Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to today's conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Marcel Wiskow. Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for attending our investor call. This morning, we published our half-year financial report 2022. All documents relating to this report can be found on our homepage in the section Investor Relations, consisting of the reports, the accompanying corporate news, and also the presentation used in this call. Short information for our Q&A session. If you want to ask questions, please use the telephone line. The number you can find in your email, which you received after your registration to this call. With me in this call are the following gentlemen, Mr. Michael Eberhardt, CEO of the company, Mr. Gregor Stöckler, COO, and Mr. Thorsten Grenz, CFO. With this short introduction of the participants, I will hand over to Michael Eberhardt, our CEO. Michael, it's your turn. Thanks, Marcel, for your introduction, and welcome also from my side to this call for the first half year 2022 and our Q2 update. I will lead you through the overview and give you an update about, let's say, the highlights and the lowlights of our Q2 result. I hand over to Thorsten, and Thorsten will give you a detailed update about our financials. Afterwards, Gregor will close the call with some outlooks going forward. If you go to page number three, you can see that I think we have a very mixed environment, a couple of very good, let's say, response of the market. Overall, our strategy pays off very well, but we also have some homework to do for the second half. Our revenue, group revenue went up by 10% to something like EUR 83.3 million. Like for like, we even improved this by EUR 14 million. Like for like means we deconsolidate our Polish business, as you could see in the footnote, and then we corrected this as like for like with EXA Datavard. Even more important for us is our partner revenue went up to EUR 23 million, up 59%, which is really, let's say, one of the big areas, focus areas on our strategy to scale via partners, to scale via software through the partner channel. The payoff here was pretty good. Our order entry, like for like, is down 10%. This is one of the area where we have some headwinds and some areas where we need to improve. Like for like, we are up 4%. We are down 10%, let's say on the IFRS, but like for like, we are up 4%. There are a couple of reasons why this happens, which I will explain later on. The service revenue is also up by 14% to EUR 59.5 million, which is good because we achieved almost 50% of our year service revenue year-end outlook. Then the software revenue was up 1%, which is not, let's say, in line with our expectation, so up to EUR 23.8 million. Here we have one specific task which you're all aware of. We have this upfront deals, and we had in Q1-Q2 2021, we have an upfront license deal of roughly EUR 4 million-EUR 5 million in revenue. If we consider this one, then the compare would be 25% up year-over-year. We have decided not to do any upfront partner deals anymore. This applies since the start of this year. Our EBIT is nicely up by +EUR 2.9 million, like for like, +EUR 3.1 million, which is a good way towards our outlook, which Gregor will give you at the end of this presentation. If you go to the next slide, we had beside the financials, we have a couple of good things. We introduced our new Crystal Bridge on our Transformation World. Transformation World was, let's say one of our, you know, this is our fair, which we always did. We stopped in 2022 caused by COVID, but now we did it in a different location, in a different style, but with a very good echo from our partners, from our customers and from our peers. In total, totally happy. In this meeting, we also introduced our, let's say, the plan for the CrystalBridge, what we have achieved so far and what we will do going forward. To make it very, very sharp, it is, let's say, we strengthen our portfolio very much in the data analytics area, in the cloud integration and connectivity part, and in the data management area. This is because we would like not only to do data transformation, but we'll be longer on the customer side to be, let's say, stronger in the customer lock-in and to drive more recurring revenue going forward. CrystalBridge will support in the future, starting from data analytics, from data management, from data, let's say, transformation, until supporting the customer to get the right data at the right place, at the right cost, and the right quality so that the customer really can get the value out of this data. That's the plan where we develop CrystalBridge towards. I talked already about the Transformation World. We had roughly, over two days, we had something like 700 participants. As said, it was, let's say, the Transformation World of SNP, but we had partners which presented their portfolio. We had significantly a number of customers and even new prospects. I think this was really very well accepted in the market. The Datavard integration is, I would say, most likely done. Not everything, let's say, from an emotional point of view, but from a legal point of view, from a process point of view, from a portfolio alignment. The focus now is on really to accelerate our cross-sell or accelerate our top line and use the portfolio to start to execute, let's say the selling of our extended portfolio items. We had the significant increase in the revenue and order entry via partners. This really pays off. Even if Q2 was a little bit weaker on the partner side, we had some slippages where the customer decided that they would need to go, let's say, a separate round. We also see some delays in project. Just this morning I got the feedback that one of the big chemical companies here in Germany, which had the plan to start S/4 upgrade to go public and to select the provider by the end of this year. They decided to skip this in 2022 because there is too much of challenges regarding the economical challenge, water challenge, the gas challenge, and all those kind of things. That means time to focus now on S/4 is maybe would overload the organization with all the different tasks, what they need to do. We see this not broadly, but in some areas we see this, and this hits us also to accelerate our software growth. We have, I think, a sound development on this operational result. It's not all great, so we still have a lot of work to do. What I can say is we get confidence and evidence that our Elevate strategy works. Our pillar to move the, let's say, stronger to our software, to move stronger to, let's say or to use the partner to accelerate our growth in the market, to get to scale in a much better different way really pays off. If you go to the order entry and the revenue comparison, you see overall the bad message here is we have a book-to-bill. Can we go to next page, please? We have a book-to-bill of roughly one, which means we did not contribute to strengthen our order backlog, but we also did not eat up a lot of our order backlog. That's the good message. The reason for that is you see that I would say it's minor, but you see that in Europe we have the revenue is very much, let's say, equal to the order entry, so it's slightly positive book-to-bill. We see also a slightly positive book-to-bill in LatAm. We had a very good order entry situation for the first half year in the U.S., but we have a slightly negative book-to-bill in the U.S., but a good line of sight now for Q3. On JAPAC, slightly positive. In U.K., it's more or less, let's say, slightly below one, but not concerning because we see what happened now in the first couple of weeks in Q3. This book-to-bill is one of our challenges. Normally, our plan is to have a book-to-bill of 1.3. This is very much caused by delays on the customer side, but also, let's say, what we see is that customers are sourcing different. If we talk, and we presented to you in the last calls always our movement on the transformation business to move from a project license towards a platform license toward an enterprise license for our CrystalBridge platform. We have this conversation with the customer, but we started, for example, with two out of three big opportunities. We started now based on a project license customer commit that he will come back here to talk about enterprise in the one case and a platform in the other case license. This will happen maybe in 2023 because of all the challenges what our partners are and our customers are seeing in the market. That means what we see is we do not get the big bulk, so the EUR 4 million or EUR 5 million software license which we had in our plan, but we get the projects which are in, let's say, in the 12 to 18 months reach us. That's changing the order entry behavior and is really giving us slightly a harder time to get this significantly ahead of the revenue curve, which is our plan for sure. The order entry with the partner, you see this is developing good. When you look to the overall quarter by quarter, we slightly improve quarter by quarter. We have out of the world's 20 biggest IT system integrators, we have 13 as our partners. Our plan is not to acquire more partners. Our plan is to do more business with the existing partners. We focus very much on partner enablement in the sales engine, in pre-sales, and in delivery part. We have achieved over 100 partner projects, which are already live, and all of them at the end, we had a 100% success rate. That means there was not one project which we at the end did not have a successful go live. That's a very positive message to the market. Beside the All for One Factory, we have now implemented also the factory with Accenture, which is the focus on the much bigger international accounts, but also deliver the service jointly between Accenture and us through a factory organization, which means industrialization of services in a manner that whatever we cannot automate via software, we drive, let's say, very much industrialized from a service process point of view. When you look at, we also increased significantly our sales of our upfront deals. Only in the first half, we sold EUR 3.7 million licenses, which you don't see in our revenue, in our order entry, and in our EBIT, because we have shown this, let's say, already in earlier periods. The effort we have driven down, and this is very important also to get the positive view from the partners because for sure IBM and Fujitsu and those partners who did upfront deals with us, like All for One Group, they are very much focusing on to get this turn to money, and at the end, it will help us to drive to improve our cash flow at the same time. We have trained more than 1,000 partner consultants to date. Yep, not all of them are ready to do a project stand alone, but most of them are engaged either through the factory or in joint projects together with us on the customer side. Now the focus is what I said before, very much on cross-enablement of the DataLab product, so that we train the customers on both sides, the partners on both sides, how we can use our extended portfolio to sell more to the same account and to get a better login on the one side and more recurring revenue on the other side. If you look at the bottom of the slide, Q2, our revenue improved from EUR 5 million to EUR 7 million in 2021 to EUR 8.1 million, and for the first half year from EUR 14.5 million to EUR 23 million, which I believe is a good development and a clear signal that our strategy works. Next page. You can see our partners, how we sort and categorize our partner landscape. We have on the one side, on the left side, our technology partners. The new one, which I would like to point out, is Snowflake, which is a very important partner when we talk about cloud, when we talk about analytics. I think that really accelerates us to be the partner in structuring group reporting, analytics and, let's say, all the more modern area in a new way. Snowflake is a company which is growing fast and I think we have a strong commitment that we will align our portfolio to their portfolio and vice versa, so that we can have a joint go-to-market campaigns and so on and so on. On the right side, as I said before, not a lot to report, not because we did not get new partners, but our focus is not acquiring new partners. Our focus is very much to really drive more revenue with the existing partner base. We made with all of them significant progress in all regions. With Fujitsu, we signed or we are in the middle now to sign second phase of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. We also have a great opportunity with Olympus, for example. With IBM, we have a solid pipeline in the U.S., solid pipeline here in Europe, and a couple of very nice deals which we signed together. Accenture, I think is the blueprint, which is accelerating significantly, at least here in Central Europe and partly in JAPAC. Then all the Big Four, PwC, maybe as number one in this area, they are very interested to do, let's say, more business with us because they have less consulting consultants themselves. They are more depending on doing software automation to manage their business going forward. To my last page, which is the headcount development, you see we are beside, let's say, all the negatives and positives, we are more or less flat year-over-year. The story behind that is much more different because we are losing people on the one side. The market is still very responsive. Our attrition rate is roughly across the company, somehow slightly below 10%. I think the last number I got is close to 11%, which is not, let's say, a dramatic, Accenture and the big SIs, they plan already for 10%, so. For us, I would say it's more on the higher side. On the other side, we also get good people. We get interest in the market, and we are moving some of the position more towards Eastern Europe and towards India so that we get our cost per dollar of the revenue down and improve our profit on the bottom line. The distribution on the right side, there is not a lot of change. What we do is we try to do, let's say, as less as possible people in the G&A and in the supporting function. Right now with all the, let's say, the unknowns in the market, we are very tight on. We are managing very close, let's say the when somebody is leaving the company, the successor and, let's say, yeah, where do we hire people? How can we get the, let's say, the efficiency up? How can we manage the cost? Because there's a lot of things. We cannot. There's high inflation on the one side, significant cost increase on the people side, in at least in countries like Germany, also in Slovakia, but also in the U.S. and in JAPAC. That means to cover the cost, let's say in an acceptable level, we need to change the mix of the people from a geographical point of view, but also from the seniority point of view. This I think is good under control. This is more or less in what we have planned after we have seen that Ukraine crisis went up and it's part of our mitigation also not to let's say to invest too much in fixed cost. By the way, we are also introducing more and more partners so that we can use partners and get more flexibility on the cost side. With that, I hand over to Thorsten. Yeah. Thank you, Michael. Let's move on to the financials. The first information on our chart number 10 is a more detailed insight into the growth of our revenues. We have carved out the organic growth to show that the company, on an organic side, grows by about 13%. Next chart also has some positive news, positive time series, both for the top line and the bottom line. The context it is an encouraging achievement to see that for the revenue line we have got the highest revenue number in the first half of a fiscal year in the company's history. EBIT is positive the first half for the first time since the year 2016. The development, the nature of the time series is quite encouraging, I think. A glance at our income statement and for this chart and for all the more detailed charts that will follow, I will not read the numbers line by line, but focus on the major points, the major messages, to give us sufficient time for discussion later on. Group revenues increased by 10%, and I will come to that in a moment, driven by service sales, with software revenues below last year's level in Q2 and flat for the first half year. Personnel expenses increased. We have seen here a salary increase in the course of the first half of the current fiscal year. Other income expenses I guess need some explanation in here, and that explains the increase is marketing. Michael has pointed to the Transformation World, our in-house fair here in Heidelberg, that contributed a large chunk of costs in the second quarter of the year. It also included here and important to explain the size of the number is, yes, indeed, increasing travel. One occasion is more or less a one-off, that is attendance of the big SAP Sapphire in North America. But we also see that business trips are increasing again. This is one of the focus points management is addressing to keep that under control. Clearly, I think the travel expenses will exceed the COVID years, but we must not go back to prior COVID levels as we have learned how productive online communication can be. I also do not want to fail to address that the result contains EUR 2.6 million in Forex, positive Forex effects, mainly due to the strong dollar. We are moving on to the service segment. The service segment is showing a steady top-line growth due to a good order backlog and increased utilization of our consulting staff. Operating profit with positive development, especially in the second quarter. The EBIT margin is positive, stands at 1.9%, after a loss of 3.6% the year before. The service segment, pardon me, the software segment looks differently. There is one key message, Michael Eberhardt has already pointed out. In the second quarter of 2021, simply speaking, there was a super large deal that has contributed decisively to the revenue number and the EBIT number in last year's figures. This deal, for the reasons Michael has stated, smaller deals, orders come in at rather shorter notice. Not the case in this year. EXA, which we report as a separate segment, smaller numbers, so percentages are distorted by the sheer small size of the numbers. For the full year, we see EBIT in the first half down EUR 0.3 million. That percentage-wise yields a large number. For the full year, we are pretty optimistic that the numbers should reach prior year's levels again. Let's move on to the order entry. We have given you the numbers split by our three segments and also provided the order backlog. For the scope of consolidation, I would like to add that this is mainly the impact from the departure of Poland that contributed a particularly strong first quarter in last year. The remaining points, customers switching to rather short orders and smaller tickets, Michael has already explained to you, and he has also addressed the tendencies in the various regions. Reconciliation of the order backlog, and here the reference, the starting date is beginning of the year or end of last year. Order entry and revenues, that is, the lion's part of the story, more or less match with a small Forex impact of various currencies all over the world that add up to a very small number. Volume adjustments are partly cancellations from existing orders. The balance sheet structure with what's on our page 18. In there, and I'm sure we will come back to that in the question and answer session later on. With a cash position that has shrunk to EUR 25 million. The counter positions are in working capital. We have increased contract assets, and we have increased receivables. I can tell you, and as I said, I'm expecting a couple of questions later on that has also become a focus point of management to go after not only a faster cash collection but to build in triggers that the contract assets and the accounts receivables do not build up to the extent they have reached right now. The liability, the equity and liability side is not spectacular. The main trend is a shift from current financial liabilities to non-current liabilities, and that we explained in earlier calls is the outcome of the refinancing of the company. Cash flow statements. Looking at the column stating the numbers for the first half of 2022. There you see what I already addressed when talking about the asset side of our balance sheet with a change in working capital of almost EUR 12 million. The operating cash flow is clearly and significantly negative, explaining the reduction in our cash position. With that, I have finished the tour d'horizon through the financials of the first six months of 2022, and I leave the floor to Gregor for the outlook. Thank you very much, Thorsten. I just learned a new word. Both of my colleagues pointed out previously, we remain positive regarding our commitment for the full year both on the important key metrics to our business group order entry EBITDA and EBIT. We remain with the previously given guidance, and we want to reconfirm our positive outlook for the midterm goals as well. Yes, we do see a darkening picture on the macroeconomic scale, and we are fully aware of the consequences, and we have built a very effective early warning system. Thorsten just pointed out a couple of highlights. Yes, very much focus on the fact that we manage cash effectively, both on the contract level as well as within the existing customer relationships. That will remain a half- year two priority, and then that should lead to a stable implemented process that will ensure that we will manage that as effectively as we did. Other than that, the outlook was given, reconfirmed, and we see that the actions taken in half year one bear fruit, not only on a strategic level, but also on the operative level, which leads to a reconfirmation here. With that, I want to close it, thank everyone, and give it back to the operator for questions and answers. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to raise a question now, please press nine and star on your telephone keypad. In case that you'd like to withdraw your question, please press nine and star again. The first question comes from Wolfgang Specht. Your line is open now. Yes, hello. Good afternoon. Some questions from my side. First on the development in the U.S. You stated, 86% revenue growth, but can you give us some indication how the profitability in this area is developing? The second one is on EXA, where I believe there is some sub-scale growth currently. What are your expectations for this asset going forward? On the order volume adjustment, is it one individual project or is it a sum of several smaller projects? The fourth question I would end with is some indication for your unweighted pipeline. Are there material changes from the EUR 500 million you indicated after Q1? Okay. I think Gregor will start with the U.S. part, and I will take this, the third and the fourth question. Gregor. Hello, Mr. Specht. Welcome back. The development in the U.S. is indeed extremely positive on the EBIT side. First half year is almost flat, which is an extreme increase in margin. We've made it a key priority to both headquarters and regional management to manage the bottom line extremely carefully in this market because of the significant economic uncertainties in the States. We will remain on that level for the remainder of the year. We have stopped both direct and indirect investments into the region and want to live it through with the people we have on board, but also take a very effective management in the accounts receivable side. The outlook there remains positive, yes, at the cost of growth as we highlighted to many of you in earlier calls, we make the preservation of bottom line and also cash a higher priority than growth, especially in those regions, as we can only afford so many investments given the situation. Okay. Maybe one thing to add in the U.S., what I personally find very encouraging that when we look quarter by quarter, not quarter-over-quarter, but quarter by quarter, we see an improved year-over-year and quarter-by-quarter development. The pipeline is also developing positively, not in line with our budgeting expectation, but in line with, let's say at least, we get now continuity and we get, I think we get, let's say the volatility problem solved what we had in 2020 and 2021. That's the good side. You talked about the EXA part. Let me be very clear on EXA. What we do right now is not to overload the team on the EXA side and on our side, we have two focus areas. We go very aggressive in Central Europe and in the U.S. with a dedicated team for the operational transfer pricing and the GVC project. This is really encouraging. We see the efforts, we see the response from the market. We see that customers are all highly interested, at least for the operational transfer pricing, to get the transparency and how they can, let's say, improve against their authorities like the tax department and this kind of things. It responds really good and we had the first closing together and a very solid pipeline on this side. On the backlog, correction, this is more or less. We do maybe this is now more guessing, but we do roughly 40%-50% of the projects we do with a fixed price and the rest we do with time and material. This is also something the team needs to learn. We finish our project sometimes ahead of the, of the, let's say, what we have estimated when we offer the customer the time and material. That means we have booked 500 days with the order entry in the order backlog, but we finish the project with 450. The team is now trained that we will deal fair with our customer. On the other side, we don't need to give back the 50 days. We can maybe offer the customer, let's say, some new interesting part in our extended portfolio. That means this is a short. What I can assure you is there is not one customer who ran away because he was. Mm-hmm. Let's say unsatisfied with our services. That's not the problem of the backlog correction, which would be a concern, but that's not the case. Yeah. Okay. The unweighted pipeline going forward? The unweighted pipeline develops still pretty good. What we did also as a pre-warning is we have now biweekly calls with all the regions. Gregor is doing this for U.S. and U.K. I do this with the rest of the regions. What we did is we took, let's say from a cost planning, we took the biggest deals where we had this enterprise platform and the enterprise license or the platform license, we took them out when we evaluate the pipeline. If we put all together, the pipeline is at an all-time record high. If we take, let's say the biggest deal out, there is a deal, for example, which is roughly EUR 50 million, and we have a couple of them, then our pipeline develops, let's say something like 10%-12% year-over-year, which is still good to finish and to meet our outlook. We did some de-risk specific on this platform area because Gregor was part of some customer negotiation. I'm involved right now in this three to four customer negotiation and very often we get the response, "Now is not the time to make a strategic decision, but to just fix the next project." That is something I think which, I personally, will not disappear in the second half, but it's maybe it can get even worse in this area. But the operational transformation still needs to be done. That's the good part. Yeah. Okay. Thanks a lot. The next question comes from Lukas Spang. Please go ahead. Yes. Good afternoon. My first question is related to the partner business. You talked now again about partner enablement. We saw the numbers, and they are also very volatile on order intake and revenue. Let's talk more about operating and business operating side. How satisfied are you with the development of the partner business, and where do you see still the gaps? The good thing is here, this is not a black and white discussion. This is different partner by partner. We have very good responses when we as better as closer we are working together, as better we have the development area. The best way is if you come to something like a joint factory. We are not able to do five, six, seven joint factories at the same time. That's also a limitation of our side. We have now, for example, with Fujitsu. We had one of the most critical project with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and we delivered phase 1 in line with the customer expectation. There was a little bit of a noise, a little bit of an escalation, but we finished it successful and we are now awarded the second phase of the project. Fujitsu is one of the younger partner in our partner ecosystem. With Accenture, great success. This factory is running like a machine together, and they have already decided to use in Europe our transformation factory as the new standard going forward. All for One, similar. IBM, very good in part of Central Europe, because they have a very strong delivery center in Italy, which really runs very well. Still, let's say, solid in the U.S. and in some industries. It's very much for example, in the utility industry, we are, I would say, the partner of choice for them in this area. For example, very difficult in JAPAC when it comes to, for example, when it comes to the Japan, because we are very much aggressive in the market with Fujitsu. I would say we have now line of sight that the partner enablement works. Again, we need to improve some of our software. Our software needs to get, let's say, we did good movements with Mission Control, with the value calculator and some other tools in the software functionality in the software. I think our user interface and the easiness of the software can still be better. We get the feedback from the partners. We are working on that together. We have line of sight that this is what we have planned. It's working. It works for big customer, it works for small customer. One smaller adaptation, there are a couple of partners which said, "Hey, our interest is not to deliver this on our own. Can you build up something to deliver this as a, let's say, behind us?" We do all the business process consulting for the customer. We do the system integration, but we would like to buy the full end-to-end transformation, data transformation from SAP. We look at this, I think we gave a positive signal because we need to scale the software. If there's the one or the other partner who is leveraging our service organization, this really helps us to keep, let's say, to be in line, to test our software directly, to get more feedback from the partners. I think that's a slight adaptation of our strategy. We will not give up our scaling. Gregor would like to add something. Want to add a couple of highlights. Also, you understand the priorities going forward from a portfolio and enablement perspective. We had driven, as we promised in the Q1 call, sales enablement with early partners. That will remain a priority. We see how important it is, and you can clearly tell the partnerships where that has been done successfully. That remains a focus for the second half year, and then of course, going forward. The previous enablement, especially 2020 and 2021, was more focused on the technical and the delivery side. Also, what you see with the announcements Michael made earlier about the Snowflake partnership, we are increasingly getting into technology partnerships, which is a new game. It's a new, also a field for growth that we see. Volkan Laux asked the question in the Q1 call about the potential integration with SAP and Signavio and so forth. We are exploring these things. It takes a little bit more time because it's like a technical assessment on both sides that requires attention to detail. With Snowflake, we have gotten here very far, and surely and slowly, we will announce more partnerships going here. That is a different nature of joint business. That will also remain a priority, but that's a midterm priority, of course. Last point. Now that we have opened these many partners, 13 of the top 20 system integrators, that of course opens the potential for increasing the footprint at the partner, both from a portfolio perspective, we have a wider portfolio that needs new enablement, but also new context, new regions inside the partner. That is, like Michael used to say, that's really guerrilla fighting because you do that partner by partner, manager by manager, VP by VP. That will yield high returns in the midterm. Of course, it's no short-term thing. There's no giant leaps here, but that is just the nature of the partner game. It is slowly, but it yields the return. Okay. Thank you for explanation. On your partnership with SAP, I would be interested if there are any contracts with SAP that will end within the next 24 months. What kind of contract do you mean? For example, any special contracts that you and SAP are working closely together. Any technological Nothing. -contract. Yeah. Nothing which is, let's say, strategic-wise important for us. We have a couple of, let's say, people applied against SAP, and they go in and out in a normal way. SAP is just, I think, Gregor, you just made a deal with, on PV, for example, to consult with our people SAP. We had a couple of people for six months now to consult SAP. That's a normal, let's say, kind of delivery partnership in this area. We had a couple of people from our R&D department, I think four or five people, this contract stopped by the end of 2021, and we took the people back, and they are working now on our product. There's nothing that we—something which can take us out of the business or risking our portfolio. What we see still is, let's say, we get positive signals. We have areas where we work closely together with SAP. I would say this remains maybe for the next couple of months, but SAP is one of our biggest partner, maybe the biggest partner in total, but also one of our biggest competitors. Similar to what Accenture will tell you. They work closely with SAP on the one side, but then, let's say when it comes to big system integration projects, SAP is sometimes the biggest competitor at the same time. This happens to us as well. We are friends in some regions, in some industries, like really good. We see some pushbacks. For example, we are fighting in Spain right now for a big deal where we are still fighting, let's say, with very aggressive to sell our own interest, us as SNP and SNP as SAP as SAP. Yeah. There's nothing which we okay, RISE will take us out of the business or they will terminate, let's say, a development contract or something like this. That's not at least nothing we are aware of. On cash conversion. Cash conversion or operating cash flow in the first half of the year was still weak. Contract assets were up again. What is your expectation in terms of cash conversion for the second half of the year? I think, yeah. Yeah. Thorsten speaking. We expect it to improve. That is a rather long way. Let me explain the various steps we are addressing. The most obvious, but not to say the easiest, is simply to make sure that accounts due and overdue are paid. There, for the half year, we lost one big fight with an overdue account. The payment is now in. A couple of days after closure of a half year, the number would have looked much better. For end of June, I can guide, it's a company from the automotive industry and automotive supplier, and they are known for playing really hard. I have to say, we need to become more robust on that. Yeah. They won the match. That continues. I'm pointing to this detail, account by account, that the attention by top management on accounts receivable and also on contract assets, I will address in a moment, has increased significantly. Second step is this attention to payment terms, which is now part of each approval process. Now we are getting to something which may be a long shot. It's about culture. It's about incentives. Look, if you're paying people by order entry or by revenues, they are not the toughest fighters for getting cash in. That is a policy and a tradition in the company, and in the industry, so we have to make sure to which degree here additional incentives or changes in incentives can be set. Finally, also in structuring projects, if we want to collect an account receivable, the first step is we need an account receivable. The faster an item moves from a contract assets to an account receivable, the faster we can invoice. There we are going to the nuts and bolts of the projects, because there, the deadlines in the projects play an important role. Having reached a certain deadline to the full satisfaction of the customer, our work is billable. Yes, we need to maybe intervene at least to enter into a detailed dialogue with project management to see whether or not we can set different deadlines. To move the moment we can invoice for to bring it forward. I think the sense of urgency is more than understood. It's also starting to catch up dynamics within the company, and I'm very confident to see better numbers for Q3 and particularly for year-end, but not the full exploitation of our potential for cash conversion in this year. You would say that, at the end, we will still see a negative operating cash flow? We are not guiding on that number. There is a chance of more than 50% to be a positive number or will be more negative? Run rates, or quarter? Run rates for 12 months. We're standing now at a significantly negative number. Given the percentage you have offered, I would say that would be a real challenge and a giant's work. Yeah. Okay. That's from my side. Thank you. We have a last question for now from Yannik Siering. Your line is open now. Yeah, thank you. Just one question left from my side. Basically on cost inflation and also your ability to pass on higher costs, maybe also in the context of your next-gen software, has this maybe offered now an opportunity to increase prices from your side? Some color on that would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah, very good question. I will start and then Thorsten and Gregor can add. What we did is, and that was really good, we had from a, let's say, European point of view, we had a standard salary increase on the first of April. But we increased our rates to the customer already beginning of the year. We had now, a couple of weeks ago, we had decided to do a second increase. With benchmarks on the market, what is our competition doing? What is our partner doing? We did some comparisons, and we decided to increase our rates the second time. On the software side, we do frequently the value calculation, and we look at what is the value of our software and how can we adapt towards the value. How can we drive the price to the best point so that value and price is good matching in this area. This we do frequently. I guess, I see that we are slightly ahead of the wave. That's important that we are not running behind. As said, this is very difficult. We have the interest of the customer, we have the interest of our employees, we have the interest of SNP for sure. That means we need to keep this in balance. So far, I think we did a good job here, and we get this very much balanced. Hope that the second half of the year is not getting additional challenges because if we increase too much and if this gets, let's say, we will even cause more delays on the budget side, and then this can go directly, let's say, reversed. I would say I'm okay. I don't know how my colleagues see this, but going forward, we watch the market carefully and for sure, we will not increase the cost without, let's say, checking what we can do on the top line. Yeah. Thanks. Any further questions? We have one more question from Johannes Ries. Your line is open now. Yes, good afternoon. You can hear me? Yep. Yes. Maybe a clarification question. Your guidance on the order intake is that you will significantly increase last year's figure. You mentioned also there are push outs of deals and maybe large deals who are only moved to project deals and maybe get bigger to enterprise deals next year. Is it still realistic or maybe to have a clear increase in the order intake, or is it more challenging than what you told us during the call? I would say the answer is exactly what you said. It is realistic, but it's getting challenged. We need challenging. We need to be close to the customer. We see positive signals. We signed very nice deals in Q2 with big enterprises. The market is still there. Let's say to win against your competition is tougher because they are also more aggressive. Then to get long-term commitment is important to get the higher volume. We have a big source, and I think the big source for us is also our cross-sell opportunity now with the new extended portfolio. This is something where we are new. We have more to offer to the same account. You know, in crisis time, it's easier to sell to existing customer compared to win new customer. We need to focus even more in times like today. Right. How strong is the business which is not SAP related? Is it growing faster? For example, transformation to a cloud transformation for hyperscalers and things like this. Gregor, would you like to answer this? Yes. We see that it's growing, but that is in line with the expectation also. In previous guidance, we said we attempt to grow twofold the group. Growth, which is absolutely realistic right now. I mean, you all have seen and read the guidance and the growth that SAP is realizing itself. We also need to deal with the fact that one of our main technology partners is not growing at the rate he, she used to. Hence, as Michael indicated, the depth and the breadth of the portfolio is an important strategic asset to deal with that uncertainty. Also to be clear, we see that this is one of the factors that is impacting on our growth potential. Our business is based on the fact that every big company on Earth runs SAP. What we see is that now even in the core, customers are making a move away to or additionally to other platforms. That is a threat and an opportunity at the same time. Of course, being management, we want to face the opportunity and manage the risk on the downside. Hence, it's exactly as you say, it's a situation we need to deal with smartly. Lucky us, we are in a position that we can handle it from a portfolio perspective. Super. Maybe and also when, how important maybe could be dealt with Signavio competitors, I think, especially one company in Munich, which is quite- Yes. Important in the space. How important could this be maybe going forward because maybe process management is an important maybe important area for a lot of companies in a fast-changing world now? It's a very good question again. I don't know if that is a known fact, but a couple of years back, we have been seen as one of the big threats to Celonis by Gartner even. We had a previous version only built with IBM on process management. So it's an area of the market we understand extremely well. Hence, we are taking the time to carefully check what is the joint value proposition. Yes, of course, we're speaking to Celonis, of course, we're speaking to Signavio to really understand, A, where the customer is moving, where the market is moving, and what a joint value proposition could look like. Now that's more a personal comment. It's my personal conviction that understanding the intersection between data and processes will become one of the gold nuggets of SAP in the future. We comment on that previously. The analysis benchmark we sit on to understand the data and the technology side of our customers is one of the key assets we have here. If we could bring that into a joint partnership with either Celonis or Signavio or both, that of course would multiply the value of that gold nugget. This is a careful shot to call because that will call for investment. In these times, we want to deal very carefully with such investment decisions. We will take the time necessary to fully understand before we make the call. If maybe it is interesting, it could be a very nice opportunity in my eyes. Also, the partnership with Snowflake make your position even stronger than the data management. It is definitely. You know, the market there in cloud data management is not overheated. I think when you see and you look at the valuations that Celonis had once gotten, it's safe to say that market is very hot right now. If it's yet overheated or not, I can't tell. I don't possess the knowledge and the capabilities to do that, but I think it's another fact to consider. Great. Thanks a lot. We have one more question from Lukas Spang. Your line is open now. Yes. One quick follow-up. In the last call, you told us about a platform deal with Deutsche Post DHL. Could you sign some additional platform deal in Q2? We are operating Deutsche Post DHL. We are now in and we are operating. That's good. Yeah, we signed a couple of smaller one, and we have three, four which should happen in the next four weeks very much with comparable, let's say, companies from a size point of view, but they are not ready. We signed a couple of smaller one, so 600K, 700K, 800K for more mid-sized companies. But the big ones, we have one big automotive OEM which we hope that we can close soon, hopefully in Q3 still. Then we have, let's say, even here in Germany two further which I guess we can do. We have one in JAPAC in Japan, which we believe we can do. I think there are one or two in the U.S. we look for, which is. For example, one of the slippages is Home Depot. Home Depot, for example, was a deal which was planned to do, and Home Depot said, "Hey, we do all the project review, so no, there's nothing between us and the customer." We are not in line today to do something like this in Q2, and they moved it more to the end of the year, maybe even to 2023. It is not locked. If your question is more with the background, is the market fully locked? No, it's still possible, but only if the customer has a clear commitment to do a transformation in, let's say, even if the world is more complex, more difficult. Some companies decide that that's the best time to start transformation. A couple of them delay because they said, "Hey, I need to focus on my core." That depends on the company strategy. We need to find the right customers. Maybe it depends a little bit also on the industry side, you know, because not all industries are seeing, let's say, something like the sign of a recession or the sign of a crisis, but the others. That means, again, back to what we said before, focus, focus is, I think our answer here. Let me just make one point what Gregor said. I think besides what Gregor said about the cloud, I think the cloud offers us also to move more to recurring revenue. I am personally very much a friend of recurring revenue because this helps you in times like today to keep your company stable. Yeah. I think also conscious of the fact that getting a customer to buy into your platform is our daily life. Yeah. Getting a customer to get full buy in also economically for all the steps he, she wants to undergo over a longer time period, that is not only difficult, it's almost impossible right now. Yes, we will show platform deals, but not with the full economical call off in one order. That is a significant difference we see over 2021 and even 2020, that we even now know the project planning goes until 2025, 2026 and 2027, but the economic call off is for the fiscal year 2022 and maybe 2023. We just have to deal with the different way to manage the order entry here, where we get visibility on pipeline and joint planning that is far ahead of the economic call off. That is why we feel significantly more secure, although the book-to-bill ratio is not at all what we are used to in this industry. We have always been shooting for 1.3, 1.25, but the economic reality is just different. If you talk about the three to four bigger ones, would they be more in the single-digit million range or would it be possible also double-digit? No, it's in the, let's say, yeah, up to the middle of the single digit. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. There are no further questions now. Well, thank you, operator. We have no further questions. If there are no further ones, we would come to an end. As usual, investor relations will be more than happy to answer any further questions afterwards. Thanks to our participants in this call. With these words, we are closing the call and wish you all the best. Ciao, ciao.