Hi, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you to SYNLAB's First Capital Markets Day, live from our Central Lab here in Barcelona. My name is Mark Reinhard, I'm the Head of Investor Relations. At this stage, I would like to welcome all people connected through the webcast. This session, for the people in the room, is following two site visits, a SYNLAB blood collection point in downtown Barcelona and our lab, our international reference lab. A state-of-the-art facility where we perform. Every day, we handle 27,000 samples. Today's conference is taking place in a part of the building we usually use for trainings, including a program called the SYNLAB Academy. After the visit, the objective of this session is to give you more insight on the strategy behind the infrastructure and maybe as importantly, the people behind the strategy. Therefore, we'll open the stage to a number of Senior Managers. They're all sitting gently on the left of the room. They will take us through different presentations, and the total presentation will last around 200 minutes with two Q&A sessions. In the first part, Mathieu will first set out the mega trends that shape our industry and SYNLAB's plan to outperform our markets. We'll have four presentations on strategic initiatives by our segment CEOs, our COO, followed by a Q&A session. In part two, we'll cover the more transversal topics, HR and ESG, M&A, finance. For the Q&A sessions, we'll take first questions from the room, but remote attendees can also submit their questions using the chat function. There's a panel that should appear on the right of your screen, and we'll make sure they are asked to management. Of course, we welcome follow-up questions after the event. That's the plan for today. Thank you very much for attending. I now hand you over to Mathieu Floreani, CEO of SYNLAB. Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon to all, and welcome to this SYNLAB Capital Markets Day. Welcome to all of you here in the room and to all of you connected around the world. Of course, we are very excited to have you here and to give you a bit of a better sense of concretely what we do. I'm sure you have, for those who were this morning participating here, understood a bit better what it means to welcome our patients, to sample them, and then visiting the site here to see how we treat, how we go about with these samples and what happens in the way also to deliver medical excellence with the advice. The next three hours will be a bit different in terms of what we do because it's. Will be mostly about how we are growing our business and what our plans are to further grow the business. As Mark mentioned, there are plenty of my colleagues sitting here in the room, and I'll introduce you every time they will present, before they present, so that you understand a bit more who you're dealing with. Now, our growth roadmap. I'll give you the conclusion before we start. I guess it's easier. The two things I think you should remember are, number one, we over-delivered every single promise we made at the IPO. Number two, we have a very strong growth opportunity and very strong growth plans delivering. Now, before I'll get into the details also, let me remind you of some characteristics of who we are. So, general characteristics, but also our investment case. Let's start with the mission. I read it because I think it's very important. It drives a lot of behaviors and things we do. We provide actionable diagnostics information for healthy lives and well-being for all. What does it mean in concrete terms? Every medical intervention today starts with a diagnostic. Simply said, if we are not around, there is no modern medicine. What is also important in what you see is the notion that we don't only address our services to patients, to people who have a problem, but also to people who want to avoid having a problem, who want to stay in good health and seek advice for that. This will only continue to change fast in the future. I would say that the last point on this, which I find exciting, also as a father of young adults, is that this purpose, which is a genuine purpose, right? It's not fabricated, it's a genuine purpose, is very strong, and this is and will be even more an asset in the future. Now, we are the undisputed leader in Europe of medical diagnostic services. I remind you, some of you have probably already seen a similar chart. Let me remind you also of what changed since you saw it first at the time of the IPO. Starting with a number of the countries, we are in 36 countries. That's the same number we had at the IPO. The difference is that now in Mexico, we have entered with two acquisitions. We're number three in the market, where we were just a reference lab here in Barcelona for the Mexican market. We have, since the IPO, performed also 28 more M&As in different geographies. Now, if you look at the color coding, dark color, top three position in the market, and in many of those markets, we actually are top one. Lighter blue, we are in top five, and very light blue is our presence. What you don't see on the chart is that we are the only player in Europe to be in the top five European markets with active presence. A few numbers, 600 million more tests we perform every year, 500 labs, and this, since the IPO, is probably in the range of 50 more labs. 1,800 blood collection points, and that's probably in the range of 200 more since the IPO. PCR tests, 50 million plus, we performed, and more than 2,000 medical experts or scientists we employ on our 30,000 employees. Now, 14 months post-IPO, as I mentioned, we delivered or over-delivered on every single of our promises. If I start from the right side, the left side, so you have the target and then the achievement. Underlying organic revenue growth, we had said 3% plus. We delivered 3.3% and excluding SEL. If we include SEL, which is also organic growth, it's 9.6%. COVID-19, we had said EUR 800 million in 2021 and EUR 500 million in 2022. Well, we delivered more than that in one year, EUR 1.6 billion, and just in Q1 of this year, EUR 450 million. M&A, we had said we will spend roughly EUR 200 million EV. We have spent more than EUR 200 million last year. Free cash flow, we had said between EUR 300 million and EUR 500 million, we achieved EUR 734 million. Leverage, we said long-term ambition is to keep it under 3x. We are at 1.23x. Then ESG, our ambition there was to establish more detailed road maps and improve our data quality, and here also we are absolutely on track. Our investment case, I mentioned it many times in the past, we are a growth story. I would say if anything changed during this time is the reinforcement of how strong this investment case is. It relies on five key points. Growth market, we operate on a market that underlying is growing and will continue to grow. I would say the pandemic also shows the resilience of this market because basically it continued growing on its long-term trend, and more so it added a lot of revenue potential with PCR testing. Leaders, second point. We are the absolute leaders in Europe, and scale matters. If I take again maybe just a very recent example, this response to COVID, we have been the fastest-growing lab in the world for, I think, five quarters in a row. This shows that scale makes a difference, that the capabilities we have be it operational, medical or commercial are unique. Number three, customer-centric medical excellence, very clear strategy. Number four, consolidator. We have consolidated this market for the last 20 years successfully, and we continue to do so. Number five, value creation. Ultimately, this is all also about creating value for our shareholders and have done that successfully for a long period of time. Now, I was talking about the market. We are operating on a large and constantly growing market, and this is because it's driven by fundamental megatrends. Demand, it's pretty obvious. Population is aging, chronic disease happening, and population is also growing. This market is also gaining size with other parameters like hospital outsourcing, making the addressable for private operators market bigger, direct to consumer. You will hear from Robert a bit later, medical sophistication of medicine, longevity, aging, type of borderline medical and consumer considerations. This all has also an impact on pricing, obviously, making the tests and the mix more rich. 2%-3%, that's more or less the underlying market growth you can expect from the markets we are exposed to. Of course, I'll show you how we transform this potential for further growth into concrete actions and plans. This market is not only growing on a long-term permanent basis, it's also fairly immune to recessions, not to say immune to recessions. If I'm just pointing to, say, GDP on the left side, right? You see the blue bars are our market growth year-over-year. Then the red is the variation of GDP worldwide. What you see very clearly in 2009, and then more recently in the pandemic, is that this has absolutely no influence on our activity. When you look to the right side, it's very obvious because healthcare systems don't stop when you have a crisis. We are absolutely necessary to most of the healthcare services with, like, 70% involvement in any medical decision. The good thing about it is that we only cost 2%-3% to the healthcare system, so we are not usually their biggest problem. Now, one of the questions we have had regularly is also to understand a bit better the market dynamics of our segments. The summary is that the volume growth is always consistently strong. There is moderate price decline, and we have visibility on what happens usually ahead of time. If I take from top to bottom, sorry, starting with France. France is regulated in three-year agreements. This has happened for a long time. We are already in the negotiation preparation of the fourth agreement, so the twelfth, say, nine years elapsed. The way the regulator works is to allocate to private operators a budget growth that they allow, right? Which is in the last three years contracts moving depending on the year from 0.5%-0.57% EUR growth. This is for the whole private industry. It doesn't mean that us, as a private operator, individual operator, we cannot outperform this, which is what we have done in the past many years by 1%-1.5% above this 0.5. Now, if you look at the dynamics, the volume growth is really driven classically by demographics, sophistication also of medicine with more specialty tests coming to reimbursement. Then it's offset to come to the agreed total budget growth by price and declines. Germany, not very different. It grows a bit faster, same kind of volume dynamics, a bit more moderate price reductions, and these are dependent on each state. The philosophy that I explained for France is not very different for Germany. Our South segment, which is made of Italy, Switzerland, Spain, LatAm, that's growing also 2%+. Same type of volume dynamics, maybe a bit faster in some cases because more possibilities for further hospital outsourcing and some direct to consumer may be a bit more dynamic. The price pressure here of -0.5% is really an average of pluses and minuses depending on the market. North and East, that's our cluster made up of U.K., the Nordics and Eastern Europe. This is growing a bit faster. More opportunities for hospital outsourcing, more emerging market in the mix and openness also to direct to consumer. There we have a positive price usually in the range of 0.5%, and that's also an average of different regulations pluses and minuses. If you look at our market exposure, the mix gives you this 2%-3%, I was mentioning. Again, you see the consistency of robust volume growth and moderate price pressure. Our plans to outperform this underlying market growth, and basically it's relying on three main levers. I start from the left, you see what I just mentioned, the 2%-3%, which is the market. The first lever is made of actioning market share gains and product mix, and this is basically encompassed in our FOR YOU transformation program. You will hear for each of these segments one of my colleagues addressing them. Retail, direct to consumer, specialties, and hospitals and prescribers. That's the first lever. Second lever, country mix. Luis will give you in the M&A section a bit more color on how this works, but basically it's exposing us more to emerging markets growing faster, giving us basically more organic growth. These two levers together give you what we guide for, the 3%+ organic growth. Now, cherry on the pie, there is a third lever, which is the outsourcing. This is basically in the European market, 50% of the market only is addressable to private operators. This is basically the other 50% coming to the market, and that's basically private or public hospitals. Of course, it's much less predictable when they come to market or when they will come. I would say just the example of SEL, this has pushed our organic growth to close to 10% last year. We have other examples in other countries where this is at play, like in Portugal, you will see with Reiner a bit later. Now let me take you through this one. Basically this is a visualization of how we outperform for each of the markets, this organic growth in each of this when I say markets, our geographies. The X-axis represents annual organic growth percentage. The Y-axis is the margin profile. The colored arrows are the main levers we pull on to accomplish this, to achieve this, additional acceleration of growth. If I take them one by one, starting with France, and nothing to do with my nationality. There we have a moderate growth acceleration, basically driven by retail levers and driven by more, specialty tests coming to reimbursement. You see that the margin profile remains stable in that case. Germany, a bit more growth and a bit more potential to accelerate, and that's relying again on specialties and on hospital outsourcing. Again, fairly stable margins. South, there you have a bit more initial growth, but much more potential to accelerate because here you just see from the colors there are plenty of more opportunities to pull on different levers. You see also, it's subtle, but it is represented, the margin improves, and this is our sheer volume leverage, where Sami will explain a bit more again in details. North and East segment, the last one, very similar to South. Again, you see this margin profile improvement. In summary, we have two of our underlying geographies that will have moderate growth acceleration, stable margins, and two cluster of countries where we'll have faster acceleration and improved margins. Now, I mentioned earlier the second lever, which was the country mix optimization, and this is also a representation of how it will evolve in a dynamic way. Basically what we project until 2025, everything remaining stable, is that we will have a 0.4% organic growth acceleration just playing with our country mix through acquisitions. You see from the bar to the right that the winner of this will be the South segment, which will most probably reach above EUR 1 billion, with increasing exposure to emerging markets. Of course, the immediate question here is what about the currency risk? Well, that's what we have addressed in the bottom two lines. It gives you the group exposure to non-euro currencies, and the bottom line is the one important here. Non-euro emerging market currency exposure today is 9%, and in the future with the same projections will remain below 15%. The summary here is that we have plenty of more room to capture additional, I would say, mechanical organic growth remaining in a very balanced FX position. The third lever. Outsourcing increases the pie mostly for large players. Here you have a representation for a selected number of countries in Europe where we have visibility on where we have data showing the evolution of the addressable market to private operators. What it tells you is that from 2005- 2015, in the 10 years, there have been EUR 400 million added, and it's the same projection in the next 10 years. This is, if you extrapolate that to the European total market, this gives you a 1 billion, a good billion, of every 10 years additional market for us. The large players are the winners in this game. This is basically relying on three dynamics, right? Number one, the trust. When you outsource hundreds of millions of EUR, you want to be very sure that you do that with someone that is very well-known in the market. Point number two, you want to make sure that these people have the capabilities, and this is not only the operational capabilities, it's also the medical capabilities and the commercial ones. We can go to that detail. Point number three, which is also important, is the breadth of the portfolio of tests that we can bring to the game. Of course, our win in Southeast London is a very clear case of all these dynamics being at play. Other markets are also, as we speak, thinking about it, beyond the U.K. The U.K. is the most obvious one because 92% of healthcare services in our industry are NHS, but there are other markets also where these dynamics are and will be at play. We are leaving the territory of organic growth to enter the wide world of inorganic. The summary here is that we have a great potential for further international expansion and consolidation. Just as a reminder, the important bubble here is probably the one on the right side, which represents the European market, right? EUR 62 billion total market. We have a 3% share of this total market. If you look at just the addressable one, it's 6%, but it doesn't change the math. This tells you, we hear a lot about some consolidation happening, right? This tells you that the potential is intact, right? Because if you just run very simplistic math, right? You say everyone has 3% of the market in the top five players. That means that the top, which it's not the case, right? The top five players would together account for 15% only of the European market. I think that gives you a perspective of how much more there is to be done. Now you go to Africa, LatAm, it's less than 1%, our share there, and same potential for further consolidation. Now, we have heard recently some larger deals happening, and the beauty, I would say, of these is that they are mostly PE-backed deals moving to PE-backed or family offices, right? This means that the consolidation is still ahead of us, independently of what I just mentioned about the overall potential. Even the larger deals will come to market at some point in the future. Another point we can hear is what about the multiples, right? There, of course, there are some intrinsic dynamics around these few larger deals. We're in a very good position to play also whenever we will think that this adds value, this is synergistic and strengthen our strategic deployment. The name of the game for us is also discipline. In summary, when you look at this chart, I think it's very obvious that we have plenty more opportunities to further consolidate the market. Now, you would be bored if I would not talk about COVID, I'm sure. It's only two slides today. Unfortunately, COVID is not over, and I would say to a degree, it's still above our long-term business case. On the left side, the graph, you are used to this one, I suppose this is our daily PCR testing volume since the inception of the pandemic. There are a few learnings on this. Number one, not many people talk about COVID these days. We are still running, as we speak, 35,000 PCRs a day. Given the increasing number of cases, week over week in every European country, I think our next week numbers. This week data on last week will be above this 35. I'm pretty sure. The second learning is look at the Omicron spike. We went from a traditional two previous waves at 100-something+ thousand per day. We went to 200,000. This, in my view, is a reflection of the maturity of the healthcare systems around where we operate, of dealing with testing and dealing with COVID-19. I would bet that the future spikes will look much closer to the Omicron one than to the ones where capacities and understanding was still ramping up. Now, you also probably remember that we have said long-term, this is not to disappear, and we have projected roughly EUR 150 million revenue to stay annually. This is based on the need for surveillance. You need to know which variants are developing, right? Today, we know it's BA.5 spreading throughout Europe, but we would not know if we would not test PCR and sequence. Hospitals have all protocols to, before admission, to test you. Now, the interesting part here is also this little table. The columns are the thousands of PCR tests per day. The lines is the average price we can have, right? From 40 to 30 euros. In each of the cells, the result is the number of million of euros that we perform in one month in those conditions. If I take the example of 65,000, the first column, last line, EUR 30, we are above that at this point, but for the sake of example, that gives you EUR 50 million, right? With 65,000 tests, EUR 30, EUR 50 million revenue. When you know that 65,000 is half of any of the waves we had before, and when you know that each wave was never less than two months, you can reasonably say that any future wave can yield in the range of four times EUR 50 million. This gives you maybe a bit of perspective on how we look at the world. I think the summary, which is even more important, is that we believe that this is integral part of our activity. Now, on COVID, not only does it increase the number of testing we do, but it has also accelerated some key trends. Five of them. Starting from left, capabilities and know-how. We have deeply embedded PCR testing capabilities, not only machines, but also know-how in a lot of labs and countries. These machines, in the hundreds, will be useful for testing HPV or HIV as just as an example, classical PCR. Second trend, brand and recognition. I would say the healthcare systems have seen us at play, but also patients and consumers. Health consciousness. This is something we have measured in a scientific marketing way, and to our surprise, is a trend that is very consistent in emerging and mature markets, where people are ready, willing to spend more time and more money to know preventively what they can do. Better nutrition, better cardiac health, and so on. This, of course, has an impact on the fourth trend here, which is out-of-pocket. They are also ready to spend more money. They were always ready to spend money, but now we have seen also that the amount has increased. The final one is digital. Very obvious for us consumers. In the past, much less obvious for regulators, a bit conservative sometimes. Well, regulators have, through the pandemic, allowed many more health transactions to go via the net, and this, of course, helps us. One way also to look at this whole thing is to say, but in the last two years, look at yourselves, right? Look at your families. Everyone in Europe has, at some point, been exposed to a lab operator. You can say the step to go from fit to fly to the test for prevention and wellness, like the one you did here this morning, is a very, very small step. We believe that if anything, the pandemic has also accelerated the opportunities for us to grow faster. Now, to conclude, this is a summary on a more near-term view of next 12 months, priorities and vision. Number one, medical excellence. We are the absolute leaders in Europe in specialties, but I don't think enough people know that, and we are reinforcing this image and this share of voice. Growth initiatives. The opportunities are tremendous. We have identified them, we have the plans, we are executing and will continue. M&A. Again, you saw also the landscape, how open it is, and again, fantastic opportunities to continue here developing ourselves. ESG. Very important for us. Catharina will give you more hints on how we look at this. But this is very important also for one topic, which is employee engagement. Employee engagement also drives organic growth. That's where I will leave you in the capable hands of my colleagues. As I stand here, very excited to continue developing SYNLAB in the coming months and years, and I'm sure you will feel the same passion and determination with my colleagues. Now, I think we start with the baby. No, not the baby. That's the next one. That's the older veteran. We start with retail. Let me introduce you to Stephan as he comes to the stage. Stephan Brune is the CEO for the South segment. He has joined us in the range of one and a half years ago. He has been an important addition, a targeted addition, because he has a lot of expertise in fast consumer goods at the beginning of his career, and then B2B and around the world. He has been active in Asia, in Europe, in the U.S. Strong addition to our suite of top team. Over to you, Stephan. Thank you very much, Mathieu. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen in the room, but also online. My name is Stephan. I'm the CEO of the Region South, as Mathieu mentioned. You here in the room, some of you have visited two of our BCPs or as we in the meantime call them, retail stores here in Barcelona. I will show you now in a couple of slides how we are using these retail stores as a key driver for growth. I can tell you just from my recent visit to Bogotá and to Mexico City last week, our staff is highly motivated and they're really executing this retail growth. There we are. Here you see an overview of the key retail countries with a total more than 1,800 of these retail stores or BCPs. In the last 15 months, we were adding more than 200 stores to our network. For example, in Latin America, 37 new store openings, in France, eight, and in Italy, 54. Just last week we opened a new store in Vicenza, in Veneto region, and the team was so proud to share it online via social media and celebrating this also with the local community. We are using and investing the profits from COVID in growing and densifying our retail network in all countries. First, you see on the left side an example from Spain, where we just opened up in the last 15 months, 16 stores, and we are continuously opening up to 35 stores in this country until the end of the year. COVID is a key driver for us to gain traffic, but also, you know, brand awareness among the patients and medics trust, because this is what people drives to us. They trust SYNLAB. On the right side of the chart, you see the payback period, the accelerated payback period of our investments. Before COVID, it was between 18-24 months, and now we have a payback period of 6-12 months in some countries, in some stores, even up to three months. We are not only investing in new stores, we are constantly reviewing our existing network to optimize locations, to close locations, to optimize profits and revenues. We have a clear standard process. We are benchmarking the BCPs with stores in the same area. We identify worst, but also of course, best performance, and we share the analysis with the local team to go deeper into analyzing and discussing this. We find and evaluate new locations. We are using their professional team, which is specialized in opening retail stores, but also a geomarketing tool, which gives us information based on social demographics, income, private insurance, and so on. The final stage is the capital approval by the local management team. On the right side of the chart, you see the impact of such a relocation, and this is one of the stores some of you have visited this morning, Bonan ova, in an affluent area of Barcelona. You see here that in the three months before the relocation and the three months after the relocation, our revenues were accelerated. Basically, this relocation was leading to a revenue growth of 56% and a patient growth of 38%. The difference is because of course, during the height of COVID, there were a lot of lower value COVID tests. We're not working only on our network. We're also constantly training our staff to sell more to patients. Basically, we do this with two main techniques. One we call cross-selling, the other one upselling. Cross-selling, I give you here an example from Spain, where basically we were adding over EUR 1 million revenue each year by receiving patients and informing them about additional possible out-of-pocket tests. We're informing about 10%, a little bit less than 10% of the patients right now, but we are increasing this constantly while training our staff. Interestingly, the conversion rate is 45%. Nearly every second patient we talk to is buying one of these out-of-pocket tests. This shows what a strong potential for growth there is. On the right side, we're showing you an example from Mexico, where basically we are doing upselling. That means that the patient is coming with a prescription to the store, and we are selling then to this patient a higher value test. For example, a patient, a female patient is coming with a prescription for mammography, and we are upgrading this then to a complete checkup. With a higher value. This means that by this technique, we could double the patients buying this, and the revenue growth in this particular store was 115%. This shows the huge potential we have by managing our B2Cs as retail stores and training our staff. We are constantly measuring feedback from our patients. This morning, I mentioned that already in the store, that we are measuring every week NPS, Net Promoter Score, on a weekly basis. We are receiving these information from 100,000 patients all over the world. We calculate the NPS by store, and we're using this NPS then to give feedback to our staff in the store, because part of their incentive, of their bonus is based on the NPS development. Also, we are giving feedback to other departments in the company, IT, HR for training, facility management. Of course, we are constantly evaluating and enhancing our customer journey in the store. Just an example, in Italy, we had in January this year an NPS in total Italy of 81.7, and we have now 85.3, which is an increase of 3.6 percentage points. The total NPS in SYNLAB is about 83%, which is quite a good score when you consider that industry average is below 70. Let me summarize this. Our retail network and the way we are managing it is a strong asset for future growth. We have a strong and scalable infrastructure. We have more than 1,800 BCPs right now, and we are constantly adding new stores. Tens of millions of people, of patients are visiting our stores, also based on COVID. This gives us an intimate knowledge of patients, of our clients, because we are in direct contact with them. We get information directly from them by NPS, and we gain their medical trust. I've shown you the significant growth potential by new openings, relocations, cross-selling, upselling techniques, and we are using this also as a base, as a brick-and-mortar base to go into the next phase, phygital, which is a mix between direct-to-consumer digital and the brick-and-mortar stores, and my colleague, Robert, will take you through that. Thank you. Let me introduce you to Robert Steinwander, our COO. He's the younger one in the team, but he's nevertheless a veteran because I think he has probably done everything you can do in a lab. You can play the little game with him that he can probably tell you specifically in a few tens of labs which type of equipment we have in which corner of the lab to the specific point. But, I would say, his knowledge of the details is also combined with a very good strategic mind, and this is what he will show you on direct-to-consumer. Robert. Thank you very much, Mathieu. Hello, everybody, also from my side. Robert Steinwander, Group COO, since 15 years in the business, and engineer by profession, responsible for commercial and operations in the SYNLAB group. Today, I'm really excited to give you an insight in our D2C approach, our ambition for the customer segment of direct-to-consumer. Two messages up front. The first one, direct-to-consumer is different from our classical business segments. Second, it's a huge opportunity over the next upcoming years, which we are trying to capture as good as possible up front. As always, in SYNLAB, we start by asking the customer, we want to know what are the customer needs. Research confirms, Mathieu said it at the beginning already, there is a change in the mindset of people, and that means people are willing to take ownership about their health, and they are willing to pay for that. Research confirms about 100+ EUR willingness to pay for a prevention wellness profile of the ones you mentioned before, Mathieu. Some facts behind the survey we did last year. First one, 90% of the people are really wanting to gain more transparency of their health. This is when people are becoming more health-conscious. Second, medical excellence is the key decision criteria for the consumers to choose the lab provider. Third, 70% of people are willing to pay for these additional services besides their coverage potentially in their local NHS system. On top of that, two important facts. What is the expectation of this customer segment? It's multi-channel and convenience, meaning the digital low-effort solutions are preferred, and the consultation behind the results is the thing which people care about and potentially make a difference between us and competition. Overall, I think a fundamental framework on which we can build upon. Now, what does D2C mean? It means, first of all, that it is a direct engagement, as you see at the left part of the slide, between the lab service provider, so us, SYNLAB, and the consumer. We, as SYNLAB, own the customer relationship. The consumer decides, contrary to several of our classical businesses like hospital or prescriber business, the consumer decides which tests to choose and which lab and blood collection point potentially in the end to choose. We, of course, have a fundamental positive point, as we have the retail base frame, what you heard just from Stephan. The infrastructure is there. We're using the BCPs on the one side, and we add several additional services for the customers, for the consumers, to have a unique patient experience. The key differentiation factors will be the right medically vetted prevention wellness profiles to choose for the typical personas in behind the consumer segments and the right ecosystem with the value-added solutions and the digital customer experience. Let me dive in deeper on the next slide on that. The key to success is to build this ecosystem to capture the growth opportunity, and this is based on a combination between physical and digital services. We call it the phygital customer journey. In short, if you look at the circle on the slide here, it looks as follows. First, we need to create an information library for what we call a patient self-triage, which contains the product portfolio from cardio panels to sports panels to women, men, over 40, over 50 panels, classical ones, which would contain PSA tests for men, plus cholesterol, plus blood count, and so on. Second, convenient and fast digital e-booking services for the consumer to enable this phygital journey and then to connect the patients to our year point three VIP services where the consumer can choose if a domiciliary care is the one thing he or she wants. Home nurse also available to come directly to where the consumer is and potentially willing to pay for that. Point four, going the pathway for home self-sampling based on our latest technologies of dried blood spot testing, where we're already offering today several vitamin panels or other nutrition offerings for people. Just going into the blood collection points, of which we have more than 2,000, as you heard from Stephan before. Point five, to close the circle, is to provide the right information, the online reports, but especially the education from our medical staff in behind to hopefully achieve what is our key aim, to have the consumer coming back each year or each in a certain rhythm, depending on the situation we are in. The market is an incredible opportunity. It's a nascent market, and it is in a high-growth phase. If you look at 2020, we were at EUR 1 billion estimated market size. Ten, eleven years from now down the road, potentially up to EUR 12 billion just for Europe, the opportunity. Not taking LATAM, Africa or other continents into account. The high growth, the CAGR rate, more than 20% is true for not only one market, but is at least 20% all across the markets in Europe. If you add that up, the D2C opportunity could represent a 10% plus of the overall addressable market of what you heard Mathieu talking about before. Even more interesting to see the development in the U.S., which is generally the one or the other step ahead from Europe traditionally here, where already in 2025, it's expected to be at the pace, and to get the penetration rate as it's forecasted for Europe in 2030. A huge opportunity here, and I'm sure we'll be able to capture a good part of that. For this, we are planning the roadmap to capture it. We already started in 2020 and even before with first D2C initiatives, upselling, as it was called also before, store-in-store concepts in French blood collection points, wellness profiles for nutrition in Italy and other options to leverage our retail network. The COVID period really was the accelerator for us to realize the opportunity and, questions like from sports companies now or the UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, where we did all the corona testing at the European Championships and for the last two Champions League seasons with UEFA, showed us the demand, the need, in behind the services. That led us to decision just now in 2022 to establish a fully new business segment. We call it SYNLAB Health for You, and this is where we are starting to mature and the capabilities to establish a team fully dedicated on the topic and to get the next step forward into 2023 to enter in the first markets with the full product offering from a digital solution to the physical connection and the product portfolio in behind. We're expecting first revenues in 2023 and are ready for expansion. To get to our goal, EUR 50 million extra revenues ambition in five years from now. Overall, we are ready. We are well-positioned, but why? To summarize that up, medical excellence, that's our DNA. That's what you have seen today in the lab visit, at least the ones you had the chance to pass the tour with us today. Medical excellence is the number one ranked decision criteria, and our 2,000 medical experts will support this pathway down to have a different customer experience through SYNLAB. Second, the geographic reach. We are the most international lab service provider today, and for the consumer, internationality really matters. There is no border thinking, I'm in this or that country, but they want to use the services online across borders. Wherever you are, we are, especially generation Y and Z. Point three, the existing customer relationships. That's our opportunity to leverage the millions of patients which are coming every year into our existing retail shops, blood collection point facilities, as you heard before. The scalable infrastructure. I got a question at the lab tour from you, I think, yeah. Can you put more on top? That will not be any problem. We have 600 million tests today. Adding up, a couple of even millions of tests into the existing infrastructure we will be able to handle. Of course, we will continue our expansion of the blood collection points. Point five, the digital platform. SYNLAB Access was absolutely proven through Corona in 2020- 2021 and even this year through the EU project, but also beyond that. We just got through that, about 1 million patients over the winter period of the Omicron wave, so we are ready technically. To summarize, the key message on D2C is rather a simple one there, but I think still very important to wrap it up. First, market growth. Huge market opportunity in a very big growing segment. Second, medical excellence. We have it. A lot of competition has not anything on that what we have. The phygital ecosystem, the combination between digital services and our infrastructure will for sure enable us to outpace our direct competition on that. Last, we have the right ingredients, the right spirit, the right team set up, I believe also, which is key for that kind of startup in the company now, to make this happen and to make it a success for SYNLAB and all of you. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. Now let me introduce you to Christoph Mahnke. Christoph is another veteran of healthcare. He's a trained medical doctor, surgeon. Head and neck surgery. Head and neck surgery. This is a bit frightening. He has, besides being a medical doctor, run some hospital and hospital chains, and he has been running our German activity over the last almost six years and will talk about molecular diagnostics. Thank you, Mathieu. Hearty welcome. Welcome also from the sort of German representative of the team. I will in the next minutes speak about growth topic that I personally find highly exciting because it really goes to the medical heart of what we do at SYNLAB, providing customer-centric medical excellence. Molecular diagnostics and therapy is a key driver in medicine for years to come, and it will be driving many medical markets, but foremost diagnostics. It already happens every day, and it will continue to do so at an even higher speed over the next years. With our experts and our network, we are very well-positioned to participate in this future market. What's good for us here, we're talking complex medicine and complex diagnostics, meaning not only higher test volumes, but also high-value diagnostics. Now, next slide. Thank you. Now, what exactly is molecular diagnostics? Basically, we're going from Chemistry to Biology, not only measuring chemical substances, but more and more understanding complex interactions at the molecular level. How do genes and proteins function? Understanding function also helps us to much better understand dysfunction causing diseases. Oftentimes, what in the past was considered one disease in many people is now understood as different diseases in different people requiring different therapies. This is the basis for individual or precision medicine and diagnostics. This approach is today foremost used in hemato-oncology, but it is relevant in almost all medical specialties. At SYNLAB, we offer many different analytical methods within molecular testing. Most of them, again, are high value and high margin. The high value explains why molecular diagnostics will be a key driver of the overall diagnostic market growth. In Europe, molecular diagnostics will grow by roughly EUR 4 billion over the next four years. This is a CAGR of 9%, much stronger than the more mature rest of diagnostics. The market share of molecular testing will thus go up to roughly 20%. This growth is driven by three key medical trends on the right-hand side. Convergence, meaning different diagnostic disciplines are merging together through molecular diagnostics. Take anatomic pathology. In the past, the pathologist was mostly looking through the microscope at slides, studying shape and color of cells. Now, increasingly, they are adding molecular diagnostics to get to a more precise diagnosis. In fact, many chemotherapies can today only be given after molecular diagnosis has been performed. Secondly, genetic information blizzard. The rapid growth of genetic data will, for many years, generate medical knowledge. This medical knowledge will lead to new therapeutic solution entering clinical practice. In order to then again make them routinely available to patients, more molecular testing will be necessary. This will also drive the third trend, individualization. Diagnosis and therapy will be tailored to smaller patient segments. More of our diagnostics will therefore be necessary to find out in exactly what segment the individual patient belongs. For society as a whole, the good news is more precise therapy means cost saving, as less money goes into useless therapies. For SYNLAB, the good news is more money will go into diagnostics. Now, we think we are very well positioned to participate in this increasing market, even though the requirements are not trivial at all. To cover convergence of diagnostic disciplines, we do have all the specialists needed. With these teams, we are ready to rapidly establish and scale new analysis as they will come up in the future. We've proven this in the pandemic. With every new wave, we had large test volumes available within days of new variants emerging. In genetics, we have large operations already. 17 sites, more than 700 specialists doing nothing but genetics, and we are continuously building the IT infrastructure behind it. Individualization means we have to reach the small patient segments. With our large geography covered, we are close to them, and we are ready to offer our services across Europe and Latin America. Also, with our huge customer base, we can cross-sell molecular testing to our regular lab clients. Now, let me give you an example how molecular diagnostics will change our business and medicine as a whole. Take colorectal cancer. This is one of the most common types of cancer in Western societies. Historically, when I graduated from medical school roughly 30 years ago, diagnosis was made by simple microscopy. Again, the pathologist looking at the shape and color of cells. Upon diagnosis, therapy consisted of surgery and maybe two-three types of chemo. Very limited options. Nowadays, and even more so in the future, the picture has changed completely. This is largely driven by new in vitro diagnostic options. With microbiome testing, we can identify and prevent disease in persons that are genetically predisposed and have a higher risk of suffering from colorectal carcinoma. iFOBT, then Septin9, are screening methods to detect disease in asymptomatic patients very early on, thereby allowing for earlier therapy, which is less invasive and more successful. Molecular pathology helps us to determine specifically what type of cancer the patient has and what degree of malignancy, thus allowing us to make a better choice when it comes to chemotherapy among the today more than 40-50 chemotherapeutic regimens that are available. Mutation screening helps us by patients that are undergoing chemotherapy to identify the development of resistance, which is a frequent cause of therapy failure in these patients, thereby helping the doctor and the patient to make a choice to switch from first-line therapy to second, fourth, and fifth-line therapy, which is currently already available in this type of tumor, thus again, yielding better outcomes. Finally, once treatment has been completed with liquid biopsy, we are able to detect recurrent or residual disease early on, then again, allowing us to initiate further therapy. Overall, the multitude of diagnostic options will lead to a much better outcome for patients. In fact, there are many experts out there who say that, colorectal cancer has gone from a grave one-time event to a chronic disease. Let me give you a second example. Pharmacogenomics. Currently, doctors, when prescribing drugs, apply standard doses. One size fits all. We do, however, know that the response to medication is highly variable and depends on the individual genetic setup of the person getting the drug. What happens today upon incurring adverse reactions, the dosage is adjusted. Basically, medication is stopped, dose is lowered, or dosing is increased, depending on the patient. As a result, this is an iterative, if you want so, trial-and-error adjustment of medication on the patient. In the future, the patient will have pharmacogenetic testing up front in order to allow a precise dosage from day one, resulting in less toxicity, increased efficacy of the medication, and fewer side effects. In part, this is standard procedure already today. Last year, Bristol Myers Squibb and Sanofi were fined $800 million in the US for marketing Clopidogrel without advising their doctors and patients to have pharmacogenomic testing up front. We do see an increasing number of applications for pharmacogenomics, and it is increasingly reimbursed even by public funds. At SYNLAB, we are offering all these tests, and we have the expertise to counsel our customers. There are many more applications in the making. We have, for ourselves, tried to get an idea of the potential beyond the market reports I showed earlier. Let's imagine there would be, in the near future, a simple blood test to screen for the five most common types of cancer to identify early-stage disease in asymptomatic people at a cost of EUR 200. Let's imagine that every person in Europe takes this test every 10 years, people above the age of 24. This would amount to an additional market of EUR 5.2 billion for molecular diagnostics. Let's imagine another approach, that with increasingly better understanding of tumor biology, EUR 1,500 worth of diagnostic is added to each new individual cancer case. By the way, this is not much considering that a single test for BRCA2 in breast cancer costs about that much. Given the incidence of around 1 million annual new cancer cases in Europe, this adds another EUR 1.5 billion. In any case, and no matter how you look at it, we do see huge potential for molecular diagnostics if you have scale and competence. SYNLAB has what it takes. We do have the specialists, we do have a geographic reach, and we can offer integrated one-stop shop services. One final thing, molecular diagnostics will require an increasing pace of change in the medical community, causing some degree of uncertainty. In this context, our trusted and accessible brand is an additional value for our customers, creating further opportunities for us at SYNLAB. Thank you very much. Thank you, Christoph. It's another veteran now that will take you through outsourcing. It's our fifth speaker and fourth nationality, and I'm pretty sure you will not guess what Rainar's nationality is. He's Estonian, and he's also a Medical Doctor, Neurologist in neurosurgery, I think, and a veteran also of lab activity for a very long time. Rainar, over to you. Thank you, Mathieu. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to close the circle of veterans or let's say of the organic growth. You heard some exciting stories by my fellow colleagues, Stephan, Robert, and Christoph, on our excellence in retail first, then probably the hugest, at least what I've seen in this market, opportunity that we have ahead of us, which is D2C. Then finally, which is very close to my heart as well, the fascinating emergence of molecular biology. What do we have left? As Mathieu called it, we have the cherry on the cake, or hospital outsourcing. Hospital outsourcing, this is like a mini SYNLAB within SYNLAB. We have a great past, we have a famous present, and also, I believe that we have a bright future. We are definitely the market leader in hospital outsourcing all over Europe. I think what is really important in this is that this contributes really highly on our reputation. Secondly, this is like very close to our core, which is customer-focused medical excellence. Let me run you through some of the key metrics on this journey. First we have the trends and how we SYNLAB tackle them. First and obvious, cost pressures everywhere in the medical systems. We have the expertise of staff and of process optimization. Second, similarly important, which is the need for highly educated and skilled specialists, medical doctors, and any other people working in a lab setting. As we have the largest network in Europe, of course, we have access to a large number of medical specialists, plus also we have a well-known track record on educating them. Third, lab process is very complex, and to have multidisciplinary complex process, that is definitely something to keep an eye on. Again, we have a network, and we have the expertise of organizing, as you heard, 30 hub labs with a very complex process, and of course, we follow the quality standards, high-quality standards in all of them. Fourth, of course, is the test repertoire. You heard today, in your lab tour that SYNLAB has the largest breadth of portfolio of lab tests available. This is the use of all our customers in all geographies we are working. Finally, which is very important for the lab testing, of course, this is turnaround times. We are available 24/7 for our customers in the countries we operate. This is quite intensive slide, but I will not cover each of the columns and each of the rows. There are four stages in hospital outsourcing. What I'm willing to give you a short understanding. First and foremost is the cornerstone of outsourcing, which is reference testing. Reference testing means the hospital decides to send specialty tests or routine tests for us to be tested in SYNLAB laboratories. You were today having a tour in one of our sort of flagship reference labs, one of the two labs in Europe, in the lab in Barcelona. The other one we have in Leinfelden. Probably in all countries we exist, we perform some sort of reference testing for the hospitals and for the medical community. This is a huge segment with a huge potential also because of our repertoire, and this also will and is contributing as the booster, margin booster and revenue booster for the stages. The second stage is like a bridgehead to larger cooperation with hospitals, and this is the partial outsourcing of hospital. Usually, in these cases, we as SYNLAB bring our framework agreements to be used by our customers, meaning that the instrumentation, the reagents, consumables, IT solutions, logistic partnerships, and also management services. We don't operate the labs, but we give our expertise to be used by our customers. Usually this is then supplemented or added by the reference testing. Then we have two last. First is the lab managed services, which is not yet the full outsourcing, but usually in this case we take care of the lab processes, we test for the hospital or medical institution, and then by governance reasons, medical institution then has the right for the final clinical evaluation or for the staffing. This is again in very many detail. It can be very broad, the difference in the partnership. The Holy Grail or the final one, fully integrated model you heard today, and you heard during the IPO also about SEL South East London, which is a typical example where the hospital or the district hospital decides to outsource all functions of the lab testing. We take over it and of course this is a huge responsibility, but again, this can happen only in case there is a huge trust between two partners. Of course, we believe in ourselves that we can deliver on this path in the best possible way. On this slide, I would like you to take with you two important notices. First, our geographical footprint. This footprint, what you see in these 15 countries, is not about reference testing because I told you that reference testing we have in most of the countries we operate, but this is where we have some sort of hospital outsourcing as part of our service offering. You see the footprint we have in southern Europe, in U.K., in Germany, we are market leaders. Our revenue on hospital outsourcing altogether is around half a billion EUR plus added SEL 200 million EUR. And of course from this full revenue, more or less half is covered by Germany and by U.K. The second or the right side of this slide, you can see the opportunity, which is vast. We have, as you can see, more than half of the market still uncovered in Germany. Only 8% of the market in U.K. is unlocked. Of course, this is not something that will lock or unlock over next year or two. You heard also Mathieu saying that our very conservative prediction is that maybe EUR 1 billion will come, let's say, available in years to come, but still you can see the amount. Of course France also with a significant size of the market still to be grabbed. I'm gonna run you through two examples. First being, again, like very much in DNA of SYNLAB, which is an example from Portugal, how we built the partnership with Hospital da Luz over 15 years. I can tell that our colleague Luis, who will present to you later the M&A, he was in the cradle of this partnership 15 years ago. SYNLAB, or not SYNLAB, but Labco, one of our predecessors in Portugal was founded because of that partnership. I think Hospital da Luz has always been a nice and medically orientated or medical excellence orientated hospital, and that's why they chose our partners 15 years ago. Now, over this course of this partnership, we've been really very agile in order to facilitate the need for growing together with the hospital. We went into private-public partnership in Loures. We built a special lab and bought a company in Coimbra. Finally, I think what is important also to mention is that we can cover now all the disciplines needed by this hospital group, which is today operating in 29 units. The top private hospital in Portugal with a top medical expertise in the business. Second example comes from one of my key countries, from U.K. Really this is again another fascinating story where we built the market leadership in 10 years. We started as a greenfield company 12 years ago, and the first NHS agreement was launched in the western part of U.K. in Taunton and that was followed a couple of years later by two. Additional agreements, another in the eastern part of U.K., near Southend in Essex, and also in Christie, which is one of the top oncology centers in the whole Europe. Of course, another cherry on the cake, which is SEL that you heard today, these deals don't come easy. There was a negotiation and a bidding process of more than three years that we went through. From a status of being an underdog or finally really winning the deal, previous year. I can tell you is that, yeah, I'm very proud to say that first of April this year, as planned, we went live with Southeast London. Southeast London is a conglomerate of six hospitals on the south side of River Thames. The service area, the offering is for 2.2 million patients living in London. That is 35 million tests per year. That is six hospitals, more than 60 labs. Of course, now we are part of their journey. We are reducing the equity or the estates needed for the other use in clinical practice by 60%. Of course, we are currently in a process of the biggest transformation ever in diagnostics because of the size of this journey. Again, what is really important for us is that we are partnering up with two leading teaching hospitals in U.K. and also in Europe, King's College and Guy's and St Thomas. On the next slide, I will also, because I had also today the questions about the opportunities, not only in U.K., but what are the opportunities in the hospital outsourcing market that we have. I'm trying to give you a picture of the size of opportunity. As I said, the opportunity is huge overall. Even if we focus just on U.K., what you can see from here is that with the existing NHS agreements, of course, we expect that because of the high level of service delivery, we can grow. We can grow really well organically and over the next five years. SEL, obviously, will grow together with us. On top of that, we have, I think, two disciplines that are really important, which is firstly genomics, as SEL is contracting with Genomics England, how we can grow this market quicker than the average market. Then finally, the referral or the reference testing market. In U.K., SEL is considered to be the largest reference testing partner for the NHS trusts. We expect that our current share of the market or current revenue is slightly over GBP 20 million. Our expectation is to grow it three times in next five years. On top of these disciplines, of course, our expectation is to work with other potential partners in NHS to have them as our customers for the next years. B2B, I think this is again a tremendous chance of us participating on the B2B market. There is Big Pharma. For instance, we are just having discussions with Novartis about the potential partnership with the drug called sirolimus and tacrolimus for testing for them. We are partnering up already now with pharmacy chain Boots, and also with companies working in the D2C sector. Our colleagues from King's College and Guy's and St Thomas cannot wait until they can start to cooperate with the colleagues from Europe with the reference testing and also, of course, offering their consultancy for their purpose. Finally, I said D2C, how we can use all this or how we can deploy this platform for the best usage of the D2C. As you see, we have only one country, and you can see the size or the magnitude of the opportunity. Last, I'm going to wrap it up shortly on the slide where you can see that we really have the best-in-class service and test offering available on the diagnostic lab diagnostic market. This is primarily because we have really a strong and very well scalable network of laboratories all over Europe and also emerging countries. We have the transformational excellence. With each transformation we make, with each new SEL or a partner, even with a smaller size, we learn something. Of course, this is for us to be used in next cases. We know how to drive customer value, and of course, we are learning from it and using it in all next cases. Finally, which is again the core of our existence, is the medical excellence. The network of skilled and highly educated specialists in our network is unprecedented, and this is to be used for the further growth of our business. This all will enable us to unproportionately benefit from the outsourcing trend that is obvious. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rainar. I think now we move to our Q&A session, and for that I call Stephan, Robert, and Christoph. More focused on organic growth, and we'll have a second Q&A session after talking about M&A, HR, and finance at the end of the session. Yes, Hassan. Thank you. Hassan Al-Wakeel, Barclays. I have a couple, please. Firstly, thank you for showing us some of the BCPs today in Barcelona. Could you walk us through the current retail contribution in absolute terms, but also the contribution to growth in markets like Spain and where you see that getting to over the medium term? Secondly, Mathieu, you talked about reimbursement and pricing pressure across some of your key markets. Do you see any changing attitudes among governments and healthcare systems coming out of the pandemic? Could you talk about any reimbursement changes you anticipate in the short term, be it in Switzerland or elsewhere? Thank you. Thank you, Hassan. First question. Generally speaking, I think retail is around 40%, give or take, of our revenue, globally, and I would say that's more or less to make it simple, also the potential for growth acceleration. Now, if you want to know more specifically about Spain, maybe Stephan. In Spain, it's about 25%-30% of the revenues, and it's a key contributor to our growth here. In Spain, we have grown the out-of-pocket year-over-year, double digit, just with what Stephan has shown you in one example of training our people to upsell. The growth was, I think, 15% and 25%, the last two years, excluding COVID, of course. Now to your second question, the short answer is no. We have not seen any change of behavior. We have seen countries increasing the budget. Some regions in Italy have done that. We have seen some countries like, this is not an anticipation, it's more a fact now, Switzerland, where there had been long-term talks where they always compare themselves to Germany and say, "Oh my God, we are very expensive," blah, blah. There were long talks over many years, and now they decided August first to cut the prices across labs by 10%. This is still temporary because they're looking into more details as we speak by test. This is not a pattern, right? This was around as a potential in the past. I would say so far no real trend one way or the other. What we have seen also as an indication, because I think it's a loaded question, right? Probably with what risks to happen on the public budget and whatever. If you look at the previous 2008-2009 crisis, there was no specific different behavior of regulators. They have a tradition of looking at things in a very consistent way and quite predictable, actually. That's where we are at this point. Perfect. If I could just follow up on BCPs in general, maybe with an example in Barcelona. I think you gave some revenue statistics on one of the charts. What does an average BCP look like in terms of potential revenues maybe in Barcelona, margin profile, and returns over a number of years? Stephan? BCPs, you know, range, you know, depending on the size, on the location. We have BCPs in our network from EUR 100,000 revenue to half a million to EUR 3 million revenues. This gives you a little bit of range. In one of the BCPs, for instance, we were today in Odell, we treat about 100 patients a day, and this is, you know, coming to about half a million EUR revenue per year. Margin is above our average margin because it's retail business and, which we are growing by the out-of-pocket business in addition, as I have shown you in the examples. Initial investment and returns? As I've shown today on the slide, before COVID, we had a payback period of about two years, and now we have a payback period of, on average, six months, and in some examples in France and Portugal, even three months we have a payback period. Investments, of course, depending on the size, but usually below EUR 100,000, right? Yeah. It's you know, basically, retail stores have a fixed amount per square meter, so it depends very much on the size of the store. Thank you. Hi. David Adlington, JP Morgan. Just on the outsourcing trend, I just wondered if the Southeast London tender, if you were able to use that as a kind of case study to go out and sell further potential to other NHS trusts? You want to answer that one? Yes. I think, I mean, we are learning hugely from a transformation of a very complex network of hospitals and different disciplines because literally we have them all represented with Southeast London. Absolutely. We are not learning only about the medical disciplines, but we are learning a lot from how to integrate different hospitals into one hub. I didn't mention, but we are now preparing to build. We are building the hub lab with 20,000 square meters on the Blackfriars Bridge. This will incorporate then a huge amount of the clinical work or the laboratory work that we perform. Absolutely, this is, of course, that's a big boost to our reputation on the market. Basically, if you are able to merge, I think it's 67 labs existing and- Yes. Without betraying any secrets, I think they discovered some of them not having the full picture. I think it's 700 rooms. Yeah. 700 rooms, literally. If you are able to do this, whatever else comes your way, this was my first criteria trust, looks probably quite easy. The short answer is yes, for sure, this will help building this trust in our capabilities, which is already very, very strong, right? We are the number one hospital operator in Europe by far with 700 contracts. I think this kind of transformations even adds to the mix. Has that process been even more complex than you initially anticipated? No, I think we anticipated it would be very complex. We see it daily, but I think we've I mean, each partnership requires two parties. Obviously, I think, the partnership we created already with the top executives, but also on the different discipline levels with the trust or the trusts have been really very strongly helping us to pursue what we planned. The good thing is that early on, we were able to establish trust because we brought some improvements very visible to the medical community in quality, turnaround time, and so on, which then, of course, helps the transformation. We are a few months live, we can say today, and the first thing that we did is we harmonized the test repertoire between six different hospitals, which is actually clinically quite demanding. Really nice milestones that we've been able to pursue. Hi. Hello. Hugo Solvet, BNP Paribas Exane. Just a quick follow-up on the payback period, which you reduced from six to 12 months. Do you think you will be able to maintain that given that your COVID sales tailwind will go down and stabilize to about EUR 450 million? Second, we've been hearing a lot of diagnostic companies recently putting an emphasis on point of care. Do you think this ultimately, probably very long-term, could slow down the traffic in your BCPs? On the first question, well, if it's EUR 150 million, it's still EUR 150 billion, and that helps further. I would say it's probably a more long-term view than the next one or two years, right? I think it's probably on the conservative side there. Maybe the payback will be a bit longer than three-six months, but it will be shorter than it usually is, still an opportunity. Point of care, this has been, for a long time, a discussion. What we have seen every time around is that this helps our business because for one point of care, usually you have a confirmation test or maybe not one-to-one, but close to that. The more point of care, the happier we are. Also we offer point of care solutions integrating the IT part and the calibration part of the quality system. It needs to fit together. We consider it as an integral part of the business and not as a threat. You wanted to add something on POC? No, it's four-digit amounts of POCT instruments out there. We are fully in it, huh? You have the mic. Yeah. Sezgi Ozener, HSBC. Thanks for the presentation. Just two questions. First of all, the D2C opportunities, we always hear them about, the French market and other markets. You don't talk about them much for markets such as Germany and Switzerland, which are more B2B. Is there a legal factor that's preventing this from developing in these markets, or would it be possible? I was also thinking about, the e-drug developments. Is there any way we can merge, you can do some activity with, in parallel with the developments on the ePharmacy front? My second question would be about, the net promoter score which you've integrated into the, bonus parameters for the blood collection points. What other parameters are there, and how do you put them into the formulation? Okay. D2C, Robert? I mean, of course, you're right, every country has different legal environments, so we are very carefully looking at that. Overall, we can say that there is no blocking point which we see in major geographies that we would not be able to go the pathway down to the consumer. To take the biggest markets, let's say you mentioned, so France, store-in-store upselling is live. We have this in several dozens, I think over 100 blood collection points in France established. What we are adding now is the phygital, the digital also approach to it to go broader to the consumer directly. All possible there. No constraints on a broader scale. Maybe for Germany, Christoph? No, it's exactly as you said. There are no sort of hard constraints. It's more like a soft factor. For good reason, we did not choose Germany as the first market to enter into this business, because in Germany we rely on getting specimen from prescribers, who are at the moment not ready to take up that sort of business. Plus, Germany has a very holistic healthcare system where almost everything is covered and available to the broad population. Therefore, the need is probably lower than in other countries. Maybe you can read out a question from the attendants, the connected attendants. On D2C question, what have been D2C sales in 2021, and what is the risk of the reduction by the COVID traffic? This may take a step back. On this one, we have D2C sales, this is the upselling part in the retail business actually. This does not yet contain the corona part. Now corona we always see separately. What I mentioned before that we have created this year SYNLAB Health for You to also enable the digital journey. There we expect the first revenues for 2023. On D2C, Stephan, anything in the existing base you would like to add here in the retail shops? Yeah. I gave some examples today about it. It depends very much on country by country, but roughly 10% of the revenues are out-of-pocket direct-to-consumer sales. And, and- On the bonus system? No. Okay. Just on the second part of the question is reduced COVID traffic going to have us incur a step back on whatever D2C activities we have had? I would say the short answer is no, because people coming for COVID were really wanting to get in and out fast and not really people. We also wanted them in and out fast. No, I would say no relationship. Now on the other question on NPS indeed. Basically we have in nearly all of our BCPs, we have a Monday morning stand-up session where the NPS of the last week is reflected and discussed. Let's say 20% of the salary of the people in the store is variable, and they get a bonus on the store performance. Not individual performance, on the store performance, which is half on NPS and half on revenue of out-of-pocket revenues. Now, the second part of the question online of Olivier Reinberg is, given upcoming inflationary trends, have you taken any first steps to alert regulators that budget growth of 1%-2% may not be enough to cover cost pressures? The short answer is yes, we have. You know, the regulators that regulate us are also having another big animal, much bigger than us, which is called hospitals. They are very well aware of what's going on in terms of the hospital system. Usually, they don't take a view that is completely separate. That would be the answer at this point. Louise? Thank you. Louise Boyer from Stifel. I have a follow-up, if I may, on the online question about the payers. You mentioned 10% out of the pocket, roughly at group scale. Having heard your presentation and the drivers of the growth going closer and closer to the consumer, the upselling and so on, what are your projections in terms of payer, I mean, out of the pocket, private insurance and public reimbursement, and how would they evolve in time? Let me just correct. The 10% is for Spain. At group level, I would suspect it's around 2%-3%. Yeah. We can follow up on that. I think it's more or less correct. We have not projected exactly your question because this really depends on the country mix, the countries you enter and where you put your M&A emphasis, so D2C, as Robert was saying, right, if the European market today is EUR 60 billion and you say you believe in 10 years D2C will be EUR 12 billion, so that's 60 + 12, 72, plus the organic growth 2%-3%, you can run the math of D2C is going to be probably more than 10% of the market. And we will, I think, reflect at least reflect the market, because I strongly believe that we will be the winners of this game. It is always out of the pocket? This is always out-of-pocket, yes. Yes, Jan. Yeah, Jan Koch from Deutsche Bank. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got two left. Starting with your retail business. In the countries where you have a D2C business model, what's the average revenue basket size for a customer who comes with a prescription from a doctor compared to one with out-of-pocket payment tests? Secondly, are there any regulatory changes which could have any implications on your business, especially on outsourcing or consolidation going forward? You want to take the one on D2C? Yeah, I think the example of Spain was mentioned. 10% share of direct payment. 90% are coming through prescription as of today. This varies of course a bit through the countries and depending on how dense our retail network is and how at the end also effective an existing national healthcare system is. What we see is that in most of the countries there is more demand than the national healthcare system can provide, and this is kind of the cherry on the cake and kind of the upstream pathway for D2C. The average basket would be, I would say, probably rough guess is anything between thirty. I'm not going to give you an average, but a range. Some of the wellness tests are in some countries 25-30 EUR for the panel, and this goes up to thousands of EUR if you have a pharmacogenetic type of test. On average, if you take probably in the range of 60 -80 EUR it would probably not be far off mark. We are still in experimentation mode here. I don't think it's the stable view of where the business will be at some point. If I may ask, in terms of the margin profile, how do they compare? Very good. They are higher margins than others because they're not necessarily highly sophisticated tests. To put them on machines, you saw this morning, is almost say marginally costing us. As it's a digital channel to a big part, it's fairly say cheap in terms of cost. You had a second question. Long-term regulatory changes. Yes. Sorry. The long-term regulatory changes always very difficult to anticipate. In NHS, I think they have eased up in last year, I think. The tender process for NHS to get private tenders, it's less tedious. That's a trend that should help some trusts to outsource easier. There are some in your region. In the Nordics, the trend is favorable. I mean that the first slide I showed you with some of the limitations, with the cost pressures, with the staffing pressures and so on, it's quite obvious that the public sector is looking for the potential of the outsourcing. That's why also in the Nordic, we know that the reforms we discussed with I think on the break as well, about the change in the full legislative system in Finland. I think Sweden is quite open, let's say, for changes. I think what we see in Eastern Europe, that in some countries the sort of sometimes regulations might get tougher, but usually it's getting more favorable for the outsourcing. We see this really going well and developing in a nice manner. I cannot remember one. Help me if I'm wrong. One single case where the regulation got more in our way than favorable. Yes, I agree. Hi. Seems to be a trend. Hi, Grace Li from Jefferies. Two questions please. One on portfolio, obviously the portfolio mix and the specialty testing being key sort of growth focus area. Our sense is the industry sort of technical capacity is very high due to COVID at the moment. What is the sort of lacking is number of staff, especially the focus on the expert medical staff and et cetera, to process and interpret the result, for example, as we've seen today. How will this impact your underlying growth that we should be expecting once the sort of COVID pandemic sort of start to ease as we are seeing right now? That's my first question. Maybe I can answer the frame. If your question is a lot of people got PCR capabilities, will that eat into our revenue potential? The short answer is no, absolutely not, because there is a long way from just PCR interpretation of results to things that are a bit more complicated in what, for example, Christoph has shown you. How it will influence our revenue development, I think it's the long-term trends that Christoph has shown you. This. There is no turning back on that, right? This is just evolution of medicine. Like digitalization, you cannot imagine that it goes back. It's exactly same for this, right? It's long-term trend, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your question. On the more sort of advanced testing specialty areas, because that seems to be where the key sort of organic story really bottleneck is, if we could call it that. No, I mean, our business model plays together with that trend, because having a large number of specialists is sort of a prerequisite in order to allow for specialization. Imagine you're a lab with two, three, four doctors. Everybody of those two, three, four doctors has to cover everything, which of course prevents specializations. Us having 2,000 academic specialists allows for single ones of them specializing in one field, and that's specialization. And that also makes us more attractive to doctors who actually do not necessarily want to cover everything of diagnostics, but say, "This is my niche, this is what I want to do day in and day out." Therefore, this is for us a competitive advantage. Yes, of course, as every other company, we have to strive for getting new and talented staff, but not more or less than others. With regards to specialization, I would go even further. Our business model is a requirement in order to allow and facilitate specialization. Thank you. Second question is on the BCP network expansion. We've seen, I think, in terms of numbers, Italy and LatAm as the sort of highest BCP openings. Is that sort of where your continued focus we could be expecting in terms of some midterm growth? Sort of part of that is divestment optimization is also a key part of that. What sort of average divestment do you do embedded in that? Stephan? About the average divestment, I have to pass. As I said, we are continuously, you know, reworking our network, and it's not that we make sharp cuts and say, "These all stores have to be closed." We make very fine decisions on locations, on patient flow, and so on. We are continuously optimizing our network. Giving- I would say maybe 5%, that we regularly shut down to reopen. Max? On the geography, I mean, this depends very much on opportunities, as I've shown you, geomarketing opportunities, geographical opportunities, but also by acquisitions opportunities, where, in which country, in which area we are expanding. I think what you mentioned, the countries you mentioned are correct, right? It will be Southern Europe and LatAm, probably first in terms of numbers, right? As we have seen, there are opportunities also in France and in some Eastern European countries to further say densify our network opening stores. I would say, yeah, south is probably the biggest opportunity. I think we need to stop here to take a break. Can you just tell me at what time we have to restart? Yes. We had one question. One more question. Yes. We still have one question? Yes. Oh, sorry. I'll try to be quick then. One question on outsourcing. I was wondering if there are significant tenders to be renewed we should be aware of in the coming month. The second question is on out-of-pocket operations. I'd like to know what percentage of the 1,800 BCPs are performing that kind of out-of-pocket test currently, and what's your view in three years? Still on that market, should we look at the U.S. market? I'm sorry. Should we look at the U.S. market as a good window to see how this segment could evolve and change in Europe? You want to take the first one or? On the tenders? Outsourcing. I can. Outsourcing tenders. No, no, sorry. Yes. As we have around 700 hospital agreements on outsourcing, then obviously we are renewing the agreements on a monthly basis like we're signing new ones. In most cases, we are able to renew. There are exceptions where in the bidding process, you know, on price or something like this, we might not be able to be successful. In most cases, yes, because of the service, we believe that we can renew the agreements. As I said, it's a continuous process. Let me just choose another word. It's not that we might not be able, it's we might not choose to renew. Yes. In some countries, you might see organic growth slowing down because we just select out of some contracts. This is the normal pruning we do also. We cannot. We are in long-term contracts. Some are not necessarily to our liking, and we have also this discipline of, say, cleaning the portfolio whenever the opportunity comes. The second question, the percentage of our B2C network that would offer D2C, I would say it's probably very limited today. If I would take a guess, 30%-ish in a sophisticated manner, right? Stephan showed you, right? We have a conversion rate of 50%, but we only pitch it to 7% of our patients visiting in some areas. That shows you how much more we can get consistency and say success in those processes. To me, the potential is in front of us not even midway, right? Then there are some areas, typically in France or in Italy, where we know we will not really offer it because it also has to be the catchment area has also to be favorable. Good. Now, the organizers get nervous, so, if we don't want to have the mics cut, let's take a break until 3:30 P.M. 3:30 P.M. back in the room, please. Thank you. Thank you. By combining more than 400 regional labs together with 30 specialized hubs, we are able to offer to all our customers all 5,000 tests all the time. Our labs are organized in a hub-and-spoke model. The spokes are our more than 400 local labs. Because they're close to our customers, this allows us to respond quickly for common tests and local medical advice. The 30 hubs are high-throughput labs and serve as centers of excellence where we concentrate our specialist tests, medical experts, and technology. Through the hubs, all SYNLAB's medical expertise is easily accessible to all our clients wherever they are in the world. Hub labs are at the heart of what we do, and I want to show you around our international reference hub lab in Barcelona, where we are offering some of the most cutting-edge technologies to our customers worldwide. Along with Leinfelden, it's also one of our two international reference hubs. Samples arrive here daily from SYNLAB locations around the world, mainly from South America. We can often deliver results to our overseas clients overnight. These samples are from Brazil. They've been pre-labeled and registered in the sending lab. Once they arrive in Barcelona, their barcodes are read, identifying the sample, exactly what tests need to be done, and which department this tube needs to go to. We consolidated six separate labs to create the 3,000-square-meter Barcelona hub. Its space and flexible layout allows us to process high sample volumes. On peak days, we process more than 100,000 tests and 30,000 different tubes from customers around the globe. The Barcelona lab has two production areas. The first one being the highly automated, high-throughput routine testing area, where we offer some of the most frequent testing with same-day result delivery to our customers. As a sample travels around the track, it attests to its testing machines. The second part of the production area is reserved for our medical experts, providing some of the most specialized tests. In Barcelona, that includes genetic sequencing for rare disease diagnosis, pre-implantation diagnosis, and cancer gene analysis. The lab also has anatomic pathology, cytology, autoimmunology, and a large variety of infectious disease testing, responding to outbreaks like Zika virus and coronavirus. Barcelona also has one of the largest radioimmunoassay labs in the world, doing tests for our international clients. Efficient logistics are key to our business. Every sample is unique. Our supply chain ensures that every sample arrives where it should, and results are delivered in the shortest possible timeframe. The final piece of the puzzle is our medical excellence. We have incredible world-class medical and academic experts. By having them at our hubs like Barcelona, we are making this expertise available across the whole SYNLAB network. Welcome back. We are now ready to embark in the second part of our session this afternoon, and we'll start with HR and ESG. Let me introduce you to Catharina, our CHRO. Catharina joined us more than two years ago, and she's a bit of a very special HR because not only does she have a long experience of HR, but also she has been leading businesses. She has been working for large companies like Danaher, for some smaller ones. What I always very much like about introducing her, she's also a professional conductor and a professional musician by training. With that. Thank you very much. Catharina. Yeah, why then in HR? It's all about people. I would like to give you an update about HR and ESG. There are two key messages that I would like you to remember. First of all, we have a strong, skilled, diverse workforce and excellent medical expertise. You have heard about that many times now. About ESG, it's a key focus for us, and we are making huge progress. Yeah. We have a growing and diverse workforce. A strong growth in our workforce to organic and M&A. At the end of 2021, we have more than 30,000 employees. Today, end of May, 600 plus below. We are a company with many part-timers, so our FTEs is a little bit around 25,000 plus. Within our entire company are 75% female employees and 60% female representatives within all leadership levels. Top management, when I talk about top management is our supervisory board, management board, and our executive committee, currently at 26%, so not enough. However, better than most companies. We have improved this number from 2020 with 9%, now with 26%. We will focus on it to improve it. It's also part of our ESG diversity goal. We have a highly skilled and well-balanced workforce. When you look at the left side, just wanted to highlight the 18% of our workforce are doctors, scientists, and medical experts. In the middle and on the right side, you see a well-balanced organization. Well-balanced age groups, but also in our regions, our segments, also really nicely balanced. Our HR strategy contributes to business success and consists of five parts. First of all, engage and empower our employees. We do a yearly engagement survey, we call it a SYNLAB Dialogue, and we want to improve year after year by discussing the results within all teams worldwide and define actions in order to become a recognized Great Place to Work. Develop our people is the second one, and we do that via our SYNLAB Campus. We have three levels within the SYNLAB Campus. First of all, the personal and professional effectiveness. We have our academies, and you also have heard this is the location where we do many of our trainings. We have a medical academy, but also in all other functions we have academies. The third level is our group level initiatives. We have an INSEAD partnership. It's a management development program for our key strategic positions around the world. Today, we have trained 50 people, 50 employees worldwide. Currently, we have 7.7 training hours per FTE. In 2020, we had 6.5. We are improving, but we also are, and we know, at this moment that we are not capturing all training hours. That will come in the near future with our learning management system. Digitalize HR. We have signed an Oracle contract, and this year we will deploy and implement this in all 36 countries, our core HR model. Leadership is a key focus what I mentioned before, and I will lead you through some slides in the coming minutes. The fifth one, to grow our talents. We have many, many initiatives within our countries and about talent and success management. Just to name a couple of ones. We have a strong focus on our employee brand, and the COVID has definitely helped the brand awareness of our company in a positive way. We are working closely with many universities across the globe, and recently we have developed a SYNLAB Fellowship program. It's an exchange program for our employees worldwide. This slide is a nice slide. I really like this slide. It is a case study, and it's called the France lab, and it's a location in the east of France. Consists of five BCPs, blood sample collection points, two analytical platforms, and one hospital contract. This location has 70 employees. This has been a journey of the last couple of four years. This is the first lab in France that received the Great Place to Work award with an 84% score. It's really amazing. A net promoter score of 96%, and when you listen to Stephan, he said the average of our SYNLAB net promoter score is 83%, and this site is 96%. Amazing. Our SYNLAB Dialogue, so our employee engagement survey, they started in 2018 with 17% and now 66%, which is again, fantastic. When you look at the France benchmark, and we are using Kincentric as a partner, this is the top quarter. It's hugely above the France benchmark. They increased their employee brand and but also their business results. At this moment, we really have no issues at all to find the right people for this site. What were the key success factors? First of all, great leadership. It's about the ACE leadership model. We have developed this model, but this leader is showing that. Be agile, communicate, connect, and execute. Having the right involvement of our employees, giving the right empowerment, but also using our Lean methods, and with Robert, with the SCS programs that we have, and giving the right attention to work, working conditions, being proactive towards our customers, and also offering customer centricity training to our employees. The lessons from what we have learned with this case study will be used for other labs to improve our result through the right engagement. ESG. ESG has always been part of our company. When we became a public company, ESG really started and that we really started to focus on ESG. I'm proud to announce. I hope you all have read our ESG report. We have published our second ESG report and living our purpose. If you have not done that, take your time, go to our website, download it, because it explains you in a lot of details our journey within our ESG. We have a strong ambition. We have identified three key areas. SYNLAB Green, the environmental part. SYNLAB Care, our social part, and the SYNLAB Citizenship, that's the governance part. For each of those areas, we have defined targets up to 2025. We have set our goals, as mentioned, up to 2025. I will highlight just a couple of ones that we have achieved in 2021. There are many more, and you can read that in our report. First of all, SYNLAB Green. Setting up the framework for the greenhouse gas emission will enable us to measure and give visibility to make the necessary improvements. We had a target when we started two years ago that we wanted to have 10% of our group laboratories to ISO 14001, and currently today, we are 15.39%. We have already achieved this target. SYNLAB Care. Development of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and human rights framework, which will aim to be a human rights leader for our people, for our partners, and our patients. We established our foundation, so I will mention more about that in the next slide. We also improved our SYNLAB Dialogue, which I mentioned before. Citizenship, I will just mention one example. We have implemented worldwide the case management and speaker policy last year. We have now a signed agreement with a law firm that will help us with any potential whistleblower cases, and we also have given a lot of training hours giving, basically explaining how these cases are need to be handled to our HR, legal, and compliance officer. We have a strong ESG governance in place. When you look at the chart and the organigram on the right side, you can see on the top level, on the supervisory board level, we have two committees. We have an ESG board committee and we have an audit and risk committee. The audit risk committee is involved in approving our ESG report. On our executive level, we have another ESG committee, and on our country level we have the CEOs being end responsible for our ESG. We have hired a group head of ESG, and we also have hired a lot of new ESG managers, new positions for bigger sized countries. We also have integrated our ESG and our risk management system. When you look at our MBO, our Management By Objectives, our bonus system, 10% of our bonus for all the key people across the globe is related to an ESG social goal. My last slide, I'm really proud about this. We has established our foundation in 2022. We are still in process of setting it up, but it will drive equitable access to healthcare. They are part of this foundation, we have three pillars. The first one, we are committed to foster early detection of diseases in women and children. The second one, enable access to medical care, and for the future, and to advance science in the field of mental illness. It is a nonprofit organization, and we will engage with our network, our employees, but also with our partners in projects through funding, investments, pro bono support, education, and scholarships. The foundation will have a board of trustees, and I will be the chair of this board of trustees. We have a defined and agreed budget of EUR 2 million, so that is all in process. We are still looking at what are the projects and partners, so the partner selection. That is a work in progress for the coming months. In the coming months, I hope that I can show you what we have selected. I really am proud of presenting that. That said, I hope you can see how HR is helping the business to grow and how we are committed to ESG. Thank you very much. Thank you, Catharina. Another old-timer, still very young. Looking very good. Luis Oliveira, our head of strategy and M&A. He is, I think, a combination that is quite unusual of entrepreneurial. He had built his own lab company through M&A and build-up, and then sold it a long time ago to SYNLAB. He has been an architect of this group in the modern shape you see it, through a lot of M&A. He's probably one in the market that can claim, one of the only ones that can claim more than 100 transactions. On top of that, he has a very good visionary and strategic mind. With that, thank you, Luis. With that, it means I'm part of the old furniture. Okay. Very good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Let me take the next few minutes to explain to you our past track record and a few of the cogs that make this what we believe to be one of the unrivaled M&A machines in at least this sector. At the end, trying to talk to you about the great opportunity that I see, or we see, still lying ahead. At the start, and on our way to becoming a global player, I should say I'm really proud of the graph we have on the left side of the slide, which shows that consistently over the years, we have delivered a significant amount of M&A with more than 152 acquisitions done so far since 2015, and the merger, an average of more than 20 per year. This has overall deployed more than EUR 1 billion of capital across four continents and 36 countries. Since 2018, when we started to review a little bit the strategy we were going to go forward, following the entrance of Mathieu, we have defined three axes for this inorganic strategy. The first one being bolt-on acquisitions, both in core countries and core countries being Italy, France, and Germany, or in the other countries. These are highly synergistic acquisitions that are aimed at densifying our hub-and-spoke models in determined geography places, and which are basically buy and close acquisitions. This will always represent the bread and butter and the bulk of our acquisitions. The second axis of our strategy is what we call new platforms. These are acquisitions that are aimed at opening new countries or new regions in unconsolidated areas where we see significant potential for growth and potential development in the future. Examples are the recent acquisitions of Mexico or the entrance in 2019 into the Swedish market. The third bucket is something that we call innovation or specialty, let's say a pool of cash and a pool of money that we earmark specifically for acquisition of technologies and skills that we believe we will need to close gaps in the future for our clients and/or to accelerate certain business transformations. You see there, for example, we have recently made a string of acquisitions in the genetics fields because we believe this is an area we needed to reinforce in our specialties. The next slide tries to link the track record I showed you before with the guidance that we have given. You can see there, it's a bit busy, but you can see that we have consistently delivered more than EUR 100-220 million of acquisition per year, even though with a slowdown in 2018 due to this strategic review and the stop we had to have because of the emergence of COVID. This is important, the delivery of that, but this could not be done if the second part of the slide on the right, which I believe is extremely important, the PMI would not be working. This is credit to my colleague, Robert Steinwander, which is able to really execute on the synergies and extract value out of the companies we acquire in a period between 12 and 24 months. That can be proven by the vintages of 2016- 2017, where we have achieved that deleverage to below seven and it's confirmed for the acquisitions of 2021, where we are absolutely on track to reach those same targets. How can we do this? With our ability to identify value-accretive M&A based on a well-defined M&A and PMI process, which starts, as you can see there on one, and is executed through a first-class process, which has been perfected over several years and several iterations of fine-tuning, which is very clear. The process is very clear for everybody involved, has several checkpoints and very clear metrics. The company has to have embedded growth, has to be able to deleverage to the numbers you've seen there within the 12 months- 24 months post-acquisition, and it has to deliver an IRR in the high teens. This is a framework everyone knows. It's very clear. It allows us to be extremely disciplined, which is the key word there. The second cog of that machine is the team. We have a very small central team of very seasoned managers, but which are complemented or extended with 36 teams in each of the countries of people which are willing and which has the know-how and the experience in M&A. This is what makes us different from many companies in the industry, is this capacity to reach out and be local in many of the countries and be able to reach out to leads that most of the times are outside of the market. This is the acquisition part, but the second part is, as I said, the PMI, having a clearly defined post-merger integration process. This is extremely important, and we are very confident on it because most of the acquisitions we do are acquisitions where MatEx and PaEx are the relevant parts of the synergies that we look for. These are highly confident. The confidence on them is very high because on one side, the MatEx is based on group contracts and transformations that are relatively easy done with the supplier contracts we have, or in the case of PaEx, because of pre-agreed transformation plans that we have up-front with the sellers. This normally brings us to the result that you see there on the right, which is an uplift on average for each target of their margin of three-five percentage points. There's another question that we need to try to answer, which is, can we continue to consolidate? My definitive answer is yes. In the 36 countries we are in, we are looking at an accessible market in excess of EUR 30 billion. This is still very highly unconsolidated. I would say approximately 60%. With some exemptions. Everybody has talked about the recent acquisitions in France, the build-up. Of course, the French market will probably not be in that category, and consolidation of the top five is probably above the 50%. It's an exception. If you look, for example, on what we call new platforms, the countries outside of Europe, the consolidation potential is even higher than the 60%. This is a huge opportunity for us. On top, we have new markets to tackle. There are, as I said, acquisitions that we will do or we will look for in innovative fields. Be it in the digital field to close some gaps or in specialty labs to acquire new skills. Let me now try to give you four quick examples of companies we acquired relatively recently. Two bolt-on stories, one platform development, and one technology acquisition. First one is the roll-up we did of our Italian business. Out of Lombardy, we set out to achieve leadership in Italy. We made a string of 38 acquisitions, giving it almost complete coverage of the country. You see there on the left the number of acquisitions we did per year. On the right, I give you two examples of acquisition-specific acquisitions we did recently. The first one being Gruppo Tronchet, a regional platform we acquired in Emilia-Romagna, which was aimed at covering a gap in an unserved area for us in Italy. With that, we have attained leadership in that region. Very importantly, within nine months, we were able to do three-quarters of the synergies we set out ourselves to do. With that, increasing its margin by eight-nine points. The second example is Igea, a mid-size bolt-on in the Lazio region. Important because it was mostly paid. 95% of the revenues of this lab were directly out of pocket. Highly accretive for us in that region it existed, and where we have very quickly overachieved our synergies. You see there more than 100% have been achieved relatively quickly. With that, the EBIT has more than doubled and is 14 percentage points above what we had in our own business plan. That means a margin of more than 35%, 18 percentage points above what it was at acquisition. The second example is another type of bolt-on. It's a bolt-on in France of a highly synergetic potential company in one of the most dynamic areas in France, Bordeaux. This is a company which had significant size for us, but most importantly, it was a real potential for buy and close. As we could close the lab, transform it into an emergency lab for one clinic hospital that they have as a client, and remove all the production out of that into one of our other platforms. Since acquisition, synergies have been realized. The margin has uplifted by 17 percentage points to be at more than 30%. Most importantly, since acquisition, we have even identified more potential for growth, and we expect even further synergies out of this company. The third case I'm showing is an example of a platform acquisition development. The logic of going into a new place and build out of that. This is the case of LatAm. We started out of Colombia, and since then we've opened four other countries. Why did we go there? What was the rationale behind that? The rationale was that it was an area with above average market growth with several unconsolidated markets and clearly ripe for buy and build and buy and close, where we could create really the logic of hub-and-spoke that we like. We've since then made 17 acquisitions, and with the recent acquisitions in Mexico, we are now turning over in the region more than EUR 200 million. One of the examples is on the right of the slide, the acquisition of Analizar, a D2C platform we acquired in Bogotá, which aimed at several objectives. We had a need for a retail network in the city, which we did not have. We needed to merge four labs that we had in the city by building a new lab. Whereas this lab had the physical conditions to bring them all together. With that, we got the B2C platform we required. We merged all these labs into this one, saving significant amounts of CapEx. Since the acquisition, this has seen revenue grow 19% at the same time that we were able to nominally reduce the cost. That has increased the margin of this company by 18 percentage points since acquisition. The fourth example falls in the category of innovation. It was a Danish company we acquired pre-COVID, where we were extremely interested in it because of the digital tools and interconnection software they had, which we wanted to connect all our labs and be able to create a real data lake behind them. Beyond that, these are a great team, strong skills, and with a tech lab mix of knowledge that was extremely appealing to us. This has been a huge success, this acquisition. Fundamentally, it was extremely important in the fight for Denmark, the fight for COVID and in its vaccination efforts. With that company has increased its revenue by almost sevenfold and still with huge scalability potential. As you can see, the small part of intragroup revenue means that we are still scratching the surface of what we can do with this company within our group. Main achievements have been the fact that EBITDA increased 8 times, which is beyond imagining. Most importantly was the fact that this was a key enabler for us to gain some of the contracts that led us to the numbers you've seen on COVID. This was the digital platform we used and that allowed us to win the contract with UEFA, and this was the differentiation that we had compared with others. Also allowed for the successful lollipop testing we did in Germany for the schools, which was a tremendous success. This is a truly scalable platform where and from where we still expect to see significant further benefit in the future. This will be for sure the backbone of our digital and data strategies for the future. I'm very confident on our continuous M&A. Why? Because we continue to see a very strong pipeline. We currently track more than 180 leads in our pipeline. That's more than EUR 1 billion of revenue all in all. Importantly, most of them fall within the category we like, which is the accretive bolt-ons, the ones that are our bread and butter, the ones where we can really synergize. That excludes any transactions that we mentioned thereof transformational targets, anything that is above EUR 50 million in revenue. Of course, this does not mean to say that we are not looking and that we are not evaluating those opportunities. Most of the opportunities all of you are thinking or might have seen in the recent past, we have looked at all of them. We look at them with a very clear focus on creating shareholder value and with the discipline I've talked about before. We will continue to do that. Only when the one shows up we will execute. With that and as a conclusion, let me give you a little bit our roadmap into the future. We will continue to expand our largest Pan-European platform. That means we will continue to close the gaps that we still see in our network, but with a clear focus on growth. We will be looking for increasing the growth of the network as a whole. The second part or the second vector will be to continue to consolidate our leadership in specialty. This is something that most people do not realize, but we are the biggest operator of specialty in Europe. This will be with a focus on converging specialties like genetics and anatomic pathology. The third view of that will be an emphasis on innovation. Acquiring the skills and technologies we need for the next decades. For example, digital resources that will help us boost the D2C efforts that were mentioned before. With that, on the right you see we will continue to target what is the guidance we've given you, about EUR 200 million per year of acquisition spend, which translates into about 5% of inorganic growth for the company. That does not mean to say that from time to time and as we grow, this might not see other things, but for now, this is the guidance. This will be done along the lines of the strategy that I've just described, always trying to maintain a balance across all our regions with a clear focus on tilting it towards higher growth. While at the same time, we see still significant potential for further international expansion outside of the current borders of the empire. Thank you. Thank you, Luis. To wrap it up, let's talk about finance, and I don't think Sami needs a lot of introduction, so I think he has done more or less whatever you can do in finance, pre-IPO, after IPO, during IPO, whatever, also in service businesses. Sami, over to you. Thank you. Thank Thank you, Mathieu. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's the last presentation before Mathieu's conclusion. You have seen six presentations beyond Mathieu's presentation here today, retail, molecular diagnostics, D2C, outsourcing, M&A, ESG, HR. The take here for me when I listen to all of this is a lot of potential for future growth, huge potential for future growth. I have again to be ready to answer the questions, "Are your financial targets not too conservative?" That's what I have in my head. Now, beyond the growth potential, there is the expertise, there is the various accents that you heard. It shows how diverse and international SYNLAB is today. And beyond that, it's also the passion, the passion of the leadership team. Today, my role will be to walk you through the financial model at SYNLAB. Five key financial highlights. Growth, growth first. Strong revenue growth. 42% organic growth in 2021, 5.4% coming from M&A. Second key element here is high profitable growth. We have high profitability also, and it's supported by a strong operating leverage, and this is where I will describe a little more today. Third pillar, strong cash. Strong cash generation. More than EUR 700 million of unlevered free cash flow last year. We have a solid balance sheet as a consequence, and we have a clear capital allocation rules. For the future, the fifth key levers, we're set for future profitable growth and we have a clear roadmap execution. Now, before going through the financial model itself, let's reground the recent performance here. Strong track record of profitable growth. Revenue growth first on the top left corner, EUR 3,765 million in full year 2021. Close to doubling compared to 2019. EUR 1 billion, EUR 1.6 billion of COVID revenue and EUR 2.2 billion of ex-COVID revenue. Top right, adjusted EBITDA, strong growth, bringing strong profitable growth. 32% margin in 2021, I mentioned earlier. 2021, 21% normalized margin, excluding the one-off of COVID and all the one-offs that we have, comparable to the margin we had in 2019 at 20.8%. EUR 1.2 billion of EBITDA, tripling the EBITDA since 2019. The bottom left corner, adjusted operating profit, which is adjusted EBITDA excluding depreciation and amortization. Here we have close to EUR 1 billion of adjusted AOP, and it's 4x from 2019. Two times revenue, three times EBITDA, four times AOP. Then unlevered free cash flow. I already mentioned above EUR 700 million of revenue, cash flow in 2021, 4.5 times compared to 2019. The takeaway here, we have exceeded all our promises communicated at IPO, and we have been challenged at the IPO on the ability to deliver those assumptions. We were questioned, challenged on the assumptions used, whether on COVID or the underlying businesses. That's the current performance. Now let's move to the model. The organic growth first, which is a primary engine to fuel the future, the business model here. Our above 3% organic revenue growth target is well supported by our achieved volume growth. Looking on the left at the revenue organic growth, historically 2%. In 2020 and 2021, we have delivered this above the 3% already, and the midterm is 3% plus. What is the most important here is the plus. To get there, we have a nominal price variation at group level, and Mathieu mentioned it by segment, but it varies between, as you can see, -0.3% to +0.5%, -0.7%. We have pluses and minuses depending on the countries and the years. From a planning assumption, on average, we use a -0.7% per year. With this nominal impact, we arrive at the volume growth, where we have a strong growth here. The market growth, Mathieu mentioned 2%-3%. The initiative will deliver 1%+, and the country mix 0.4% gets you to the 4%+ on the volume growth. The takeaway, we have a track record of consistency accelerating the volume growth since 2019. We talked about the Swiss prices, for example, the -10% starting the first of August. This will be around EUR 4 million impact this year, EUR 6 million next year for rolling twelve months. It's offset by other countries where we have positive impact related to the inflation. The U.K., we have a positive impact on prices. But beyond price, the volume growth is the most important element for margin expansion. Now let's go to the heart of the model. Here you have the key assumptions behind our model. Let's go through it. Starting point, the first column, you have a normalized year N with a 21% margin. The composition, revenue 100, MatEx 25%, PEx 40%, OpEx 14%. Going to the right, column by column, price, we talked about it, -0.7% historical average. The volume, 4.2% volume to get to an assumption of 3.5% organic growth. This volume of 4.2% on the revenue translates into a 10.1% growth in EBITDA. Obviously, the MatEx is fully variable. On PEx and OpEx, we have a 45% variable, 55% fixed cost. This is obviously an average at group level. It varies slightly by countries and by model when you have a B2B, B2C or hospitals. On average, this is what we see. You have inflation. Inflation, historical rate, -1.3%, relatively nominal, and we have out of this 2% on PEx. We'll come back to this because this is obviously the key lever or drivers that is changing or evolving versus historical trend. Then you have the productivity. Productivity, 1%. Nominal 1%, cost out every year. Thanks to the initiatives we're driving, we call it SALIX internally, it's procurement and productivity savings. When we compute all those columns, you get to a normalized N+1, and you get to 21.4%. We mechanically improve our margin from 21%- 21.4%, thanks to the volume leverage. Now, this is a normalized model that I explained to you here. You have the key assumptions on the right. This is including the EUR 150 million long-term revenue from COVID. This excludes any one-off, whether on the pluses or on the minuses. This excludes any major change on mix, from outsourcing contract like SEL or additional investments that we may have on D2C or others, and any significant change on prices. Let's variabilize some of those on the next page. Now that we have grounded the model, let's take some assumptions here on some of the levers. On the left, you have the historical inflation case with the number of volume where we have changed, variabilized the organic growth. You can see that at 2% organic growth, the margin doesn't improve, 21%. At 4.5%, it improved even further versus the 21.4% at 21.7%. This is with the historical inflation at -1.3% and with the productivity at 1% per year. Now, if we have higher inflation, just changing the inflation from -1.3 to -3%, you get to a drop of margin to 21%, 21.1. We're dropping 1.3 points of margin with the increased inflation of 1.7 points. Now looking on the right, the multi-year illustration here now, how does it flow over time? The first curve is curve number one, which is the historical inflation level. This is how we were able to improve continuously our margin to get to our 23% midterm target, which was around, let's say, 20 25. In the dark blue, you have the curve two, where you have the new assumption on inflation. This is scenarios. This is illustrative scenarios. The two A is only changing the inflation 3% in N plus one and in N plus two, and then we come back to historical level. It shows that we will decrease the margin, and then it will come back again thanks to our model. How to make it come back quicker? First, we have two levers. We have the price, so we can assume that we can improve the prices, and we have already talked about this in our prior communication, so we have been relatively conservative here. An improvement of reducing by half the drop of the price in N plus two, and then we still keep the same assumption minus 0.7. It improves slightly the margin curve. Then you have another one where you can increase the productivity. Moving from 1%-1.5%, from 1%-1.5% the productivity will get you back to the curve, probably a little bit later, a couple of years more. It shows what it shows here at the end is that our model yields long-term margin expansion. Irrespective of the starting point, we improve the margin. We may have a negative impact coming from inflation, but we have the levers to improve it back. The key message here again, this is illustrative scenarios. This is not 2023 guidance. The guidance for 2023, we will communicate during the Q3 2022 financial release in November. Why there? Because we'll have the bottom-up roll-up from the countries for the budget 2023. We are very local business, and there is a lot of assumptions, so we'll have a very well-grounded case at that time. The takeaway again, the SYNLAB model yields long-term margin expansion, and this is the most important thing that I would like you to keep in mind out of this session. Let's go now through the other key characteristic of the SYNLAB model. The next one is that we have very resilient cash flow profile with high cash flow conversion potential, low risk with tailwind from COVID to come. You can see it on the right here, our working capital has increased in the last two years, and we have around EUR 100 million of working capital to unlock with the reduction of COVID, mostly coming from receivable. Our historical DSO in 2019 was 57 days. It's up, but it can come below 50 days. This is our target to bring it below 50 days. We have around EUR 100 million to unlock here. At the same time from the CapEx, you can see that we have invested more in the business in the last two years, doubling the CapEx from EUR 69 million to EUR 143 million, IT, lab equipment, new BCP, the retail strategy. Despite those investment, the takeaway on the page is that 45%-50% cash conversion from EBITDA. This is our midterm target ambitions that we have been able to deliver already in the past. Next page, capital allocation. Nothing new on this page, just to reiterate and reinforce the messages that we have already communicated. Our capital allocation is driven by one key element. It's to support our future growth. That's all about future growth. CapEx, EUR 270 million in 2022, and 9% of revenue. For the midterm, we're looking to 6%-7%. It will be difficult to go below the 6%. This includes the leases. M&A, I think Luis already mentioned repeatedly, around EUR 200 million of EV per year spent. The leverage will keep it below 3x. But again, I reiterate, with the flexibility to go beyond that number not to miss a strategic acquisition, and then with the objective to come back below 3x after a couple of periods. The dividends, 20% payout ratio for 2022, and for the midterm, 20%-30%. Just wanted to remind you, we have around EUR 1 billion cash available to fuel the SYNLAB future growth. The guidance, again, to reiterate here what we have already said, there is no change to our 2022 guidance today. I wanted to reiterate our confidence to deliver those numbers. We are highly confident that we will be delivering those numbers for the year. EUR 3.1 billion revenue and 24%-25% margin. Now on the midterm, long-term guidance, this is what we have communicated at the IPO. The revenue growth around 10% CAGR, with the base year being 2019, including 3%+ on organic growth. Then on M&A, 5% growth per annum. Between the two, you have SEL, because SEL is not in the 3%+, base year being 2019. The COVID-19, same thing. You have EUR 150 million per year. This gets you to the 10% CAGR. The 5% growth per annum for acquisition includes the organic growth coming from the acquisitions, so it's not the revenues that you need to acquire every year. The margin, 23%, is our target for the long term, with non-durable inflation, as we explained. There is probably a small change here, midterm, long term, you may have noticed it, but it's a couple of years, it's not more. I wanted to reiterate that it's achievable. That's a key message. Last, cash conversion, I already mentioned it, 44, 45-50%. I will hand it now back to Mathieu for the conclusion before the Q&A session. Thank you, Sami. Indeed, time to conclude. The last few hours, you heard a lot about our plans, right? Stephan on B2C, Robert, D2C. We had Christoph on specialties, and Rainer on outsourcing, and this was the plans on organic growth, and Luis on inorganic and M&A, Catharina, HR and ESG. You just had the wrap-up on the model and what all of this means anchored into growth with Sami. I think all of these presentations show you that we are set to deliver strong, profitable revenue growth. The four buckets, again, number one, organic. That's encompassed in the FOR YOU strategy and initiatives. COVID impact, we have all the infrastructure and capabilities. We also have the brand recognition from the last two years. Operational efficiencies, this has always been around Lean, but also footprint optimization. M&A, systematic execution, would be my choice of words. If you look at those four buckets, the focus of the last two years was organic COVID M&A. It was all about delivering, taking advantage of the potential out there. The future balance of these four will be much more organic efficiencies and M&A. I would say COVID, we know how to deal with it. We have the proactive and reactive capabilities to go with the potential of the market whenever it comes. I think two things to remember, again. Number one, we delivered and over-delivered every single promise of our IPO. Number two, we have an absolute clear strategy and the plans to continue developing SYNLAB successfully in the future. With that, we can now open the Q&A, and I call Catharina, Luis and Sami to help me address your questions. Jan, you are the first. Great. Thank you. I would like to start with your EBITDA guidance. Could you quantify what long term means, what that exactly means? I know there are still many moving parts, but could you help us understand what are your current expectations for the EBITDA margin for 2025? Secondly, on your capital allocation, your medium guidance calls for leverage of below 3x, but with your current M&A strategy, it's going to be difficult to reach that threshold. What are your plans to increase your leverage going forward? In relation to this, could you provide an update on your ambitions in Asia? Finally, on your growth potential. We heard a lot of your growth drivers today, but what is the long-term organic growth potential of your company? I understand that your midterm guidance calls for 3%+, but given that, already 1/3 of your revenues are growing by above 8%, do you believe that you could grow organically by more than 4% sustainably in the long run? Let's start with the organic growth, because as you mentioned, it fuels the margin potential here. There is a lot of potential. Our guidance is 3%+. We'll not change it today. But there is no reason why we cannot do more than 3%. So that's when we will have continuously delivered the 4%, we will change our guidance. Revenue growth drives margin growth. I think you have explained it today. The inflation is something new. So if I was here explaining to you that despite all the inflation that you see in the news, we're still delivering the 23% in the same time frame as the IPO, this would be wrong. But now, we have levers to improve the margin through incremental productivity, and this incremental productivity will come through digitalization, through revising our Food lab footprint. There is potential for more productivity, but it takes time. It doesn't come overnight. When you ask me short term, long term, I would say two more years. The difference between the two is two more years. Now the margin for 2025, you have seen it. The curve is continuously improving. It's difficult to give you an exact number today. But it's continuous. There is no hiccup. There is no acceleration. It's relatively linear. On Asia, we are still looking indeed, and it will come when time will come. We are very busy with plenty of other opportunities, so we don't need necessarily Asia. There is for sure potential there to consolidate and bring medical excellence to the markets. Thank you. Hassan Al-Wakeel, Barclays. A couple from me. Firstly, it was encouraging to see the exit rate on organic growth coming out of Q1, and I wonder if you can comment on to what extent this has been sustained from at least the part of Q2 that you have seen, and how we should think about the rest of the year, given some of the reinvestment cuts that we talked about earlier. Secondly, on inflation, thank you for the sensitivity that you provided. Just to follow up, I mean, maybe a bit more around your confidence level on that 23%, how that compares to what you think is a more underlying margin today, and what are the real building blocks for us to actually think about in you achieving that? Maybe as a corollary to this, how has employee attrition or cost cutting on that front trended in the last few months, as COVID volumes have receded? A lot of questions. First one on the margin for, let's say, step by step. 2022 will be in the range 24%-25% that we have communicated, and we're confident about this, no doubt. This includes, obviously, the reduction of COVID volume as well as the start of the reduction of the cost from COVID, or the resources that we have put on COVID. Now, next year margin will remain impacted by COVID because the COVID number next year will be above EUR 150 million. We can see it in the consensus that is out there today. The consensus, your consensus is around 23%. That's where we are, 22.8%. This includes, I think, we need to see how there is a lot of variability and the inflation is still an unknown. What is the true impact on inflation and how long it will last, and which will be depths, it varies every day. The price of the barrel, the impact on what's happening in Europe, this is unclear yet and unknown. It's difficult to communicate on some things around that without knowing the full impact. What would be, and I mentioned it multiple time, the price impact. There is ongoing discussions that will start next week with the French authorities on the renewal of the three-year contract. This is, as mentioned, we have already communicated that we need to increase prices because of. You have seen the sensitivity here, so it can play very quickly. We have seen some prices going up. If you want some reassurance, I can give you here one point today. You are looking for Q2. We'll have positive pricing in Q2. We mentioned the Swiss pricing dropping in August, which is negative news. I can give you a positive news. Q2 prices will be positive. It's positive already year to date, quarter to date. It's thanks to increases of prices that we have seen in many countries despite the price drop in France, which continues at 3%. That's one element for Q2. For the volume perspective, I will not... I mean, there is a lot of pluses and minuses because of working days, the prior effects, the fact that last year was impacted by the confinement. Some of the measurement difficulties that we had in the last year. But we are still confident. Volumes are resilient in our activity. Nothing is changing here. We are very confident in delivering our full year commitment to EUR 3.1 billion. Now you ask question on staff attrition. This big resignation that we hear a lot about, we don't see it. That's not good, but that's good. We have traditionally attrition in our activity like, I think, any company. This helps us also trimming down, besides the temporary contracts we mentioned earlier, our COVID dedicated staff. To say bluntly, we are reducing staff as we speak, and we have reduced, and we are reducing, and will continue reducing staff to a level where we keep this flexibility of addressing the opportunity of the next waves in the fall. Are you able to quantify that, in terms of the reduction in staff? I don't know, peak to trough or peak to today? Sure. We are probably, I would say to give an order of magnitude, it's more than 1,000. Sami, just to clarify on that two-year extension that you talked about for medium-term margins, that's not assuming any of these price discussions that you just talked about? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So just one question on the M&As. It drew my attention, of course, that the size of the M&A it went down in half in 2022 compared to 2021. Is it the market scarcity, or are there any other factors leading to that? Yeah, second of all, again, like, just as mentioned, to get to three leverage, you'll need larger M&As, and your pipeline obviously doesn't include them. Do you have a limit or a bracket that's a range that we should expect? Mm-hmm. You want to answer M&A, Luis? I mean, to the first question, it's not true that 2022 is lower than 2021. What we have shown there for 2022 is what is announced. There's much more to come, still in 2022, which will for sure reach levels similar to the ones of 2021. I meant the average size in terms of. On average size? Average size based on revenues. It varies every year, so, but the number will be overall relatively similar. What we should, we are ready to play with you, right? In the sense that you expect an annual number, so we give you an annual number. What we should do, to be honest, on M&A is to say, "You know what? We're going to spend EUR 800 million in four years. See you in four years." Because it doesn't make sense to target an exact number every year. We would make mistakes, right? Because if I tell Luis Vieira, "You have to spend EUR 200 million or more," he will know to spend them, right? For sure. This is not how we operate, right? If I would tell him, "But you have to have EUR 5 million average size or EUR 10 million or EUR 15 million," same, he would find them, but are they the best opportunities given what we need at the moment in time? Probably not. You have to bear with us here to know that these numbers are. You have seen in the past some years we did EUR 400 million, some years 880 million, and this will continue to be like this, right? Maybe this year we'll do more than EUR 200 million, maybe slightly less. I don't know. What is important is that we continuously have a pipeline with the discipline and the rigor to look at it strategically, that we anticipate where we want to step in and what is good for us. Now, on the leverage, maybe? The leverage is a consequence of what has been said. I mean, we can, to complement first the questions, the answers on the prior questions, the size of the deal, we do bolt-on, which is like bread and butter, and then you have the mid-size deal, and this is what makes a change. The ability to do mid-size deal or larger deal, it's not predictable. You need to. It can happen in December or in February. If it happens in February, the year 2022 will be less than EUR 200 million, but the life to date will be higher on average. That's the point. It's very unpredictable, but there are enough potential. We don't want to drive Luis to say, "Before 31st of December, you close the deal," because then you don't have the best deal. The M&A will come when it comes, but we have potential for mid-size and for large size. Sure. I mean, the year-to-year volatility is very natural, and I understand. Actually, the question was more on you, your larger deals in 2021, for example, the transaction Mexico- Mm-hmm. They weren't very large. I mean, looking into your history, I don't see a very large deal that would move your leverage substantially. Mm-hmm. What I was trying to understand was, would there be a very large deal that would surprise us, and what would be the size of a large deal that we should be expecting or not expecting? The large deal, EUR 500 million-EUR 800 million EV. This will get us to our higher than three times with the ability to come down before. When we model it. You have that in the pipeline or? We don't have one. We have more than one in the pipelines, but it's more complicated to achieve. Okay. Yeah. That's just what I want to understand. Thank you very much. This is the secret of the sauce. Sorry. Not something we can disclose. It will come. Thank you. One question on your targets and your 23% margin. You mentioned, I don't know what was your exact wording, but not including high inflation, what is your assumption there in terms of inflation? Midterm will come back to historical level. It needs to be looked at the differential between inflation and pricing, and that there is still an unknown. If inflation remains at a high level for the long term, prices will adjust. There is a lag probably, but once inflation is there for a long time, the prices also will be adjusted accordingly. It's not the absolute assumption for inflation itself, it's the differential with the price that is critical. What's your assumption in your business? It's a historical one. That means we have a -0.7% of price and -1.3% of inflation. Combined, you have a roughly 2% negative to absorb through volume leverage and productivity. Is that including your personnel cost increase? Yeah. We have a question from Matthias Mierwald online. I will read it out. You have described interesting organic growth options. What's the total investment budget allocated to those for the next years and your return expectation ROIC? You want to? On the investment there is M&A and CapEx, when we talk about investment, and there is a portion in OpEx also. On M&A, I mean, when we do investment, like the genetic one in Spain, it will be part of EUR 200 million, so it's covered. Here we have a very rigorous metrics on the return and on how to look at acquisitions. The second element is on CapEx. I've guided to 6-7% of revenue on a midterm. Then for 2022, we have 9%, so we're investing a little bit more. If we have upside to this on revenue with a little bit more COVID, we will be able to spend even more because we are reinvesting a portion of COVID into the future growth, and we've seen it for the retail, for example. We've seen how it can accelerate the return for the blood collection point. There's another question. In your higher inflation scenario, you're taking into account the 3% inflation and that decrease your margin to 20.1%. What would be the sensitivity of your margin if with a, like, current inflation close to 7%-8%? What are the margin level then? Sorry. If the inflation goes to 6%-7%, what the margin would be? It's too early to say because if we reach those level of inflation, there will be a price impact. There will be naturally, mechanically a price adjustment. As mentioned earlier, the regulator will face the pressure on the hospital at the same time, and we will be linked somehow. Then there will be, as mentioned, we will accelerate some of the productivity. We have also, to a degree, protection on, obviously some of our MatEx and some of our OpEx, in long-term agreements. You cannot consider that whatever you read in the newspaper, will hit us, nominally, the same way, right? There's a question. Yes, there is another question from Matthias Mierwald online. In your model, how does your expected ROIC compare to your expected WACC? Is ROIC versus WACC a yardstick for management compensation? Now we are entering very more complicated and elaborated technical discussion here. What I can say to stay simple, the management compensation first is on the P&L revenue, EBITDA, and cash on a yearly basis. The long-term compensation is created on the total shareholder return. This is where we're measured on. For any return on investment we're looking for, it's always looked at an IRR of double digit. It's looking at return on CapEx of 2-3 years. That's the kind of headwind or things we're looking at when we are making decisions, business decisions. Now, WACC and ROIC are more technical elements here, which are far from the operation and the business decisions to be taken. I mean, obviously, if the interest rate goes up, if the leverage is close to the 3%, we'll be a bit more cautious and on any future investment. That's where we are. A seller must be calling. Sorry. To come back on the inflation. Just currently, at what level is your inflation at the group level trending? Because you just mentioned that some of your costs are protected. Yeah. through contracts, et cetera. Just to understand what is the dynamic today in your business. Obviously today we had a negative 1.3% in our budget. We have communicated for the full year that we have assumed EUR 25 million more cost, which is roughly doubling the inflation. Those EUR 25 million more cost was EUR 10 million in OpEx and EUR 15 million in OpEx, with nominal impact on the MatEx because of the multiyear contract. This is still valid. Okay. Even I think we will end up the year probably with a bit more inflation on OpEx and less inflation on CapEx because of the nature of our renegotiation on a yearly basis on our OpEx. Which leads to the discussion for next year, what would be the next year inflation, and this is where we will see the OpEx inflation a bit higher than the historical one. If you believe the central banks have an impact on the economy, I think they seem to be quite determined to tame the inflation fairly fast, right? Which for us indirectly has a beneficial effect because we are competing in some of our acquisitions against highly leveraged companies, right? Higher interest rates will help us more than some others. There's always a positive somewhere. Again, maybe I won't because there are not a lot of. I mean, I answered the question on the organic growth, but one critical element of this equation is where do you put the cursor? We put 3%+. You talked about the 4%, but this is one key lever for future margin expansion. If we can do even more on organic growth, and we have heard today that there is a lot of opportunity, everyone, I mean, whether D2C, whether the specialty, whether the outsourcing. This is where, I mean, one option is for the group is the acceleration of the organic growth. We would have exhausted your questions. That looks surprising. Question for Mathieu Floreani. Mathieu, can you give us a sense of the magnitude of the long-term benefit of COVID alluded to on page 17 and by when they can be realized? I have to remember what page seventeen is. That's probably the five trends after the COVID page I showed you on what this can change, right, in the future. It's a very difficult question to answer because what we have seen is that, you know, today in many respects, we are still a very young company, right? We have to learn to execute better, more consistently, right? You heard Stephan saying when we propose upselling in Spain, 50% conversion. This drives us mad, right? Because we only do it in 7% of the cases. You have to be, say, humble enough to say, well, to get this 7% to maybe 15% or 20%, takes a bit of time, right? I think there is a lot of organic growth embedded in better execution even before we see all these trends helping us, right? We are building as we speak a platform on D2C, and this then has the scalability of any internet platform, right? Because at the end of the day, we have all the resources on the ground which no other startup or other company has in the same magnitude. It's very difficult to quantify how this will further help us. We are in a unique business, right? Because basically the volume growth never goes back. I repeat, it never goes back. We have never seen a market where the volume growth has gone back. Never. Recession or no recession. Now, that in these times we are, I think, is something quite strong. It's about how we can further step up our game to get all this potential. I'm where I'm sitting and when I look at what we have accomplished and what there is out there in terms of potential, I mean, I have been around for quite a long time in many different industries. I've never seen that, right? Where you have a market that is supportive, that doesn't go back. You have price pressure, but this is fairly limited to what you have in any B2B market. On top of that, you have fundamental trends that are not disruptions, but that are positive disruptions to your business, right? This is quite, in my view, unbelievable and motivating. Now, to put an exact, say, number on this is probably a bit difficult, but you probably heard all the confidence we have in further developing would be my, say, non-precise answer to this question. All right. Another question? Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. Maybe to be clear on that, is it possible to have a split by segment, where you think you have a good pricing power? Is it possible to remind us where by segment you have more pricing power? The other side of the question would be by country or by your big four clusters, where do you think it is the most likely to get price increases from government or from the flexibility or the elasticity in the market by 2023? Mm-hmm. Thank you. I think Sami will answer, let me guess, the two questions in one. Yeah. I think we've already given a high level split here, and we have 10%-15% segment of our activity where we have a price leverage. On 45% we believe it's not in our hand, but doesn't mean that it will not happen. On 40%, we have historical experience where it's happening naturally, because in Eastern Europe or in the UK or in Nordic countries, prices are naturally going up when there is inflation. This is the segmentation we have today. We can refine it. Again, I gave a new piece of information today, Q2 prices are up. Which indicates that there is already an element here offsetting the incremental inflations that we're seeing. We will refine for the Q3. For our guidance in 2023, we'll work on trying to make it even clearer. With the budget assumption. Cause it's very local. At the same time, it's very multidimensional. We have two or three minutes for a last question, if any. All right. Well, as you heard, our There is one. Another one online. I was about to say, as you heard today, our activity is also about being on time. Let's take this one. We are looking at an uncertain environment. How do you see the benefits of your high level of diversification, geographies, tests, channels going forward? I think this is where the strengths play at full, right? And I'm not sure many other companies in our activity will be able to show quarters with positive pricing, right? This is the full extent of the diversification, right? Not only is it such a fundamental need of healthcare systems, that's the volume growth that always grows for whatever happens. Regulators behave a bit differently in different geographies with different lag times and so on and so forth on different tests. That is the power of a diversified portfolio, be it geographic. Within the geography, be it mature and emerging markets. Then on the type of customers, the type of payers, we have probably an over-proportion compared to many of our competitors of out-of-pocket given this mix of activities. We probably have an over-proportion also of specialty tests. We'll see what how this all these advantages or strengths play out in the future. As Sami said, it's very difficult at this point to really predict what exactly will happen anywhere. This, I would say, the strength of how the company is structured will play, I'm sure, in the coming months as a differentiator. With that, it's 500. Thank you very, very much for all of you online and even more so, thank you for all of you who have here in the room dedicated your day to get a bit more understanding of SYNLAB and hopefully witness and share the passion that animates you in developing SYNLAB further. Thank you, and have a safe and on-time journey back home.