Welcome from SGL side as well. You know today we want to present you our financial 2023 and give you more details about our expectations for the upcoming years. Today we have our CEO Torsten Derr attending the call. Good morning everyone. Our CFO Thomas Dippold. Hello. Our colleague Jürgen Becker from the accounting, Jürgen Reck from investor relations. Good morning. Thank you. Now I hand over to our CFO Thomas Dippold. Good morning. This is Thomas Dippold. I would like to guide you through the full year figures for the year 2023. Apologies for my voice. It should last at least for this call. I suffer a little bit from a cold but do my very best to guide you through that. First of all and most important message which you can see on this slide SGL has reached its targets we once set beginning of the year for 2023. So we've reached our guidance in a very challenging environment and with some ups and downs which I would like to show you a little bit through. On the overall performance of SGL it looks exactly as we described it as a kind of a stabilization year and later on when we look at the investments also into an investment year where we do major investments. And I think this is exactly what we performed. You see our sales decline by 4% and our EBITDA pre declines by 2.5%. This is more or less in line with what we said and is well within our guidance. However, if you take a closer look underneath these general and overall figures then you would see that three out of four business units that we have in our portfolio which is GS Graphite Solutions Process Technology and also Composite Solutions have the highest sales the highest EBITDA and the highest EBITDA margin ever. The only thing that hinder that to show that is the performance of our carbon fiber and I think we touch that throughout the presentation later on. Graphite Solutions grew quite a bit is 52% of the overall turnover that we have now. Carbon fiber declined heavily and reaches just 20% of the overall sales that we have. When we look at the profitability and the sales and we just exclude carbon fiber then the businesses the remaining three businesses would have grown 10% plus in sales and 20% plus in EBITDA. I think that's a remarkable development of our core businesses which we clearly pointed out. It's just hidden with a poor performance of carbon fiber. And again, we talk about our applications carbon fiber throughout the call quite a bit. On the next slide you see the performance of our largest and most no not most but very profitable business unit which is Graphite Solutions. Here in the turnover, we see a sales increase of 10% now reaching EUR 565 million coming from EUR 512 million the year before. So it's a remarkable increase and even more remarkable is the development of our EBITDA pre. This increases by 13% and now reaching EUR 134 million. And when you just calculate what happened in between the sales goes up by let's say EUR 50 million and our EBITDA goes up by EUR 15 million then you see that the incremental increase has reached a 30% margin. Where does it come from? Especially semiconductor business and there in particular our silicon carbide business. You see on the right in our comments semiconductor business we will also elaborate later on in the call a little bit on our plans especially in this business went up by 40% the overall driver there. And we fully utilize our capacities in this business unit. This is why we invest so heavily in this business. And in order to finance this growth we collected throughout the year 2023 some EUR 77 million customer down payments from our customers that we now convert into assets in order to make the growth possible. This, as we always said, customer down payments are interest-free no securities only some guarantees that we have this bi so it's a very cheap financing and we like that very much because the customer are also tied to us because they have to order otherwise, they don't get the down payment back. And the performance especially in the bottom line is quite remarkable. We now have an EBITDA pre margin of 23.7% in this business despite all the other businesses where we have some chemical industry, some normal industrial business, but also some automotive. This was just so-so or stable or maybe just growing with a single digit margin—not margin, but growth rate. This had very much this performance for the overall, yeah, performance of the group. The second one, which is the smallest business unit, participated also in a very good way, which is Process Tech, which you see here on slide number six if you just have the printout of our slides. Process Tech had a remarkable year 2023. This is just fantastic. The sales went up by more than 20% and they now reach EUR 127.9 million and the profit more than doubled from roughly EUR 10 million the year before to now EUR 22.4 million. We now reach a EBITDA margin in this business of 17.5%. We will later on also show a little bit the evolution of the margins in the business since 2020 since Torsten and I we since we joined this company how this businesses evolves and how they develop. And I think Process Tech is one of the most remarkable turnaround stories that we have in our portfolio and this margin is very healthy. And where does it come from? We have a very strong order book. I think we were very successful in acquiring a lot of big projects that will help us also throughout the year 2024. We have a big contribution also from our service business which helps quite a bit. This comes that the profitability is so strong and also the sales growth there. This had also very much their contribution to reach our goals and to reach the guidance. The business unit which we will talk later on quite a bit about, and this is especially in Torsten's part that we will show something there that was disappointing the most, is our carbon fiber business unit. I think we discussed that throughout the year, and this is ongoing also in fourth quarter and here you see the kind of accident report for the full year that we have in carbon fiber. Sales dropped by 35% coming from roughly EUR 350 million to now EUR 225 million. And I mean a sales drop which comes from especially in particular the wind market where literally nothing could be sold and we have a lot of idle stock in and some inventory in the value chain. So we could hardly sell anything. We started throughout the year to idle capacity and with that you can't cover the fixed costs anymore. And you see it especially in the profitability we have a drop of roughly EUR 35 million coming from EUR 43 million the year before to now EUR 7 million. But when you slice it, this result in two, into slides or in two halves, then you see here also in our comments the result, the at equity result of our joint venture BSCCB. Sorry for that, we just show. I'm not sure if you see that. Okay. Sorry, there was a technical issue on the presentation. My apologies for that, at least here on my slide. You see that the result contribution from BSCCB from our joint venture is even increasing and now reaches EUR 18 million. The year before it was EUR 16 million. And our contribution from the operative business, our carbon fiber business, went down from EUR 27 to minus 10 million. So, we have a 37 decline in operative profitability in this business unit. Now you know why we have some divestiture plans that we at least would like to test the market with. Again this will be in Torsten's part when we talk about that later. But this major decline in sales going in line with the profitability really hits us hard. But again the three other business could compensate. On the next slide number eight you see our Composite Solutions business. Composite Solutions has stable sales reaching; they were the year before EUR 150; they are now EUR 153, so this is more or less in line and is now a pure player automotive business that we have there. But you have to bear in mind the year before in 2022 we still had our Gardena business in the United States. It's located in the US, and this was an aerospace business which we sold. This business was contributing with EUR 30 million the year before. As the sales is now even that means in fact you don't see a growth here but if you exclude Gardena the year before then you would see a 20% growth of this business unit which is quite remarkable. Also, in the profitability you hardly see a slight decline by two increase by two million coming from 20 to 22. But the thing is also our Gardena business contributed with EUR 5 million the year before. So also, here the increase is quite remarkable, and we now reach a very healthy 14.4% EBITDA margin in 2023 in this business. On the next slide I would show you a little bit reconciliation between our EBITDA and the EBIT throughout the year 2023. This is maybe worth mentioning. We had one major impairment because of the poor development of our carbon fiber business. You probably remember at half year we had to impair our carbon fiber business. There was a triggering event because the wind market was performing so poorly. Also the capital cost WACC increased quite a big bit because the interest rate were soaring. And you see that we hardly have any one-off effects. This are remaining EUR 2 million that remains of the restructuring project. So our EBITDA almost equals our EBITDA pre. The normal depreciation that we have is roughly EUR 60 million. This is also as you know our guideline for our operative CapEx and investments. And then we had this investment of rough divestiture or impairment sorry of EUR 45 million and some purchase price allocations that come with it. So in the end we had roughly EUR 50 million non-recurring items and then you see still a quite healthy EBIT of EUR 56.6 million that we achieved in the year 2023. Coming to other KPIs here on slide number 10 which we very much focus on then you see that our balance sheet is super healthy. You see a net result of another EUR 41 million. Yes, there's a huge drop compared to the year before but here you have to also see that we had this impairment of roughly EUR 50 million which I just explained. If you add this on top, then this net result in 2023 would have reached roughly EUR 90 million. In 2022 we had a one-off effect with the sale of our Griesheim business where we could release some provisions and this was a one-off that operate positively impacted our net result. This was exactly EUR 26 million. If you take this out then also our net result on a operative performance level would roughly be the same. We are very proud of our free cash flow. This was EUR 67 the year before and we now reach EUR 95. Yes, we guided it on the level of last year but there are a lot of customer down payments as I already mentioned in that. And just at the year-end we received quite a bit of customer down payments which the customer transferred the money to us, and this is why it overshoot quite a bit. 95 is very strong, and this also contributes that the net financial debt could be decreased so significantly coming from EUR 170 million to now EUR 115 million that we reach. That means a leverage of 0.7. This is a super healthy relation, and our ROCE reaches 13% to 11.3% is almost unchanged. Our equity ratio is also at very stable 41.1% despite the higher effects from higher interest rate and the pension on the equity side of the balance sheet. And I think we can be very proud of this development. SGL is a different company when you look at the balance sheet than it was some four or five years ago. On slide number 11 we would like to show you a little bit where we invest how we do that and where future growth trends for us are allocated. You see that in the year 2023 we invested roughly EUR 90 million and you see in the total column you see that roughly 60% is our depreciation amortization level. So 1.5 times our depreciation is what we invest, or you can also say 8% to 9% of our sales is what we invest no it depends on with what KPI yeah you like better. You see that our GS Graphite Solutions business gets a major chunk of the investments with almost EUR 60 million. There we increase the capacity to a large extent. We started that and this will go on through the year 2024 and other years especially in the increase of our capacities in the semiconductor business and there especially in the silicon carbide business. This is all growth projects behind that some replacements but most of them are growth projects. We hardly have any CAPEX in Process Tech. This is more or less a project business there. They hardly need any assets for that. In carbon fiber we have a project with a biomass plant that we installed in our Lavradio site in Portugal. Why that? We would like to replace gas and we don't like the cyclicity and the consumption of gas there. And Portugal is a wood country so we're trying to have some renewable effects also there. So this is a kind of a replacement that we have because we find an alternative way to create steam and energy in order to run our production there. Composite Solutions has just some EUR 5 million with project tools and some line expansions there. And the other EUR 10 million or EUR 11 million that you see are corporate projects and there we also touched that. The capacity expansion on our Meitingen site near Augsburg where our joint venture, the German joint venture part, of this BSCCB business is located and they get a 9,000 square meters capacity expansion. I was last week in Meitingen and I think they're making great progress there. And the first 10 to 10 million are also already in this building. The rest will come in 2024. As a summary, as I guided you as with the initial slide through sales and EBIT and now I guided you a little bit through the businesses how they developed and performed. As a summary, we guided our sales to be on previous year level. I think we reached that to a large extent. As we said, we already anticipated some downturns in carbon fiber which we could kind of compensate with the other businesses. That then carbon fiber deteriorate even further and the other businesses luckily could compensate that to a large extent makes us very proud. Same in the profitability. I think this is almost a perfect target hit that we had. We had EUR 172 the year before we now have EUR 168. This is a 2% deviation from that, and we are right in the middle of our guidance with EUR 160 to 180 that we gave you. I think this helps a lot to digest the carbon fiber impact. With that, I would like to hand over to Torsten who will talk a little bit about the carbon fiber business and our plans there and also our growth project that we have in particular. Torsten, please continue. Thanks Thomas. Yeah here in this diagram you can see the journey that Thomas and I took with SGL. And Thomas and me we started our work in 2020 and we focused on the mega trends and innovative products in fast-growing markets. You can see here that three of our four business units achieved record turnover record results and record margins. We are particularly proud of the high margin level of almost 24% in our business unit the largest business unit Graphite Solutions where we have developed a portfolio into the direction of semiconductors. And despite many improvements our carbon fiber business has developed in the opposite direction and you can see this in the third bundle of this diagrams here it went down and those figures are without our BSCCB joint venture. It has developed in the opposite direction. Currently we see a weak demand in our main application which we have in the wind industry. In the wind industry carbon fibers are used for reinforcement of the wind turbine blades. Yeah we are following two routes to solve the problem. First is specialization in attractive niche markets for example hydrogen pressure vessels. There we have developed a fiber for and this is a market which is growing exponentially. Second solution is we are looking for a partner or an investor to provide this businesses the necessary resources which the businesses business carbon fiber deserves. You can see on this slide something which we consolidate at equity, and we don't talk about it that much. It's our carbon brake business. This in the diagram on the left you can see the business unit CF results with the contribution of exactly this joint venture BSCCB. BSCCB is a 50/50 JV between us SGL and the Italian brake company Brembo. At BSCCB we produce carbon brake discs and consolidate the result at equity. The carbon fiber results are here shown in purple and in gray you can see the additional at equity result of BSCCB. At BSCCB we are trapped in a luxury problem. The customers want more brake discs and we have to expand our capacity because we are running at our limits. If you buy your new Lamborghini or Ferrari it moves from extra equipment into serial equipment and we will even see a faster growth than we experienced in the past. Currently, and you can see this on the right-hand side, we will invest in the next two years EUR 150 million in this business. EUR 120 million go to our site which is an SGL site in Meitingen and EUR 30 million go to the site of our partner to the Brembo site in Stezzano. Down in the bar graphs you can see that alone in Meitingen we expand our capacity from today by 70% and we will more than double the surface in the production hall which Thomas already mentioned. Yeah, I already mentioned that our business with carbon fiber is an attractive opportunity and carbon fiber represents a fully integrated carbon fiber business. It's highly attractive and we operate world-scale capacities. We expect a recovery of the wind business soon and we have blue-chip customers at hand. We are not the right owner for the carbon fiber business because we are always in difficulties where to put our money in. As our Graphite Solutions business is so important for us and so fast-growing and offers so high margin, the decision either to invest in carbon fibers or into Graphite Solutions, the answer is always Graphite Solutions. So we are looking for a good partner with a good story who is a better owner than us and who is willing to invest the money into the business which the business deserves. Next slide, Thomas. Yeah, due to the persistently weak demand in carbon fibers coming from the wind industry, we give the following guidance for 2024. We see the revenue on prior year's level and EBITDA will be between EUR 160 million and EUR 170 million. We will also on this year maintain the focus on our semiconductor business and on electromobility and we are going to expand our capacities in our business unit GS. If we could resolve the negative earning situation in our business unit CF the company would be in an EBITDA frame between EUR 180 million and EUR 190 million. This is a hypothetical calculation. On the next slide you can see what we are doing in our semiconductor business. Our biggest growth is driven by the business unit GS. And within this business unit we were able to increase the share of sales accounted to semiconductors from 36% to 46% in just one year. If we look deeper into the semiconductor business, and you can see this on the right-hand side of this chart, you can see that we were able to increase our semi-sales from EUR 123 million in 2021 to EUR 262 million in last year. In 2023 the revenue from graphite components used for silicon carbide production accounted for 61% of our total sales in semi. Our semiconductor business is shown here in more detail and also the development which we expect for the coming years. In gray you see the LED business green is the SI the silicon semi business and purple is the silicon carbide business which we are focusing at. And you can see that our aim or that we are aiming to total sales of over EUR 400 million in 2028. We were also able to increase the silicon carbide sales by 48% and 44% in the years in the last two years. The diagram which is depicted here is only based on existing contracts. So there might be additional growth from customers or contracts which we don't know yet. But this is a base case which we took in through our calculations. Next slide please Thomas. Next slide. Let us now turn to our medium growth plans. In 2028 we plan to grow our sales to EUR 1.6 million with an EBITDA between EUR 300 million and EUR 330 million. Due to the strong impact of our high margin semiconductor business, we expect to grow our margin from today 15% in this market segment to 19% to 21%. Sales are expected to grow with a CAGR of 8%. EBITDA will grow with a CAGR of 14%. Yeah, the last slide I want to summarize summarize our mid-term strategy with which has not changed at all. So, we stick to the strategy which Thomas and me have decided on in 2021. And here you can see a brief summary. One, we focus on businesses on business units which are in the mega trends digitization, renewable energies, and climate-friendly mobility. Two, we see an ongoing high demand for special graphite especially for the production of silicon carbide-based semiconductors. Three, we will invest to increase our capacities, and you see this in carbon brake disc. You see this in our graphite segment. We reached the maximum of our capacities, and we are going to invest step by step. Most of our CapEx comes from customer down payments, so this is a very cash-friendly way to expand our capacities. We focus on innovative and customer-focused products. Last but not least, and this is point 5, I want to remind you we are a portfolio company. We structured our business, our company, in four business units, and I often refer to companies in a company with a one P&L statement, which we report to the capital markets, and I want to remind you we can easily adjust the structure of our company either by divestiture or by acquisition. We will continue exactly this strategy, and with this word said, I'm going to hand over back to Claudia. Yes, thank you. I think now we have enough time to answer your questions. Francie, maybe you can give a short introduction how to use the Q&A tool. Yes, thank you very much, Claudia. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will 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. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. Our first question today is from Andreas Heine from Stifel. Please go ahead with your question. Thanks for giving me the chance to ask the first questions. I have several and ask them one by one. The first is on fourth quarter. I was surprised about the positive outcome and carbon fibers as the operating trends have probably not changed you might explain why we have seen a positive EBITDA in the final quarter and in the other direction it was on the corporate line where there were higher expenses than in the quarters before. In the guidance for 2024 you also expressed that the corporate line will see higher expenses in this year. Maybe you can explain this and then I ask some smaller other questions. Okay, these were three questions. If I take it right, Andreas, I tried to do my best to answer them all the way you asked them. The first one you mentioned, the relatively good result of carbon fiber in fourth quarter. You're 100% right. What happened there? There was an operative one-off effect, but our auditor confirmed it's an operative effect. It's not a pre-effect but an operative effect because we had a reversal of a deferral that we had of roughly EUR 4 million. It's also explained a little bit in our annual report, at least on 22. I can show you the pages where we mentioned that. It's, and we could reverse a deferral, and it's like a kind of a provision or, in German, Passive Rechnungsabgrenzungsposten. This had a result effect on our P&L with EUR 4.1 million and this certainly contributed in fourth quarter and this is the reason why carbon fiber is relatively good in this quarter. And you're right if you take it out to see the real operating performance we wouldn't be at -10.9 but at -15 if you take this out. 100% right. Second question it's exactly the opposite on corporate. On corporate we had two effects that explained that a little bit why fourth quarter was maybe in this direction. However, I would like to mention fourth quarter is exactly as promised. Normally we have about a corporate cost of minus EUR 4.5 million per quarter and on a run rate and if you take the full year then we're exactly there. So it's more the reason why the first three quarters maybe a little bit less and then everything came on top in fourth quarter. There are two effects. On the one hand side we gave a true up to the businesses so with that our corporate gets worse but the operative businesses get better. This is one thing. And it's kind of digested in the operative business unit that we just presented. And the other effect we had some higher provisions for our bonuses especially on the corporate level because their contribution how the corporate senior management is yeah affected has not been done throughout the year but especially in fourth quarter. That is the main effects that are in there. But I would like to mention on the corporate costs overall. They're exactly in line with what they were guided. And your last question was on the guidance, if I remember that correctly, on the guidance for corporate in the year 2024. Yes, we have roughly EUR 3 to 4 million higher costs that we guide in this kind of segment, non-operating segment. And these costs, on the one hand side, we have higher personnel costs that we see. Second reason is we calculate again with 100% bonus they don't get 100% bonus the corporate guys in this year. And the third reason is also that some of the costs that we have with our market tests with carbon fibers are also collected at the moment in this segment. These are the three effects that contribute to that. Very good, thanks for that explanation. May I squeeze one more financial question in? How do we have to think about the free cash flow in 2024? So you have received the pre-payments of EUR 100 million already. You invest EUR 150 million in 2024 and according to former statements you have made is that the pre-payments are roughly speaking paid back over a 3-year period. So of the EUR 100 million then maybe EUR 30 million to be repaid in form of deliveries in 2024. Maybe you can help us there a little bit. I try my best. We, of course, 95 is something we can't repeat there, and we are also honest with you there. The trend that our customers give us customer down payments to such a large extent that we see in particular in the year 2023 will slow down. I would, I wouldn't say that it goes down heavily, but we will see a slowdown. You have to calculate. You're 100% right. We so far received roughly EUR 100 million inflow, and you have to bear in mind in this particular year 2023 we already have EUR 10 million reimbursed with a sale of our silicon carbide products to our customers. There will be a net inflow with customer down payments also in 2024 and this is why that most of the money will be invested into CapEx expansion in this year and I mean we plan EUR 150 million. This is massive. With our operating performance we still would like to stick to our rule where we say we invest with our own money on the level of depreciation to also maintain and achieve a healthy cash flow. We would like to maintain that but we invest on let's say EUR 50 to 60 million level. The rest is customer down payment and for the building of the expansion that Torsten mentioned for our joint venture part that we do in Meitingen. For there we have a special financing, but certainly you see it in investing cash flow and the financing then in the financing cash flow. This will be around EUR 20 million that we do there. But with that I think we reached EUR 150 million which is massive. We haven't done that for many many many years to invest so much. And bear in mind except the EUR 20 million that I just mentioned for the remains of the building with BSCCB it all goes in value creation machinery capacity expansion. No new sites, no new buildings. We can all do that in our existing sites, and we do everything, and I like the word that Torsten is always using there. It's de-bottlenecking, and we have a max out of our sites. This is what we try to achieve, and this is a major plan. Thanks a lot. Our next question is from Lars Vom Cleff from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead with your question. Yes, thank you very much. Good morning, thanks for taking my questions. Three quick ones, if I may. The first one regarding your medium-term guidance on slide 22. I assume both the sales target as well as the EBITDA margin at this stage still includes corporate not corporate finance carbon fibers, correct? Yes, we haven't excluded it. It's not a discontinued operation or asset held for sale. It includes carbon fiber. 100% right. Okay, perfect. And then, maybe I know you're not giving absolute amounts of your order backlog or order intake, but are you still experiencing a positive momentum or is it declining at this stage? No, what we see in first quarter is similar to what we have seen in fourth quarter, so we see positive and negative effects which are balancing out. Okay, and then maybe the last one regarding process technology. I mean, the chemicals industry is still in a difficult position, and in the most recent history it was the case that the chemicals industry took the chance to use the lower business volume to do some maintenance and refurbishment, from which your process technology division is benefiting. Is this still the case, or are you seeing it fading out at this stage? Yes, Lars, if you cut our Process Technology business in half, there are two parts of the business. One we call bread and butter business. These are, for example, heat exchangers which we sell to chemical industry and then they are replaced after 10 years and then we sell new ones. This business really went down as you explained because chemical industry has CapEx cuts and so on. We have a second business which we call systems and in systems we sell for example apparatus to produce hydrochloric acid or cleaning of phosphoric acid and we were lucky that we were able to compensate our bread and butter business in the wet chemical industry with a very very strong systems business. And we sold a lot of synthesis equipment for phosphoric acid which goes into lithium iron phosphate batteries and they need all ultra-pure phosphoric acid and we have a very healthy demand for the systems in PT and this drove our business and we're in a lucky situation that that business was balanced out by a very good one. Perfect, thank you very much. I'll go back into the queue. Thomas? So, I think the next question here will Thomas Junghans, so maybe Francis, you can open the line for him. Perfect, can you hear me? Yes, yes, yes, loud and clear. Perfect, perfect. Thanks. So, the first question is a little bit a personal question, if I may. We are a little bit surprised by the fact that we don't want to extend the contract, Mr. Derr. So maybe you can give us a little bit more color on this because I think SGL Carbon, yeah, is the best CEO head of the company, especially if the company gets rid of carbon fibers. And so, my second question is, why don't you, why don't you want to reap the fruits of your fantastic work? And maybe we can go one by one the questions. Yeah, yes, you are right, and I can tell you all rumors which were written in the internet are wrong. I like my friend Thomas very much. I have a very good relation to the supervisory board, and you are very right. We cleaned up the company, and the company is ready for growth in very attractive segments, so from this point of view, there's no reason to go, and the team which I have here is simply fantastic. It's the best team I worked with, but where I'm good at, I'm a specialist in transforming companies, and I will do this, and I stay in the company. You have to suffer from some more conference calls with me in the quarters to come. So, I stay here for quite a while. I will continue and work on the project carbon fibers and will try to find a better owner, and then SGL is in very good shape, and then it's for me time to move on and use my skills where I'm good in another company, and I think there will be a very good successor to drive the growth of SGL forward, yeah. This is the story, but nothing behind, nothing which drives me out of the company. SGL is a fantastic company, a fantastic company. Very well explained, thank you. I must start. My second question is with respect to process technology. You are guiding for stable sales but a slight decline in EBITDA. Is it due to the product shift from the chemical industry products to products for the battery industry or why do you expecting a decline and for how long does the order backlog provide visibility with respect to the operational development and process technology? Thomas, maybe yeah, you're right, but you also have to look at the level of profitability that process tech has. We have reached EUR 22 million, and a slight or even a significant or major decline or increase would be EUR 2 million. I think we had a major increase of profitability coming from the year 2022 to 2023, and you can be sure that Torsten and I, that when we have our target setting meetings with the business units, we can be very rigid, very strict, and of course we would like to drive the positive development. However, we see that their increase was very remarkable, and I think that they kind of consolidate on the level where they are is just a matter of a conservative planning which you normally always had. You never had a disappointment. We never, since Torsten and I are here with the company, you never saw a guidance adjustment in a negative manner. It's, if at all, in the other direction, and I think we would like to give them a year to breathe and to install the little bit of capacity they want to invest, at least EUR 1.5 million there. This is, and if they try to fulfill all the project that they have in the books, and this goes in line with your second question, how well or how good is the visibility of this business? It remains the same. We have a visibility of 6-9 months there. For that, this is exactly in line with the guidance that we gave. first quarter is almost over already now that we talk with the full-year figures and we meet again in five weeks when we publish our first quarter. I think this is exactly why we are not worried about the performance of process tech. I think they will perform as described. Yeah, yeah, thanks. My third question is with respect to the potential divestment of carbon fibers. As I understand it correctly, maybe both Composite Solutions and the joint venture with Brembo source carbon fiber materials via the carbon fiber business unit. How would the business be managed if carbon fiber now is being sold? Would there be supply commitments agreed with a potential buyer or how does it work? Yes, so Thomas, what we are doing, we consolidate the results of BSCCB at equity in our carbon fiber business unit, but they are managed completely independently by two management teams, and the only connection is that there's a buy and sell relationship, and it's not, it's not that large. We produce something which we call carbon chips, and the carbon chips are included in the brake disc. They are one of the raw material you, you use in carbon brake disc, and of course we secure, because we invest in BSCCB that much, this supply relationship for a very long time, and this is a good solution for both parts, for CF they have a long-term customer, and also for our carbon business, but we don't sell our share in BSCCB. To make this clear, it's only the carbon fiber business we are talking about. Yeah, and what about Composite Solutions? Composite Solutions is another business unit and this is core core core in our company so currently we only talk about the pure carbon fiber business. Okay okay got it thanks. I will step back in the queue thanks. Thank you. Thank you Thomas. The next question is from Lukas Spang. Please go ahead with your question. Yes, hi, good morning. I would like to follow on the carbon fiber strategic revenue, so do you have already some interesting parties for this business unit? And if so, can you share a little bit more details? How many parties are interested? Are these more strategic investors or financial investors? Anything you can share with us? Lukas, I think that's a nice try and I know exactly that we can't answer this question and sorry for that but we just started the process and let's put it this way as this kind of target is not so often on in the market we see a certain interest which we are very happy with let's put it this way but the process has just started as we announced it we're right at the very beginning. And, Thomas, to add, both categories' Lukas mentioned are in the past. Of course, of course, everybody would like to have a look at that for sure, yeah. Mm-hmm, okay, and then also thanks for the transparency in terms of last year's CapEx. Can you also share a little bit more light on the 2024, how much is spending for Graphite Solutions and how much would be for carbon fiber? I'm sorry, we also don't disclose that, but carbon fiber you can imagine as we have 30%. I'm just trying to help. In fact, I can't answer the question, but the thing is if we have 30% down in our revenues that means or 35 even that also means that we have idle capacity, so the day the wind market or the pressure vessel market comes back or gets some boost, we will be up and ready and start production again. Do we need capacity expansion there? No, as I said, in this year we made this biomass plant or biomass unit in order to produce our steam in a more environmentally friendly way. This is what we did. CapEx goes down to a necessary minimum. Look at the profitability. Why should we invest there? This is exactly that dilemma that Torsten has mentioned or our super attractive market is in graphite and this is where the major chunk also this is where the customer down payments come and you can expect a lot to be invested in graphite. Yeah, and the EUR 20 million you mentioned before is included in the EUR 150 million, or does this come on top? Of course CapEx is CapEx and if you invest also in a building, of course this is not so super attractive because in fact we can only get a rent and then later on a contribution from their result, but this is how the joint venture contract goes and we are more than happy to give them a new home that they can start ramping up their production. But that is included in the EUR 150 million. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It is, it is, just to clarify that again. Yeah. Okay, and then last question: if we compare the outlook for 2028, now it's one year later, but if you compare the numbers, you are more optimistic than one year before, so you expect now EUR 300 to 330 million instead of EUR 270 to 300 million, so where does this more optimistic earnings outlook come from? Is it just graphite solutions because one year ago you were probably more optimistic about carbon fiber, so where does this come from? I think I understand where you're coming from and I understand your problem, and at the moment you still see a kind of a back end loaded development of carbon fiber. The wind market will come back. We strongly believe that, and everybody's saying that. Otherwise, our... especially in Europe, our goals to get net zero and everything, and they will be a hoax, and we can't do that. So of course this is reflected in our plan. The wind market can't stay on the level where we are, and the pressure vessel market in the hydrogen and fuel cell business—this will also need and require carbon fiber. You can't contain the pressure of 700 bars in aluminum tanks and others. They need carbon fiber enhanced, and there are many companies out there who are developing this and preparing for this market, and this is reflected also of course in our business case. And if you are interested or whoever is interested in getting to know or want to buy carbon fiber, we'll see that reflected in our business case that we have there, and we believe in that. We just say we're not the right owner, and carbon fiber is also in there. I know that you would like to see how it's our development without carbon fiber, but the big chunk of the growth—to answer this question the other way around—is definitely Graphite Solutions for sure. This is absolutely core, and this is the booster of our sales and profitability also in the future, and there in particular semiconductors and in super particular silicon carbide. Yeah, okay, but yes, you mentioned the right point. It's very back-end loaded, it seems. It is for sure. Thanks, that's from my side. Thank you, thanks, Lukas. The next question is from Sven Sauer from Kepler. Please go ahead. Hello, good morning. Thank you also from my side. I'm going to go through the questions at once because I'm having some connection problems. The first one is, could you share with us why you received EUR 5 million less in dividends this year? I maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought this was a fixed dividend payment. The second question would be if you could maybe explain a bit more the theoretical calculation of the higher guidance. I don't fully understand what this would entail. Is it a sale of the business or a recovery? And also what kind of timing are we looking at here? And the third question would be on slide 20 where you showed the medium-term outlook for the SE and SiC business. It seems that there is a jump in 2026. There's a big bit higher growth, but maybe I just saw it wrong. Maybe you could share some infos on that. Thanks. Hello Sven, this is Thomas, and dividends, you are right and you have good eyes that apparently you have the dividend always has to be mutually agreed with the shareholders. We have Brembo and us and you are 100% right. This former EUR 15 million dividend that we had went down to EUR 10 million, but exactly because of that Torsten has shown that and it's shown on in the presentation on slide number, give me a second, 15. We invest overall some EUR 150 million in the expansion of the business and only the buildings is being borne by the by the relevant shareholders, so for us it's EUR 10 million last year and maybe some EUR 20 million. I don't know when the groundbreaking of course already took place, but I think end of the year, beginning of 2025, this site or this expansion in Germany in Meitingen should be up and ready. In Stezzano I think it's faster and because they have the building in in in in Stezzano, the Brembo site has a lot of idle space where they can expand their business and they of course have to invest the other monies into the expansion, the machinery of their tools and their sites, and of course they can take some loans which yeah can be done, but the start of the capacity expansion they also did with their own cash flow. And therefore, we said we reduce the dividend at least in this year for that reason that they can achieve that before or they also maybe start their own financing and try to get the right monies from yeah that they need to cope with that expansion. That's the background, but again it's not a fixed dividend, we respect that and it has to be agreed also with our JV partner. None of us has control, but we have a very friendly and a very good JV. This is maybe the only 50/50 JVs in our life that we see that it's really working over a long time, we like that very much and it's we all agreed with that dividend adjustment. Yeah, Sven, the next question was on the growth, and I have here again the slide which you mentioned, and you you see this jump from 2025 to 2026, and a very simple answer: we invest into the semicon business, and a lot of investments are going to our site in St. Marys in the US. What we need is more production hall capacity, so we did the building construction in the last year, and then we ordered at the same time furnaces, and there are not that many suppliers in the market, and delivery time is up to two years. And they will come when we have all the connections, the utilities, and the buildings ready. Then we hope that the production equipment is coming, and we see a startup end of 2025, so we will have the sales in 2026. This is a simple reason for it. Sven, there was another question. We don't want to drop that or neglect that, but to be honest, I didn't get that. Maybe you can repeat that again. Yeah, sure, sure. Thanks for the answers so far. The theoretical calculation of the higher guidance, the—I think it was 180-190. I'm not sure, I don't know the numbers. I'm wondering what would this entail. I mean, are you referring to if you would sell the carbon fiber business or if there was a recovery, or and what kind of timing are you assuming for this guidance. Sven, much, much easier, just take carbon fiber out. Yeah, no rationale behind this. This is why I called it a hypothetical calculation. Yeah, there was no sales value, or anything connected to it. Just taking it out, then you come to 180. This was the answer to it. Okay, that's clear. Then, just going to sneak a final question on in the end the battery material business in the Graphite Solutions segment was also a bit down in 2023. Could you maybe share some color on that? Yeah, yes, it was down, and we don't see that much recovery on that market, and this is especially affecting. You see a lot of battery manufacturing projects in Europe just disappearing because of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US They all move to the US or stay in China, and I see this as a big mistake for Europe because, taking this into account, no battery plants there will be no graphite for batteries, and this is why our demand is down. We still have the same set of customers, which are more customers coming from Asia, and they will buy this similar amount this year as last year, so not a big change, but we are not satisfied with the development. Thank you for your answers. Thank you, Sven. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and one. We have a follow-up question for Mr. Heine. Mr. Heine, please go ahead with your question. Thanks, only a small one. Maybe you can update also on the trends on the Composite Solutions. I've seen that you expect slightly lower sales. The business unit had a strong performance basically independent from what the global car production was, but now it seems that there is a link. Maybe you can explain a little bit what you expect from this division for 2024 and also mid-term in your 2028 guidance. Andreas, the short answer is this is project business and we had a global leadership conference which we did exactly at the site of CF and they brought some samples CF they brought some samples and some cars where the samples are built in and we talk about Ferrari cars so in the high luxury segment. And this is highly independent of everything you know about cars it's still performing and I asked Mr. Ge who is the business head of this business unit and he says order intake still good we just lost one project which was one of the bigger ones but we have a lot in our pipeline and we will compensate this pretty soon we think. It's still that your trend is strong and independent from what we see in the global car market. Yes, yes, and same, same with the carbon brake disc. Yeah, they also go in the luxury segment, and we see an uninterrupted growth since three or four years, and even Corona accelerated the business in both parts of the segment we look at. At people who can buy the cars where our parts go in and they need to have 10 million wealth at least, and this share was growing after Corona, so the demand for these cars is going up, and we are benefiting from this in both in the carbon brake disc and in our CS business. Pretty clear, thanks. That were my last questions. The next question comes from Dario Dickmann from HSBC. Please go ahead with your question. Hello, thanks for taking my question. I would have a last question on the carbon fiber sale or potential sale. I'm sure that a lot of Chinese companies would laugh to buy your carbon fiber business, but how is it from a regulatory perspective? Could we exclude it since it will not be allowed, or could they still be in for a potential sale? We have to check that, but again we are at the very beginning of the process. Let's see how far we get. Let's see who is the best owner for that, and we also have the last say into whom we may sell it if there are some regulatory cartel or whatever restrictions. I think we cross the bridge when we get there. It's too early to talk about that right now. Okay, thank you very much, and maybe as last question, you mentioned that carbon fiber business would require additional resources going forward, which you obviously prefer to put in your graphite business, but what type of investments would be the most critical for the carbon fiber business. Yeah, you cannot say most critical, but it's very fixed cost intense this business. That means if you invest into extension of capacity, you can dilute the fixed cost very easy. For example, we could build additional precursor manufacturing lines in Lavradio or extend the number of lines in our big site in Moses Lake in the US. These were investments which we could do and they would bring the cost position of the carbon fibers forward. So this is what we have in mind as a clear investment plan to the front, but Thomas and me always decided more for the semicon business in the business unit GS. This is why another owner or a different owner would be beneficial for the business unit. Yes, makes sense. Thank you. We have a follow-up from Mr. Junghans, please go ahead. Yeah, thanks again. One last question from my side with respect to CapEx: are there any plans to purchase another isostatic press? Hello? Thomas, thanks for the question. Not short term, because I like low-cost debottlenecking very much. To do a brownfield investment is always better than to go into another site, and our current carbon fiber graphite press is in Bonn, and in Bonn we have very very limited space situation. That means we have to go to another site, and if you build a site from scratch with all the utilities, this is never the best solution. So short term we will go exactly for low cost debottleneckings like we did in the past, and there's a lot of potential still. Perfect thank you. That was our last question for today, and I hand back to Claudia for closing comments. Yeah, thanks for your participation. Have a fantastic weekend, and you know, you will find all the documents on our webpage. And if you have additional questions, please call Jürgen or myself. Thank you and have a nice weekend. Bye-bye. Have a nice weekend.