Welcome, dear listeners, to the very first edition of our IR Quarterly Wrap-Up by Siemens Healthineers. Before we start, I would like to briefly describe to you what the aim of this new format is. We would like to make sure everyone gets a chance to hear our answers to the most pressing questions which came up during our post-reporting roadshow. That is the aim of this podcast. I am sitting here in Erlangen with Bernd and Jochen to give you a compact run-through of the most frequently discussed topics. If you did not get the chance to catch up with us post-reporting, or if you simply want to compare notes, here's your chance. Great to have you both here, Bernd and Jochen, and maybe it would be good, before we dive into Q&A, if you, Bernd, could just briefly run us through the past Q4 that we just reported on. Yeah, thank you, Marc, and thank you for initiating this format. So definitely, I was very happy about the strong finish of our fiscal year. We had an excellent double-digit revenue growth of 11% ex- antigen in Q4. On top of that, order intake was again very strong, with a really marvelous book-to-bill ratio of 1.16 for equipment. And also on the bottom line, excluding antigen and the diagnostics transformation costs, adjusted EBIT was up by 20%. That's true, and that was on back of a strong performance across all four segments, right? Yes, definitely. I mean, really, all four segments contributed. Imaging, again, excellent revenue growth at strong margins. Also here, increasing its order backlog with a strong book-to-bill. Very similar story at AT with a robust finish. I'm also very happy about Diagnostics, yeah, where we have a nice track record quarter-over-quarter of accelerating top-line growth and improving profitability. I mean, the personal highlight for me was Varian, yeah, where the team really set an exclamation mark with a revenue growth of 30%, yeah, at a margin of 19%. That's true. Our performance of Varian in the quarter was pretty... in, in the year was pretty volatile, with a great last quarter, and we were often asked, Jochen, maybe you can answer to that, why was that the case? And also, if we should expect or maybe are able to avoid this kind of volatility going forward. I mean, nobody loves volatility, and it's never helpful, and also not for margins, yeah? When we look at the sources, Varian grew much faster in the past, and this created a lot of, I would say, challenge in the supply chain. And then we had volatility in inbound logistics, due to the inability of one of our suppliers to deliver a component, and then we created some volatility on ourselves, yeah, because we were not able to bring all the parts at the right point in time to our customers. And all these things, the supplier issues as well as the internal logistics topics, they are fixable. They are not questioning the business case at all, yeah? We will hear Arthur speaking at the Meet the Management about the topic and about his initiatives to fix this rather sooner than later. Yeah, obviously, very much looking forward to that. Speaking of outlook, with regards to our Outlook 2024, we often get the question: "Is it too conservative? No, I think our outlook is extremely balanced, yeah, as always. We are seeing good growth across the board from the strong order book Bernd was referring to beforehand. We have strong service growth, and we have even baked into our 5%-7% revenue growth, a headwind of about 100 basis points from China. Taking into account, on the one hand, the nice dynamics we see in all the business with underlying margins, and including the headwinds we see from China and foreign exchange, we still show margin expansion across the board with one little exception, which is Imaging. But Imaging, as you know, has anyway industry-leading margins, and the impacts from foreign exchange and China are the biggest in this business, yeah? Our China assumptions were interpreted as conservative. I think we call this transparent. It's assumption-based, obviously, and if it changes, we will be clear about it, yeah. Maybe could you remind the listeners of how we came to this assumption with regards to the revenue headwind in China? Yeah, maybe I comment on this one. So a simple calculation, yeah, which is based on some simplified assumptions, but I think it's about right overall, is if you assume this anti-corruption campaign takes about six months, yeah, starting in the July-August timeframe and runs about till Chinese New Year, we expect about 30% less equipment order intake compared to a normal period. And since China is a fast-turning market when it comes to book-to-bill time, this lack of 30% equipment orders growth will translate in 15% less equipment revenue in China. China is about 15% of our equipment business in Siemens Healthineers, and when you do the math, you end up at about EUR 200 million, which is about 1% of Siemens Healthineers' top line. Okay. Yeah. Speaking of China, we also had a lot of questions around the factor behind this situation in China. Bernd, you were recently there, if I'm not mistaken. How do we see the anti-corruption campaign evolving? And also, how is our longer-term assessment of the Chinese market? So, I mean, yes, I was in China, but I also want to say, I mean, we have 7,500 employees in China. We are very, very much locally present and a real part of the Chinese healthcare agenda since decades. So China is, and remains, a very attractive market. It is a growing market. There's a lot of demand. And also, my long-term assessment of the actions of the government, there's a lot of positives also in it, yeah, because in the end, it's about making the whole distribution more rational, making sure, yeah, that it's clear who the middlemen are, what they really do, and that there's no margin stacking happening, yeah? In a way, all the measures, or many of the measures we have seen from the Chinese government in the last years, help to increase transparency and bringing us closer to the customers. I understand what we also wanted to bring across, that this is clearly a temporary effect, right? Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah, and I mean, as an aside, I mean, you know, if we did this nine months ago, we would talk about the stimulus program for hospitals and think about, "Hey, what's the upside?" Yeah, and we were always a bit careful in saying, "Hey, I mean, this is, this is there for a while," but then, you know, demand will be driven by the natural growth of procedure growth, and that's the same here. Yeah, we will see the market swing back, and in the end, whenever there's an unnatural holding back of investment decisions, it comes back as pent-up demand. Absolutely, and I think that brings me to the next point that we had a lot of discussions on. That's basically our 2025 guidance. So this swing back comes in that year as one of the factors. So what do you say to the investors if they ask you, "How is our 2025 EPS CAGR achievable, Jochen? Yeah, good, good question. I think in 2025, or the year-over-year development on EPS from 2024 to 2025 is steeper than from 2023 to 2024. A A couple of reasons, yeah? One is we expect the China topic to come back, yeah, which is a headwind in 2024 and a tailwind in 2025. Secondly, we see all business nicely growing. We expect margin expansion across the board and skewed towards 2025, in particular in Diagnostics, due to the transformation savings kicking in at full extent, and in Varian, with addressing all the topics based on the nice growth trajectory we are seeing. And I think an important topic is below the line, yeah? We have significant headwind year-over-year in 2024 from interest expenses and from a normalization of the tax rate, which we do not expect to see from 2024 to 2025. True. So really good dynamic towards 2025, but I also think it's worth reminding our listeners of the new midterm ambition that we published together with the Q4. Yeah, I think it's very important that we also look beyond 2025, especially as the strong trajectory continues, yeah? We expect mid- to high-single-digit growth on the top line and double-digit earnings growth in the midterm, yeah. We see the segment trajectory also continues beyond 2025, with Imaging growing at least mid-single-digit and expanding industry-leading margins from scale, Varian growing at least high-single-digit and advancing towards what we call Imaging-like margins, so well above the 20%. Advanced Therapies growing at least also mid-single-digit, and returning to industry-leading margins, and Diagnostics to grow at least at market, and advancing to mid-teens margins in the midterm, which is very important to note, because the 8%-12% in 2025 is only an intermediate step. Yeah. Great. Thanks, Jochen. So, speaking of diagnostics, unsurprisingly, considering the press rumors before the release, there was a lot of talk on diagnostics during the roadshow, a lot of questions about its position in our company and what the strategic future is, and about the transformation program. Maybe, Bernd, you could help the listeners here a bit. Yeah, I mean, that gave us the opportunity to once again be very clear about this, and we see two distinctly different sources of value creation for Siemens Healthineers. There's a big part of the business, which is the EUR 17 billion made up by Imaging, Advanced Therapies, and Varian, where we go from strengths to strengths, where the businesses are synergistic, complement each other. We can benefit from each other in R&D in production, in value partnerships, in go-to-market. Diagnostics is a different business in a different phase. It's a razor-razor blade business with a lot of potential, and the focus here is the transformation and nothing else but the transformation, and everything else would be a distraction. Mm-hmm. Continuing with diagnostics, Bernd, we had a lot of questions on the roadshow with regards to its margin development going forward and also its potential to grow. So maybe you could help the listeners here. Yeah, let me walk you through the transformation program. Within Diagnostics, we have three businesses. One is about 15% of the top line. That's the Point-of-Care business, which is nicely growing and profitable. There's the specialty lab solutions business, which comprises coagulation, plasma proteins, and allergy, also nicely growing and profitable. And then there's the central lab solution business, where we have now Atellica as the market-leading platform complete. It's already 40% of that business, yeah, which in total is 60% of Diagnostics. The Atellica franchise is growing strongly double-digit, yeah, and at the same time, the legacy business, which is the burden in the P&L, is, quote, unquote, "melting down." And this is also where we can target the cost savings, yeah? So when we talk about the EUR 300 million cost saving, it's not some kind of a lawnmower approach. It is a very targeted way of getting rid of the costs, which we always had in this not very efficient setup of overlapping technology stacks, and we are extremely confident that these EUR 300 million cost savings will be fully realized by 2025, supporting the margin targets we have, in combination with accelerated growth and a more rational P&L growing with the improving scale of the Atellica platform. Great. Thanks, Bernd. Sometimes also linked to this whole discussion around this speculation on potentially selling diagnostics and what we would then potentially do with proceeds, people asked us about our leverage, yeah, which is perceived to be relatively high, and what we are going to do to bring it down. Obviously, we've set out targets here and also said we are improving our operating cash flow. Maybe, Jochen, you could give us some more background on that. Yeah, I mean, during the pandemic, we had to manage a trade-off, you know, between being able to deliver on the one hand, or optimizing operating working capital levels, and we obviously prioritized being able to deliver very successfully. And we now have the pandemic, and we have also the supply chain challenges behind us, and therefore, we can now focus on reducing operating working capital again, and we will, so to say, free up cash by doing this, yeah. By the way, we, from a capital allocation standpoint, we are not going for major acquisition in the near term or the midterm. We have done, or we do, smaller tuck-in M&A, if it makes sense strategically. We just did two, yeah, in the most recent quarter, and this is going to proceed. Not more, but also not less. With this strategy, we will come to net debt over EBITDA with 3.0 at the end of this fiscal year, and then proceed on this trajectory to 2.X in 2025, yeah. Great. Thanks, Jochen. And now to wrap it up on a great note, which is a strong part of our equity story, the value partnerships. We had quite a few questions around this, which is good, because people notice. The questions we got were around, how are we able to grow so strongly here? Is it at the cost of lower prices? Or why is our competition not also doing the same? Maybe, Bernd. Yeah. I think it's an important, very important topic, and I was very happy that we had time to discuss it, yeah, because while the segment trajectories are of utmost importance, it's also important to see how we get stronger across Siemens Healthineers by leveraging our strength together. To give you some numbers, I mean, the value partnership business was about EUR 400 million in size in terms of orders. The time of the IPO, about three years ago, we crossed the EUR 1 billion line, and now it's already EUR 2 billion in the last fiscal year in terms of orders. Total order backlog is now EUR 5 billion, and this is nicely profitable wall to wall. And in addition to this, you can almost look at it as an additional source of our recurring revenue. The secret sauce here is that we have a combination of leading businesses, which makes us the partner of choice on the departmental level, but at the same time, we can cover many departments of a hospital, whether it's radiology, nuclear medicine, radiation therapy, the emergency room, cardiology, neurosurgery. That gives us the right to play one level higher and also discuss with the C -level how to be a partner in their expansion plans, whether it's about ambulatory care, whether it's about addressing staff shortage, and so on. Yeah, so that gives us the right to have a seat at their table and to really develop from a strong equipment and technology company to a real trusted advisor, and it's something we are very proud of. By the way, it also resonates with public and private customers, yeah, at the same time, yeah. Great. And I think a strong portfolio is also what you will be seeing at our Meet the Management event on the seventh of December, round about two weeks from this recording, one week from when you will be hearing this recording. At this event in Forchheim, where we are expecting many institutional investors and also our sell-side analysts that are covering us, we are going to be, on the one hand, showing you the breadth of our portfolio in terms of products, and we'll be giving you a chance to speak to our segment heads in Q&A sessions, and there will be four presentations, a presentation by each of the four segment heads, where you will s ee their plans on how they are aiming to achieve their midterm targets. From us three, you will hear the next time in around about three months from now in the then second episode of the quarterly IR Wrap-Up by Siemens Healthineers. Looking forward to hearing you and seeing you on the road. Bye-bye. Stay safe, and have a good crossover into the next year.