A very warm welcome to our conference call about the business development and financials of the first half 2020. Furthermore, we will give you an outlook in our expectations for the upcoming months, especially about the energy situation. On behalf of SGL Carbon, our CEO, Torsten Derr, and our CFO, Thomas Dippold, as well as accounting and PR team is on the phone. We will present financials and outlook today, and they will answer all your questions. Now I hand over to our CEO, Torsten Derr. Thank you very much, Claudia. Good afternoon to everyone. This is Torsten Derr, and I'm very happy to present good figures today. I want first to talk about resilience, because our business is divided up into four different business units. We serve on the one hand carbon fibers, which go into wind energy. We are strong in automotive. We have graphite, which goes into the semiconductor business. We produce, for example, heat exchangers for the chemical industry. You see different industries, customers with very limited overlap, and this helps us to make the business really resilient. In all four business units, our order situation was ongoingly very strong. Especially, we saw increasing demand from the semiconductors industry, and I want to focus here on silicon carbide, which is a specialty which we produce, and this goes into electromobility in both into charging stations and into automotive, into the cars. For example, into inverters. This is a business where we have a pretty strong foothold in the market. This strong foothold gives us strong pricing power. You will later on see that we were able to pass on almost all price increases from energy and also from raw materials to our customers. In total, we have seen sales increase by 10.7% and EBITDA, our profitability figure, went up 22.6%. You can see we are still following a clear price over volume strategy. We also strengthened our balance sheet, and Thomas will give you some more information on this. Our equity ratio is now 35.7%. This is a plus of 8.7 percentage points, compared to last reporting period. We are also going to increase our guidance, more about this later on in our presentation. With this, I would like to hand over to our CFO, Thomas Dippold. Yeah. Thank you, Torsten. This is Thomas Dippold, CFO of SGL Carbon. Welcome to this conference call for the first six months of the year 2020. It's my honor and my pleasure to guide you through the figures for the first six months. On this slide five, you can see how we performed on a group level. You can see, as Torsten already pointed out, we reached roughly EUR 550 million in the first half of the year 2022, coming from roughly EUR 500 million the year before. This is an increase of 10.7% or EUR 53.1 million. I think that's a quite remarkable achievement that we've seen so far. We take the sales increase without any translational effect, so when we exclude the currency conversion, then our sales went up by 7.6%. We benefited by more than 2% from mainly the very strong U.S. dollar in the first six months of the year. I think the second message that we have to bring across is already what Torsten mentioned in his summary, that all business units, again, contributed to the sales increase, and none of them were left behind. All contributed to that strong development, and this makes us very happy and proud. When we look at our bottom line, you know that the EBITDA pre, as we call it, is our guiding KPI for our profitability. We reached EUR 87.9 million in the first six months of this year, coming from 71.7 in the first six months of last year. This is an increase of 22.6% or EUR 16.2 million. This takes us to a margin of 16% if you take EBITDA in relation to sales coming from 14.4% last year. I think this again shows how resilient our business model is and given all the turmoil in the market that we come across so far. The EBITDA improvement, which is a lot stronger than the profitability growth, comes from the very strong profitable growth in our businesses, and this is mainly in the silicon carbide business, as Torsten pointed out. Second is we still continue with our strict cost management. Last but not least, we are quite successful in passing on all the cost increases from raw materials, energy and transportation to our customers. How do we do that? On the one hand side, we have price variation clauses, mainly for the raw materials. We have strict and really stubborn negotiations with our customers, where we have real brute force in simply passing on the costs. Sometimes we work with some surcharges and some timely adjustments of the prices, which we can reflect so that everybody can follow and can reconcile what we're doing. On the next slide, you see the development of our largest business unit, which is Graphite Solutions. Graphite Solutions grows by 10% rate to EUR 243.4 million, coming from 221.2, which is increase of EUR 22 million. All the stable trends, they continue. Graphite Solutions is a broad base and serving multiple industries. They are all and businesses, they are all growing, mainly the semiconductor and in semiconductor, especially the silicon carbide business, which increases in double-digit figures. This is really a high margin business, and we can grow quite substantially in this business. I think it's also good and a good sign for us that also the industrial application business, which is the largest and maybe has been the most sluggish one in the previous quarter, is also recovering, and we also see some increasing orders from our industrial applications business. When we look at the profitability, we see our EBITDA growing by 22.7%, which is more or less exactly the same growth rate as we have on an overall group level, coming from EUR 44 million to EUR 54 million. With that, we reach a margin EBITDA pre to sales of fantastic 22.2 percentage points. I think this is really a fantastic development. Over 2 percentage points increase in the margin on a like-for-like figure. This is a very strong performance. Where does it come from? As I said, we have profitable growth. We have higher sales that come with it. Of course, we focus a lot on the semiconductor business and there, especially on the silicon carbide business. We don't see any, well, major obstacles with all the availability discussions on raw materials. The business unit really successfully managed all the supplies in the first six months of the year, and I think they did a good job there. On slide number seven, you see the development of our smallest business unit, which is Process Technology. Our smallest business unit is the one with the highest growth rate, if you look at the relative figures in percentage points. PT has grown by 20.6% in sales, coming from EUR 40.8 million and now reaching EUR 49.2 million. This is EUR 8.4 million higher than last year in the same period of time. You probably remember, if you follow us continuously, that especially in the second half of last year, we said PT is still not developing in the way we wanted, but we see increasing order intakes there. This is now what materializes also in sales in the first six months of the year. They really delivered what they promised and told us in the respective time frame. You see that our book-to-bill ratio is at 1.6x, which is very high. We think this is at least what we heard from the business unit, and we are in close and intense contacts with the business unit management. They tell us that through the high sales that we have, we have to extend the lead times with our customers. Normally we have six to nine months lead time for the projects. Now it's up to one year or even beyond. This might be a reason why we see extraordinarily high order intakes in this business unit. This of course guarantees also the growth for the next months and the nearer future. Profitability-wise, you see that we, in the meantime, reached 8.3 percentage points in margin when you take EBITDA in relation to the sales. This is now we reach almost double-digit figures, and this is exactly the direction we want this, you know, specialty provider for the chemical industry to be. We were coming from loss-making times in the past, and we are very happy with the development of this business unit so far. Because they really make sure of the high utilization, they have a fully loaded capacity and have very low capital costs. They pass on all the increased raw material prices to the customers, and they still benefit now from all the transformation saving in our restructuring project. On slide number eight, you see development of our second biggest business unit, which is carbon fiber. Carbon fiber also developed quite well when you look at the top line of our sales. They grew by almost 6% or almost EUR 10 million from EUR 166 million to EUR 176 million. The reason for that is simply because we were also able to pass on all the raw material increases to our customers. The first six months of the year 2022 was highly dominated by you know the expiry of the BMW i3 contract, which is a very profitable take-or-pay contract, was scheduled for the 30th of June. This is exactly the time when this project was finished. From the 1st of July onwards, we can now put all our quantities into mainly the wind market, but also into some aerospace and industrial applications market. All of them are increasing. All of them are waiting for the capacity and the projects and the products to come. Of course, it was necessary to fulfill the contract accordingly. Therefore, the first six months of the year were highly dominated by the BMW business. The profitability, we suffered a little bit compared to the first six months of the year. However, if you just look at the second quarter of the year, then you see a fantastic development because we were really catching up. The first three months were highly affected, and therefore, also when you look at the first six months, they were highly affected by a special effect, you know, that we had some energy derivatives in order to, we hedged our energy supply for the full year. We had a hedge ratio of over 90% now in carbon fibers, which is a very energy-intensive business. We wanted to make sure that on this level that we hedged, we were able to produce all the year through, and this cost us EUR 9.2 million, and this is still affecting our profitability. You see a growth of roughly 6%. You see a downturn in our EBITDA pre-development by -13%. If you take this special effect out, then you also see a further improvement of our margin there accordingly. Last but not least, on slide number nine, you see our Composite Solutions business, which is the second smallest of our business units, and they grew by 15.6%, coming from EUR 60.2 million and now reaching almost EUR 70 million, which is a strong development by another EUR 9.4 million. They really can confirm the trend, which is simply going up. I think the strategy to go into serial production and to have profitable growth by that really pays off. They were not in the markets or in the products they were serving, which is battery cases, which is leaf springs, and which is composite material in general for the automotive industry. They were so far not affected by any bottlenecks or any secondary effect from the Ukraine war. They were really making use of the capacity utilization of the automation from the serial production and the strong cost saving that they were implementing. They're really also doing a very good job, and you see that in the EBITDA pre development coming from EUR 5.7 million in the first six months of last year to now EUR 9.7 million, which is a fantastic development by over 70% increase. To put a little bit of water into the wine, then we have to take into consideration that we have a one-off compensation payment. It's operative. This is why we show it in EBITDA pre, but it's a compensation payment from a termination of a contract which we have been awarded, but the customer and the automotive customer just turned around and said, "No. Well, I want to have it in a different way. Then we had a negotiation, and for that, we received a compensation payment of EUR 3.7 million. This is in our EBITDA pre. If you take this out, then the margin would be around 10%, same as last year. They're growing roughly at the same margin as last year. To finalize our split between the business units of the group, on slide number 10, you see our non-profit or non-operative business unit corporate, where we just, you know, sum up all the corporate functions and corporate services to support the group and also the businesses. In the previous calls or since Torsten and me since we joined the company, we always promised to turn our corporate business unit into a lean service provider. If you look back two years ago, they were making EUR 30 million sales and this year they would be or if you just look at the normal sales, they would be down to a level of roughly EUR 10 million. However, the first half of this year is affected with a special sales impact which is a kind of a technical effect. It's an IFRS 15 effect because in the termination agreement of Showa Denko, which left our Meitingen site. You know, Showa Denko is the buyer of our electrode business in 2020, and in 2020 they left our Meitingen site, and they left it kind of in a premature phase so that the lease contract foresaw a longer staying on the site. They left early, and for that reason, they had to make certain compensation payments, and one was also for some refurbishment, restructuring, or demolition of the buildings they were using. After this has been properly conducted and finalized, we could, you know, we saw that the down payment was a little bit too high from today's perspective, and we have a EUR 6.6 million impact in sales, because we could somehow release this down payment, and this went straight into net profit, at least with the gross margin that was in there. This is a technical effect which is affecting our sales. If we take this out, then our sales would be EUR 5 million, which is exactly the service we provide mainly for our partner and our joint venture on our Meitingen site, BSCCB, which is the brake disc business that we have together with our Brembo friends. When you look at the EBITDA pre, then you see that we saved another EUR 2.4 million. We had EBITDA pre of - EUR 10.5 million last year, and now we have only - EUR 8.1 million for the corporate function service. You see that we also do our homework on a corporate and group level. On slide 11, I mean, we are always talking about EBITDA pre so far, which is again just to highlight that our guiding KPI for profitability. However, the truth is always what's at the very bottom of the P&L, and this is the net result. You know that in so many years, SGL has been loss-making, at least on an operative level. We are very proud and happy to show you that we have reached a net result of EUR 48.8 million, which is an increase of EUR 30.9 million compared to last year. The main part of it is really our operative result that we achieved. EUR 10.6 million out of the EUR 48 million is due to one-off effects. One is the Griesheim effect. This has been properly told to the capital market on an ad hoc message end of March, if I'm not mistaken. This is when we published that we have sold the hereditary building right or in German, Erbbaurecht, on our former site in Griesheim to a new buyer. The effect for the first six months of the year, EUR 11.7 million, which is in there. Then we have the purchase price allocation of EUR 5.2 million, and this is offset by the Showa Denko effect that I just mentioned to you. All in all, this explains the one-off effect of this roughly EUR 10 million that's in there, and this is positive. 48.8% is a very strong net result, which goes then, if you look to the second part of this chart, to the equity ratio. As Torsten already mentioned, we have reached an equity ratio of 35.7%, coming from 27%. We have really went up by almost 9% in the first six months of this year compared to the year-end 2021. Roughly EUR 50 million is coming from the profit increase that we have achieved. EUR 30 million is coming from some FX effects with currency adjustments because the euro was so weak. Another EUR 60 million were coming from higher interest rates, which were affecting the pensions accordingly. The pensions went down by roughly EUR 60 million, and the equity went up with that, with long-term interest hikes accordingly. Last but not least, our net financial debt remains roughly at the same level as at year-end. It increased, in fact, by EUR 6.6 million. How come that? This is mainly due to the reason that our free cash flow is, as we announced and as we guided, significantly lower than last year. In fact, it's almost EUR 50 million lower than last year. In last year, in the free cash flow, we had a lot of one-off effects. However, they count as free cash flow. This year we have a much higher working capital because with all the critical inventories, we made sure that we get enough or whenever we have some spot deals in the market, we made sure of that. This is the reason why our inventory is up by roughly EUR 70 million. We know it's a lot, but on the other hand, this also guarantees that we, you know, don't have to interrupt our production and that we can really run our production at the maximum out. We have a higher variable remuneration in this year. Last year there hasn't been any, because this was, there was no bonus payment for the year 2020. Also a dividend affected last year's free cash flow. In the first six months of last year, we received a dividend from our joint venture, Brembo, of EUR 5 million. This year, this will be in the second half of the year for some technical reasons, but this is about to come. Therefore, our free cash flow is significantly lower than last year. This explains the kind of stable development of our net financial debt. With that, I would hand back to Torsten, who's guiding you through the outlook and the challenges we are facing. Yes. Thank you very much, Thomas. Before I come to the guidance and the outlook, I would like to discuss a little bit our energy situation. I would like to start with this slide, and on the left-hand side, you can see the current situation. Currently, there was in none of our plants a shortage on natural gas or energy. As our order book is pretty full, we try to secure this, and we hedged our energy demands, electricity and natural gas by 90%. This explains the one-off payment we had in Q1, where we paid EUR 9.2 million to increase the hedging ratio. For all the Germans in the call, you know, in Germany we are discussing the Habeck Umlage, a gas surcharge which you have to pay between EUR 1.5 and EUR 0.5 per kWh additionally to the gas price. This affects only our German sites. To give you a rough figure, we have a total demand annually of 100 GWh. We estimate the amount of this Habeck gas surcharge by less than EUR 1 million. This EUR 1 million, which we have to pay, is already included in our guidance, so something which we can digest. On the other hand side, there are a lot of European countries which are initiating or have them in place, they have a gas subsidy program. You know, we have quite a lot of sites in Europe. We have two sites in France, four sites in Germany, two sites in Poland, one in Spain and one in Portugal. We have to apply at several programs which are very different by nature. To give you a little bit of a flavor, I told you we have natural gas 100 GWh in Portugal. We have natural gas of more than 500 GWh. There are sites which have a much higher impact than our German sites. Currently, we try to understand the subsidy programs, and we already signed the applications form. I'm pretty sure that this will be positive in the one or other country to a very different extent, depending on how large our production is in the country. This is not included in our guidance so far because we don't know how much money we will receive under the different programs. Now I come to the contingency measures. The best is to save energy, because every energy you save, you don't have to pay. Thomas and me were pushing our production managers very hard to reduce the overall electricity and gas demand. This was first, and in total we are having 28 energy saving projects, and five are already implemented, and they will contribute already this year in the fourth quarter. In Meitingen, we are discussing a photovoltaic system, and we want to substitute 6% of the electricity we consume from the grid from external providers by our own solar fields. We think that by end of next year we will be ready and in operation. In other sites, I will show you this on the next slide, we try to substitute gas supply by other things like oil or propane gas. I will show you in the next slide how we did this. This is focusing on our German sites. Here you can see on the left-hand side a big tank. Please look at the gas-oil supplying truck on the right-hand side. So it's really huge and it's 1.5 million L. This is a tank which was idle. We own this tank for 20 years. It is idle since 10 years. It took us quite some effort in four months to get a permit to use this as a oil storage tank again. We refilled the tank in Meitingen with 1.5 million L of oil. This is already purchased in our working capital, but we are not using it so far. We are still running everything on natural gas. This is currently discussed, Germany is going to impose a haircut of 20% or 30%. It would be possible to change for the heating of the buildings and heating of the plants to oil. We are doing this in Bonn and in Meitingen. In Meitingen, heating of buildings is roughly 50% of our total gas consumptions. In Bonn, it's a little bit less. It's 1/4 of the gas we use. We could easily heat our buildings four to five months even under a haircut scenario. I think this was a big deal. Tank is revitalized and it's filled with oil, and this will help us, even under gas cut situation, to survive the winter. In Bonn, we have a similar storage tank, much smaller, 100,000 L. Here we are checking if we get the permit to reactivate this tank. We are currently changing for heating of the buildings, the burner from gas to oil. You need different kind of burners. We ordered everything that we can if a gas supply is disrupted in Bonn, that we can switch from gas to oil. This is for heating the buildings. It's much more difficult in our production. This is fired by natural gas. Due to the chemical nature of graphite and carbon fibers and different heat curves, it's very difficult to do this one-to-one switch. If we would switch our production plants from gas to oil, we would have a downtime of at least three months to six months to readjust the production parameters. It's very unlikely that we can switch our production from gas to oil. But 50% respectively in Meitingen, respectively 25% in Bonn is better than nothing. The gas cuts, which we're currently discussing are between 20% and 30%, and both will help us to survive, even in end-to-end gas disruption. Also, on the safe side, our legal department was pretty active, because you can imagine if a gas cut happens and we cannot maintain all of our value chains in the company, we might not be able to supply customers where we have contracts. What we have done since the beginning of this year, we adjusted all selling contracts, especially the force majeure clause and the general terms, which protect us from indemnification of our customers in case of no supply. Most of our new contracts, like Thomas said, have an energy escalation clause. If energy increases, it's pretty easy for us to forward this to our customers. Next slide shows the external factors. Overall market conditions with low visibility. I think everyone can agree what happens in Ukraine with the war to Russia, the picture is very, very blurry, yeah. The war can end by end of this year, can even get harder, nobody knows. For China, the zero COVID policy hurt our supply chains pretty much, but we managed it pretty well. What I can say right now, all our plants in China are running flat out. We are back to 100% capacity. Transportation from China to Europe or China to U.S. still is very tough, but everything was managed so far. I expect that the situation will ease up by end of this year. We expect that energy prices will stay on a very high level as it is today, and the availability of gas, especially in the months November and December, is in Germany, very uncertain. It's not the case in Portugal because our Portuguese plant is served by North African gas, so different route, no Russian gas. Our German plants and maybe Poland will be mostly affected by Russian gas cut. What does this mean for the SGL outlook? Currently, we have no production restrictions and no lack of raw materials in none of our four business units. We have a continued good order situation and but we have the termination of the i3 contract. This ran out three weeks ago, and BMW i3 is history, and we convert the volumes from the i3 to the wind energy market with a little bit less margin. We have strong pricing power in all of our four business units, and this is why we increase our guidance to the upper end of the corridor, which we gave you last time. I come to the guidance on the next slide. On top of the sales down is the EBITDA in million euro. If we assume that our strong core markets, such as semiconductors, electro mobility, and renewables, are continuing like they did, and we get the oil, the natural gas, and also the raw materials, we can lift up our sales guidance from EUR 1 billion to EUR 1.1 billion. EBITDA. Usually we do 60% of the total EBITDA in the first half of the year. The figures which Thomas presented you right now, we did EUR 90 million in the first half year. We lift up our guidance to the upper end of the corridor, EUR 130 million-EUR 150 million. It's more in the region of EUR 150 million. Please remember eight, the second half year is burdened by the termination of the BMW i3 business, but we are pretty successful to shift over the volume. Guidance, EBITDA at the upper end of the corridor. This is our last slide, and this is a summary of what we said. The influence of geopolitical developments was in the first half year lower than expected, and this is why our profitability was higher. The performance was pretty strong, stronger than Thomas and me expected at the beginning of the year. We followed our price over volume strategy, sales up 10% and EBITDA pre up 22.6%. We have an ongoing good order situation in all business units, and we are able to pass on the price increases, and this is a pretty good situation for us. Our balance sheet is now strong. If you remember back two years ago, as Thomas and me joined this company, our equity rate was 17.5%, and we more than doubled the equity rate now to 35.7%, which equals a leverage ratio of 1.4x. Also balance sheet-wise, pretty strong resilience. You have seen we have lifted our guidance again to the upper end of the corridor now, around EUR 150 million. This concludes our prepared remarks, and I would like to hand back to Claudia. Yes, thank you. Now we can start with the Q&A session, and the moderator will give you some more technical details. The first question is from the line of Sven Sauer from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes. Hello. Congratulations on the results, and thanks for taking my questions. I have two. I was just wondering, I mean, in June, you raised the guidance, and I was wondering what's the new trigger for the disproportionate earnings growth. Now you're expecting the upper range of EBITDA guidance, but sticking with the EUR 1.1 billion in sales already announced in June. Yes. This is Thomas. I'm trying to answer your question. Yeah. As you can see, we reached EUR 550 million exactly in the first half of the year, and we said we want to reach EUR 1.1 billion. So we are exactly at 50% sales-wise there. Profitability-wise, we are at 60% as Claudia also mentioned in the presentation. The reason is we have August, we have December. The one is a holiday month, the other one is a Christmas and maybe a football World Cup month. So this is something we have to take a little bit into consideration. The other thing is, as Torsten was mentioning, we lose the BMW i3 contract. I mean, this has long time been planned and we replace it quantity-wise 100% with wind capacities and other industries. The profitability is definitely a different one than we had with the take-or-pay contract. This is the reason with all the risk and uncertainties that we still see in the market. We are confident to reach the top line, but we think that the second half of the year, profit-wise, I mean, we haven't seen any impact on our P&L and our business model in the first six months of the year, but the risks are still out there and this is why we are a little bit cautious on the way forward. Okay. I mean, maybe I formulated my question wrong, but you were expecting now since June, a better earnings development. No. We just stick to our guidance range that we gave on the seventh of June when we increased our guidance. Yeah. We will just make it a little bit more precise that we say. Okay. It's not the range EUR 130 million-EUR 150 million. Yeah. It is at the upper end, which is around EUR 150 million, to phrase the answer differently. Sorry, sir, for not taking your question properly then. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. Thanks. The second question is, regarding the hedging. I'm not sure, can you comment on if there's a hedging of the energy prices, planned for 2023? Yes it is. Currently, we have a hedging ratio of 90% in total for 2023. We already have hedged worldwide more than 50% of our total exposure. We want to close more deals because our order entry and order backlog is so good that we have to guarantee the availability of our capacity. This is why we need. We are not going into the next year with a lot of energy spot demand. Okay. We are closing our exposure month by month. Okay, great. Just a follow-up question. Can you also quantify the margin improvement you have from the hedging? Because, I mean, we're going forward, we're going to have to, you know, continue probably with high energy prices. The hedging expenses will also be higher. I mean, I was just wondering what maybe a normalized margin would be. Yeah. This is difficult to answer, to be honest, from today's perspective, we are right at the beginning of our budgeting phase. You see currencies, you see interest rates, you see everything. Yeah. We just put together all the bits and pieces and I'm afraid we have to postpone the answer to this question until beginning of next year when we give you the guidance for 2023. Then I think we have a much clearer picture on where we're gonna end up in 2023. For now, this would be speculation and we shouldn't do that here. Okay. Sorry, but the 50% of the hedging in 2023, was this already part of the EUR 9 million that you paid in Q1? No. No. There's going to be a cash outflow for this 50% coming up. I mean, there are various ways how you can hedge things. You can buy options, you can buy forwards, or you simply fix prices, then you have to pay anything upfront. It depends on the instrument and the derivatives, how you do it. Just in the end, you can also have a long-term contract that's just fixed. Mm. which you normally have at home with your gas bills and your electricity, something like that. In the end, I think we have to wait a little bit, because there are multiple ways and it varies from country to country and site by site, how we have to do it. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question is the line of Andreas Heine from Stifel. Please go ahead. Yes, good afternoon. I have a few and would like to ask them one by one, maybe, because otherwise it might be too much. I think at the end of the BMW contract, again, you highlighted this several times, and also that you will transfer this into especially to the wind energy market. Could you update us whether that has been successful? Are your carbon fiber plants fully loaded and you really could immediately switch to the other use of your carbon fibers? Yes, Andreas, this is Torsten. Thanks for the question. Our plants are fully loaded, and we even did in our carbon fiber unit a low-cost debottlenecking, so we increased our capacity a little bit and even this increased capacity is sold. Okay. That was the first one. The second, I've seen that textile business in the first half was flat in sales, while raw materials and prices probably went significantly up. Can you update us how you run this business in this very difficult environment, and how you can secure that it is not too much drain on earnings? Sorry, Andreas. It was a little bit difficult to understand. You asked about Okay. The textile business. Is this right? The textile business in Lavradio. I've seen in the split of the sales that it was flat in sales from last year to this year. Yeah. Of course, energy costs were up, pitches were up, and acrylonitrile is up. I would assume that prices are significantly higher, so same sales means much lower volume. I just want to know how you run this business and how you can avoid losing money. Andreas, what we describe as textiles is a mixture of different products. For example, our PANOX business goes in, which goes into the aerospace industry as an insulation material, and demand is very high there. You are mentioning or you meant, I guess, the acrylic fibers, which go into apparel and best way to describe is a spot business. We buy acrylonitrile, which is a chemical, on the spot market or contracted. Then we have energy prices, and then we negotiate prices with the customers. If we agree on the price, which is beneficial for us and the customer, we do that deal. Otherwise, we do it not. Okay. Don't expect a big minus from this business. I think it's more or less a spot business. You know, we are only doing this because the plant in Lavradio was bought by my predecessors to produce precursor for carbon fibers. The textile business is just to run the capacities flat out and to bring the fixed cost down. This is the only reason, and we do it on a spot basis. This is a way how we. There's no strategic rationale behind it, just opportunistic, yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. That's very clear. I've seen that you have very strong growth in automotive in carbon fibers, and you alluded to this with the BMW contract. In Graphite it was not as favorable as last year. I thought that with your participating in e-mobility, that you have also solid growth rates in the automotive business in the Graphite Solutions part. Yeah. How is that? Andreas, our growth was in the real graphites business. We have a different business, which is also in our Graphite Solutions business, which we call pressed-to-size. There we produce from press or molded graphite, we produce parts, for example, parts for liquids or for oils for automotive. This business was in fact going down, and this is what we call automotive. If we sell pure graphite, this is not summarized under automotive. Okay. It's only the pressed-to-size business, and there we saw all the fluctuation, which you saw in the automotive segment. Okay. Understood. Only some technical questions. In the cash flow statement, the net working capital was an outflow of EUR 27 million, and then as mentioned, EUR 40 million others. I guess it includes bonuses, but probably I wish you get that, but obviously EUR 40 million is not all bonuses. What- No. Unfortunately not, but no, luckily. As a CFO, personally I say unfortunately, as a CFO, I say luckily, not. The thing is, we have some technical reversions because there's an equity result that's in the EBIT, and that's kind of converted there. Yes, the bonus is also in there, but also the Griesheim effect, which is shown. I have. They're all reverted in others and all the three effects sum up to the EUR 40 million. Okay. Understood. I did not fully understood the corporate line. You have additional EUR 6.6 million in sales, I understood with the gross margin. On the other hand, you said that earnings would have come down or expenses would have come down with the personnel reducing the administration costs. Yeah. If I take the EUR 6.6 million without any margin and add that to the H1 with the EBITDA pre shown in corporate, I would probably get to higher expenses in H1. No. This is exactly. Sorry, then I didn't explain it properly in the presentation. Sorry for that. Thanks for the question because this gives me the chance to put it in the right direction. The gross margin part of it, which is the EUR 4.7 million, is a pre-result. You don't see it in our EBITDA pre. But you see it in our net result. This is why I explained the EUR 10.6 million as a one-off effect, which is Griesheim, which is the Showa Denko cost margin effect that I just highlight and being offset by the purchase price allocation of the EUR 5.2 million. This is the background behind it. You see it. All right. I'm sorry for the confusion, but I haven't invented the IFRS standards. Yeah. I just have to follow it. It's IFRS 15, and it says you have to see it in the top line because we don't have any sales pre, so it's. Yeah. Technically simply has to be in there, but it's not a result that you can see in our EBITDA pre, because it's a pre-result. Now, I think I confused a lot of participants as well, at least 95%. This is how I would like to explain it. If anybody needs extra explanation, please give Claudia, give Jürgen or give myself a ring, and we do it in a one-on-one. I know it's very complicated. It also took a while for me to understand. It basically means what you show with this EBITDA pre is a run rate. That's just the same. Yes. If you double this, then we get the right understanding what this number should look like on a full year basis. Exactly. If you take out this technical effect, and then you have EUR 5 million sales, you take it times two, then you know exactly what we will be at the year-end. If you take the profitability, so to speak, or the result that you see of the EBITDA pre, which is EUR 8.1 million, and take it times two, then you most likely have the result for the year-end. This is for corporate. This is no rocket science. No. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. These were my questions, and I'll go back to Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Richard Schramm from HSBC. Please go ahead. Yes. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I have first a question on the inventory levels you mentioned. Is this, as you indicated, fully covering or the reduction for H2 or even goes already beyond this and is therefore no further price risk from the material side at the moment in your guidance here, can you exclude this? Did I understand this correctly? Yes. Yeah. We have so to speak loaded our warehouses with EUR 70 million of inventory. You're 100% right. We did that with all the critical parts which we need in order to be able to produce. Everything that we have on stock is being needed for orders that we already have in our books. We buy what we can somehow you know put into the products that we are about to sell, and this is how we do that. If we see any opportunistic deals, and we know for sure that we can use it, then we do it. We've also made very clear, Torsten and myself, in the many meetings we had with our business units, and we follow them very closely in these turbulent times, that this is now the upper end of our inventory development, and we certainly want to get it down to a healthy level. Yeah. Thomas, let me add one thing. Thomas mentions the EUR 60 million-EUR 70 million inventory. Around a 50% is bound in our graphite value chain, and the graphite value chain takes pretty long. You start with pitch and coke, and then it takes six to nine months until graphite, which we sell into the market, comes out. Due to the strong customer demand, we started our value chain for graphite at capacity. This is concurrently pumped through this value chain over six to nine months, so we cannot interrupt the graphite production process and will be sold later on. Customer demand, as I said, is very, very healthy currently. Okay. Thank you. Also, a point which is often discussed is the reliability of suppliers. How would you judge your situation? Do you have critical suppliers where you run the risk that they might see problems, for example, with the energy supply or other problems so that this might cause problems then going forward into 2023 from this side? Yes. We reacted at end of last year and followed a double or triple supplier strategy. For every raw material, we have more than one supplier. I would say in terms of availability, we would be oversupplied if we take all, and this gives a little bit of stability. I have to admit that our procurement department did a tough job. There were problems everywhere in energy procurement, in raw material procurement, and very often, Thomas and me had to step in, and I did many CEO calls to secure raw materials, but so far we did it, and we don't see any disruption. Negotiations with gas and electricity key suppliers were pretty tough, especially in Germany. One where we purchased large amounts of gas simply went bankrupt and was secured by the German government. We had to look for other suppliers. It was not an easy ride, but to be honest, I don't see right now any issues with energy or with raw materials. What is very tough to get right now is, for example, steel for investments. If we want to increase our capacity somewhere, we have delivery times of more than a year. To expand our capacity, this is pretty tough and takes a long time. Yeah, but raw materials to run our assets, I would say from today's perspective, solid, yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Our next question is from the line of Lukas Spang from Tigris Capital GmbH. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi, good afternoon, gentlemen. My first question is just a clarification question. If I got it right, you said that you can pass all, so 100% of your increased material costs to customers, and this is also related to the future contracts or future revenues? Yeah. No, I don't know the exact figures, but it's close to all what we were able to pass on. It's not included in all contracts. The new contracts, this is what I said, which we made this year, had different terms and conditions, different force majeure clause, and most of them are containing a raw material price escalation clause, but not all. And. For example, you know, automotive contracts usually don't have a raw material price escalation clauses inside, and you have no guaranteed volumes. In other industries, they have, you know. It's not all. Sorry if I gave a misinformation which was misunderstood. Okay. If there is the possibility to pass them on, is there some limitation, or can you really pass them all the increased material price to the customer? Well, in the end it takes two to and the customer needs to take it. Of course, we can't force him. We still need to have a contract and to have an agreement. We just cannot say, "This is the price," and in the end, nobody buys it. But so far, and so to speak, the demand from the customer and their desire to get the product also to guarantee their production is apparently higher than the price sensitivity or price elasticity that we have. Lukas, if you look simply at the markets where we are in, we supply carbon fibers to wind energy. You know about the European Green Deal. All wind turbine producers are running flat out, and they need carbon fibers. Our market is pretty healthy. You know about the chip crisis. All chip manufacturers are running flat out. They need our graphite. This is what I said at the very beginning. Our markets are really running well. Everyone talks about recession. I cannot see it today in our order book. The industries we serve are currently pretty healthy. Only automotive in some segments is going down a little bit. Okay. Coming back to the energy topic, very interesting and good information about the 100 GWh. If we assume a really bad case scenario and you would not even get any gas anymore, what would that mean for your production in Bonn related to the complete production of your company? Lukas, it's very hard to answer this question. First of all, we established a crisis team and a certain procedure which will start from that day on where gas supply is disrupted. We have some of our assets which we run in Germany, we have them double or triple. You know, we are running more than one graphitization plant, and we will shuffle in a different way our supply chains. We would not start from Germany, we would start from Poland and then go to China or a different way. It's very hard to plan this up front because it depends on if the gas cut is 10%, 30% or 80%. Totally different scenarios. What we have, we have defined an action list, which are the first steps to do. We have defined the crisis team, even the starting time. It will be started every morning at 7:30 A.M., 1.5 Hours is defined. I think we are pretty well prepared. We did everything we can. To give you a number, an euro number of this effect, almost impossible. Okay. On the i3 topic, can you give us an idea on rough number, how much of earnings and revenue this business contributed in the first half of the year? No, sorry, we are not allowed to disclose those figures. It's a contract we had with BMW. I can give you a slight idea of the volume. It was 20%-25% of the carbon fiber volume which we produced, which went into this model. The EBITDA was disproportionately high. Okay. Last one also to this topic, BMW is also planning more e-mobility cars. Do you see there a chance again for you, or would you say there are other materials that are used for the production of these cars? Yeah. There are two cars in the world which had a chassis produced from carbon fibers. This was the i3, a big volume car, and the i20. We are in both cars, and we are exclusive suppliers of both cars. BMW discontinued the i3 since three weeks, and the i20 is still running for another four to five years. This will be supplied by us. No other car manufacturer copied this model to produce the frame of the car from carbon fiber. The big demand for carbon fiber in automotive will simply disappear. Other applications, for example, steel substitution for cross car beams in a car, where you substitute heavy steel by lightweight carbon fibers, this is growing by 5%-10% every year but starting from a very small basis. BMW, Volkswagen and all car manufacturers you know get some carbon fiber elements from us. What I wanted to say, it drops by the discontinuation of the i3, and then it grows again from a smaller level. Okay. Yeah, thank you for the explanation. Thanks for the question, Lukas. The next question is from the line of Lars Vom-Cleff from Deutsche Bank AG. Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. Two smaller ones left, I admit. The first one would be, I mean, in Q2, we saw the euro weakening severely, and we reached parity during the quarter. Could you quantify the impact that has had on your EBITDA? As you said, the growth rate in sales on the top line was from 7.6% growth versus 10.7%, so it's roughly 3% in the top line. It's a lower single digit amount that's affecting our EBITDA pre. Okay, thanks. A quick technical question. We saw tax rates of 9% in Q1, 10% in Q2. Is 10% ± the rate we should also take for the full year, or will it rather trend towards 25% in the second half again? Oh, if it was 9%, now 10%, then it's gonna be 11% and 12% probably. No, I'm just kidding. I think we have a lot of losses carried forward, which helps us to a certain extent that the tax rate is at that level. To be honest, there's no indication why it should go up. The profit distribution all over the group should roughly stay the same and there's no indication why it should be different at year-end. Perfect. Thank you very much. We have a follow-up question from Andreas Heine. Please go ahead. It's only a small one, actually. In former presentation, you had always where you stand in your cost alignment program. It's not included anymore. Is that now behind? Is that all fixed and set, or are additional projects running? Yeah, Andreas, thanks. We showed it so often that we wanted to discontinue to show this slide. It's running flat out, but it's going up to a certain level and we are stopping the reporting first and the Bonsai program, how we call it internally, runs out by end of this year. This does not mean that we are discontinuing to work in lean structures, yeah? We try to continue the spirit from Bonsai, but we have almost harvested, I would say 90% + from the project, and this is why we stopped reporting. Okay. All right. There are no further questions at this time, and I hand back to Claudia Kellert for closing comments. Yeah. Thanks a lot for your attention, especially on this hot day. If you have any further questions, please call Jürgen Reck or myself, and we are happy to answer your questions. Have a nice afternoon and goodbye. Hope to see you soon. Bye-bye.