Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome back to our next presentation, which is Verbio. As part of our today's German Select Conference, I'm happy to have with me Alina Köhler. She's the Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy. She will walk us through the company's performance, touching on key milestones and market trends. Before we dive in, a quick housekeeping note, the conference is being recorded and all participants are in a listen-only mode. If you have questions, please submit them using the chat box and we will address them in the Q&A session after the presentation. With that, I'll hand it over to you, Alina. The floor is yours. Thank you, and thank you for having me, and a very warm welcome from my side as well. There's not a day that goes by that we're not reminded that our supply chains are currently very strongly under pressure, and our import dependence shows in the price volatility that we're seeing. At the same time, the structural requirement of reducing our emissions remains intact. This is where Verbio steps in. We deliver energy security and sustainability. Let me give you a quick overview of the company. As a leading bioenergy producer, we transform local agricultural biomass and agricultural residues into renewable fuels and green molecules using our proprietary biorefineries. Since our feedstock does not pass the Strait of Hormuz, we can provide local energy that is scalable and that already fits existing infrastructure. The company was founded by Dr. Georg Pollert and Claus Sauter, who's our today CEO, in the early 2000s when overproduction was still the main driver. The company was then IPO'd in 2006. In our last financial year, more than 1,400 employees produced 12 TWh of bioenergy. With that, we also produced 4.5 million tons of CO2 savings. That's really important because we monetize both energy and the CO2 savings. We have assets located across the world, and especially in Germany. I know it's really small here on the slide now, our entire capacity utilization is fully ramped. We have started with an international diversification a few years back into North America and India. Here we are still in the ramp-up. Let me quickly give you the key metrics and the figures that we use to manage the company. You can see, or you cannot see very well, I think it's really small, but our production volumes have increased strongly over time, and this is due to operational efficiency measures, but also due to the ramp-up that I have just mentioned outside of Germany. At the same time, and now let's address the elephant in the room, the EBITDA has decreased. The reason here is external market factors, disruptions that we have experienced in specifically the German, but also the European market. I will touch on that a bit later. You can also see that we have already started a recovery with our EBITDA in the first half of 2025/2026, the current financial year, of EUR 45.5 million. As you can also tell from how I phrased that, we have a broken financial year, so our year ends at the 30th of June. Let me give you a bit more color on how our business model works and the competitive advantage that comes with it. Our biorefineries pretty much work like oil refineries, but instead of fossil imported oil, we use local biomass and residues. Starting from the top, we use oil seeds to produce biodiesel, glycerine, and sterols. Glycerine and sterols are going into the pharma and the food industry, and that's why we mostly use rapeseed oil in our production, because we need to make sure that glycerine and sterols are vegan, kosher, non-GMO. This process of producing sterols as a co-product for biodiesel is very unique and shows the technological skills that we have. All of these products are harbored in our Biodiesel segment. We also produce ethanol, and you use starch to produce ethanol, and you can use cereals for that. Typically, you would use wheat or corn. Since we use the remaining fraction from that production process, which is called stillage, to produce renewable natural gas, we can also use different types of feedstocks there. We can use rye, we can use triticale, and that really sets us apart from our competitors, because they don't produce bioethanol and biomethane in the same process, but rather they produce bioethanol and animal feed, which is mostly used for the process wheat and corn. Renewable natural gas, by the way, or biomethane, which is just a synonym, is directly interchangeable with fossil gas because it's exactly the same molecule. A byproduct of our renewable natural gas production is fertilizer, and here you can also see the circularity of our business model and how we have our full value chain locally. Nevertheless, we serve markets across food, pharma, transport, globally and locally. Here we choose where we can put our molecules to attract the highest value. All in all, our proprietary technology and our market know-how, hence gives us edge in the market and enables us to extract the most value from the biomass that we put in. This you can also see in the graph here on this slide, where we are showing our gross margin per ton of liquid biofuel. The dark bar or the darker part of the bar basically represents the reference market spread. What do I mean by the reference market spread? This is what the competitor or anyone could get in the market, minus the production costs. We can optimize our margin on top, and I have just talked you through the business model and how we do that exactly. Summarizing it here, we can do that through our feedstock cost advantage. When we choose rye or triticale, we would do that if they have a cost advantage for the value that they bring. We have operational efficiency, so thanks to our technological know-how, we can manage our energy use and our resource use in general very well. With that, we also bring more CO2 savings potential and CO2 savings efficiency in our biofuels, which is part of our co-product capture, aside from the fertilizers or sterols or glycerine. Last, the market optimization, I have just touched on that as well. We have the ability to move our molecules globally to bring it to the best paying market. Again, you can see that overall the gross margin per ton of liquid fuel has declined year-over-year. What's very comforting here is that our premium has declined less than the market reference spread, showing the relative resilience of our, or through our co-products. Hence, with this, we have managed to outperform our peers over the past few years on a return on capital employed basis. In fact, our return was above 20% across the cycle, which is pretty impressive. Nevertheless, you can also see the underperformance in 2024, 2025. The reason why we're underperforming our peers here is that our peers are mostly U.S.-based, so they have not felt the E.U. disruptions to the same extent that we have, and I will talk about that in a second. Also we have ramp-up costs related to our international and diversification strategy. Both of this is temporary. As you have seen, our EBITDA has already recovered for the first half of the financial year. Now I have mentioned the market disruptions quite a bit, so I want to give you a bit more background before we then focus on what's ahead. In Germany, fuel suppliers are obligated to bring down CO2 emissions, and they can do that by either blending fuel such as bioethanol or biodiesel in the fossil counterparts like diesel and gasoline, or they can buy CO2 savings credits from companies like Verbio, who bring, for example, renewable natural gas into transport market. Since we're not obligated ourselves, we can sell the CO2 savings that we generate with that to those companies. In the past, there was an incentive scheme that allowed the double crediting for advanced fuels. Advanced fuels is anything that is based on waste. It makes sense because that's something that we want to increase and where we want to have more capacities in Europe. However, there was a structural mistake in the regulation because there were no controls and hence a lot of mislabeling happened, especially at foreign producers, because we did have controls here in Europe, but no controls outside of Europe. Hence the market price collapsed, because through the mislabeling, a lot of additional CO2 was created and/or CO2 savings was created. Hence the entire sector suffered and also, so did our EBITDA, as you can see here on the bottom graph. Now the tides are turning. Now we have a new regulation draft, and with the announcement of that, where they want to right the wrongs, the price has already recovered. Let me now give you a quick overview of how the key shortcomings are being corrected. First of all, the double counting is removed. When the double counting is removed, that means that there's less artificial CO2 savings in the market. We have stricter controls. Those stricter controls especially help also to keep out fraudulent product. On top of that comes a higher mandate. The GHG or the greenhouse gas savings mandate has been increased, especially to absorb the surplus that has been created in the past with the fraudulent product. Overall, all these measures actually increase the competitive advantage or the competitiveness of crop-based fuels, such as fuels as our biodiesel based on rapeseed oil or bioethanol based on corn, which of course, benefits us. We produce both, so we have the advanced fuels and we have the crop-based fuels. With this, the policy is now finally not creating additional market uncertainty, but it actually now really underpins market growth. On the left side here of the slide, you can see the graph that basically puts the demand curve and how it's going to develop based on the mandate in a very concise manner. In 2025, which is not depicted here, the CO2 savings mandate was at 10%. 10% basically means 20 million tons of CO2 savings that the oil companies need to create or buy because our market size is around 200 million tons of emissions in Germany per annum. Now we can see that this figure, the 10%, is basically doubling in the next few years. At the same time, as I mentioned, the supply is dialing back because we do not have the fraudulent product anymore, and we do not have the artificial CO2 savings from double crediting. Hence, this is very good news for the biofuel sector. We're not only seeing that in Germany, but overall, the global momentum for biofuels is very strong. While demand is generally policy-backed, the structural drivers across the regions differ. Right now, and like I said in the beginning, you hear that in the news every day, the supply chain resilience in Europe and in Asia are the major drivers here. For example, India already has blend rates of 20%, where they blend 20% of ethanol that they can produce within the country into their gasoline. In Germany, actually, BioLNG, which is the liquefied biomethane that we also produce and sell, is the star of the show. Here's why. Like I said in the beginning, our feedstock does not go through the Strait of Hormuz, and this is why we can keep our prices stable. Even before the war started, LNG or BioLNG specifically has been already the best option for fleet operators. Now this price stability really comes to shine. To give you some figures here, if you look at our pumps or even of competitors, BioLNG is priced at around EUR 1 per kg, whereas the diesel price, you all know, it's above EUR 2 per liter. When you compare that on an energy basis, this actually means that BioLNG is 1/3 of the cost of diesel. Overall, for the fleet operator, and if you take together the OpEx and CapEx cost per km, BioLNG is the best option. Fuel economics clearly plays a role here. Fuel economics is also something that's driving demand in North America, because in North America, ethanol is cheap. Ethanol is cheap because there's an overproduction of corn in the States. Already today, around 40%-50% of corn is going to the biofuels industry. Any president that wants to be president of the United States need to make the farmers happy because they need their votes. They have two ways to do that. Increase the domestic demand, which the government just did. They have now set an E15 blend rate for summer, which means 15% of ethanol into gasoline, and they're even in talks to do that for the entire year, whereas in the past, in winter times, it has been around 5%-10%. The second thing is they can increase export. How do they do that? Well, Trump has actually included ethanol in most of the trade agreements so far. In Asia, at the same time, the blending rates are being lifted, for example. Overall, the backdrop is very strong for biofuels. How do we, as Verbio, now capitalize on this growth? One thing, of course, is volume growth. I have mentioned our international expansion before. In the States, we have two plants. One is the biorefinery that sits in Nevada, which is also here shown as a picture on this slide, and the other one is our South Bend ethanol production unit. Once both of them are fully ramped, we will actually have a footprint of production volumes of 50/50 Europe and America. Clearly, we are now moving from investment to execution here. Growth is not just about volume growth or bringing more molecules into the market. It's actually also about increasing the value per molecule that we bring in the market or per ton of biomass that we use. I did walk you through the levers before when we talked about our competitive advantage, so I won't do that again. We see specifically here a lot of earnings potential still or a margin optimization potential for our future. Let me also give you an example here. Co-product capture, which includes any additional CO2 savings that we can sell in the market, is a big lever for us. Right now, our biogenic CO2, which is another stream in the bioethanol production process, is not fully utilized. Here we have the potential to actually utilize 500,000 tons of biogenic CO2 that we produce, which would be in a level of around EUR 100 million-EUR 200 million in revenues. The demand for CO2 gases, and this is also quite interesting actually, is also now an issue with the broken supply chains that we're seeing. In the U.K., the government is actually paying another ethanol producer to bring up the plant again, because they have idled the plant, to ramp that up again because they are in need of those CO2 gases, underpinning the value of this specific value stream that we have here. In the U.S., we also do have further upside coming from CO2 sequestration. Here we do CO2 utilization in the U.S. We can do CO2 sequestration, where we actually bring our CO2 underground and would get a tax credit. Lastly, we increase our value creation through innovation. This gives us even more optionality when we talk about end markets. We have invested into the ethenolysis plant, which is located in Bitterfeld, and there we are using our biodiesel to produce specialty chemicals. Those specialty chemicals can be used in surfactants, plastic lubricants, and polymers. There we will go into the material applications rather than into energy use. The production starts in the second half of this financial year, which is the first half of our, oh sorry, of this calendar year, which is the first half of our next financial year, so 2026/2027. Putting it all together for you, and then we can start with the Q&A. We are currently restoring profitability of our core business due to better quality regulation. Secondly, we're capitalizing on our growth opportunities through international expansion. Thirdly, we see further margin improvement potential and resilience through optimization and innovation. Clearly we are past peak investment levels and are ready to harvest the fruits. Harry, are you moderating the questions? Sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry. We received a few questions, and just a short reminder, please use the chat box for your questions. The first question is, what is the time difference, the delay between producing biofuels and selling GHG quota for Verbio in Germany? That depends. Generally, when we sell our biodiesel or our bioethanol, there's a standard CO2 saving that comes with the product. This is also the reason why the oil companies buy those products in the first place. When we have additional CO2 savings because we produce better than the standard, those we can either sell with the product, which we do when we fix that in our term contracts, or we can sell it at any time during a year. Okay, perfect. Talking about capital allocation and the dividend, what is Verbio's future dividend policy? Resuming a constant EUR 0.20 dividend per year, slowly increasing the dividend year after year, or turning into a non-dividend growth stock? No, as we have communicated also at the AGM, we want to come back to at least our stable dividend of EUR 0.20 per share. Okay, perfect. The RIN prices in the U.S. have been rising. Can the RIN prices be compared to the German GHG quota? If yes, do the RIN prices increase the same effect as GHG quota, meaning plus EUR 1 in the GHG price means EUR 1 million additional EBITDA for Verbio? Quite a complex question. Yeah. Maybe let me break that down. First of all, the RINS and the GHG quota, those are different systems. However, they are both here to manage demand, and as I have said during the presentation, in the U.S., the driver is more the support of the farmer. We're also seeing that they want to manage their CO2 savings with it. In Germany, it's really about the CO2 emission reductions. The RINS are basically the currency of the system in the U.S. They have a volume obligation. Instead of managing the fuel demand by bringing down emissions, it's about the volumes that are brought into the market. They have just released their Renewable Volume Obligations for the coming years, and they have very strong demand, which is also why the RIN prices are currently rising. Different systems, different drivers, however, the drivers enforce each other in the world currently, and we are very well located to be operating in Europe as well as in the U.S. The same thing that you had mentioned, I think there was a sensitivity related to the GHG quota. This was before we had the removal of the double counting. I just want to mention that. Oh, okay. Speaking about the Iran war and the energy prices, the higher energy price shock affects U.S. renewable fuel credit markets. Can this impact be compared to the European market? Sorry, I didn't quite catch it. Can you come again? Yeah, sure. The Iran war and the sudden energy price shock affected the U.S. renewable fuel credit markets, compared to Europe. Has there been a change in the market dynamics? I'm not exactly sure where the question is heading, so maybe we can do the next one. Yeah, sure. We go. Maybe you can give us an idea about the transport market. The question is coming from Switzerland. Nearly every fourth new commercial vehicle sold is electric. Do you have an idea? Does this also account for Germany or for other European countries? I don't have the figure on top of my head right now. In fact, the electrification here moves much, much slower than the government has initially anticipated. The thing is that we still have the fleet that is existing and that only very, very slowly, even if you have every fourth car will be electric, it takes a very long time until you have the full electrification of the vehicle market. Sure, we will get there. Specifically for the heavy-duty transport sector, we do not see an all-electric strategy. You may have not seen it on the slide because it was very small and I have not talked about it in detail. Even China, the land of battery, has an adoption rate of more than 35% of CNG and LNG vehicles in the heavy-duty section for new vehicles. I think that makes it pretty clear that this is where we are heading, and specifically with the ability to keep the BioLNG prices stable as we have been for the past. This is now finally showing it's a huge competitive advantage versus fossil. Okay, sure. Let's have a look into the future, this time into the long term. What are the maximum earnings potential for Verbio until 2030? Can you comment on this? We have not put out a midterm guidance. Okay. There are a few more questions coming in. Maybe we can get to this one. Are there any major maintenance turnarounds in 2026, which we should be aware of? Generally, and this also boils down to our technological expertise, we do our maintenance while we run. That means we still stop production for one or two days a quarter, but it's not something that shows in our financials very dominantly because we do that at all times. We have a running maintenance program, but we never shut down for a couple of weeks as you might know it from American ethanol producers, for example, or some other renewable diesel producers. Okay. Thanks a lot. Alina, actually, we are not running out of questions, but we are running out of time. I would like to say thank you for the insightful questions and the answers you've provided. It was a pleasure for me and to all our guests. We would appreciate your feedback to be shared with the company. We have sent a small email to you, and we will really appreciate if you give us a few answers regarding the feedback. Our conference is going on, so the next presentation will be Hypoport SE, and we provided you a link down in the chat box. With this, I would say see you there, and thanks a lot, Alina. Thank you so much.