets in place. Compared to 2019, we aim to reduce them in Europe and Brazil by about EUR 200 million by 2025, and that will be more than 20% less than the non-personnel costs compared to 2019. To give you an example, we now plan our budgets from zero base, we've installed rigorous cost center controlling, and we're challenging each other and the way we operate regularly through internal reviews. In total, our aim is that these improvements in fixed costs will give an additional four percentage points of return on sales by 2025. Second, we're fully committed to financial performance. That means we will focus on those opportunities that help us grow contribution margins, and we will not push volume for volume's sake. I'd like to give you some examples. We're currently streamlining our product portfolio. We've already reduced the number of base models, that is the variety of vehicles we offer to our customers, from 140 to 100. This actually has very little impact on our customers because we're targeting only extreme low runners. It does have a big impact on our costs internally since we don't need to spend money on everything that would be necessary to keep a product variant alive, like expanding storage areas, keeping manuals updated, or having spare parts available. This again allows us to invest in new products which are more appreciated by our customers and that are intended to drive revenue and contribution margin. We also intend to keep working on our material costs. We've lowered them successfully over the past years since 2019 already by approximately EUR 200 million, and we still have a lot of ideas on how we can reduce even more. We're working hard on our quality issues because we believe that this will in the long run improve our material costs too. As an example, some of you might know that we had problems with our water retarder for many years. That situation is much more stable today, and we have also reintroduced the oil retarder a couple of weeks ago. We have changed our view on pricing. In the past, we focused quite heavily on market share. Now we intend to focus on profitable segments and markets, and we also aim to offer higher margin options to our customers that help them do their business better. Regarding our used truck business, we already adjusted our steering about two years ago, both in terms of buyback commitments and by being more cautious in setting residual values. In 2021, we're well underway. Compared to 2019, we have improved the contribution from used vehicles by over EUR 100 million. If we sum up all of the contribution margin measures I just mentioned, we aim to achieve a plus of about three percentage points return on sale. Our third lever is services. This is expected to also give us at least one extra percentage point of return on sales. Let me explain how. We're investing in retail and strengthening our service network, both alone and with partners, and we're addressing a couple of white spots where we didn't have any workshop before. We're also working to improve our spare parts availability and to make IT systems in retail easier to work with. In addition, we expect a higher penetration from new service contracts since we will be offering new contract types, and we're introducing service contracts in new markets. Recently, we also just started to roll out My TruckPoint, which is a new platform that will make it easier for our customers to connect with us and to work efficiently together with us. We also see potential when it comes to e-mobility services. Our customers have a lot of questions on how to get their fleet going, for example, regarding the number of charging stations or the most suitable route to electrify. We will offer consulting services along with our eActros to answer those questions. We also intend to offer a broad range of new digital solutions, and these products will be co-developed with our customers to fit their needs. Fundamentally, our target with our service portfolio and our digital solutions is to keep our customers on the road and out of our workshops because we know that every hour when a truck stands in the workshop is an hour wasted for our customers. In everything we do, we're gonna do our best to minimize that time. Our most important lever is increasing customer satisfaction. Our customers are central to all we do, not just in sales or retail, but in the whole organization. In the past, we haven't always given our customers the priority that they deserve. In one of the most important independent customer satisfaction studies for European truck OEMs, we were not ranked like a premium brand. Now, our clear ambition is to be on the podium for all customer buying criteria and to be number one for the most important ones. To get there, we've started several initiatives. We, the whole management team and I, have started having customer experience days. During these days, we meet with a couple of different customers each time, and we discuss really openly about where we are strong and where we need to improve to meet our customers' expectations. We don't only talk, we've also improved our organization in sales and marketing to better serve and support our people in the frontline. To track our progress, we also installed a tool called C-Star, where we measure customer feedback and act on it quickly. Most importantly, we're involving our customers much more, for example, in the early stages of product and service development. The Actros F and Actros L are recent examples of this. These variants of the Actros have been developed purely based on customer feedback. Another really good example is the new fully electric eActros that's now in serious production in our plant in Wörth, and our first deliveries to customers are planned for December. Last but not least, during next year, we plan to bring a major update of our heavy-duty engine with improved efficiency and improved performance. In the near future, all of these initiatives are expected to increase customer satisfaction, so I'm hopeful for the future. To summarize, we've identified four levers to drive our profit turnaround. We're taking actions on each of these levers to become a more robust company and to lower our break-even point, and we are expecting these measures to lead to meaningful results in 2025 and even sooner. These four levers are fundamental to our business success, which is why we also made them part of our new Mercedes-Benz Trucks strategies. There is another two levers of that strategy that I didn't mention so far. Sustainability is one of them. It's key to everything we do. You'll hear more from Martin later regarding our commitment on the corporate level, so I'm not gonna go into a lot of details, but I really wanna say that I'm committed to help the transport sector to transition to a more sustainable future. This motivates me personally, and I know it motivates my whole organization. The last lever I wanna mention is one team. To make all of the stuff happen that I've talked about so far, we have to develop our people, and we have to work together with confidence, openness, and trust as one team. In my leadership team, we've committed ourselves to this objective, and as you see, it's an explicit part of our strategy. This company is full of great people, and it's our job to bring them to their full potential. We are all committed to raising the performance of Mercedes-Benz Trucks and doing our part to help drive Daimler Truck forward. I'm excited about the journey that we're on, the journey of building an organization that will be even more responsive to our customers, that will deliver on our commitments towards our teams, towards our investors, and towards society. With that, I hand over to John O'Leary. Thank you, Karin, for the insights on the path forward with Mercedes-Benz Trucks. I'm John O'Leary, President and CEO of Daimler Truck North America, or DTNA, as we're more commonly known. I'm honored to lead the most successful truck manufacturer in North America by both volume and profitability. It's a bold claim, I know, and while it certainly paints a target on our back, let me explain how we have and how we are fending off our competition, and more importantly, how we're going to leverage our strength to make our business even stronger. Daimler Truck North America has built a highly successful business predicated on three things, an absolute dedication to delivering customer-focused products, providing unparalleled customer service, and disciplined cost control. When it comes to our vehicles, we are fully cognizant of the fact that our trucks are tools for our customers' jobs, and so we don't do science projects. Instead, we deliver real solutions for real needs. Take, for instance, our flagship Freightliner Cascadia, which has been the truck of choice for large fleets since its introduction. That truck has remained number one as a result of answering customer calls for unsurpassed fuel efficiency, delivering maximum driver comfort, and exhibiting an absolute commitment to safety. I'm proud to say that we haven't rested on our laurels or let our lead lapse. As a case in point, since its launch, we have improved the Cascadia's fuel efficiency by over 34%. Our relentless work to continue delivering customer-focused solutions is why we are the clear market leader in the on-highway segment. In fact, when you look at the top full truckload and less-than-truckload carriers in the country, we believe a vast majority of them depend on DTNA and our trucks. The factors I mentioned, delivering customer-focused solutions, providing great customer service, and disciplined cost control, have allowed us to grow and hold market share to approximately 40% of all Class six to eight commercial vehicles. Despite a pandemic-stunted market in 2020, that trend continued to hold, and our business continues to show resiliency this year, even though the production challenges stemming from component shortages. In fact, as you can see from our return on sales for the first nine months of this year, we're confident in our plan and our path to achieve a 12% return by 2025. In order to meet that objective, we plan to continue to maintain strict cost discipline, defend our on-highway business while capturing increased share of the vocational market, further expand our aftermarket capabilities to safeguard the customer experience and increase revenue, strengthen our connected vehicle service offerings, and lead the industry's future with the deployment of autonomous technologies and the transition to zero-emission vehicles. Unpacking those a bit further, let me start with a look at our cost discipline. Through multiple business cycles, this is something we've shown the ability to do quite well, and we do so by making pragmatic investments in our product portfolio, extracting operational efficiencies wherever we can, and utilizing a highly flexible manufacturing network to adjust to rapidly changing pressures on the freight market. When it comes to our product portfolio, we can obviously produce, partner, or simply procure, and we're equally comfortable throwing the right lever for the right need at the right time. I'll point to our Detroit-branded technologies as a great example of what we can do in-house, but we've also employed targeted procurement like that with Proterra for batteries and drivetrains for electric school bus as a way to leverage the open market for technologies and as one way we can get to market quickly in burgeoning segments. Partnerships, like those with Volvo Group for hydrogen fuel cells, help us defray high costs for advanced technologies. Similarly, that spirit of flexibility is built into a geographically dispersed and highly malleable production network that can adjust based on market conditions and demand. Three U.S. full vehicle assembly centers located in Cleveland and Mount Holly, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon, produce our complete portfolio of trucks, while two complementary assembly plants in Mexico provide added network flexibility from the standpoint of cost, labor relations, and currency exposures. In addition, we can machine parts in-house if needed at our Gastonia components facilities, and we produce proprietary engines, axles, transmissions, and other components at our Redford, Michigan, plant. Lastly, we have stringent fixed overhead cost controls in place, with plans to reduce costs by 8% by 2025 from 2019 levels. Looking at our second growth lever, we believe we have a tremendous opportunity in the vocational segment to deliver more volume in the smaller yet highly profitable portion of the market. We made a deliberate, and what I believe to be a prescient, investment of $380 million to undertake a full model refresh of our heavy-duty vocational lineup. Like we did with the Cascadia, we listened to our customers. We visited their operations. We recreated the road surfaces they travel on at our own proving grounds so that we were sure that we were able to deliver a truck that stands up to the abuse they will dish out in the field. Last year, we proudly introduced the first of those trucks, the Western Star 49X. At the end of September this year, we introduced the second truck, the 47X, to form the Western Star X-Series. In 2022, we plan to introduce another product benefiting from this investment. Three new vehicles in three years is as unprecedented for us as it is for the industry, but the market is responding very favorably. In fact, Western Star is on track to sell more trucks in 2022 than it has in any other year in its 54-year history. Moreover, we kept a keen eye on the cost basis and found synergies where we could with shared componentry from other product lines. For instance, the X-Series trucks leverage the same cab as the Freightliner Cascadia, which has been reinforced to withstand the unique abuse from off-highway use. It's a clear example of the focus we put on delivering real solutions for our customers while safeguarding per-unit margins. Additionally, in terms of profitability, heavy-duty vocational trucks turn far less frequently than the on-highway products, and as a result, they go out the door content rich and with excellent margins. Even while we work to grow our share in the vocational segment, we will vigorously defend our on-highway leadership. You heard me say we've continued to evolve the market-leading Freightliner Cascadia since its introduction, and we will continue to advance that platform and others through R&D funding, which just in the past two years alone amounted to nearly $2 billion, excluding the vocational investment referenced earlier. Remember, the cargo our customers are hauling is often worth more than the truck they're driving, so returning them to the road as quickly as possible is extremely important. I'm proud to say that we've internalized this goal with a very real KPI to get our customers back on the road in 24 hours or less when service is required, a goal derived directly from customer feedback. As impressive as our trucks are, I think our aftermarket network is perhaps the greatest factor in allowing us to maintain the fierce customer loyalty that we have. We've built out this crucial linchpin with more than 1,150 locations, and we plan to grow dealer rooftops by 30 locations and 500 service bays in the coming 18 months. To further enable our goals, we have a parts distribution network with 12 warehousing centers strategically located across North America. They stock 100,000 unique parts, collectively ship 170 truckloads of parts per day, and get 90% of ordered parts to their destinations in 12 hours or less. We're set to capitalize on this further by strengthening our parts distribution channel to support our lift and shift towards increasing online parts sales. According to McKinsey & Company, online truck part sales is in and of itself a $3 billion industry in the U.S., with projected 25% annual growth. Next year, DTNA's Excelerator eCommerce platform for parts sales is set to transition from being exclusively B2B to add B2C capability and capture more of the direct parts sales pie. Lastly, we also continue to expand our digital readiness and aftermarket with a connection to IoT to utilize advanced technology to serve our customers. We've applied machine learning to our parts stocking, have been trialing 3D printing for rapid parts prototyping, and we're continually connecting more of our back-end systems to improve the responsiveness to customer needs. Segueing to our additional services-based growth levers, we already benefit from embedded telematics in our 300,000 connected trucks on the road that allow us to predictably assess truck down situations and drive value for our customers. We continue to expand our offerings, whether designed in-house or sourced from strategic partners. Platform Science is one such partner, and the connected truck platform in our trucks will launch early next year in the Freightliner Cascadia. This will allow customers to seamlessly integrate one tablet into their trucks and display truck health fed by Detroit Connect, as well as select from their favorite third-party apps for things like routing and dispatching or using an electronic logging device, as examples. Also, in collaboration with Daimler Truck Financial Services, we're poised to offer our customers unparalleled support that only a captive lender can provide to finance one truck or thousands of them. Fed by the single source of vehicle truth that is Detroit Connect, we have the unique ability to garner insights into truck usage and charge on a pay-by-mile method if a customer desires. Our dynamic lease launches next year, and the opportunities merely start there, with insurance and warranty services also capable of being charged by use. The team at Daimler Truck Financial Services, helmed by Richard Howard, who formerly served as DTNA's SVP of sales and marketing and is intimately versed in the needs of the trucking fleets we serve, is well suited to create a win-win-win solution for DTNA, DTFS, and our mutual customers. Looking at autonomous driving technology for Class A trucks, we have a vision for accident-free driving, and we're firmly on that journey with the development and deployment of autonomous trucks and services so that we can keep the flow of goods and our global economy moving safer and more efficiently. Designing and releasing a truck that follows the commands of an autonomous system requires a paradigm shift. We basically have to reinvent the truck. Our mission is to safely deploy the first-ever scalable and profitable autonomous truck with redundant systems. To achieve this, our strategy is to work with two strong autonomous technology partners. Our dual strategy of partnering with both Waymo and Torc offers us multiple routes to commercialization, and it provides our customers the choice of which autonomous driving system works best for their business. Daimler Truck and Torc formed the first strategic alliance between an autonomous vehicle technology pioneer and a truck manufacturer when Daimler acquired a majority stake in Torc in 2019, and we see real value creation from this deal. While Torc operates as an independent subsidiary and serves as the lead for autonomous system development, innovation, and testing, they're closely connected to our internal development teams and plans for the hub-to-hub business model we're focused on. Today, they're testing on public roads in Virginia, New Mexico, and Texas and are gaining valuable data from real miles. Meanwhile, under our partnership with Waymo, we have a meeting of industry titans who share the common goal of improving road safety and efficiency for fleet customers. We're on track to deliver an autonomous Freightliner Cascadia truck equipped with the Waymo Driver to customers in the U.S. in the coming years. We've already delivered the initial chassis with the first version of the redundant braking and steering components to the team at Waymo for them to integrate their autonomous system. No different than offering proprietary or third-party powertrain solutions, we're able to offer our customers the power of choice of the industry's best autonomous driving solutions based on one truck platform with the lowest total cost of ownership. These autonomous driving technologies offer us compelling growth opportunities beyond simply the chassis or even the software, with the ancillary benefit of additional after-sales revenue, new business models along the autonomous value chain, or the added potential to capitalize on data as a service. Also, another changing dynamic for our industry which we're looking forward to is the transition to electric vehicles. We're bringing our quintessential ability to deliver on what customers want to this promising market segment. Or more appropriately, segments, as we're set to cover Class eight and Class six, seven through our Freightliner brand, Class five parcel delivery through our Freightliner Custom Chassis products, and one of my personal favorites, given the significance of its cargo, the school bus segment with Thomas Built Buses. We're making pragmatic investments to build momentum for the long term. We're doing this right and maximizing our ROI by making sure we're delivering what customers expect. In fact, we learned from them by deploying over 40 pre-production Class six, seven and Class eight eM2 and eCascadia trucks to their operations in the past two years. They are very real trucks that have been performing real work in the real world, and they just surpassed one million collective miles of use. Earlier this year, we opened the order boards for both models, and in part as a result of piloting our trucks, we already have a backlog of 700 trucks. As I mentioned earlier, to scale with market demand, we're prepared with a multipronged strategy. We're procuring battery packs for the Jouley school bus and MT50e walk-in van chassis from Proterra, a company in which we've also invested. We'll be using our own battery packs with battery cells sourced from our global Daimler Truck team for eCascadia and eM2. However, for any emerging technology, there's more to it than just the product, so we're looking to holistically support our customers with eConsulting services to help them navigate the dramatic shift from internal combustion engines. With our in-house eConsulting team, we're offering a tiered service model to provide everything from chargers to assistance with much larger infrastructure projects, such as distributed energy services, things like on-site energy storage and solar arrays. To date, we've assisted more than 40 customers install infrastructure through our Freightliner electric innovation and CX demonstration fleets. We've sold services to the likes of Knight-Swift, Schneider, and Reyes Holdings, the West Coast bottler of Coca-Cola products, to support production trucks which they'll begin operating late next year. We're not limiting ourselves to depot-based projects. In April, we laid the blueprint for publicly accessible charging sites specifically designed for use by commercial vehicles. Electric Island, located in our hometown of Portland, Oregon, is the first of its kind and currently the only U.S. charging site open to the public that comfortably accommodates an electric truck with trailer in tow, which we built in cooperation with our local electric company, Portland General Electric. To really move the needle on this segment, we need a network of accessible charging stations available for drivers of our trucks or any truck driver hauling freight more than from point A to point B and back. We're prepared to be part of the solution in this regard, and we'll have more details to share on this front soon. Let me close on this slide by saying that when it comes to zero-emission vehicles, we know it's not just one solution to make the full transition, but a combination of them. Just like all of our product and service offerings, we plan to provide choices for our customers. Late this decade, with our cellcentric powertrain offering, we will introduce a hydrogen fuel cell system to address the longest haul segments where battery electric trucks will continue to be challenged by recharging requirements until battery density increases by orders of magnitude. I know that was a lot, but let me finish by saying Daimler Truck North America is committed to generating benchmark revenue and returns continuously, which I say with all due humility and absence of hubris. My leadership team and I are fully aware that yesterday's home runs don't win today's games, but past success shows we know how to win and that we're willing to do the work necessary to win. We do it by delivering real solutions and an unparalleled experience for our customers, and we have a plan to continue doing the same, even as the industry advances into a new era of mobility. We do it by staying extremely disciplined with our spending and pragmatic in our investments, and we will do the same even as the industry advances. Now, over to Karl Deppen with insights on Trucks Asia. Thank you, John. I am Karl Deppen, heading Daimler Truck's Asia business from December 1 onwards. I am currently running our Brazil business. Today, I'm excited to give you further insights into Asia's potential and elaborate on how we plan to capitalize on these opportunities and maximize our financial contribution to the group. To start, we have a strong, proven track record in the region. We are one of the top players in some of the world's biggest markets, Japan, Indonesia, and China. We have well-established product ranges rooted in Daimler Truck technology, an effective recurring service business model, a low breakeven point, and are taking the reins in the shift towards e-mobility. Across the globe, in addition to our own plans, we have established a strong sales network with partners globally. Asia makes up more than 60% of the global truck market, according to IHS. To be successful here, you need a strong local brand and strong products, and these we have, with Mitsubishi Fuso and BharatBenz. Asia, excluding China, is predicted to deliver significant volume growth by the end of the decade. China, already the single largest truck market today, will continue to be as important in the future. An investor recently told me that he has been hearing about Asian growth for 20 years, but that Daimler Trucks has not delivered on profitability in the region since. I'm well aware of this, but let me repeat what was said in May during the strategy day: every region must deliver, and we are committed to delivering in Asia. Our goal in the region is clear and simple: to achieve regional benchmark profitability. I can prove we are on a good track. Last year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our FUSO business experienced the worst sales volume since the 1990s. However, even in this very negative environment, and with ongoing restructuring efforts, we closed our books positive due to our activities to optimize our break-even point. Please have a look at our most recent achievements. Year to date, 2021, we achieved a return on sales of 7% under still challenging conditions in some key markets. This does include certain one-time benefits, as referenced by Jochen during the Q3 result call, and a strong China market due to pre-buy effects. Operationally, we have also significantly improved versus 2019, with similar volumes. In other words, we are on a similar level of operational profitability as 2018, but with much lower volume. It's this progress that we take with us to achieving our sunny 9% ambition. We are adopting a multi-pronged approach to maximize our profitability for a return on sales ambition of 9% by 2025. We have defined four aspects that center on leveraging opportunities in our important markets and also on optimizing our cost structure. The following slides will detail our clear action plan for each of the four categories. We plan to further focus and strengthen the position of the FUSO brand through continued cost optimization and expanding our service capability to drive profitability. Currently, a large part of our fixed cost is already covered by downstream businesses. In 2019, this figure was about 75%, and this year it's already at 85%. We aim to improve this to 100% by 2025 to add robustness in downward cycles and further lower our break-even point. Other major pillars are ongoing improvement programs and structural measures. We are committed to placing a clear emphasis on profitable and promising businesses and ceasing business operations which are not on the required profitability level. This is what we did, for example, with our FUSO new vehicle sales in the U.S. and Canada earlier this year. At the same time, we are strengthening our retail network in Japan by revamping our branches, expanding our services, increasing our digitalization efforts, as well as making structural changes to our network. We plan also to seize opportunities that India presents, where our BharatBenz brand has experienced the fastest growth among all competitors. India is an important market for the group. We have already sold more than 100,000 trucks in India, and I am confident that the Indian market will revitalize soon, and that it still offers many opportunities for our company. India might become the next engine of very dynamic growth in Asia, and in our view, we are perfectly well prepared to grow our business profitably, not only with our products made in India for India. We also see further strategic potential from using India as an export and service hub and as low-cost, high-quality R&D and IT hub for Daimler Truck's worldwide operations. Overall, we plan to achieve double-digit volume growth by 2025 and improve our global cost structure by supplying components and shared services to other markets and entities. Moving on to China, the biggest truck market in the world. This market will serve as the most important game changer for our growth as we focus on localizing Mercedes-Benz to suit the market. China boasts the largest heavy-duty truck market in the world, and tremendous growth is expected in the advanced truck segment. Unlike other international truck makers, we already enjoy a strong base set up in the country, having established our own production and sales offices by extending our powerful partnership with Foton, one of the largest truck manufacturers in China. Our joint venture, BFDA, is gearing up for future growth. The next step here is to implement our plans to localize the Actros in China for China in order to strive for a significant part of the advanced heavy-duty truck market. Moving forward, we also intend to increase our production by adding another 60,000 unit capacity per year and grow our China business into a global sourcing hub. Ladies and gentlemen, when competitors announced electric trucks for the first time, we had already launched them. We were the pioneers in this field. Back in 2017, other companies rode prototypes on stages, and that year, we already brought the first generation of our battery electric eCanter onto the roads in three continents. By the end of this year, this number is expected to have grown to 300 eCanters delivered to customers worldwide. These trucks have covered an estimated more than three million kilometers in the real-life operation so far, and we plan to launch our third generation of the eCanter next year. We will do so alongside a full-fledged array of services, offering our customers the entire ecosystem of electric mobility. At the same time, we intend to ensure that we further leverage our downstream revenues while transforming our business models from diesel to electricity. Asia, especially Asian mega cities, is determined to switch to zero-emission trucks rather soon. With our experience and our battery and fuel cell electric product pipeline, we believe we are perfectly well prepared to cater for all these opportunities ahead of us. As you can see, Asia presents many opportunities for growth and new businesses in both stable and developing markets. Our plan leverages our strong local brands and takes advantage of our exposure to grow markets across the region. We have great positions in Japan, in China, India, Indonesia, and beyond. We are committed to improving our margin structure and financial resilience by deepening our service revenue and lowering our fixed cost. Coupled with our highly diverse management team and workforce, I'm very confident that we will truly succeed in Asia. I know that the expectation for these regions are very high, but so is our potential. Let me assure you, once again, we will continue to work furiously to further increase our profitability and optimize our financial performance. With this, let me please hand over to Till and his presentation on Daimler Buses. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Till Oberwörder, CEO of Daimler Buses. Let me inform you about the business at Daimler Buses. What's our situation right now in terms of market and financial performance? Where do we want to be in the years to come, and what are our plans to get there? Let's start with our market position. As you can see on the slide, we start with a position of strength. We are market leader in Europe, Latin America, and Mexico, which are among the most important global bus markets in terms of total volume. In Brazil, every second bus, in fact, is a Daimler bus. We have led the market there since we entered it 65 years ago. What are the main assets that make us global market leader? The first one is a strong local production footprint. Secondly, we are also close to our customers when it comes to sales and services. We have a strong direct sales force and a dense and primarily owned service network, so customers are doing business with us directly, and this helps us in more than one way. We get our feedback directly from our customers. We can react quickly, and that leads to high loyalty. Of course, direct sales are good for our margins. Thirdly, we cover all segments in the global bus market, meaning we are one-stop shop. Last but not least, we have a strong offering in terms of brands and technology. We see our Setra and Mercedes-Benz buses as pioneers for our industry and safety systems. We have introduced many systems as industry first. One important example is Preventive Brake Assist. The high degree of commonality we have with our trucks is another key lever for our strong position. As of today, we share and integrate many technologies. We have been successfully sharing our conventional powertrain platforms over many decades, and we also work together regarding new technologies, be it active safety systems or the new truck platform for electric drive. We plan to make use of it from the second half of this decade on. We are also working together with our truck colleagues regarding purchasing. We view the lead buyer concept as having huge positive scale effects for all of us. Other fields we are cooperating in are production plants, customer service, administration, and in the future, we plan to have common customer offerings of Daimler Truck Financial Services as well. The benefits of these synergies are, in our view, well-known. Firstly, these innovations come into our buses more quickly. Secondly, we can see scale effects to improve our financial performance, and that's why we are clearly committed to further maximize these synergies in the future. We want to fully leverage these scale effects, especially when looking at new technologies. Now, let's look a bit closer at our business and our financial performance. In a nutshell, all figures for 2021 make for difficult reading. The reason is quite simple. The COVID-19 pandemic hit our industry very hard, much harder than the truck business. We are used to cyclical business, but right now, all global bus markets are hit at the same time. Tourism is basically at a standstill, so the situation is really challenging, most of all for the coach segment. Accordingly, the recovery in the global coach market is the prerequisite for things to get better. The good news is, we believe we are well-positioned when this market comes back, and we are convinced this will happen. We don't see tomorrow, but in the medium term. As soon as people are allowed to travel without restrictions and quarantine rules again, we believe they will. We are starting from a position of strength. We are undisputed leader of the European coach segment. 1/3 of coaches sold in the past 10 years was either a Setra or Mercedes-Benz coach. What are, in our opinion, the main reasons for this strong position? We can address a high degree of individualization, and that's exactly what these customers wish for. This creates a great proximity and loyalty. On top, our customers often are family entrepreneurs with whom we have really close contact. These factors allow us to position our vehicles with the potential for attractive margins. We believe we are all set to build on this strength and to capitalize on market recovery by sticking to our two brand strategy, launching new products that we have held back due to the pandemic, and equipping them with those technologies our customers expect from us, industry-leading safety systems. Looking forward, we're confident. Our business has a solid foundation. In fact, in pre-COVID times, we led our industry performance-wise. Based on information available in the market, we could not identify a single competitor who had better return on sales than Daimler Buses. We achieved a return on sales of 6% in 2018 and 2019. As part of an independent company, Daimler Buses ambition is a 7.5% return on sales in sunny conditions, and we are committed to deliver this. As you can see, we plan major contributions to come from improved fixed overhead cost. There's more to it. We have four main levers to fill the gap, and you can see them on the right. I will guide you through them one by one. One lever to close the gap will be growth in North America. As said before, we're number one in our most important bus markets already. We still want to and can grow, and we plan to do so by focusing on the most profitable markets and segments, because then we use our resources best. With this rationale in mind, we decided to reenter the North American coach market. As you might know, we already are in this market for quite some time. To be honest, we have not been living up to expectations, neither to our own, nor those of our customers, be it the product, the brand, our service network, or the sales setup. Nothing did really match with the market demands. We sat down, we made a thorough analysis, and we decided to change most of the things we did so far. We will now target the private coach segment. This is a decent market segment with roughly 2,000 units a year, and we expect it to grow. Most importantly, it is a very promising profit pool, a pool where we plan to participate considerably. Our ambition is 15%-20% market share in this segment by 2025. We plan to enter this segment with an all-new purpose-built coach. We will use the strongest brand we have in stock, Mercedes-Benz, our rock-solid promise for quality, safety, and reliability. The coaches plan to come with many technologies that made us number one in Europe, first and foremost, the most advanced safety features. We plan to equip it with well-known engines from our family brand, Detroit Diesel. We intend to have our own sales force, dedicated business unit, Daimler Coaches North America. We aim to offer a new level of service by joining forces with Daimler Truck North America. We plan to leverage their existing operations and their dense service and after-sales network. We have many reasons to believe we'll get a fair share of the U.S. private coach market. Let's look at our next lever, zero emission products. We entered the market with our first electric city bus, the eCitaro, back in 2018. We have sold over 650 units so far. In Germany alone, every other electric city bus is a Mercedes-Benz eCitaro. Right now, we're working on a service network that equals the regular service density. Nearly 40 workshops across Europe are already in place. Looking forward, we expect the market for zero-emission buses to grow rapidly for the rest of this decade. Our ambition is that Daimler Buses will be at the forefront of this transformation towards emission-free people transport. We have a clear roadmap to electrify our product portfolio across all segments and markets. In Latin America, we'll start with urban transport, and we plan to launch our first E-chassis next year. In Europe, we plan for our city bus segment to be fully electric by 2030. We aim to introduce the third generation of our lithium-ion batteries next year. It comes with a huge improvement in terms of energy density. We also plan to offer a fuel cell as range extender by 2023. For the inter-urban bus segment, we strive to offer a first electric vehicle by 2025, and we plan to have zero-emission coaches on the roads by 2030. Technology-wise, we are pursuing a dual strategy with battery, electric, and fuel cell drive, like our truck colleagues. As mentioned earlier, we intend to share platform for electric drive in the second half of this decade. Our next lever towards the solid 7.5% return on sales is services. Up to 2025, we expect the most revenue to come of our traditional service business, and we see additional growth potential here. Our dense direct sales network can help to push service contracts, trainings, and parts sales. We believe our aftermarket brand, OMNIplus, is unique and differentiating. We see further growth opportunities, though, related to e-mobility. We have dedicated consulting services to help our customers getting started with electric fleets. We are covering issues like fleet configuration and charging infrastructure for our customers, the integration of new electric buses into their existing fleet management, and many related tasks. We expect this to be an advantage to win tenders. We are also offering a broad portfolio of digital solutions that add value for customers. With OMNIplus Uptime, for example, we are able to reduce the number of vehicle breakdowns and consequently increase the availability of our buses. We are looking forward to working closely with our colleagues from Daimler Truck Financial Services to offer tailor-made financing solutions to our customers. The last and very important lever, structural cost measures. The pandemic has made one thing very clear: we have to be more resilient in volatile markets. We have to be even better than in the past. We need to become an even more robust business, and we know that, and we plan to lower our break-even point and decrease our fixed cost by EUR 300 million. As said in the beginning, we have a solid business foundation, but we still can improve. What major actions are we taking to lower our break-even point? We keep working on our personnel cost, and we continuously improve our global production footprint. We manufacture an increasing number of our integral buses, more than 50%, outside of Germany. We have made major cost improvement by bundling the body-in-white production for all coaches at our Czech plant. This transfer from Germany comes with an expected four-digit improvement in contribution margin per unit. We intend to keep improving the competitiveness of our European production network, and we are also not afraid to stop doing things when they do not contribute to our business in the long run. We are taking clear, shareholder-friendly decisions. To sum it up, Daimler Buses has a strong market position and trusted global brands. Our profitability has been good, and we are striving for it to be even better. We plan to get there with a greater share of services revenue, with higher contribution margins per unit and reduced fixed overheads. I'm convinced we initiated the right measures to help lower our break-even point and enhance our profitability to reach sunny conditions. With that, I thank you for listening and hand over to Stefan Buchner. Thank you, Till. Hello. My name is Stefan Buchner, and I'm responsible for financial services within Daimler Truck, a newly created entity following the separation from Daimler Mobility. We at Daimler Truck Financial Services have a clear role, driving enduring customer relationships. How are we doing this? Well, the frequency and the depth of our interactions lead to a strong connection and knowledge about our customers and their business. We are focused on their specific needs and making them even more successful. This is the foundation for building long-lasting relationships, and that means more sales of trucks and buses, active life cycle management of the vehicles, more services around the trucks and buses, and finally, of course, contributing to the profit and cash flow of Daimler Truck. In the next couple of minutes, I would like to highlight the following facts about our business approach. We have a strong captive business from day one. We aim to focus on operational excellence right from the beginning with our phased startup approach. With a clear strategy how to grow and to power vehicle sales and services revenue expansion, and we are committed to delivering attractive returns in terms of profit and thereby generating cash contribution. First, our strong captive business. We are committed to leveraging more than 40 years of experience as a leader in commercial vehicle financing, and we intend to establish Daimler Truck Financial Services in three waves, thereby transferring not only our existing high-quality truck and bus portfolio, but also our experienced employees. As a first step, wave one aims to cover our headquarters in seven countries, namely U.S., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, and Japan. With around EUR 16 billion, it will be the majority of our overall portfolio. We will continue with the integration of wave two, so that by end of 2022, the main truck and bus markets in Europe and Argentina will be transferred as well. The total portfolio predominantly consists of our finance and wholesale products. In the beginning, our operating lease products will only represent a minor portion within our portfolio. The North American powerhouse will be the majority of our overall portfolio. In terms of penetration rate, North America is planned to be at the lower end, while Europe and Latin America will be at the higher end. Overall, we are planning that a quarter of our trucks and buses sold will be financed or leased with Daimler Truck Financial Services. From 2023, we plan to start our third and last wave by ramping up operations in Germany and France and preparing further new market launches. This phased approach is intended to give us the opportunity to ensure operational efficiency from the start, best cope with the regulatory environment, and leave a lot of systems and process legacies behind us. We are a risk taker, and one of our biggest assets is the solid track record, the DNA of our risk management and underwriting policies from our successful history at Daimler Mobility. We are committed to not compromise on our conservative and prudent risk governance and will aim for the highest standards on the quality of our acquisitions. Our risk governance model, with central policies and guidelines, central risk provisioning, and centrally steered rating models, is fully embedded into our risk strategy and defined risk appetite. The result is visible. Our net credit losses over the last seven years averaged at a level of 45 basis points, including the pandemic peak last year. We are committed to making sure that our acquisition quality will stay at a high level overall. We are proud to be ready for day one and cannot wait to future-proof our business model and leverage the opportunities ahead. Before talking about our way forward, I would like to be fully transparent about our starting positions. Our strengths are clear. We are a well-positioned commercial vehicle capital finance company with unique customer access, strong leasing and financing products, and a prudent risk management. Our recurring revenue base is not only creating constant income, but also provides critical insights into customer requirements, hence enabling more sales and services. However, we are also very clear regarding our challenges. We built up a company from scratch, which will require hard work and dedication. With our decentralized operating model, we will not be able to utilize the full advantage of our scale at the beginning. We will speed up and introduce more tailored offerings for specific customers, and we will work hard in Europe to meet our profitability ambitions in that region. We see promising opportunities, which we will consequently exploit. Firstly, due to our exclusive dedication on trucks and buses, we aim to improve our customer focus and to implement new financial services and service solution much faster and more effectively. Secondly, the chance of a new and, in many areas, harmonized IT landscape will not only play into our operational excellence, but it is also designed to strongly contribute to our profitability in Europe. Thirdly, we expect it to be the basis for developing profitable business in new markets faster and easier in the future. With our new dedicated IT framework and the centralized control functions, we aim to benefit from lower break-even points in the new markets. What will be our key levers that will make us successful and will increase our share of wallet in the industry? Foremost, we are committed to delivering a fully operational financial services business on December 1, 2021. I am proud of the team. We have already achieved a lot in a short period of time. Second, we will accelerate the core with more dedication to our customers and branch more new and advanced products like Dynamic Lease. As a result, we plan to deliver higher penetration rates and more sales of trucks and buses. Third, we will grow our service business. Take insurance or fleet management capabilities as an example. In addition to that, the transformation of the industry is opening new opportunities in areas like e-infrastructure, financing solutions for depot charging, or telematic services, which could be bundled for the customer. We believe this one-stop shopping will help our customers to make their business even more successful. Our phased approach is to be the basis for a lean country setup from which we can expand into new promising and emerging markets with the lean digital solutions, for example, in Eastern Europe. Moreover, we plan to partner up to expand our business further, especially in overseas markets. Finally, efficiency of our operations is key from the beginning. We are committed to developing new digital solutions to establish a lean cost structure. We believe our governance model will make sure that our track record and risk management is maintained, and with a dedicated focus, is even further improved. Numbers tell the story, but at the end, it's a people business. This is why we put people always around everything. It is about our customers, knowing them, understanding them, and working every day and night to make them more successful. This is at our hearts. We have established a highly motivated and skilled team to serve that spirit and to make us all successful. Bottom line, we are committed to contributing to the service growth ambition of Daimler Truck. From tailor-made finance and lease products, to the introduction of fully integrated and customer-centric solutions. Here are some examples. We plan to increase our penetration rate to around 30% in the next couple of years, and we aim to expand our existing products into new markets. Additionally, new finance products outside of the traditional finance and leasing world are evolving fast. Take flexible pay-as-you-drive services, like Dynamic Lease or Dynamic Insurance. All can be very relevant for truck and bus customers. The transformation in the industry is making new solutions possible, necessary, and attractive, like charging, e-infrastructure, or battery leasing. Another example is the integration of connected services in the future. You see, we're transforming this company from a pure financial into a services business. Therefore, our goal is to contribute significantly to the increasing recurring revenues and increasing our share of wallet. We see this as ultimately driving shareholder value creation. It is a numbers game. The portfolio transfer is expected to get us to the level above EUR 20 billion by end of 2022. The ramp-up of two bigger markets, France and Germany, in 2023 is expected to accelerate growth further. We expect to be under full operational swing in 2025, and aim to achieve target benchmark KPIs from then onwards. This staggered approach gives us the opportunity to establish lean and efficient infrastructure, processes, and organization, which is fully focusing on operational excellence from day one on. It gives us the chance to establish smart digital solutions and to get rid of certain IT legacy systems with the aim for further positive impact on our costs. After the ramp-up investments and optimization phase, we plan to develop our organization to a highly competitive level in 2025, and we will not rest there. Moving over to the liability side of our business. We will make sure that our capital structure is well-balanced from the start. With an equity ratio of around 9%, we have a healthy equity cushion to support a solid investment-grade credit rating. Our debt structure is balanced from the start, with good access to different funding sources. In the beginning, our ABS capabilities will be concentrated on our well-established facilities in the U.S. market. This gives us room to develop further and generate a funding cushion or dry powder against capital market turbulences. Important for us is to stay with our matched funding principles on liquidity, interest rate, currency, and country. We aim to work on strengthening our global footprint further, using market opportunities to diversify our funding. All of that translates into clear financial targets. Despite the ramp-up investments into our systems, processes, and organizations, we expect to be profitable from day one onwards and plan to ramp up to more than 14% return on equity by 2025 in sunny conditions. The entire Daimler Truck Financial Services team is geared up to be self-funding from 2025 onwards. Meaning, we would be able to fund our future growth on our own and be able to pay back dividends to our shareholders. Shortly after, we are in full swing in our core markets. Under these normalized operations, we are committed to closing the gap to the best-in-class competitors. Moreover, you can be certain we will not stop there. To sum it all up, we're excited about the future opportunities of Daimler Truck and Daimler Truck Financial Services, and we are committed to delivering on our core promises. We actively drive enduring customer relationships. We have a strong captive business and solid foundation for growth from day one on. We have a well-balanced funding mix. We strive to focus on operational excellence right from the beginning with our phased and startup approach. With a clear growth strategy, we plan to power vehicle sales and expand service revenue. We are committed to delivering attractive returns in terms of profit and generate cash contribution for our shareholders in the future. Thank you very much, and looking forward to your questions. Back to Martin. Thank you, Stefan. Ladies and gentlemen, my colleagues and I have told you in great detail about our business ambitions. You heard a number of examples supporting what I said with regard to ESG. There's a full commitment by our management team to do things right for our environment, our society, and our company. I would like to add, the same is true for our teams around the globe. They are all fired up to change things for the better. I'm glad we do not only have the enthusiasm, we also have the know-how to really change things. We've got the expertise, the engineering DNA, and the right mindset. Innovation is our way to tackle challenges and to bring progress to the world ever since we founded our industry. Now, we are dedicated to bringing emission-free trucks and buses to the markets, but we will not stop there. Our commitment to sustainability goes way beyond environmental issues. We are committed to be a responsible part of our society. We want to be a company people like to interact with and to work for, a company people trust, a company that's great to have in the neighborhood, and we support our commitments to environment and society with a strong corporate governance and a very transparent disclosure and reporting in the future. The ESG framework is a good fit for us. It covers the major areas we plan to engage in. It will help us to be transparent towards our stakeholders. What's important to know, we are not starting from scratch with our sustainable business strategy. We are continuing to build on a strong foundation that we set up inside Daimler AG. We want to contribute to protect environment. Key to this is certainly our path to CO2 neutral road transportation. You have already received a lot of information about our emission-free vehicles today and in the previous presentations. You know the timeline, and you know also that we are fully focused on battery, electric, and hydrogen drivetrains. But these products are only one part of the equation to achieve global CO2 neutral transport. We also need our global production to become CO2 neutral. We have given ourselves a clear roadmap. We plan for all our European plants to become CO2 neutral by 2022. By 2025, we aim for our production plants in India and the U.S. to be CO2 neutral. By 2039, we want to achieve CO2 neutral production at all our plants and in all our business units worldwide. Renewable electricity is one approach for us to get there. In Europe, for example, we plan to purchase all electricity from renewable energy sources by 2022, and we also plan to increase the on-site production of energy from renewable sources. We already have installed photovoltaic systems at locations in Japan, India, the United States, Turkey, and Germany. Another topic we will work on regarding our production is the use of primary resources in our production. Looking beyond our company, we also want our supply chain to be sustainable. Of course, we expect all our suppliers to work in line with regulatory requirements to protect the environment, and we require our direct suppliers to comply with our company sustainability standards. These include specific requirements towards environment protection, also for working conditions, protection of human rights, safety, business ethics, and compliance. As a company, we are related to our society in many ways. People interact with our products. They interact with our teams. Sometimes they even become part of our company. We want all these relations to be trustful. We want to be a responsible partner to our society. We want to do the right thing, and we put our focus on three areas to live up to those ambitions. The first one is safety. To us, road safety is a true matter of social responsibility, and it always has been the core of our DNA. A large number of safety features, which are commonplace in our industry today, have been pioneered or often even been invented by us. Our vision is accident-free driving, and we know that when talking about trucks and buses, we need active safety systems. We have to keep accidents from happening. To get there, we keep developing new systems that can assist the driver with his or her daily work. Our active Sideguard Assist is a great example for that. It can help the driver by warning of cyclists, pedestrians, and even vehicles in the blind spot. A major help to keep accidents from happening, especially in cities with a lot of traffic. We are also committed to do the right thing for a very special group within our society, our team. We want to be a great employer. That means, first of all, that we want everyone to be safe and healthy at work. We are convinced that we have industry-leading standards and a very good track record in that regard, and we are working on new initiatives to improve further. We want more. We want our teams to be proud when they talk about their work and their company, so we continuously work on our company culture. Now, let me just add one more aspect. In our company, we want everyone to have the opportunity to succeed, irrespective of their gender, cultural background, nationality, or any other status. We have a lot of initiatives to promote diversity in place, and we are happy that our efforts already pay off. We have recently just been named top company for women to work for in transportation in the United States. Our third field of action is corporate responsibility. We know that our group can make a difference in many ways, and a lot of good things are already happening every day around the globe. Many of our employees are engaged in their communities. Our group supports many different organizations and institutions with financial donations, vehicles, and much more. We want to understand where else there's a need for action from us, so we're working on more transparency in our supply chain, specifically when it comes to human rights protection. We want transparency in both our own entities and our supply chain, and we already started initiatives to screen our suppliers. To execute on our ambitions, we need to have the right forward-looking governance. Three things are most important to us in this field. First, we have agreed on leading standards in compliance. They stand for themselves, but they also help to reach our ambitions in the pillars E and S. Second, we plan to have an effective governance body in place. We, as a management board, will be responsible for ESG matters being implemented with concrete goals in our day-to-day business, and we will link our remuneration to success in that field. Third, we also intend to provide transparent ESG reporting and disclosure. We will keep you posted on our progress in the months to come. We have very clear ambitions when it comes to sustainability. We have already made many relevant decisions, and we are systematically implementing them, and we are looking forward to that because we will change things for the better. As I said in the beginning, performance and ESG are not a contradiction to us. They are not conflicting goals. Quite the opposite. We see the growing importance of ESG as a tailwind for our business, and we believe acting in a sustainable way will help us to create value. That's a cue for Jochen to take over again. Thank you. Thank you, Martin. Ladies and gentlemen, you've heard all of the exciting plans from my colleagues on how we will deliver our ambitious financial targets, and we are laser-focused on achieving these ambitions. Now, let's turn to our financial guidance for 2021 and 2022. The most decisive markets for us are the heavy-duty markets in North America and Europe. As we announced earlier, we want to focus on heavy duty. Therefore, we will provide market assumptions for North America and Europe today and in future. We currently see the ongoing strong demand from customers regarding our product in these markets. Our current order backlog is at an all-time high. However, due to the semiconductor shortage, we and the whole industry are not able to fulfill this demand. Therefore, in the end, the supply chain problem defines the size of the markets in the year 2021, and we also expect a severe impact in 2022. For 2021, we see significantly increasing markets in North America and Europe compared to 2020. For 2022, we expect a better situation regarding the availability of semiconductors than in the second half of 2021. At this point of time, there is still a high level of uncertainty. In total, we expect stable markets in 2022 compared to 2021 in North America and Europe. However, if the supply chain constraint situation eases, we believe there's a significant upside potential for both markets. Let's talk next about the financials for Daimler Truck overall. For 2021, we disclose a target corridor, and in the future, we plan to follow the current Daimler approach of always comparing our numbers to the previous year. For 2021, we expect our overall revenue for the group in the range between EUR 37 billion and EUR 39 billion. Group EBIT is expected to be in the range between EUR 3.4 billion and EUR 3.8 billion. Please keep in mind that there is a positive impact due to the establishment of the cellcentric joint venture with Volvo, which is partly compensated by negative impact from restructuring measures. Group EBIT adjusted is expected to be in the range of EUR 2.3 billion-EUR 2.7 billion. For the industrial business, we confirm our adjusted return on sales assumption of 6%-8%. Free cash flow is expected to be strong in a range of EUR 1.5 billion-EUR 2 billion. We expect to spend EUR 900 million-EUR 1 billion for capital expenditures for property, plant, and equipment, and EUR 1.5 billion-EUR 1.7 billion for research and development. What do we expect for 2022? We expect significantly higher revenues for the year 2022 as compared to 2021. Group EBIT is expected to be slightly lower than in 2021 due to the nonrecurrence of the one-time effect of the establishment of the cellcentric joint venture. To make it clear, this has nothing to do with our operational performance. Therefore, Group EBIT adjusted is expected to be significantly higher in 2022 than in 2021. For the industrial business, the adjusted return on sales is expected to be in the range of 7%-9%. Keep in mind that at this point of time, we still see a high level of uncertainty regarding a semiconductor shortage. We anticipate a slight decrease in free cash flow for the industrial business in 2022 compared with 2021, also to the already mentioned cellcentric effect. On the investment side, we expect the level to remain rather flat compared to the lower level of 2021. For R&D spending, we expect a slight increase coming from a low level in 2021. Now let's talk about the segment assumptions for 2021. We expect a solid sales volume of 160,000-170,000 units at Trucks North America. This should lead to an adjusted return on sales between 9% and 11%. Mercedes-Benz is expected to have 140,000-150,000 unit sales. We assume here an adjusted return on sales in the range of 4%-6%. Based on a similar volume level as seen in 2019, we see a significantly higher profitability, which further evidence that our restructuring measures are bearing fruit. As stated before, we are by far not where we want to be. Trucks Asia is forecasted to have solid sales levels between 140,000 and 150,000 units. We expect to have an adjusted return on sales ratio of 6%-8%, including positive non-recurring effects from China. On the Daimler Buses side, times are very challenging to the COVID-19-related non-existence of the coach business in Europe. Therefore, we expect an adjusted return on sales between -4% and -2%. Last but not least, we have our newly established financial services business, which is currently in ramp-up phase, and we believe we will report a pre-tax return on equity between 5% and 7%. Well, with that, thanks a lot, and I hand over back to Martin. With that, let me wrap up the presentation part of our Capital Market Day. I don't want to show another presentation. I just want to emphasize four things. First of all, we believe Daimler Truck is fully ready for independence. We can't wait to take our future in our own hands with the right culture, the right governance, and the right strategy. Second, we believe Daimler Truck is in a strong position already with leading brands and technology. We aim to become even stronger with an intense customer focus, leading in zero emission vehicles and an expansion of our software and services. Third, we are committed to accelerating our financial performance with the right levers to increase our profitability, clear ambitions for margins, focus on free cash flow, and full dedication to provide unparalleled transparency on our progress. Fourth, we intend to focus on shareholder returns by targeting value creation, a robust balance sheet, and a 40% dividend payout. We are a good company. We will become a great one. Thank you very much for your attention. Now, we are looking forward to a second round of Q&As with you. My colleagues from the business segments will join me again, and Christian Herrmann will again be our host for the session. Thank you. Thank you, Martin, and welcome back to the second Q&A session. Also, a warm welcome to Jürgen Hartwig, Head of Human Resources of Daimler Truck AG, who joined us here on stage to complete the Daimler Truck Board of Management. You have now the opportunity to raise questions to the full board. As a reminder, I will repeat the practical instructions for this Q&A session. In case you want to raise a question to our management team, you will have to dial in individually by telephone and register. The dial-in numbers have been shared within our invite that we sent out two weeks ago. We will identify the questioner by name, but please also introduce yourself with your name and the name of the organization that you are representing before asking your question. As a matter of fairness, again, please limit yourself to two questions. Please mute the live stream while raising your question and listening to the responses. Now, before we start, the operator will again explain the procedure for dialing in. Thank you. We will now begin our second question and answer session. At our customer's request, this Q&A session will be recorded. If you want to raise a question, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you want to withdraw your question, please dial zero and two on your telephone keypad. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press the star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. If you are using speaker equipment, please lift the handset before making your selection. I would like to remind you that this teleconference is governed by the disclaimer wording that you find in our published Capital Market Day documents. Please note that our presentations contain forward-looking statements that reflect management's current views with respect to future events. Such statements are subject to many risks and uncertainties. If the assumptions underlying any of these statements prove incorrect, then actual results may be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Forward-looking statements speak only to the date on which they are made. One moment, please, for the first question. Thanks again for the explanation. The first question would be to Stephen Reitman from Societe Generale. Yes, thank you. Stephen Reitman, Societe Generale, London. I have two questions regarding slide 32 and slide 47. On slide 32, you very kindly shown us the breakdown of the sort of profitability on the, now on divisional basis, which is excellent, very interesting to see. I'm just wondering if you'd share with us your view on what those figures look like at the half year stage, because obviously, as you mentioned, the peak of the semiconductor crisis was in the Q3 for all of you. It would be interesting to see what would more steady run rate was looking like in the first half of the year, or particularly for the Q2 for Mercedes and for Trucks North America and Trucks Asia and the like. My second question is on slide 47, which is regarding about the performance of Mercedes-Benz and in terms of customer satisfaction, service and product. Back in May, it was quite a revelation for Karin Rådström to come on and actually admit to all the failings of the Mercedes-Benz organization, which is something that I haven't heard in over 30 years covering this company. It was very refreshing to hear that and obviously very helpful because you recognize the problems, you can start fixing them. I would like a bit more information maybe on what progress you're making on this. You've mentioned that you're meeting your customers more, but what else, what other concrete steps are you taking? What kind of benchmarks will we be able to see in terms of how you're improving on these metrics, which I think are probably quite a large way to explaining the fall, the lack of profitability or the relative lack of profitability of the Mercedes-Benz organization versus maybe other benchmarks. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. I think the first one for Jochen and then Karin on Mercedes-Benz. Yeah. Thanks for your question. First of all, you said it rightfully and we said it also in the speech. In the first half year, we were really able to manage the semiconductor pretty well. We had a stronger profitability through the half year. And then after the summer break, really the semiconductor hit us hard. Overall, you have seen the numbers. We are still slightly above the 6% from a year-to-date perspective, but the Q3 was significantly lower through the volume. We'll not disclose these detailed numbers at that point of time, also as part of the spin-off, but you can think about a significant lower number for Q3. Okay. I can take the second question. The study that I was referring to both in May and in the presentation today, it's actually looking at three different parts of the business. Maybe I go through a little bit what we're doing in each of the categories. The first one is product, and I spoke about that. I think it's just to connect our engineers closer to our customers and to really make sure when we develop that we test with them and we loop what we're planning to do early on. I think a couple of good examples, eActros for sure, where we've been two years already working closely together. I mentioned also quickly the Actros F and Actros L. If I would use Actros L as an example, what we've done there is we've improved the driver comfort significantly and also reduced the noise in the cab. I think those are two things coming directly from customer feedback that we've been able to address in terms of product. Then in terms of sales, I think we're making progress. We still have a lot of work to do, to be honest. I think one thing that we're working very hard on right now as part of the split is our system support for the front line, where today we're sharing a lot of systems with the car side and where we're now first of all just getting ready for day one, so splitting up the systems, but also looking midterm at having much smoother processes supported by the IT systems and a larger degree of digitalization, which will make it easier for our salespeople to do less administration and have much more time being out with the customers. The third aspect is services. Also there, we're making progress. I would say that we still have some ways to go. We did have a quite good trend, for instance, in spare parts availability, but obviously with the current supply bottlenecks, that also affects the aftermarket. But we're working on it to do both short-term things and midterm things. Another part of the split will be that we now start to look at how to build up our own truck-dedicated parts logistics, which is also coming as part of the split and something we've done together with the car guys in the past. Would you say that you're satisfied you're rebuilding a much more of a service culture, which was, from your previous organization? That's something that's being redeveloped here at Mercedes as well. Yeah, I think I mean, I explained it a little bit in my presentation earlier on. For sure, we have a lot of potential in services, and we are addressing that. We're not done with that. I think you're never done, but I think we're making good progress. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you, Karin. Next in line is Henning Cosman from HSBC. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. Thanks for the presentation, everybody, and for all the additional detail. My question is partly to the first part of the session still, when Andreas, I believe, talked about the total cost of ownership parity for your clients, for the zero-emission vehicles in 2025 and 2027 respectively. I was curious if you were prepared to share a little bit your profitability expectations for yourself as well, when it comes to zero-emission vehicles. You have, of course, but aggressive profitability improvement targets, especially in Europe, and quite aggressive electrification targets at the same time. Sometimes on the car side, at least in a qualitative way, we get indications about margin parity. I was hoping you could share some details. You have a lot of moving parts, of course. At the same time, you're reducing the vertical integration on the internal combustion engine side. If you could please discuss profitability by powertrain technology a little bit. Do you see it peaking in 2025? I think that's the target year that you have attached to your midterm guidance. Do you see it peaking there and then it levels off again as you're sharply increasing the degree of electrification, or how should we think about all of that? Thank you very much. Thank you for the question. I think, Martin would- I will start with some basic answers, and then potentially Jochen and Andreas, you chime in. For me, the key issue is we want to make money with zero emission trucks as with combustion engine trucks. Yeah, there's absolutely no doubt, and there's no reason why that shouldn't be the key. However, when we talk about cost, parity is the most important one from our customers because nobody buys a truck because he wants to. Everyone buys a truck because he wants to earn money with it. The cost for them is cents per mile or cents per kilometer. That's the key question for them. The biggest intangible in that whole equation, whether it's 2025 or 2027, is the price and cost for energy and the price and cost for CO2. One thing is clear, our trucks will be more expensive, yes. That's not because our margins are higher, that's because the cost for the truck is higher. Fuel cell or battery pack is more expensive than today's engines. For the more detailed one, I pass on to you, potentially the pricing question and then, some more details about costing. Over to Andreas. Yeah. Thanks, Martin. First of all, short-term, and when we give guidance for 2021 and 2022, obviously given the relatively low volume on E at the moment, it doesn't play a major role. There it's not the point. When we talk about 2025, different picture. Obviously much higher share on zero emission trucks. That's baked into our business plan. As Martin rightfully said, there's no reason to assume that from our perspective, not from a customer's perspective, but from our perspective, the margins are similar. Might be a different composition between truck and aftersales, but overall same margins or even higher margins than today with a diesel truck. With that, there's no reason if the number of, or the penetration of the trucks are getting higher between 2025 and 2030, that the profitability is going down. Clear answer is, it's baked in our business plan, and we do not expect after 2025 any change on that. With that, probably, Andreas, I hand over to you. Yeah. Thanks, Jochen, Martin. Not much to add. Yeah, as you said, Martin, three important things as for TCO. Product costs. I would add product efficiency. Certainly cost or price of energy. As for product cost, yes, today, significantly above the conventional powertrain, but very aggressive targets moving forward. As for product cost and as for product efficiency, we are very confident. As for energy price, obviously, you see this varying over the global landscape, depending on the market, the legislation, the availability of energy. The 2025 is in reach, given those three factors in the equation, as for TCO, for some markets, for others, it will obviously take longer. To deal with this uncertainty, obviously, we will offer not only the best-in-class zero emission vehicles, but also still offer the best-in-class diesel vehicles. Yeah. Thanks, Andreas. To your last point there, if I can just follow up on the lesser degree of vertical integration and with your partnering on internal combustion engines. Do you anticipate that will go with, without a detrimental effect on profitability or even have an accretive effect on profitability? Yeah, Henning, another good question. We have well understood that in order to long-term differentiate from the competition in zero emission technology, we also need to be vertically integrated in the value chain as for zero emission technologies. We're using partners, yes, and that helps on the funding side, that helps also on the rapid ramp-up of know-how, but it doesn't mean that we will not vertically integrate. For the key components that are differentiating in the electric drivetrain, obviously, we are also starting a vertical integration. Thank you very much. Thank you, Henning. The next question is for George Galliers from Goldman. Yes. George Galliers from Goldman. Thank you for taking my question. The first question I had was for Karin, just with respect to the 4% improvement in return on sales. What I'm trying to understand is how front-end loaded could that potentially be, and how much could be achieved by 2023. If I look at the slide deck, you flagged EUR 280 million on personnel costs by the end of 2023, EUR 200 million of variable cost improvements already achieved, and EUR 100 million on used activities already in terms of improvement. In aggregate, this gets me to EUR 580 million or around 3.5% of the 4%. Does that sound sort of conceptually right to you, that this is fairly front-end loaded, and you will deliver the vast majority of the 4%, by the end of 2023? The second question I had was for Jochen on the financials. You note that you expect a significant increase in revenue for next year, though you're expecting the North American and European heavy duty markets to be flat. Can you just help us understand what's driving the revenue growth there? And then also for, some of us who are less familiar with Daimler's terminology, can you just define what significant and slight increases mean in percentage terms? Thank you. Karin, first one for you, and then, John and Jochen. Yep. I can start then. Yes, it is quite front-loaded. The EUR 280, we have concrete measures in place to hopefully make that happen by the end of 2022. In terms of going beyond that, hopefully we can find more. I think there's always more cost improvements to be found, both in terms of personnel costs and non-personnel costs. Go ahead. Yeah. Okay. Well, the second question was about revenue. You're right. We are saying the markets are flat, but also keep in mind there's still a range, even if it's flat. That's the one thing. The second thing is, this year especially, we are very much hit on the heavy duty side. So we expect a normalization in the mix, meaning stronger share on heavy duty, less on medium duty. It's not a general change, but due to the fact that we had this huge hit in 2021, it's a normalization. Then last but not least, and John talked about it earlier, we have the new product which we launched already last year on the vocational side. So we also see opportunities on the U.S. market, as well. If I may, before I hand over maybe John to you, on the specific numbers, how we define significant slide and so on, it depends on which KPI we are talking about. Therefore, I would ask Investor Relations to provide the information afterwards because it's really different KPI by KPI. Yeah. Jochen, thank you. Again, I would only piggyback on what you said. The vocational launch of the 47X and 49X has been tremendous. Demand from customers is strong, acceptance has been strong. They're very happy with the product. We're anticipating the Biden infrastructure package to have a pretty significant increase in the overall vocational market over some period of time, and we want to participate in that. We feel our timing is very strong for that. I'll probably just leave it there. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Next in line is Jose Asumendi from JP Morgan. Hey, thanks very much. Jose from JP Morgan. Just a couple of follow-ups, please, maybe for Karin. Karin, can you please talk a little bit more around the non-personal cost reduction program within the 4% margin booster that you have for Mercedes-Benz Trucks? Can you give us some examples of that? And also, can you speak a little bit about how does it work in practical terms to increase the share of revenues of aftermarket and service specifically in Europe? Yeah, those two items. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. About the non-personnel costs, to be honest, it's not three huge things that we're doing, but it's a couple of hundred different things that we're doing to address non-personnel costs. It's also this kind of costs where if everyone does a little bit and then you add it up, like really you get a bit of a really quite big effect on the bottom line. I would say it's like the normal kind of, not boring, but it's the normal costs like traveling, like consultants and how can we work more efficiently, do more things digital, what can we do with our own muscles rather than taking in expensive consultants. It's basically all of that stuff and having the same view on what's reasonable all across the company and challenging each other. I think that also just asking the questions, we see actually a different kind of mindset when it comes to getting costs down. The second one about services. Yeah, a lot of work has started, as I mentioned, both in terms of how we do parts pricing. We've implemented a program where we use analytics to do parts pricing in a much more intelligent way, so that gives some effect. Obviously, a very important KPI is contract penetration, so service contract penetration, especially on kind of the bigger contracts like Mercedes-Benz Uptime and the complete contracts. That's also something to just follow that up and to measure that on the highest level gives it a lot more emphasis. Of course, also to look at I mean, it's a little bit different between different markets, what we need to do to drive contract penetration, but it might be targeting a specific segment. In other markets, it might be training our dealers better on how to sell contracts or incentives to make them more keen on looking at that part of the business. It's a lot of things that we're doing, and we see the first kind of evidence that it's moving in the right direction. That's super helpful. Maybe just one quick follow-up for you, Karin and Martin. Do you have any products in any regions that you're not happy with that you want to basically take out because they're not contributing to margins and they might be there for historical reasons, but, you know, you're gonna exit at some point? Well, I mentioned in my speech, I mean, we've looked at sort of our base models, and we've already reduced significantly on the low. I mean, we had actually some models that we hadn't sold for a few years. Those were quite easy to take out. I would say, in general, just like some of my colleagues stated, that every region has to deliver. Of course, we're now much more closely following each product line, and also each product line has to deliver. That's something we're looking at, and maybe I come back in the future, but for now we're not stopping any. There's no big announcements today on that. Fantastic. Thank you. Next in line is Frank Biller from LBBW. Yes. Hello. Good afternoon. Frank Biller, LBBW. Just two questions. The one is again on TCO and absolute profit per truck for electric trucks and also fuel cell trucks. Am I right? Assuming a much higher price and the same margin level, when selling a new vehicle implies a much higher profit and adding lower maintenance, new services, longer lifetime of profit pool here. All in all, that should be a much higher absolute profit per electrified truck. Is that right? That's the first question. The second one is on financial services. Here, just to make it clear, net liquidity after the spin-off should be in the range of EUR 5 billion, you said, and here with three waves. Wave one, the first portfolio, then the second, and then third coming from 2023 onwards. That means a capital increase of half a billion EUR in 2022, and EUR 1 billion in 2023, roundabout. My question here is, the net liquidity should go down then for Daimler Truck. Is that right, industrial business? The other thing is, what happens to a customer financing a truck in Germany? Is the truck then in the portfolio of Daimler AG, or is it already in the Daimler Truck business, when financed in 2022, for example? Thank you for those questions. I think, Martin will start, then Jochen and, Stefan on the specific financial services. Yeah, Mr. Biller, the first one is a pretty complex question. There's a lot of forward-looking issues. There's a lot of advantages in the new world, you know. You've seen it in all of the presentation. I will hand it further on then to John to give it potential North American flavor, so we can look from a different side to it. You have seen it in Till Oberwörder's presentation about buses, where we talk about eConsulting. You've seen it in Asia when we talk about, you know, we have a far more closer to connectivity contact to the customers, how they drive and ride their electric trucks. I have a feeling electric trucks will stay much longer with the first time buyer. They'll be much longer in our reach. We might not do so much in the first years in service, but on a longer period of time, we'll find. There's a lot of things where I would say which we develop over the time, but in general, we don't put in our planning that there will be a bigger drop in profitability. John, potentially you in North America, you do a lot on that with tools with customers in the discussion. Give it a little bit of a North American flavor to it. Yeah. Certainly on the service front, we're very active in that right now. Certainly we're trying to get to the 50% of all revenue by 2030 target that we've established for ourselves. We're actively moving in that direction. We're doing things on the connectivity area. We just had an announcement about a partnership with Platform Science, which is basically, if you wanna think of it as an iPad in the dash, where you can have apps, and then it takes the data from the truck, and it allows the driver a better experience. It allows the fleet to download their software to the truck. For just one example, we're doing things like that with our financial services colleagues. We have a pay-by-mile lease type of product. We're very active in all aspects of trying to grow our service business. Even on, call it the basic blocking and tackling of establishing more roofs. We're actively managing our dealer network so that they're growing the amount of space and technicians and trying to get vehicles out on the road on a 24-hour turnaround basis. So again, just trying to do anything we can to make a service experience with us significantly better than our competitors. I guess maybe now turn it to Stefan. Or Jochen, maybe. I will take the net industrial liquidity question, then I hand it over to Stefan. Thanks for the question, but I think there's a misunderstanding. When I mentioned earlier in the first Q&A session that we have capital protections planned for ramping up our financial services business, I was not referring only to 2022, but to the full ramp up until the financial service business is self-funded. So this roughly EUR half a billion you mentioned, it's not for 2022, but it's the overall ramp up. With that, Stefan, I will hand over to you. Thank you, Jochen. Maybe I can take that, Frank. Thank you for that question. It's right. For us, it was very important from the beginning that we have a very solid funding structure, and that starts with the equity in the first place, which gave us the opportunity as well to have a solid investment grade rating. We are striving and we are planning for 9% equity overall. There will be sufficient equity from the beginning as well for ramping up what you said in wave two next year and the wave three when it comes to Germany and France from 2023 onwards. In that respect, this is a slow move up. In that respect, we need some more equity in this mid-three-digit EUR million range until 2025, we have sufficient profitability to steam our growth on our own for the future, but as well have enough dividends and cash paid back to our ultimate shareholder, Daimler Truck. Thank you, Stefan. For the new business, it's all There was a question in Germany. Daimler Truck? There was a question in Germany. The old one to Daimler AG award. Yes. Stefan. Yes. The dividend which we ultimately are generating, we are moving up to Daimler Truck AG and Daimler Truck Holding AG, so to the industrial side, and they will show that up then at the end in the net industrial liquidity. That is right. You had one other question, Frank. I forgot this. That is about Germany. As said, Germany is then our third wave. We are planning to start operations in Germany in 2023 from scratch. That means we are very much focused that our team it will be then transferred in 2023, taking over operations. That means as well that next year the underwriting and the portfolio and the business will be still done by Daimler Mobility. Thanks a lot. Yeah. That's clear. Thank you. Next in line is Michael Jacks from Bank of America. Hi. Michael Jacks from Bank of America. Thanks for taking my questions. I think mine are probably best directed towards Cole and Jochen. The first one is around Trucks Asia. Could you share with us what the quantum of abnormal and pre-buy benefits was in this business year to date? And what a more normalized adjusted EBIT margin run rate might look like going into 2022? That's the first question. And then the second question, you mentioned record high order backlogs, which I guess suggests the same for delivery lead times. Are you concerned at all by recent inflation trends in labor, energy, and freight costs and the potential mismatch with prices of truck orders that were booked earlier in Q3? Or is this already catered for in your guidance? Thanks. Well, I could start on this one. Well, on a target or the margin on the Asian business, I think I said it in the speech already. We have a strong margin until September. We included, or that is included, an effect in China. If you take that out, I also mentioned that you can see as a run rate, the current run rate of 5% of our business. That's the one for 2021. For 2022, we do not give guidance on segment level at that point of time. Bear with us. We will do that latest in our annual press conference for this year then in 2022. I could also take the question on high order backlog. Well, first of all, it's absolutely right. We have not only high order backlog, but we also have a very good structure in the order backlog. It's very important to mention it's not that it was one shot, very high order intake, and then we have lower number. It's a constant flow of order intake. That means even today, our customer will also take into consideration what it means with inflation and other effects, which can have an impact on transport volume overall. It's still very high from an order inflow, so we have no concerns on that side. The other one, this is always important if you have a high order backlog, and in times when the supply chain is constrained, we are looking very carefully on move-outs, and we look very carefully on cancellations. At the moment, there's nothing specific to mention. We really believe this order backlog is very rock solid. For our guidance in 2022, that was the last question. Obviously, demand is much higher than supply in 2021. It's hard to predict what already happens in 2022. We expect also severe impact of semiconductor shortage in 2022, and we have baked that into our business plan. Thanks. Perhaps just one last follow-up on that. Also relating to the question on your guidance for significant revenue growth increase on a flat heavy truck market. I'm surprised that pricing wasn't mentioned as the main contributing factor here. Is there something I'm missing perhaps? No. It's pricing is a big, big topic. It was a good topic in 2021, and it will be a strong one in 2022 as well. If you look on the magnitude of impact on the revenue, the structural effect, especially on the heavy-duty side, is a bigger impact than in pricing. That does not take anything away that we also go for higher prices in 2022. That's also part of the business plan, also baked in. That's very clear. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Next question is for Himanshu Agarwal from Jefferies. Hi. Himanshu from Jefferies. Thanks for taking my questions. First one, I just wanted to come back to the market outlook for heavy-duty trucks. Despite strong demand, you're talking about next year to be flat versus 2021, while more of your peers are talking about mid to high single-digit growth including IHS. I was just wondering if you could give a bit more color on that. Secondly, I wanted to talk about China. You have chosen to localize the production with your JV partner in China while your peers have chosen to set up greenfield operations. Could you talk about your rationale for choosing one over the other? Also, I think you mentioned in your comments that you plan to use China as a global sourcing hub. Does that mean you intend to export trucks from China to the other markets? Those trucks will be in your JV and not in your core group. Lastly, just a quick one on Mercedes-Benz. I see that your 2019 margin was quite low versus 2018 on broadly similar revenue. Was there any one-offs in 2019? Basically, what impacted the low 2019 margins? Thank you. I think Jochen will start. No, Karin. Karin, and then Karin for you. Karin start. I can start. Okay, Karin. Honestly, since I wasn't there in 2019, I think I hand that question back to Jochen, what one-timers there might have been. Yeah. You know, we have the general policy. If there are significant one-timers, we disclose them. There were restructuring also in 2019, but as a disclosed item, we are talking here always about ongoing or adjusted numbers. There was nothing extraordinary in 2019 on the Mercedes side. Go ahead. Please go ahead. Sorry. Please go ahead. No, on the second question you raised about China, yes, we have decided to continue our path with our joint venture partner. As you are aware of, we have been in the joint venture with our partner, Foton, since 2012. Bear in mind since then, we have already put together more than 900,000 units into the market in customer hands. We have already a strong track record in that joint venture. Going forward, we do see significant growth opportunities from that market, as China has been growing into the largest truck market in the world. With the solid GDP development, we see continuous growth there. We feel confident with our setup. We have already a big number of vehicles in the market. With the next level, we are bringing the Actros to China. Here, we can see there is an excellent blend of our proven technology from the Actros. At the same time, we leverage on our local footprint with the joint venture partner. That means basically, we are bringing proven technology to enter this advanced heavy duty truck segment by leveraging our cost competitive local production. From that point of view, we feel that we have a very strong base with our joint venture partner, good network, and this makes us confident to continue on this path. Second part of the question on the exports, I think, we are focusing now really to bring the truck to the market made in China for China. This is really the focus. If later on we see opportunities for other markets, we are ready to do so, and we are flexible to do so, even in the joint venture structure. Bear also in mind, there are not only finished goods to be exported. We see also very attractive opportunities for leveraging the supply base for our network. All in all, we feel confident with a solid footprint in the country to have a central part of the success of our strategy. Potentially, I might add to that strategically, and we have it in our contracts. Every Mercedes-Benz truck we export from China will certainly be a Daimler Truck AG truck and not a joint venture truck. It will be then part of the Mercedes-Benz truck route. We have I think we have the one question open about the markets. Let me say one thing in general, and then potentially Karin Rådström can add about her expectations for the European market. 2022 is potentially the most craziest year I have in my long time in trucking. From the demand, it would be the absolute record year, especially in North America, especially in Europe. It's not the demand that will define the market, it's the supply. Every chip we get will go in a truck and will be sold. Every chip we are missing won't go in a truck. Therefore, the ultimate size of the market is determined by the amount of supply in our industry. Not just for us, but for our competitors as well. Therefore, the market is pretty difficult to predict. We are prepared to really follow any market, yeah, if we have the supplies. Karin, potentially give a flavor of the European market. I think you answered it very well, so I don't have anything to add. Okay. A lot of uncertainty. We prepare for different scenarios. Your customers are really pushing hard to get there. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's a super tough situation now because, I guess, like all the regions, we're not delivering on the promise we made to our customers. Sometimes we can't give as clear information as we would like, so we try to handle that. We do see that this will carry over into 2022, and we, as you say, really fight for every truck and for every chip. We continue doing that, and we continue try to be super agile in our processes to adapt to different scenarios that could happen during next year. Thank you. Okay, thank- Next in line would be Daniel Schwarz from Stifel. Yes. Thank you very much. I had a follow-up question for Jochen Goetz on the EBIT margin guidance for 2022. When the mix contributes much to revenues in a flat market, and pricing is great, and the cost savings are kicking in already, partially in 2022, is a one percentage point increase in the adjusted EBIT margin? Very conservative, or could you say what the offsetting factors are? The other question would be to Karin Rådström. You explained that you will reduce complexity in the number of variants that you offer. You're coming from Scania, and I thought that the key strength of Scania is to be able to offer very customized products to the client. But Mercedes-Benz Trucks, maybe it's a bit much, too much, of a commodity. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? Okay, let me start with the guidance for 2022. I think it was said several times, 2022 is on the one hand a strong year from a demand perspective. On the other hand, there's still a lot of uncertainty regarding the supply chain. When we prepared our guidance, we have taken into consideration both things. And we obviously included a kind of a conservative approach when it comes to full supply to our customers. That's number one. Number two, you're right, pricing is a big issue, and we have that also baked into the plan and the guidance. But on the other hand, also take into consideration that we see at the moment, and we expect that it continue, a strong increase in raw material as well. There's also uncertainty, as always with raw material, but that's also part of the planning. Therefore, we think the guidance of 7%-9% is a realistic but ambitious guidance for the year 2022. With that, over to Karin. Yes. I would actually say that Mercedes-Benz Trucks has the most versatile and wide range of products in the market, and catering definitely to customer needs. With that being said, of course, there is always a balance in having a lot of variance and a lot of flexibility with complexity and being efficient. I think that balance maybe in the past was a little bit too far over here. We move it back over here by reducing the number of base model or Baumuster. But I still think we will have a really good solid offering to our customers. Thank you, Karin. Okay. Thank you. I think now we have time for one last question, and this goes to Kai Müller from Barclays. Hi, thank you very much for taking that question still. It's just a pretty general question on the guidance. When we talk about 2021 on your slide 99, the revenue and EBIT numbers, are they all referring just to the industrial business, or does it include already something for the FinCO? And then also to understand the difference between the adjusted EBIT and the reported EBIT. I understand it, of course, includes the uplift from the Volvo JV, but if I understand, that was only EUR 600 million. Where is the difference from? And then lastly, also on that guidance, when I do the adjusted return on sales 6%-8%, but I look at your range that you suggest in terms of absolute numbers, they don't seem to fully match up. What is the reason for that? First of all, thanks for your question. When we look on the numbers, EBIT numbers, revenue numbers, that's all in, that's a group number. When we talk about the 6%-8% with respect to 7%-9%, that's then the guidance for the industrial business, just to make that clear. We talk about second question, if I understood you right, was the question what is in the adjusted items. There are two adjusted items. One is an effect in restructuring. We always said that it's a low figure, double-digit million EUR of restructuring ongoing in Europe and Brazil and the Bus. You're absolutely right, the other part is the joint venture. There is a big difference. You're referring to the EUR 600 million, which was right in an old logic, where we basically split the effect between PACCAR and Daimler Truck. As part of the spin-off, we report all the numbers in a way like it would always be part of Daimler Truck in the past, and with that, it's no longer the 50%, but it's 100%. On the guidance for this year, well, there's a lot of uncertainty, also short-term, we talked about it. Therefore, we give a broader range on the guidance, because of the semiconductor, and that's the reason why we have this broad range. That also gives broader ranges on EBIT and on ROAS than we normally would do, at that point of the year. Perfect. Could you give us an indication how much then your revenues are from the FinCO, just so we know what we should apply the 6%-8% to an industrial revenue line that you expect? It's for 2021, and we talked about it earlier, we are in a ramp-up phase, so it's by far not the revenue we expect in the full ramp-up. For this year, it will be a range of EUR 1 billion-EUR 1.5 billion revenue. Okay. We would subtract that from the group revenue to get to the industrial Exactly. 6-8 for. Okay. Fantastic. Very clear. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for virtually being with us today, and thank you for your questions. We hope you enjoyed the Daimler Truck Capital Market Day. Also, a big thank you to the management team for the presentations and for answering all of these questions. Now Investor Relations remains at your disposal to answer any further questions you might have. We look forward to talk to you soon. Martin, now over to you with some final remarks. Yeah. Also, a very big thank you from my side and the entire Daimler Truck Management Team for being with us today here, out there on the screens. I really enjoyed today's event, and I hope you did so, too. It is important to us to share all the information you need firsthand to fully understand our company. We also want to share our enthusiasm, because at Daimler Trucks, we are truly excited about our road ahead. We can't not wait to take our future in our own hands and to show to the world what we are capable of. We are very much looking forward to our public listing in December, and we are all in to deliver on what we showed you today. With that, I would like to say goodbye for now. We really value the interaction with you. Your feedback helps us to further move in the right direction. Thanks a lot for today, and talk to you again soon. Goodbye.