Morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Munich Re Earnings Outlook 2024 call. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing star and one. Press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. It'll be my pleasure to turn the conference over to Christian Becker-Hussong. Please go ahead, sir. Yeah, thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our call on our 2024 earnings outlook. Procedure is the usual one. I will, in a second, hand it over to Christoph. He will start and kick off the call with his opening remarks. Afterwards, we will go right into Q&A and should have plenty of time to answer all your questions. So, Christoph, please. Yeah, thank you, Christian. Good morning, everybody, also from my side. I promise for the last time this year. And as Christian just said, I'll just start with a few opening remarks, very brief ones today, and then we'll go right into Q&A. I think what you saw today is that a continuously strong underlying development in all segments allowed us to announce another profitability increase. Just back in November, you remember that at our Q3 reporting, we lifted our guidance already to EUR 4.5 billion, and now we are confident to further improve the results, allowing us to communicate a EUR 5 billion net result for 2024. Again, as in 2023, all segments are expected to contribute nicely to this ambition. We continue to benefit from our well-diversified portfolio, insurance business, and investment portfolio alike. Let's start with the primary business. ERGO continues to deliver on its ambition, and ERGO has been steadily growing its earnings contribution year- by- year for some years already. We expect a continuation of the strong operating earnings trend and therefore, again, moderately but consistently higher net earnings. The 2024 outlook, increasing from EUR 0.7 billion to EUR 0.8 billion, confirms that steady path. In reinsurance, we expect the market environment to remain favorable, manifested in the anticipated increase in insurance revenue from EUR 38 billion to EUR 39 billion, and then again, materially higher net result outlook of EUR 4.2 billion. In Life Re, as you know, IFRS 17 led to a better visibility of the value creation of the business. The strong underlying performance of Life Re and the pleasing new business development, both reflected in the recently updated outlook for 2023, are expected to continue. And given the earnings recognition pattern in IFRS 17, this should translate into a moderate but sustainable increase of IFRS results, and it is reflected in the increase of the total technical result outlook from EUR 1.4 billion to EUR 1.45 billion. In P&C Re, we expect the combined ratio to materially improve from around 86% underlying in 2023 to around 82% in 2024. This improvement is partly driven by the fact that we no longer expect to offset part of the discounting impact by building up additional reserve prudency as we did in 2023. The other driver for a better combined ratio is obviously a further operating improvement in the current favorable market environment. The January renewals are just ongoing, as you know, and we continue to be optimistic about the outcome. We are confident to take full advantage of the market opportunities that play to our strength and being able to deploy the full capacity that is in demand at risk-return, adequate prices, and terms and conditions. One additional remark on the P&C Re segment result. In 2023, it enjoyed some tailwind from the interest rate-related benefit on technical reserves. Broadly speaking, higher discounting versus, for the time being, lower unwind in the insurance finance income and expenses, IFIE. This benefit will be significantly smaller in 2024, and in the context of our overall result, it will be immaterial. In a nutshell, all those technical effects we have been discussing so much during this year, all of them should be insignificant in 2024, at least if interest rates don't change substantially. Along with the strength of our insurance business, the investment income is expected to increase as well, as the higher reinvestment rates will more and more translate into higher running yields. Some realized losses will likely remain unavoidable due to normal portfolio turnover, also in 2024. And as a result, we expect the group ROI to increase to above 2.8%. Thus, all in all, the 2024 outlook is expected to very nicely support our 2025 ambition, based on a strong capitalization, an attractive return on equity, and continued EPS and DPS growth. As usual, we intend to inform you about our capital management proposals in February. All forecasts and targets are subject to increased uncertainties from various sources, augmented by the fact that IFRS 9 and IFRS 17 are inherently more volatile than old regimes. Our steering approach remains unchanged. We strive for a continuously growing earnings trajectory and to the extent possible, given our business model, dampened volatility. With that, I hand it back to Christian, but not before already now wishing you and yours a happy holiday season and all the best in the coming year. Thank you, Christoph. We can go directly into Q&A. My usual reminder, please, not more than two questions each, and please feel free to go ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we'll begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Our first question today is from Andrew Ritchie from Autonomous. Please go ahead. Oh, hi there. Good morning. Thanks for holding this call. I wonder if you could just talk through a bit more the sensitivity of the outlook to interest rate moves. Christoph, obviously, that's been topical given the moves we've seen recently. I get the assumed spread between IFIE and service result is more or less neutral. I suppose I'm trying to think, to the extent that would go negative, do you feel you have buffers or flexibility to offset? So that would be my first question. Second question is sort of related to that, actually. I'm just curious, I mean, the incoming I have from investors this morning is, has Munich really been at the Christmas wine a bit too early? This seems, you know, pretty punchy earnings target relative to history. Maybe just outline at a headline level, where some of the buffers would be still to protect it in the event of, you know, a more challenging year. Thank you, Andrew. Yes. So interest sensitivity. Let's start with a more technical aspect of the question. So the question about this, this difference between discount and IFIE. And indeed, the support we have from that difference is significantly smaller than what we had either in 2023 or even more in 2022. So for 2024, it's very small. It's still positive. So it's not completely gone. But indeed, with as soon as interest rates get smaller, also the support will be smaller and eventually might be really zero or even turn sign. We don't know that. It really depends on how the interest rates continue to develop, by the way, in various currencies. So we are not only depending on the Euro space, but at least the US dollar is equally relevant. So therefore, already in that regard, there are some uncertainties in the plan when it comes to interest rate development, but of course, there are also others. If you just think about the investment result, for example, as mentioned in my introductory remarks, I mean, due to normal portfolio turnover, we expect losses to be realized. So no overlay as we did in 2023 for results steering, but just the normal activity our portfolio managers are conducting necessarily leads to the realization of losses, as long as you do have unrealized losses. Now, these unrealized losses will be smaller if interest rates go down. So in a sense, that would even support short-term the result if you realize less losses, just as we don't steer it, it just happens with normal portfolio activity. So therefore, I think in a nutshell, my answer would be the interest rate sensitivity alone is clearly digestible. If you do not have jumps like, you know, 200 basis points up or down, or so very extreme changes. And on top of that, we should not look at a single sensitivity in isolation, because as you know, all these markets are interrelated and there is no interest rate movement without a related equities movement, and you have the equity markets and the commodity and other markets all affecting us as well. So what we did in the planning process is we looked at a variety of sensitivities and felt that our EUR 5 billion target is a reasonable assumption, a reasonable plan number, given, of course, all the possible ups and downs you might have from changing market parameters. So this includes interest rates as well as all the other parameters as well. Now, buffers. Indeed, I was mentioning that our intention is to dampen volatility as much as we can. Buffers, where are they? Obviously, we can use our excess reserves levels, in case, in particular, on the technical side, something would develop more volatile than what we would have expected. There are some buffers. We do have, yeah, of course, on the investment side, some liberty how much losses to realize or even realizing some gains, if there are some, and we still do have some. So there are certain room to maneuver. And that, that's already pretty much it, if you ask me. So I think it's less than that. This is also what I meant when I said that IFRS 9 and 17 is inherently more volatile than the old regime. Because, I mean, other than those items, we do not have so many items where we can really influence them than the result. But already those give us plenty of space. So, and again, the result steering or generally, the earnings steering approaches is unchanged. Great. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Tryfonas Spyrou from Spiral. Please go ahead with your question. Hi, good morning, and thank you for the presentation and call. I had a question on the P&C combined ratio. My understanding is that there's not much benefit taken for the expected sort of renewals, given that these are under sort of negotiations at the moment. So would you look to update us on the combined ratio next year, or you won't look to change that potentially? And I guess, related to that more broadly, should we expect, given the combined ratio now includes a significant element of discounting, should we expect an annual target of the combined ratio every year now as a more sort of general observation? And the second one is just really on P&C Germany. I just wanted to understand a little bit more on what's driving that significant sort of 2-point improvement on the Combined Ratio year-on-year. That'll be very interesting. Thank you. Sure. Yeah. So indeed, the Combined Ratios depend on a number of assumptions which you have to take in the planning process. Obviously, one of those is how the renewals are going. Another assumption would be the interest rate level, to give another very relevant assumption out here. The assumption in the 82 of discount is 8%, roughly. And for the renewal, the assumption is that we are, as I said, we are very optimistic for the renewal. But yeah, I mean, at this stage, we cannot just not know what precisely the outcome of the 1/1 renewal will be. But if I look at the 8% discount assumption, which is also quite uncertain at this point in time, also the renewal outcome is uncertain. So therefore, what we did is like always what you do in planning. You have different scenarios. You look at what the potential outcome could be, and you find out what is your best estimate, having in mind also, what is happening in other businesses. You know, not all our businesses are renewal and are renewing in one-one. And we have the primary business as well in our reinsurance segment. So there's many levers. So you look at all of them, and you come up with what your best estimate is. And this is how we came up with the 82%. To your question, if going forward, guidance will depend on interest rate levels? Yes, of course, it will. So if interest rates would change drastically, of course, that would have an impact on our combined ratio. And then again, I mean, as long as the changes are not too significant, we might be able to compensate, to use some of the buffers or fill up buffers, depending on in which direction it goes. And if just deviations are too big, then obviously the volatility will have to be shown also in our PNL. But so far so good. I think the 82 is clearly best estimate. I think what I should mention, though, is, I mean, if I remind all of you to what we did a year ago. A year ago, when we, for the first time, gave out a guidance, in the IFRS 17 regime, the clear commentary was that that was a conservative guidance, a particularly conservative one, given that the new regime was there. And then we were immediately outperforming the guidance, if you remember. Now from a more general remark, this time, it's not that particularly cautious guidance anymore. So the EUR 5 billion target now is, I would say, back to the normal degree approach, how we set targets. But we didn't add an additional level of prudence on top of what we usually did in the past, because we are now more familiar with IFRS 17. Everybody's used to it. So, as much as volatility still is higher than before, we thought it wouldn't make sense anymore to just put up additional buffers in the guidance. So it's something what we would call a best estimate. But I think outside observers sometimes would even regard it as a conservative best estimate. But I would say it's our best estimate. And similarly, on the ERGO P&C Germany side, also there, the Combined Ratio just reflects what we think operationally is possible, looking at pricing, volume, and also cost planning going forward. So all the relevant levers, and then coming up with the best estimate. So it's pretty similar. So the methodology is anyway the same, and the planning approach is consistent throughout our group, so nothing further to comment here. That's very helpful. Thank you. The next question comes from Vinit Malhotra for Mediobanca. Please go ahead. Yes, good afternoon. Good morning, also. It tells me about the holiday season. So, my two questions, first one is, you know, the slight change in the I wouldn't, I shouldn't say reserving approach, because obviously it's not changed, but the whole not taking in the tailwind, which you said is going to be smaller, but still there, but not taking that tailwind. I'm just curious to hear a little bit about this change because I think one of the positives we were thinking during the year was, you know, the fact that you were doing that, and now you're stopping doing that. So, I can see that the strength of reserves has been built could be one rationale, but I'm just curious to hear your thoughts, because also, even now, you know, there are some uncertainty on inflation, on cash, on casualty, et cetera. So just curious, quality and climate change. So just curious about your approach. And also, second, could you comment a little bit about how the Q4 is shaping up, or in 2023, are you likely to exceed that EUR 4.5 billion? Because now we are almost done with the quarter, and I was thinking there might be some commentary on that. Thank you very much. Yeah, good morning, Vinit. Thank you for the question. First of all, let me remind you a little bit of our general reserving approach. What we always do and did for many years already is that we choose the initial loss picks in a very conservative way in order to be able to enjoy a positive run-off and once the business or the claims are fully settled, sometimes many years later. And this leads to the guidance for this year, which, where we had 5% reserve run-off as a guidance. In the past, it has been 4%, but the approach was always the same. The initial loss pick, very conservative, and then we enjoy the run-off. And this has been consistent for a long time. On top of that, only this year, we decided to increase the prudency additionally, because we had this higher discount benefit in reality versus our initial guidance, our initial plan. We had 8%, roughly on average, 8%-9% discount in reality, while in the plan, we had 5%. So you could say 3% difference was higher than expected or higher than assumed in the outlook. So we took the opportunity to even more, build even, build up even more buffer, or at least over the first three quarters. And, and to, you know, outside of the general reserving strategy, increase the prudency even further. Now, there was never really a requirement to do so. So neither inflation, nor business development, nor climate change, nor whatever other reason you could think about, really made it necessary for us to increase the prudence by this additional, additional 3% discount. We just did it because the opportunity felt right and because in the context of our results-steering approach, we thought a gradually increasing earnings trajectory would make a lot of sense for us. So dampen the result, increase the prudence even further on top of what we did traditionally, but really meant as a one-off during this year, and at least during the first three quarters. So I, I do not even know what we are going to do for Q4. It's too early to say. So, but, but one-offish. And now the question is: why do we not continue with this one-offish kind of additional prudence in our reserves? Well, that answer is very simple. There's a natural limitation, how prudent you can be in your reserving. And even talking about the best estimate range and always striving to be at the upper end of the best estimate range and maybe stretching even the range to be even higher. There's I mean, at some point there is a natural limitation, and you just cannot go any higher. And therefore, we thought, let's go back to the usual conservative practice, which we have anyway. So initial loss picks, very conservative, enjoy the run-off later, but no additional conservative overlay because it's just not needed and our reserves, they are just full. Sure. The next question comes from Kamran Hossain from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Two questions for me. The first one is on the life and health guidance. I've seen the technical result, kind of increasing slightly from last year's target, I guess, at a nine-month stage. Are there any, well, I guess, there's been a lot of discussion about how the P&C develops. When we look forward on life and health beyond next year, are there any. Well, should, you know, how should we think about the factors that might influence that number? Or is the kind of 1.45, like, a new baseline for you to go from? Or, you know, if we get really large kind of interest rate reductions, risk-free rate reductions, will that number come down a lot? The second question is, looking at the impact of, like, market moves, or kind of impairments. There was a very high-profile kind of issue in the press earlier this week where you were called out. Should we expect any impact from that? Hopefully, you know what I'm talking about, Signa. Should we expect any impact, and will there be any impact, if there is in this year or in 2024? Thank you. Yeah, thank you. So let's start with life and health. So as you know, our life and health business more or less contains two parts. One is the part we account for according to IFRS 17, and then we have the IFRS 9 business. The IFRS 17 business, you know, already the way the results are derived in IFRS 17 leads to a very stable result pattern. So you have a CSM, you transfer the CSM into the bottom line, and then very steadily the result is being delivered. So that, that's very stable. On top of that, we have the IFRS 9 business, which is a little bit more volatile. Interest rate effects could affect that, for example, also currency effects could have a bigger impact on that. And generally, the duration of that business is a little bit smaller. So there, a higher volatility is happening. Now, the outlook, basically, yes, starts from the 1.4 baseline, which is the best estimate as a starting point. And then we increase it a little bit because we think that the new business we are writing in either of those two businesses will able to add a little bit of additional earnings steadily, because you know, the CSM will then again be released over a long time steadily, but a little bit on top of that. So showing that we are able to grow our book and have higher earnings going forward. And then there will be some volatility, I'm sure, around that, but more coming from the IFRS 9 business. And yeah, let's see. I mean, the growth, maybe to comment further on that. Also, in the past, in IFRS 4, we showed some additional earnings every single year. So that pattern is pretty similar. But maybe the difference is that the relative portion of new business is a little bit smaller in the context of the very high CSM release you have anyway, already. So as the in-force contribution has gone higher, and so the CSM is reduced every year quite a bit, you need more new business to compensate for that effect. So this is why maybe in relative terms, if you look at the +EUR 50 million we are showing in the context of the EUR 1.4 billion, maybe optically, looks a little bit smaller than the increases we have been showing in the past in the context of IFRS 4. But the reason really is that IFRS 17 is showing a higher portion of the profits already earlier, so already now, not only in the future, which makes it harder in the context to put a lot on top of that. So that's maybe in relative terms, the difference here. But other than that, it's just adding new business. You have some runoff in the business, and then there will be some volatility, I'm sure, in the IFRS 9 business. The question on Signa Holdings, I think if you were able to read in the press, we have some investments in that segment and with that counterpart. At this point, I wouldn't expect any significant impact from that. We are only having covered portfolios there. And as far as we understand the situation, we are certain that the cover we have, so the real estate behind and the valuations behind that, would protect us. Thanks very much. Our next question is from Ivan Bokhmat from Barclays. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thank you very much. I was wondering if I could ask you about the property catastrophe assumptions that you have in your budget for 2024. Maybe, firstly, could you share some color on the size and just how profitable that book has been this year, you know, in broad terms, as some of your peers have already highlighted. And maybe whether you think that the returns could be quite sustainable now with the changes to the attachment points and terms that you have achieved in 2023. And related to that, maybe you could talk in broad terms about the cat budget. Thank you. Sure. So the cat business generally always has been a profitable business for us. Only not in each and every single year, because it doesn't make sense to look at that business from a single year's perspective, because if you're hit by a big event, eventually this big event can wipe out your profits in that segment immediately. But if you look at a business in a 5- or 10-year time horizon, it always profits. It's always profitable. We do have here a diversification effect across the various geographies, but also diversification in time. So if you have big losses in one year, you earn them back later on, or you did earn them before. So long term, it's a profitable business anyway. Now, in this particular year, until Q3, we were slightly below the budgets when it comes to large losses, generally. So therefore, this year has been, for us, I would say, in line with expectation. Also, the losses we saw were a little bit different than the year before, but of course, obviously all in line with the models. If you remember 2022, with the big Hurricane Ian, we had one very significant event, very much, yeah, dominating the large loss statistics. While this year it was more like a number of mid-sized events, which just added up, still with the, you know, overall, then, a significant loss amount. So significant events this year have been, for example, as you know, the Turkish earthquake for us, some New Zealand events we had in the first quarter. We had quite a few losses from mid-sized events around thunderstorms, tornadoes, these kind of things globally. So it's just adding up. For Q4, it's too early to talk about it, really. We will do that in February with our year-end results. So I will not comment on Q4 at this point. But generally, I think the pattern we saw until Q3, why should it be so much different than in the fourth quarter? It's only one quarter left, so the year very much is anyway defined by the first three quarters already. So therefore, I would not expect that year to be significantly, neither below nor significantly above the entire budget, right? Because it's just after three months, we were relatively close to budget, so why should it deviate so much? If not, a very big event would still hit us. And this is the big disclaimer in our business you always have to make. I mean, the year is only over once it's over, and if a big event hits you in the last day before a new year, it's still the old year, and you might be forced to pay significant claims. And this is also one of the reasons I'm not able to comment on Q4 yet, because we are cautious. We learned our lessons in the past, where here and there, we had big events, even after Christmas in the last 20, 30 years. So we wouldn't comment any earlier than once the year really is over. The budget for next year, I cannot tell you in detail yet, because the way it works is that we do the one renewal, and then once we know our book in detail after the renewal, we do the statistical calculation, which then will derive the amount of basic losses versus large losses we have to expect next year. And we can't do that before the renewal is not over. I can only tell you what I would assume as an outcome from that exercise. There, my assumption, but it's only really my personal assumption, would be that it would be more or less in line what we had this year. But more or less in line could easily mean one or one percentage point up or down, or maybe even two. But ballpark, I wouldn't expect it to change significantly. I mean, our book generally has been stable over many years, so why should it change drastically this time? But order of magnitude, a percentage point or two of large loss budget, is always possible as a change. And again, we'll do the calculation only in the first quarter. The next question comes from Will Hardcastle, from UBS. Please go ahead. Mr. Hardcastle, your line is open. Maybe you're on mute? Perhaps you can join the queue again. We will Mr. Hardcastle? No, we should continue with the next question, please. Yeah, the next question is from Freya Kong, from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you for the presentation. On the reinsurance revenue outlook, it implies around 3% growth, I guess, across P&C and life and health. How do you see this split between the two businesses? And for P&C, given that nominal rates are expected to still be quite high, I would think, I'm rather surprised by, I guess, the volume outlook implied here. Could you just give some color around your thoughts and expectations here? And secondly, on the ROI guidance of over 2.8%, is there any explicit assumption for write-downs or realized losses? Thanks. Yeah, sure. So revenue, I think our general disclaimer, I'll have to make it again. I'm sorry for that. We don't care so much about revenue. So therefore, already planning position when it comes to revenue is probably less than when it comes to bottom line or combined ratios or so. Because fundamentally, it will depend very much on you know, on business mix decisions and sometimes even renewal decision on single treaties, where very often volume is not really correlated also with profitability. And particularly our P&C reinsurance business, volume is not a good indicator for how profitable you are or how much money you make. And therefore, this volume number is an indication looking where we currently stand. There are some currency effects as well in the plan, because we take certain assumptions about how the U.S. dollar, for example, develops. And then there are certain assumptions, how we think the renewal goes and how the business mix develops. All of them highly uncertain. Therefore, I would just maybe ask for not overinterpreting these, these 3% growth number. It could be easily different, either higher or lower, and we wouldn't care really so much. Similarly, also the split between life and non-life, because also in life, you can structure treaties in one or the other way. And either you have a lot of premium or you have no premium at all, and the profitability is sometimes unaffected by that decision. So therefore, take it as our ambition to grow our business further, also reflected in the revenue line, but please focus on the bottom line, which is much more speaking than the revenue line. In primary, it's different. In primary insurance, growing revenue always mean that, that also your margin go up because your business is very steady. You do not have, you know, big one-offs from single treaties, which are restructured or so, but it is, you know, many, many small treaties, which you just add. So the more volume you have, generally, the more money you make. And therefore, on the ERGO side, revenue growth matters much more than in the reinsurance segment. And there, only due to rounding, I think the growth at ERGO is not that clearly visible in the revenue outlook numbers. But ERGO has, as always, very nice, relevant growth targets for the next year. And then again, depending on business line and market, deviating a bit, but generally, we expect the ERGO business to grow. The ROI 2.8, in, of course, as always, the way we look at our investments, we start with the running yield, and then we deduct investment expenses, depreciations, and we also deduct loss realizations. I mentioned them in my introductory remarks already that we assume quite a bit of realization. I think what I can say is that we would expect the running yield to be around 3.4%. So the gap between 3.4% and 2.8% is, let's say, the space we have for investment expenses, write-downs, and loss realizations. Okay, thank you. The next question comes from Jochen Schmitt, from Metzler. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning. One question from my side on the 8 percentage point discounting effect, which you mentioned in the non-life Combined Ratio target. You seem not to expect any major change versus the discounting effect in 2023. Could you maybe comment on this a bit further, given the movements in interest rates in recent weeks? That's my question. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Jochen. I mean, the way you do it in planning is obviously much less precise than what you do in the actuals. And in reality, the discount numbers heavily depends not only on the actual interest rate level in one currency, but it depends on interest rates in various currencies. It also depends on business mix, on cash flow pattern, on if you have more liability claims or more property claims, so duration of what's happening. So there's many drivers behind that. So what you can do in planning only is more or less having a very rough estimate, what you think is going to happen based on a number of parameters, and one of them, of course, is the interest rate level. So that, that's how we came up with the 8%, but it, it's really not a very precise, precise number. So therefore, it remains to be seen what the actual number is going to be then next year, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, and it will be fluctuating anyway. But this brings me back to a question I've answered, I think, earlier already. So if interest rates move, I think there are various levers going up and down, and looking only at the discount effect in isolation would just look at it at a single item where our guidance obviously depends in various areas on market parameters, like interest rates, but also others than that, such that I would never look in isolation at the discount. The 8% was an assumption we made. It can be different, but the EUR 5 billion target and the combined ratio target in the overall context are our current best estimate. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from Ashik Musaddi from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning, Christoph. Sorry, I joined a bit later on, so I might have missed the earlier part of your answers. Just one question. I mean, clearly, there is some interest rates have come down significantly in last one month or so, I mean, 100 basis points. So I'm just trying to understand how you're thinking about this when it comes to discounting effect, investment income, and IFIE. I don't think, I mean, maybe IFIE will not have a big difference in, in, like, one year period, but probably discounting benefit and investment income might have some benefit. So can we get some color on that? That's the only question I have. Thank you. Yeah, Ashik, I'll try to be brief because I think we covered quite a bit of it already in the call. Again, interest rate is one of various parameters we have in the planning. Other market parameters matter equally, like currency, for example, or the equity market effects and many others, commodities. The interest rate level also affects us in various ways. Investment result equally like also in the EFY or in the discount numbers, as just covered before. So therefore, there is a little bit an offset also already in the interest rate level, in isolation, between these various areas, and even more, if we look at other parameters on top of that. On the interest side, for example, I mean, obviously, if interest rates are lower, the discount gets lower, so that's something you see immediately in the result. The IFIE will also be affected. We currently do not expect a lot of support anymore from the difference between discount and IFIE anyway. But yeah, this could shift and become slightly negative or only less slightly positive, so there might be some changes in that regard. On the other hand, we still plan to realize some losses due to the ongoing portfolio management activities of our asset managers. So if they sell a bond nowadays, they realize losses anyway. Now, if interest rates move, the amount of loss being realized with the sale of a bond might change as well. This could even be some upside, because with the amount of losses, so, you know, with the single security being sold, you realize less losses now than maybe a month ago. And again, this is all moving up and down all the time. The interest rate levels are volatile, everything else is volatile. So therefore, we don't care so much. I mean, our outlook is our best estimate. And with that, we go into the next year, and we'll see how market parameters will develop. Okay, but fair to say that you have taken into account the current drop in interest rates, or at least some of it? As I said before, we did not explicitly, because that is also not even how planning works. Okay. So we plan on certain assumptions, like the 8% discount, and the 8% is not an explicit reflection of everyday single interest rate level, but it's a broad assumption which we derive from various perspectives. And I mentioned a few of them already, but we think overall that the outlook as we presented them, and those are highly aggregated numbers, as you know. Yeah. They make sense also in the current environment, and they are our current best estimate. That's great. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Christian. Thanks, Christoph. The next question comes from Faizan Lakhani from HSBC. Please go ahead. Good morning. Thank you for your press release this morning. My first question is on the combined ratio guidance. How much have you sort of explicitly allowed for 2023 earn through and the 2024 renewals within that? The second question is partly coming back to discount. I know you've gone over it in detail. I was just trying to understand, why do we not see a greater sort of impact from the 2022 locked-in aspect for the IFIE? And why does that come off completely for 2024? And I guess, connected to that, if interest rates move by a further 2 points, could you still manage the result towards the EUR 5 billion? Or do you think at that sort of point, we would get revised guidance? Thank you. So I start with the first question, which is, I think, the combination walk from the 86 underlying this year to the 82. And I will do it very superficially in a first step. The superficial answer would be, look, this year we have been more or less feeding 3 percentage points into our reserves for that extra prudency, extra conservativism I've been mentioning before. So if you're not doing that again, the 86 would go down to 83, and then the remaining improvement from 83 to 82 is operational improvement, some of which is the earn through of the renewals we saw already during this year, and then the remainder is our current expectations for the renewals next year. This is the walk, very high level, but. There's a lot of rounding, of course, but this is the way we look at it. The second question is a very hypothetical one. So I don't think I can answer that. What would happen if something, you know, would move significantly? As I said before, for smaller interest rate movements, all our analysis sensitivities would suggest that there is many offsetting items. Very drastic moves would have a more drastic impact, but then there, again, there's so many, many different levers. You could also ask me what we do with our guidance if we have either no or very high number of losses next year. Also there, I couldn't tell you. So therefore, please accept the outlook as our current best estimate. But obviously, I mean, we are in a volatile business, either on the capital market or on the loss side. Many things can happen during the year. We'll dampen volatility wherever it's reasonably possible. And again, our steering philosophy is that we want to have a very steady, continuous earnings trajectory, slightly growing, going forward. This is our general steering approach. But if volatility goes beyond a certain threshold, and frankly, I can't tell you what exactly the threshold is. If it goes beyond a certain threshold, then, of course, the volatility will also be unavoidable to some extent. But I think if you look back the last few quarters or even years, we were able to dampen volatility quite well, and the earnings trajectory has been quite steady. So I'm pretty optimistic that we are going to be able to achieve that also going forward. Why not? Sorry, just on the IFI locked-in aspect, why that comes up? I'm not sure if I got the question correctly. Of course, we have locked in, as I mean, locked in interest, and now, with every loss, we lock it in with the current interest rate level, and then you have the unwind of the interest, which goes into the IFIE. And this is all fully reflected in our plan. And depending on where the interest rate level is, the discount versus IFIE, which is expected to be very small anyway, could still be slightly positive, slightly negative, a little bit higher positive, but in any case, I wouldn't expect it to be material in the context of our overall result level. Yeah. So slightly positive, slightly negative, I wouldn't expect it to be any material. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Roland Pfänder from Oddo BHF. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning. Just one question from my side. I would be interested if you are executing any portfolio steering in P&C Reinsurance. So do you see any business pockets where you are more cautious in underwriting, for example? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Roland. Well, more cautious? I think the general approach is always the same for us. So we are very happy to extend our business footprint globally as soon as certain minimum conditions are being met. Minimum conditions meaning profitability level as well as terms and conditions in line with our underwriting standards. So as long as this is the case, we are happy to write business everywhere. Now, are there certain areas where it's a little bit harder to find business fulfilling all these requirements? Yes, there are always a few. I think the most prominent one we have been touching upon quite often recently is the U.S. casualty business, where we in pricing see sometimes really movements down to price level, which is not sustainable from our side. So there we continue to be very cautious. That's just one example. But generally, the approach is very much one where we are agnostic when it comes to the business. Generally, as long as our profitability targets and T&C targets are met, we are happy to write it everywhere. Just that, you know, depending on where you are currently, clients are not always happy with that. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, and I hand back to Christian Becker-Hussong for closing comments. Thank you very much to everyone for joining us this morning. There's nothing left than other than to wish you a very nice festive season. Hope you all have a few days off. So all the best for the coming days and weeks, and we are very much looking forward to seeing you again early next year. Thanks for the good cooperation this year, and stay healthy. See you soon. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you very much for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.