Good morning, and welcome to 3i's Capital Markets Seminar in respect of Action's 2020 financial results. My name is Simon Borrows. I'm the CEO of 3i and Chairman of Action, and also on the line we have Julia Wilson, CFO of 3i, as well as Sander van der Laan, CEO of Action, and Joost Sliepenbeek, CFO of Action. We plan to go through the Action presentation, which has been put on our website this morning. This morning's Capital Markets day is focused on Action, but before diving into that subject, I wanted to advise you that the non-Action 3i private equity portfolio continues to perform strongly with good growth across the portfolio as a whole. The last 12 months have been an extraordinary time for all of us and thrown up many challenges and opportunities. Fortunately, we've seen more of the latter than the former in the 3i portfolio. Many of our investee companies, and particularly those in the consumer and retail sector, have had to adapt fast to a rapidly changing environment, and few have done that better than Action. Action has faced significant lockdown disruption in eight of the last 13 months, and yet has still delivered strong growth in sales, profits, and cash. It's been a story of fantastic adaptability on behalf of the management team and staff at Action, as well as the inexorable power of the brand and its customer-centric formula. The ability of all the team to almost switch instantaneously between store, Click and Collect, and shopping by appointment at high volume Action stores is a testament to their energy and pragmatism, as well as the quality of the group's IT and supply chain capabilities. The very strong recovery in demand and trading in different countries as lockdowns have been released is testimony to the popularity of Action with consumers and the power of its straightforward offer of good products, low prices, and surprise. We believe Action has performed remarkably well over the last year. Its resilience and competitive advantage have come through very strongly in the battlefield that was 2020. This has only increased 3i's confidence in the long-term compounding benefit of this asset to 3i's shareholders. Now, before we move on to Action's presentation, I have a few instructions on the webcast and Q&A. You will have an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. You'll be able to do so in two ways: by clicking on this tab and typing the question in, or alternatively, you will be able to dial into the conference call and ask your question directly. Some of you will have received dial-in details by email, but we will provide them again before the Q&A. There will be a five-minute break before the start of the Q&A to allow you to dial into the call or refresh your cup of coffee. Okay, let me now hand over to Sander to take you through the detail of Action's 2020. Sander. Thank you, Simon. Good morning, everybody, somewhere in the world, and welcome also on behalf of Action. My name is Sander van der Laan, and I am the CEO of Action since October 2015. Spent basically 30 years in consumer and retail, predominantly for retail companies. I'm here together with my CFO, Joost Sliepenbeek, who joined the company a little bit more than two years ago and also brings a lot of experience both in finance as well as in retail finance, I should say. I will move on to the next page, which is the agenda. What I will do together with Joost is first I will give an update on the performance of 2020, which clearly was a very, I would say, different year because of the impact of COVID. I will basically reconfirm our strategy and also our long-term objectives in a strategy update. Subsequently, Joost will take it over and dive a little bit deeper into the financial performance for 2020, and then I will come back with a trading update because I can understand that you're all curious to hear how the year has started, since COVID still hasn't left us. That's kind of what we would like to do, and then, like Simon said, after the comfort break, we would like to provide an opportunity for Q&A. On page six, you basically see a summary of the highlights of last year. You could say despite COVID, we will still be able to deliver very strong results. Normally we would have delivered double-digit sales numbers, but a 9% or 8.9% sales growth is pretty, I would say, strong achievement, driven by only -1.4% like-for-like. We will explain that in depth because we have realized this with very significant lockdowns and periods of eight, nine, 10 weeks of store closures in our largest markets. We've delivered EUR 609 million of operating EBITDA, 12.4% more than the year prior. That's also a very good achievement. We've still been able to open new stores in Czech and 164 stores across Europe. Again, a very strong cash conversion. All these numbers, we will dive into the background of that in the rest of the presentation. On page seven, you basically see that our journey and our track record continues for b oth sales, store expansion, operating EBITDA are still very much, I would say, in line with the trends. Also when you look and dive a little bit deeper into like-for-like, we've also made an attempt to normalize our like-for-like for the lockdown period and particularly for the periods when stores were closed. Joost will explain it a little bit deeper how we got to the 10.4%, because clearly you were curious about that. Moving on to the next page, and let me spend a little bit more time around that, because basically, when we take a step back and we look at last year, you can basically break the year down into four periods. First of all, we had the pre-corona period. Corona was still a disease in China, and it hasn't impacted Europe yet. In P1, P2, and also in the first two weeks of P3, we actually had a very good start with more than 7% like-for-like growth in the first 10 weeks, 11 weeks of the year. Basically, this week last year, we really started to be impacted by the lockdowns. Austria, Belgium, France, all went into very firm lockdowns, and all our stores in Austria, Belgium, and France had to be closed. A number of our stores in Germany were closed, a significant number. Some stores in Luxembourg, in Poland were closed, and the only country which remained fully open was the Netherlands. Although many retailers closed their doors in the Netherlands, but they didn't have to do that, they choose to do so. We called that, at that point in time, the soft lockdown in Holland, and that had really impacted our performance in the second half of March, and particularly in P 4. That was, I would say, the low point in last year's performance. You can see the like-for-like, which we realized. Basically, as of the second half of May, we started to reopen in all our markets, and then you can see that we had a period of relatively less interruption between P 6 and P 10, with very strong double-digit like-for-like, and this was driven by all our markets. We will open up the box by country a little bit later. Double-digit like-for-like, and we've been able to do that with a relatively poor product availability. As you know, we at Action are very proud that we bring every week between 150 and 200 new articles into the store. When the stores had to be closed, we had to create a pause in the supply chain, and that created very significant supply chain interruption, basically in Q2 and in Q3, and it took us till the middle of Q4 before we were in better shape again. Despite these availability challenges, we were still able to deliver double- digit like-for-like. The good thing is, we've learned a lot about that. Meanwhile, we already have the second or the third lockdown either behind us or we're still in the middle of that. Our product availability today is actually better than it was before the first lockdown started last year. Still opportunity to improve, but we learned a great deal. Then in November, as the French would say, so in Belgium and France and in Austria, we went back into lockdown. This time, we didn't have to close the stores. We were allowed, particularly in France and Belgium, to keep the stores open, but we were only allowed to sell the so-called essential articles. Those articles which are also being sold in particularly supermarkets, food and drink, laundry and cleaning, personal care, and pet care, we were allowed to keep selling those articles. We call it the essential categories. Most of the so-called non-food assortment or general merchandise assortment, we were not allowed to sell. That was already a little bit better versus, I would say, the lockdown in April, May. Then in December, we were allowed to reopen, fully reopen in France, Belgium and Austria again. We were impacted by the lockdown in Germany and in the Netherlands. You can see that all these developments have created a huge impact on our like-for-like. We finished the year with 1.4%. If you would normalize it for the periods where we would be closed, our underlying like-for-like is actually a little bit more than 10%, and Joost will come back on that a little bit later. Very, I would say, turbulent year. Moving on to the next page. COVID, we had all hoped that this year we would already be released from COVID, and unfortunately, that is not the case, has clearly impacted the world enormously, but has also impacted our business. We are a company with 1,739 stores today. Normally, we have more than 10 million customers per week in the store. We employ around 60,000 people. Our number one priority for the past 12 months has to be to provide a safe shopping and work environment for both our customers and our employees. We have made very significant investments into equipment, into protective materials, but also into what we call door policy. In many cases, we have to put an employee at the front of the door to basically control and monitor the customer flow into the store because we have to commit to certain restrictions of customer numbers per square meter. We've spent significant money, time and effort. That went well. Up until now, I have not been informed about any customer who has been infected in our stores. I'm not aware of any infection of a customer in our store. Yes, we do have employees who are being infected, but the vast majority of them did not pick up this infection at the workplace. They picked it up at their private place because we are doing research for that. In the meantime, also our offices are impacted because we have been working remotely, basically 90%, 95% of the time for the past 12 months as well. Despite all of that, we have been able to manage the company properly and also to deliver, I would say, strong results in the context of the situation. Moving on to the next page. Next to our key priority, safety of employees and customers. Clearly, we need to run the business. Yes, our plan last year was impacted because of COVID. The supply chain was interrupted. In March last year, we decided to put our total store expansion on hold. We paused our expansion plans into Czech and also into Italy, and we decided for two months not to commit to any new CapEx investments. Fortunately, already in the second half of Q2, we could see that our cash position was strong enough to start recommitting, and then we were still able to open 164 stores throughout, I would say, the year. We have been really, very focused on cash management. That is still the case. Joost will come back on that. Our financial performance, both from a P&L perspective but also from a cash flow perspective, has remained very, very strong. The good thing is, our 2023 business plan is not at risk. On the contrary, we actually believe that our competitive position has actually strengthened because of this. Once COVID is either behind us or fully under control, we really believe that we can show the power of Action, both as a customer proposition, but also from an investment case perspective. On page 11, you see some statements about the expansion. We have successfully opened 164 stores across eight markets. We opened our first five pilot stores in Czech. I will come back on it a little bit later. We opened store 100 in Poland. We opened a new distribution center in Verrières, France, which now gives us more capacity, actually, a little bit of overcapacity for the French market. We opened our second hub in Wrocław, Poland, and I will also go back on that a little bit later. In addition to the international expansion, we continue to strengthen our unique customer proposition, not only with this very dynamic and competitive assortment in terms of surprise, price, and quality. In addition to that, we are also investing into, I would say, new innovations. We've actually developed a what we internally called extra large store, which is a 1,600 sq m box net selling area, which you should compare to the normal range between 800 sq m and 1,100 sq m, where we opened that pilot store in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, which is a place very close to Paris. Same store, same articles, same prices, same promotions. A little bit of a different floor plan, more build presentation, more communication, also more information about particularly ESG, more space, more light. All of that led to extremely, I would say, promising sales figure of more than EUR 400,000 of sales in the first few weeks. Also last week, we did more than EUR 365,000 of sales in this store, which is four times as much versus the average store in France. Currently, we are in the process of evaluating this store size. I would not consider this to be a different format. It's a size difference. Once this is successful, we clearly are going to consider to open more of these sizable stores, particularly in the French markets. On the right-hand side, you see another innovation, which we call self-checkout. With this, we are providing customers with the opportunity to scan the articles themselves and basically to pay electronically. Very, very successful. Customers are instantly used to that. Probably they have been educated already by other retailers like McDonald's or the supermarkets, because from day one, 50% of the transactions already are flowing through the self-checkouts, which is very, I would say, customer-friendly. In addition to that, it also provides opportunity for our store operate model. I wanted to make some statements about the performance in 2020 in some of our existing markets. First of all, the Netherlands, our home market, our number two market, we had a very, very strong year, 8.4% like-for-like over the first eight period, 11 periods of the year. Clearly, with the lockdown in the second half of December, where we had to close all our stores in the Netherlands, we finished a little bit different, with a very strong performance, a very well-known brand. In addition to the eight new stores which we've opened across the country, we've also invested in a refreshment approach of 28 existing stores. In addition to that, we've enlarged five stores and relocated 8 stores. We already have 107 stores which are now operating with self-checkouts. We have two distribution centers in the Netherlands, and the Netherlands had a very strong performance. Maybe also nice to share with you, we have been completely closed in the Netherlands for almost eight weeks. At the end of that period, we were actually elected by the consumers in the Netherlands as the store which was most missed by the Dutch consumers. That is also noticeable when I will come back on the trading updates. Moving on to France. France is our biggest market with still ample opportunity to grow. This is page 14. We had clearly had planned more store openings last year in France, and we were hit by the lockdown. Despite that, we opened 42 stores. Very strong like-for-like in the first eight weeks and a very strong like-for-like, I would say, throughout the summer. Meanwhile, we are having more than 2.7 million customers per week, and sales is being driven by a combination of like-for-like and expansion, store expansion. Germany. Last year was a fantastic year for Germany. Despite all the corona, let's say, complexity on page 15, we were able to open 42 stores with very strong like-for-like figures. I'm particularly pleased that also our stores in the south of Germany, in Baden-Württemberg and in Bayern, where we started to expand aggressively in 2017, that those stores are really starting to trade very well. Given the fact there are 83 million people living in Germany, we will soon open store 400. We still believe there's a huge potential to grow. What you can also see is that particularly, that the average sales per store is really starting to grow quite significantly, EUR 3.3 million last year versus EUR 2.8 million in 2017. From a value creation perspective, this is the key number to watch. In addition to that, I'm also pleased to see, and that is all a result of a more selective approach, I would say, that also the average sales of our new stores is really starting to improve, because EUR 2.9 million for 42 stores is a very good number. Very promising, I would say, development in Germany. Accelerated by the lockdowns, I'm proud to say that we have now also developed a Click and Collect version at Action. We didn't have that before the lockdown started. We have learnt that once the store is closed or partly closed, there is really an appetite for customers to go online, to select the store, to select the assortment, and basically to select a pickup moment. The customer goes to the store, and basically at the service desk in the French and the Belgium stores, you could pick up the articles and pay for that. In the Netherlands, we were not allowed to open the store, and we were also not allowed to offer Click and Collect up until week six. What you see on the right-hand side of the slide, in week six, we started to offer in the Netherlands Click and Collect only, because we were not allowed to do any more than that. We were really very positively surprised that we were already able to do EUR 8.8 million of sales in that first week, which would be 28% of the sales. There was an index of 28% versus the prior year. You could see that in week seven and week eight, that sales started to develop. As of week nine, the Dutch government invented something new. It is called shopping by appointment. Normally you wouldn't do that in a high volume shopping environment like Action. The concept was basically that in addition to Click and Collect, a customer could go online, and at that point in time, we were allowed to have a maximum of two customers, only two customers on 1,000 sq m net, to have two customers in the store, and they had to stay in the store for at least 10 minutes. The theoretical maximum capacity per hour was only 12 customers. I'm still happy to see that in week nine and week 10, sales improved, and you could also see a certain shift from Click and Collect to shopping by appointment. Then, fortunately, the Dutch government made an additional decision, because as of Tuesday this week, we are now allowed to handle one customer per 25 sq m. That means that we can now handle roughly 100 customers per hour. That is really making a huge difference. Our budgeted sales for this week was EUR 32.7 million. We actually believe that we are going to hit that number. We had a very strong start on Tuesday and a very good day yesterday. On Tuesday, we had actually a like-for-like of +70%. We can also see that the appetite for Click and Collect is now quickly kind of reducing. Although still yesterday, 13% of our sales was Click and Collect. I'm much more optimistic in that sense about the sales outlook for the weeks and the months ahead of us. Even if we need to operate with this shopping-by-appointment model in combination with Click and Collect, we actually believe we can deliver very good sales numbers. Finally, to wrap up on last year's performance. In 2017, we also had some additional other notable successes on page 17. We have made significant investments into our digital customer interface. We have also made a very significant investment in a new supply chain planning tool, which we call Symphony. We already actually had Symphony, and we've expanded the functionality, which allows us to manage the end-to-end flow of goods, basically from the source to the stores, in a much more efficient and effective way. We have been rolling out our workforce management system to all our stores. We have further strengthened our private label portfolio. We also made significant additional steps in the domain of ESG. What you see on the bottom right of the picture is a big Action truck. We actually had two trucks, which we filled with goods, and those two trucks, they've been driving to Lesbos, because there were a lot of refugees living in those tented camps. Our drivers volunteered to drive with an Action truck full of essential goods, basically to provide some relief to the people over there. Moving on to the next topic, which is about the strategic part. I already said, despite all this turbulence of COVID, we are still very comfortable about the strategy and the business plan going forward. On page 19, you see a lot of, I would say, similar statements as you've seen before, because up until last year, we were presenting to a strategy with four pillars. Strengthening our unique customer value proposition. To drive like-for-like. Secondly, geographic/international geographic expansion, basically replicating the Action format across more territories, Strategy 2. Building scalability across all those countries in the chain, and then developing an organization based on people and values. Now you see another, let's say, box on this slide, and that's the green one. Make sustainability accessible. We actually believe that ESG, internally, we call it actually ASR, Action Social Responsibility. We believe that it's so important in both our customer proposition but also in the way we operate, that we have decided to elevate sustainability and social responsibility into our strategy, into basically a fifth pillar. We have already done a lot of activities in the past few years, but we want to make a point both internally and also externally, that we want to do more, and we want to do better, and we want to accelerate. Therefore, we have elevated this into our strategic framework. On page 20, you see basically the key ingredients of the winning customer proposition of Action. We are a one-brand, one-format business with only 14 categories and only 6,000 SKUs. Every week when you walk into our store, there is new merchandise, there are new articles, between 150 new articles and 200 new articles every week. Every day we commit ourselves to the lowest price possible. We are fundamentally or largely an everyday low price retailer, EDLP, and only 8% of our assortment of our sales we generate with a promotional price. We offer a very convenient and easy shopping environment. We want to offer good quality products which are sourced and delivered in a sustainable and a responsible way. We are called a non-food discounter. We do believe that we have a very unique proposition and operating formats. With that, on page 21, we make the Action Wheel of Retail fly. We have a very distinct proposition which drives customers to the store. We have an unbeatable financial model with an average payback of a store of one year based on historic openings. We generate all the cash which we need to invest in new stores, in IT, in supply chain, we generate ourselves. Then again, we can reinvest the surplus of that into the proposition. Driven by that, we make a very strong profit and a very healthy and strong cash flow. Let me move on then to some, let's say, statements I would like to make about our strategic investment. On page 23, on the left-hand side, you still see the same 14 categories as we had them last year. We've also evaluated, or we are evaluating these 14 categories every year, and we still believe that these are the right 14 categories to carry. Within those categories, we have a lot of flexibility to adjust. For instance, we have made some significant changes within those categories to accommodate the needs of customers by developing and buying new cleaning items, face masks, protective measures, etc. A very, I would say, responsive way of adjusting our assortments. In addition to that, we are also making more and more steps from an innovation perspective and also from a quality perspective. That is being recognized not only by customers but also by other, I would say, institutions. Particularly our buying team is very proud that they are receiving multiple awards for that. On page 24, on the left-hand side, I'm reconfirming that two-thirds of the assortment is dynamic and only one-third, only 2,000 SKUs are standard SKUs. I always say you only have discovered the beauty of Action once you have visited us for 52 times. You really need to visit our stores for 52 consecutive weeks before you got a really good feel for what we offer and how relevant we are in each and every week. On the right-hand side, you can see that that is being recognized. Does Action offer a surprising assortment? Yes, that's the answer most of our customers are giving back to us, and also when you compare that to the closest competitor. By the way, you can see that in Poland, that you have one competitor who is apparently a little bit more surprising. That competitor is actually Castorama, so that's a do-it-yourself chain. Apparently in the do-it-yourself domain, we got some work to do, and that's good because there's always an opportunity to improve. You can see fundamentally, we have a very unique point of differentiation. Next to surprise, and I'm moving on to page 25, it's very much about price. We claim that we're not only the cheapest in town on a comparable base vis-à-vis the competition, but also when you look to the different price ranges within our store, we really manage that very carefully. 60% of what we sell sits below EUR 2. The average price we realize depends a little bit on the country, around EUR 1.80, including VAT. Why has Action not yet developed an e-commerce proposition as in-home delivery? Well, one of the reasons for that, the net selling price of an Action article sits around EUR 1.45. It is pretty difficult to make money on EUR 1.45. I can challenge or invite you, go to the website of Amazon, Alibaba or whatever, or any local, let's say, e-commerce player. In that segment, we are really, really very, very competitive. Also we are standing out from a pricing perspective, as you can see again on the right-hand side of the slide. On page 26, there's a lot of data. We are providing this data every year, and I'm not going to spend too much time on it. The message on the right-hand side, we have a very well strong brand, in particular Belgium and in the Netherlands, and still a big opportunity to grow in France, Germany, Poland, and in Austria, which is actually a growth opportunity going forward. Also from a penetration perspective, so 64% of all the people in the Netherlands have been in an Action store in the past six months. You can see that in Germany and France, those percentages are significantly lower, and then you even need to correct this for the fact that we're not yet operating nationally in those markets. Moving on to slide 27. On the left-hand side, you see some examples about high volume articles. For instance, when you look to face masks, we sold last year 76 million face masks across Europe. If you talk about Action being an essential retailer, I'm quite sure that in the Netherlands, we have been the market leader in face masks in those periods where we were open. Also disposable gloves, a very high volume item. On the right-hand side, you see the difference in sales density between us and the average competitors. Although I have to share with you, these numbers are based on 2019 statistics because with the COVID distortion, it didn't make sense to update these numbers for last year because that would not give a realistic picture. On page 28, some examples of the results of the investments which we've done in our digital interface. 2.3 million people on Facebook being Action fan, 21% up. 272 million web sessions, 38% up. As a matter of fact, last week, we had across Europe, more than 10 million people visiting our website. Clearly this was also driven by Click and Collect, by shopping by appointment, but there's enormous drive of people who go to the website. They're looking for information, they're looking for prices, they're looking for stores. We really are getting traction also in the digital domain. I'm also very happy and proud to announce that once the lockdown in the Netherlands is finished, that we are ready to launch our Action app in the Netherlands first. Well, we really think that is going to be a big success as well. In the following years, we would like to roll that out across Europe. Moving on to sustainability or ESG, a very big and important, I would say, point of differentiation. On slide 30, you actually see an ad which we've published in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, where we would like to tell to the customers that you can really shop safely in an Action store. That we also wanted to make the point towards the customers that we have very relevant, essential, articles for people's everyday life and also in this, in complicated times of COVID. We are offering those articles again against the very low prices which people are kind of used of Action. On page 31, you can see that in the past few years, we have already made very good progress in the domain of ASR. For instance, on the plastic side, we have stopped selling disposable plastic bags in all countries last year. We have also proactively decided to stop selling single-use plastic plates, plastic cups, plastic silverware. In a year from now, there will be European legislation, and we decided to already commit ourselves to that legislation two years in advance. We have committed ourselves, a few years ago, to move for all our textiles and clothing to 100% BCI, and last year, 76% of all the cotton we sourced was already BCI. Also for sustainable timber, you see some examples and also some hard numbers. Really, I would say good progress and a lot more things have happened in the years behind us. However, we believe this is not enough. We believe we need to do more. Therefore, we have updated our sustainability strategy, and we've decided that we want to commit ourselves to four specific developmental goals, which are also being embraced by the United Nations. The United Nations, a few years ago, have defined 17, let's say, sustainable development goals. We believe that four of those are very relevant for, let's say, the Action format and also the Action organization. The first one is about responsible consumption, and we've developed a philosophy around the product pillar. I'm not going to walk through all the statements on that slide, but this is basically the ambition and the objective which we formulated. We have committed ourselves to the environmental pillar. We have committed ourselves to the people pillar, and we have what we internally call the good citizenship pillar. For each of those pillars, we have defined specific objectives and plans. I also said earlier, maybe I should explain it a little bit more. When we launched strategy, make sustainability accessible, I think sustainability speaks for itself, but I think the word accessibility requires some explanation. What you often see is that sustainable companies are also starting to increase prices, or that only premium companies can afford to, let's say, to offer sustainability. What we would like to do, we want to make sustainability accessible for everybody. We want to make sure that in the price of our articles, sustainability is built in. We are a big company. We buy big volumes. We believe if Action commits to something, then we can really make a noticeable difference, both towards customers, but also in the supply chain. We want to make sustainability accessible. On page 33, you see that for the product domain, we have formulated a number of objectives, safety, social compliance, product and manufacturing, packaging. For each of those, we've defined specific objectives and specific timing. For all of them, we're working on that, and we also are going to report on that. On Monday morning next week, we are going to release our annual update 2020. In our annual update 2020, we will disclose a lot more information, but also a lot more progress in the domain of sustainability. On page 34, you see some examples of objectives which we formulated for environment. For instance, yes, Action uses packaging to transport and to protect our products. We have a program to reduce the amount of packaging, to completely recycle all the packaging we use, and to make sure that we're moving towards materials which basically are, how can we say it, replaceable. Also on the energy side, we are working with double-decker trucks. All our stores have LED lighting. Yesterday, we've approved an investment in energy monitoring equipment, which means that we can centrally see how much energy each store is going to use, is using across Europe, and we can regulate that. We have approved an investment in solar energy, in solar panels for all our new warehouses, but also our existing warehouse in Zwaagdijk, 110 sq m roof is going to be equipped with solar energy panels in the next few months. We're making very, very significant investments, I would say, throughout the supply chain. We also are going to communicate a lot more about that. Already last year, we introduced what we call the green thumb, which is basically a symbol towards our customers. In every week in all our commercial communication, we're using the green thumb for certain articles to demonstrate that we are making progress in the domain of sustainability. Let me move on to international geographic expansion. Slide 36, basically, this is a refreshment of last year, and the message is, we have a very strong format, which is highly replicable across countries, and the average historical payback of our store is one year. All our stores opened before 2020 are profitable. On page 37, we don't have a desire to develop more brands or to create more complexity by developing more formats. Although I did explain to you the Click and Collect approach and also shopping by appointment, you could say, in a way that is a format, we're still offering the same articles against the same prices. In that sense, it doesn't create too much complexity throughout the organization. On page 38, you see a map of Europe, because that's the continent we want to focus on. On the right-hand side, you can see that we currently, or by the end of last year, we had 1,716 stores opened in our eight existing markets. This includes the Czech Republic. You can see that in those markets, there is still a lot of white space, or actually a lot of light blue space. For instance, in France, we have now almost 600 stores open, and we believe we can go to at least 1,100 stores in France. In Germany, we will open store 400 soon. We believe we can at least go up to 1,200 stores in Germany. In Poland, we have 105 stores today. We believe we can at least grow to 500- 600 stores in the years ahead of us. In the existing markets, there is already a lot of opportunity. We believe that the European continent has an opportunity for at least 6,000 Action stores in the years ahead of us. In 2020, we opened the first five stores in Czech. We evaluated those successfully. We also had planned our store pilots in the north of Italy, which unfortunately we had to postpone to Q1 2021. I will come back on that. We're currently working on the preparation of our store openings in Spain, which we intend to do in Q1 next year, I would say, subject to the COVID developments. The idea would be that we will open our first stores in the Catalunya area, which we will basically supply from our La Bastide warehouse, which sits in the south of France. Let me say a few things about those new markets. The Czech Republic, 11 million people living in the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic is at this point, not the place to be from a COVID perspective, because they are really fighting very, very hard and with very, very high infection rates. Every week, 1% of all Czech people are getting infected in the past few weeks. Currently, we are open in the Czech Republic, selling essentials only, roughly 55% of the assortment we are allowed to sell. Despite all of that, we have a budget to open 12 stores this year, and we are going to do that. Actually, in the next 12 weeks, we are going to double our network in Czech, and we are going to open five stores, and we are able to build, fill, open, and operate those stores, even, I would say, during a lockdown periods. We are very optimistic. We have two distribution centers, one in Poland and one in Bratislava, Slovakia, which can supply the Czech Republic. We do not have to make additional infrastructural investments to unlock this opportunity. The sales per store in Czech is beyond our expectations. We have taken the Polish sales as a point of reference, and we are already very happy with the Polish sales, but the Czech sales has significantly outperformed the Polish part. Moving on to page 40. We are currently planning, or we have planned to open between five and seven pilot stores in the north of Italy, in the province of Lombardia and the province of Piemonte. That is actually the plan. Lombardia, that was actually the place which was hit the hardest by the COVID situation last year. Therefore, we had to postpone our store openings. We have now planned the first store opening in Vanzaghello, which is a town north of Milan. In the first quarter, the original plan was to open that store in the beginning of April, although it could very well be that we need to postpone it for a few weeks since Italy went to a very firm national lockdown again last weekend, which at this point in time is supposed to end at April 6th. Whether we're going to open beginning of April or the end of April, it's not going to change the potential of the north of Italy. Italy has almost 60 million people, and 28 million Italians are living in the north of Italy, and the wealth, the GDP per capita in the north of Italy is very similar, I would say, to the Benelux. We are very, let's say, curious to see how things are going to develop. Clearly, we actually hope that we can approach the average sales per store as we have realized in France. We don't know that yet, so therefore, we're going to do a test. Once we will roll out Italy, hopefully, in the course of next year or start with the rollout, we will also then start constructing our first DC, which quite likely will be built a little bit north of Milan as well. Moving on to scalability, and we've made some choices in this update this year. Therefore, I'm not going to make too much statements about that, but on page 42, you see an overview of the distribution network, and all these colors are basically representing the stores which are being supplied by the DC in the middle of that. Basically, what you can see that we are trying to create a higher density of DCs because the distribution cost of Action, the supply chain cost, you can basically break them down between the DC operation and the transportation cost. After a certain level of number of kilometers, it becomes inefficient, and then you need to open a warehouse basically closer to the markets. I'm also happy to share with you that finally we are allowed to open our warehouse in Bratislava. That warehouse was actually already constructed last year, we ran into a number of permitting issues. Meanwhile, that has been resolved, and we are now in the process of preparing the opening of the warehouse, which will start to supply the first stores as of week 30. That basically means that all the Austrian stores are going to be shifted from our Biblis warehouse and our Austria warehouse, and that will reduce the transportation distance on average per store with 357 km. The 70 stores in Austria, they will basically benefit greatly, not only in terms of profitability, but also in terms of flexibility, because now we are also able to open a lot more stores in Vienna, which is a big city. 1.8 million potential customers are living in Vienna. Vienna sits very close to Bratislava. That will again help us to accelerate on that part of Austria. Bratislava can also help us to unlock the opportunity of the Czech Republic. We are also in the process of building our second warehouse in Poland, in Bieruń. That warehouse is supposed to be finished by the end of this year, this will be the first warehouse outside the Netherlands, which we're going to operate ourselves. You probably know that all the other non-Dutch warehouses are currently being operated by an LSP, a logistical service provider. We've decided that we would prefer to have a little bit of a hybrid approach also outside the Netherlands. We believe that the Polish markets, since we also have a lot of Polish supply chain employees across Europe, which we can also use a little bit, is a good opportunity to test the water. That DC is supposed to open in the second half of this year. Moving on to page 43. Action has a very significant ambition also to grow its portion of direct sourcing. What do I mean with that? With direct sourcing, I mean the articles which we source directly ourselves in the Far East. We fly to the Far East, our buying team goes there. We work together with our partner, Li & Fung. We visit factories, we control these factories, and we really want to drive that portion of our sourcing. It's currently around 12% of sales, but in the next few years, we want 12%-13%, we want to move to 20% of sales. However, that also means that we will receive more containers directly, and our DCs are actually not really built and designed to receive those containers. We've now developed a new, let's say, philosophy, and that's what we call the hub. A hub is basically a receiving place for containers, particularly from the Far East. We will unload those containers, we will palletize the products, we will store those pallets in the hub, then we will keep the inventory, basically, we have a kind of a mini ecosystem. Because the hub is basically supplying the surrounding DCs. We started with that in Saint-Martin-de-Crau, which sits in the South of France. We opened the second hub in Wrocław, Poland. In the future, we're going to open two more hubs, although we haven't planned or timed those two hubs yet. This is really going to help us to create more availability and also more, I would say, flexibility and speed in our supply chain. I would say a few examples of building more scalability. Moving on to the last topic, which is about organization, people and value. On page 46, you see an overview of the senior management of Action. I'm very happy to share that we have recently recruited a new director store operations. His name is Florian Knauer. He is 38 years old, or I should say, young. Worked for almost 18 years for Rossmann, so a large international drugstore operator. Has been living and working in the Czech Republic and in Hungary, and has been responsible for multiple countries within Rossmann for the past 18 years. He joined our company as of the beginning of this year, and as of April the 1st, he will take charge of store operations and basically the country operations. In addition to that, we have also recruited our first general manager for the Czech Republic and our first General Manager for Italy, so Peter and Philippe. Both of them are going to join payroll in the next few months. After an induction program, that we will make sure that we have our own local Italian/Czech team on the ground. As you know, Action is a discounter, and we do not only have a very successful and distinct customer proposition and a very unique, I would say, financial operating model, but we also have a very strong organization. We believe that the way how we work together, the way we treat people, the way we behave, also makes us very, I would say, different, and is a very unique and important ingredient of the Action success. Values like customer focus, teamwork, simplicity, discipline, cost consciousness and respect are very, very important. We have developed an approach, and what you see on this page is a little booklet. We're cascading this approach basically from the executive board up until, let's say, operational level in all our stores and all our warehouses. All our employees are being touched and being motivated and being informed, instructed, inspired with this program, and we call it internally the Be Actionable program. With that, my strategy update is coming to an end. Basically, to wrap up, we did have a very strong year of 2020 in the context of the complexity of COVID. It has not harmed our ability to compete, and we are still very, very confident about the potential of the company. I would now like to ask Joost to dive a little bit deeper into the financial performance of the company in 2020. Joost, please go ahead. Thank you, Sander. Good morning. My name is Joost Sliepenbeek, and I'm the CFO of Action since November 2018. In the next about 30 minutes, I'm going to cover the following. First, our financial performance in 2020. Our cash management during the year, and especially during the two lockdown periods. Finally, a few notes on how our operating EBITDA reconciles to EBITDA under IFRS. On slide 48, I start with a slide that you have seen before. It is the financial model behind our strategy. These fundamentals remain unchanged. They also explain the resilience of our performance, even in a year with COVID-19. The most important elements are the two main value drivers for Action, being like-for-like and the opening of new stores. The fact that the model is highly repeatable and the performance is consistent over various dimensions, countries, categories, and stores. The payback of our stores, which is very attractive because we rent our stores and the investment spend per store, despite the fact that it creates a very attractive store, is relatively low. Historically, we've had an average payback period of around one year. Our business model also has a negative total working capital that generates cash when we grow. Finally, our model is proven, and it can be applied to many more countries than the eight where we are active today. Moving on to slide 49, I will use that financial model and the usual performance metrics to comment on our 2020 performance. As you've heard from Sander, 2020 has been a truly exceptional year, and to understand Action's financial performance, you need additional information. I will also cover the impact of the specific circumstances in 2020, being the extra 53rd week. How like-for-like can be normalized to adjust for the impact of lockdowns, and the impact of COVID-19 and social distancing measures on operating costs. In addition, I will talk about how Germany, Austria, and Poland have come of age with store contribution margins increasing significantly. How we have continued to invest in Action, albeit with a lower store rollout program due to the pandemic. Moving to slide 50. In accordance with the ISO week date system, the financial year 2020 included a 53rd week, which ran from 28th December to the 3rd of January of this year, 2021. Last time this happened was in 2015. In our management reporting, the impact of this 53rd week is separately reported for a better year-on-year comparison. That is also what I will do in the remainder of my presentation, unless I mention specifically otherwise. Like-for-like sales growth, as you undoubtedly know, is always calculated on a 52-week basis. The 53rd week generally is relatively profitable, as mostly only variable costs are allocated to this week. However, in 2020 this was different, because this was a short trading week with a New Year's Day on Friday, and also with a significant number of Action stores closed or restricted to selling only essential items. All in all, this extra week contributed EUR 67.9 million of net sales and EUR 7.2 million of operating EBITDA. Below right on the slide, you see the run rate EBITDA. The reduction in new store openings as a result of the pandemic, from 230 in 2019 to 164 in 2020, led to a reduction in the EBITDA run rate adjustment from EUR 60 million in 2019 to EUR 35 million in 2020. Moving to slide 51. A reported like-for-like for 2020 was - 1.4%. However, this number, of course, was significantly impacted by the two periods of lockdowns. This was for the first period, weeks 12-19, where we had store closures or assortment restrictions across all markets, except for the Netherlands. The second lockdown, which was weeks 44-52, where assortment restrictions impacted France, Belgium, and Austria in period 11, and Germany and Austria in period 12, and stores were closed in the Netherlands as of Wednesday, 16th December. In order to have a like-for-like data point for the year that is reasonably comparable to prior years and also can be a reference for 2021, we've adjusted the like-for-like for the two impacted periods to calculate a normalized like-for-like. Including these adjustments, a normalized like-for-like for 2020 would be + 10.4%. This is significantly higher than the reported - 1.4%, but also than the average of 6% for the six years before 2020. That is a reflection of the following two facts. First, of the significant impact of especially the first lockdown, where at the lowest point, we had approximately 930 stores out of 1,568 stores closed completely, and a further 204 stores only allowed to sell essentials. More importantly, it's also a reflection of the fantastic performance of our format in the period in between the two lockdowns, where our like-for-like was + 12.7%. Let me explain how we went about calculating the adjustments. We've taken a slightly different approach for the two lockdown periods. For the first lockdown period, we first of all decided not only to adjust for the period that stores were closed or had significant range restrictions, but also for the immediately following three weeks to adjust for the reopening effect. That means that the period continues up to and including week 22, and that is three weeks after all stores were open again with the full assortment. To calculate the adjustment, we've used the realized like-for-like for this year, for 2020, year-to-date week 11. We've applied this on a country-by-country basis. If a country reopened earlier, we've only applied the adjustment for the relevant period that it was closed. The adjustment brings like-for-like for that period from a reported -34.9% to +7.4%. In the second lockdown period, we had a different situation because more of the lockdowns were range restrictions. For the second lockdown, we've used the year-to-date performance up to and including quarter three as the basis for the adjustment. Where relevant with the adjustment for the first lockdown period included. Same as for the first lockdown period, we have applied this on a country-by-country basis. In addition, we have adjusted for a reopening by using the year-to-date like-for-like also for the three weeks following a reopening. That leads to the picture on slide 52. In the first period from week one up to and including week 11, we outperformed our budget. Year-to-date, end of week 11, we had overall sales growth of 22% and a like-for-like of + 7.3%. In the second period, from week 12 up to and including week 22, the first lockdown had a considerable impact on the business, leading to an overall sales decline in this period of 29% and a like-for-like of - 34.9%. You can also clearly see on the graph that we have included weeks 20 up to and including week 22 in this period, as these weeks were helped by a reopening effect following the lifting of restrictions. Adjusted like-for-like over this period was + 7.4%. Just as an aside, so today is Thursday, the 18th of March, which is first day of week 11, and that means that next week we will start to cycle against the first lockdown with our reported number. The third period between the lockdowns was from week 23 up to and including week 43. In the first three months of this period, we were working hard to restart our supply chain and rebuild the performance, which meant that availability was not at normal levels. Although these availability issues have certainly impacted sales, it is impossible to determine the extent of this impact, and therefore we have not normalized for this. In this period, we nevertheless realized a remarkable overall sales growth of 23.9% and a like-for-like of +12.7%. In the last and fourth period, we had the second lockdown. Overall sales growth was 23.3%, like-for-like -4.8%, and normalized like-for-like was +11.3%. Now that I've explained how we calculated the normalized like-for-like, I also want to give two disclaimers. First, we've taken an approach to determine the adjustments which we think make sense and can be justified. Having said that, I also acknowledge that our choices involve judgment. For instance, our decision to include the reopening effect in week 20 through week 22. My second disclaimer is that although there were no significant lockdown restrictions in the period from week 23 up to and including week 43, customer behavior was no doubt influenced by other circumstances. It is impossible to determine the impact of this, and therefore this has not been adjusted, as we also did not adjust for the availability issues in the first three months of this period. That means that we need to take this into account when comparing the normalized like-for-like for 2020 with prior years or with 2021. On slide 53, you see the like-for-like in the period in between the two lockdowns, per country. As you know, like-for-like includes the ramp-up of new stores and therefore is different across markets depending on their maturity. Taking that into account, the like-for-likes in Germany and Austria are incredibly strong. Analyzing the drivers behind it is difficult. We've seen that customers have changed their behavior because of COVID-19. Generally speaking, they've made less frequent trips, but with bigger baskets. The extent of these changes is, however, different per market and for the periods in the year. We believe that in Germany and Austria, the like-for-likes are certainly also a reflection of increased awareness and customer appreciation for our format. In addition, in Austria, it's also because of the changes that we've made in the organization in 2019. Moving to slide 55, sorry, slide 54, let me take you through the four quarters of the year and explain the way COVID-19 has impacted our numbers. In the first two periods of the first quarter, we had a strong start and were performing above our budget. Year-to-date period two, we had overall sales growth of 22% and EBITDA growth of 47%. The first lockdown had a considerable impact starting week 12 in period three, which, by the way, is a five-week period, leading to an overall sales growth for the first quarter, as you can see on the slide, of 9.1% and EBITDA growth of 5.6%. In the second quarter, the lockdown continued for the first six weeks of the quarter. That means both our period four and period five were impacted, leading to an overall quarter with negative sales growth of 8.8% and negative EBITDA growth of 19.5%. Period six was the first full period with all stores open. Although we were then working hard to rebuild performance of the supply chain, which meant that availability was not yet at normal levels, in period six, we realized a remarkable overall sales growth of 22% and EBITDA growth of 44%. In the third quarter, sales continued to be strong, and operating leverage meant that this translated into good profitability. Overall sales growth was 23.3% and EBITDA growth 43%. In the fourth quarter, we had the second lockdown, which took different forms and periods. In the periods that we were open without restrictions, we had strong sales, leading to an overall sales growth in the quarter of 15.3% and EBITDA growth of 17.9%. During the year, in some of the situations where we were forced to close stores, we have received wage subsidies for furloughed staff for a total amount of EUR 18 million, of which EUR 15 million related to France. Note that in these situations, we have supplemented the subsidies in all cases to at least 80% of normal wages. In addition, we negotiated in total EUR 9 million of rent discounts for stores that were closed. At the same time, we had to incur in total EUR 25 million of extra wage costs to maintain social distancing with door policies, extra hygiene, et cetera. If I then move to slide 55, you can see our store openings. At the end of period two, we had opened nine new stores, which was pretty much in line with our budget. At the beginning of the first lockdown, we had to decide to hold our expansion to conserve cash. As the uncertainty at that moment was considerable, this meant that we not only stopped CapEx, which means building stores, but also signing new contracts. We did not enter into any new obligations. Although we could already reverse this after two months, at the beginning of May, this nevertheless meant that we could not catch up with opening again soon because we first had to refill our pipeline. All in all, this meant that we ended the year with 164 new stores, which is 66 stores down from 2019. The good news is that we've worked hard on the pipeline and now have the ambition to open 300 stores in 2021, and that is significantly higher than the average of 235 stores for the period 2017 until 2019. Also, as Sander already mentioned, in 2021, we plan to open pilot stores in Northern Italy later this year. On slide 56, you see our margins across categories. An important reason for our success is our margin management. Our brand promise is more than you expect for less than you imagine. This translates into the lowest price and a great surprise. That means that within our chosen categories, we can offer a changing range of products. That again allows us to buy only products that also provide an attractive margin. That shows in the consistent and stable margin performance across categories. Of course, the lockdowns have impacted gross margins. There's a country mix effect, which on the whole for the year has been limited. It was significant in certain periods. For instance, when France and Belgium were closed in the spring lockdown. Also the share of promotions has been lower and promotional margins slightly higher. Nevertheless, this has not led to significant changes in our margins and margin development, not for the whole and also not for categories. The impact on obsolescence of COVID-19 was limited to 5 basis points higher, and that was mostly because of the impact of the spring lockdown on our Easter season. On slide 57, I want to show profitability. I want to analyze this for the period in between the two lockdowns, and these are our financial period six through period 10. For the stores that were open for a full year, both in 2019 as well in 2020. This is the 1,322 stores that were opened before 2019. The analysis starts with the like-for-like drivers. The like-for-like in these periods was mainly driven by a higher ticket amount. That means that on top of our normal operating leverage, we had extra leverage when comparing OpEx to sales. This slide shows the average store contribution margin, and it compares last year with this year. Overall, the increase was 120 basis points. The increase correlates with like-for-like growth. In the Netherlands, where we did not have to close the stores during the first wave, the like-for-like in this period was 8.8%, translating in a store contribution margin, which was 60 basis points higher. In Belgium and France, the increase is even more significant, with in both cases, 100 basis points. In Germany, average store contribution margin has improved with a very significant 285 basis points. Also, if you break this apart for the states or Bundesländer, you see that we've made the strongest progress in the Bundesländer, where we until now saw a somewhat longer ramp-up of like-for-like sales. That is in the east, the south, mainly Bavaria and Berlin. This brings Germany in line in terms of average store contribution margin with the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Most of that was driven by the 20% like-for-like, with margin improvement and productivity adding as well. Finally, Austria and Poland have, in addition to the leverage from additional sales, the leverage that is typical for the build-up phase of new countries. That in Austria, we have made organization changes in 2019 that are also showing good results. On slide 58, our CapEx development. In 2020, CapEx decreased EUR 37 million or 17% to EUR 173 million. EUR 26 million of that is explained by less store openings, 164 stores in 2020 versus 230 stores in 2019. The remaining difference is mostly explained by EUR 14.5 million lower CapEx for new DCs. Included in the number for 2019 were investments for the three DCs that we opened in 2019, plus investment for two further new DCs, one being Bratislava in Slovakia and the other one being Verrières in France. Verrières became operational in week 47 of 2020, whereas Bratislava was delayed to 2021 because of permitting issues and will start outbound in week 30 of this year. Notwithstanding the above, we were able to continue to invest in a number of core IT infrastructure projects consistent with our actions in recent years. This consistent investment, together with the quality of our staff, has played an important part in delivering the operational resilience and flexibility that was important to our ability to flex to the challenges of the pandemic in 2020. On slide 59, you see our cash conversion. When we had the 3i Capital Markets Seminar last year, which was the 19th of March, Sander and I have briefed you on the first lockdown and the very significant operational impact it had. In that meeting, I've also explained our response to this and the actions that we had to take in respect of cash conservation. Because of the impact of the closings and also the uncertainty at that moment in relation to how this would evolve, these had to be decisive actions with immediate effect. We postponed orders and extended the payment terms of the outstandings with 30 days. We delayed the rent payments for stores and distribution centers that were closed. We reduced investments in expansion, and we have used the facilities that governments put in place to postpone tax payments, including corporate income taxes, VAT, and wage taxes where applicable. In addition, in certain countries where we were forced to close stores, we applied for selected support measures provided by governments, so-called furlough schemes, to reclaim part of the wages of our store personnel. In this way, we have been able to absorb the estimated EUR 483 million of lost net sales in the eight weeks of the spring lockdown. We went into the first lockdown with EUR 400 million of cash and liquidity. This was end of week 11, and it included EUR 300 million of cash and cash equivalents, further enhanced by EUR 100 million of our revolving facility. At the lowest end of period position, which was end of our period four, this cash headroom was EUR 301 million, so approximately EUR 100 million lower. As you know, our format is highly cash generative, and we have the ability to recoup quickly once circumstances revert to normal. This was helped by the combined effect of the postponed orders, extended payment terms, reduced CapEx, and has led to an accelerated recovery of our cash after the store reopenings in week 20. The overall impact of the second lockdown was less than in the spring, and the impact on our cash could be handled relatively easy without taking measures that were considered prudent in the first lockdown as a reaction to the then unprecedented level of uncertainty. Consequently, we ended the year with a healthy cash position of EUR 590 million and an additional EUR 100 million unused of the revolving facility, which means a total cash and liquidity of EUR 690 million. Note that this 53rd week had a negative impact on ending cash v ersus end of week 52, the cash balance reduced by EUR 38 million, primarily as a result of the fifth quarterly interest payment of EUR 27 million. In addition, there were certain employee-related payments, mainly salaries, which normally occurred in the first week of the next fiscal years, but were now included in the 2020 cash flow. Including all of the above, our operating cash flow for the year on a 53-week basis ended at EUR 451 million versus operating EBITDA of EUR 616 million. Therefore, a cash conversion of 73%, which is completely in line with prior years and again, demonstrating our strong economic model. On slide 60, we bring together the high-level financials as I've covered them per item in the previous slides. Finally, on slide 61, a few notes on IFRS 16. In 2019, we've implemented IFRS 16. In this presentation, all the financial information is still on what you could call a pre-IFRS 16 basis. We have chosen for this to keep consistency and comparability over the years. Our 2020 annual report will, of course, include IFRS 16. This slide shows the impact. In the profit and loss statement, our EBITDA is EUR 166 million higher than operating EBITDA. That is essentially by excluding EUR 202 million of lease costs and including EUR 36 million of adjusting items that mostly relate to non-recurring costs for long-term incentive plans. Further down in the P&L, depreciation increases with EUR 190 million and interest with EUR 19 million. On the balance sheet, a right-of-use asset of EUR 758 million and a lease liability of EUR 784 million is added. In calculating the liability, our lease term estimate is relatively short. For the stores, that is on average 3.4 years. This reflects our lease contracts that provide us flexibility with short initial terms and renewal options that we can elect to use. If you would calculate additional EBITDA over the lease liability, you would arrive at a 3.9 times leverage. I come to my summary on slide 62. As I said in my introduction, 2020 has been an exceptional year. We've had the impact of the corona pandemic, which was particularly significant in the first lockdown in the spring. Nevertheless, Action has ended 2020 with 8.9% sales growth and 12.4% EBITDA growth, both on a 52-week basis. We also had a cash conversion of 73% in line with our record of prior years. What I consider to be even more telling is our performance in the period in between the two lockdowns. This evidence that we have managed to stop-start processes in various countries and our supply chain exceptionally well, and we have maintained our cost control, and as a consequence, have shown strong operating leverage. Now I want to hand back to Sander to discuss current trading. Thank you, Joost. This was all about the past, 2020. Meanwhile, we are already in week 11 of the new year. Let me give you a brief heads-up. I'm first talking about slide 54. Slide 54 is showing by country the current, I would say, status with regards to COVID. Let me give an example. In the Netherlands, we are currently open between quotes with shopping by appointment only. We need to comply with the rule one customer per 25 sq m. If the store has 1,000 sq m net selling area, the maximum number of customers is 40. We are offering Click and Collect. We're selling the full range. That's how you should read it. Basically, if you take a step back, then the good news is that with the exception of 18 stores in France and currently two stores in Germany, all stores are open. We have 18 stores in Germany and five stores in Czech who are selling essentials only. You can see that in most big markets, we are also offering Click and Collect. This page is actually changing by the day. Tonight, President Macron is going to make a speech in France, and we actually expect further restrictions in France. To give you a specific example about France, we have 572 stores. 18 stores are currently closed, which are pretty big stores. We would normally do almost EUR 2 million of sales on a weekly base in those 18 stores. In France, there are currently two geographies. One is in the south of France, in the Nice area, and one is in the northwest of France, in the Dunkirk area, where we are confronted with weekend lockdowns, which basically means that we are not allowed to keep our stores open on Saturday and Sunday. That's impacting 22 stores. We're currently missing the Saturday sales already of 40 stores, and we expect more of that to be announced later today by Macron. Anyway, at a certain point, these lockdowns will be behind us because the vaccination and probably spring weather is going to help us, and that will bring us back into a fully open situation again. That is the current situation, but this is changing by the day and by the week, and we are really on top of that. Moving on to page 54. We have started the year with negative like-for-like in P1 and P2, which was driven by a combination of very strong like-for-like in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and Poland, with a minimum year-to-date like-for-like of 25%. The minimum of those four countries, 25%, but the three other countries are significantly above 25%. Then in the Netherlands, Germany, and Czech, clearly we had either no sales or negative like-for-like in the first two months. However, in P3, Germany and the Netherlands are significantly improving. This week, actually, we will report positive like-for-like in all markets except the Czech Republic. It also means that the like-for-like for P3 is turning positively. The supply chain and DCs are operating well, given the complexities, with very good product availability across all markets. Our store expansion plan is on target. Like Joost was referring to, we have an ambition to open 300 stores this year across nine different countries. So far, so good. We are currently above last year in Q1, that's also fine. Last but not least, cash and liquidity is really important. Our current position is EUR 525 million, and there is a seasonal element in there, but also in the most recent weeks, we have actually been able to expand our cash position. That also brings us in a very good position for the future. If that would not be the case, clearly we would not commit ourselves to such a significant store expansion program. Action is in really good shape given these complex circumstances. With that, I am handing over to Simon, but I think he's going to introduce the break first. Simon? Thanks, Sander. I'm not going to introduce the break just yet. I do want to conclude by saying that it will take more than eight months of lockdown interruptions to shift Action off its 2023 plan of EUR 9 billion of sales and EBITDA of over EUR 1 billion. Indeed, the Action team and board believe that Action's business model and its potential profitability is even stronger as a result of the experience gained during the pandemic. I just want to say a word about the 3i team. The 3i team that works on Action is highly engaged with the company and has relentlessly pursued a sustainable long-term growth agenda for this very special business. Since the first year of our investment in Action, when we bought the company from the founders, we've jealously guarded the original customer-centric values of the business, as well as bringing an ambitious and long-term mindset. We're as excited today about the scale of the growth opportunities for Action as we were nine years ago. Let me thank you for listening, and what we'd like to do is now move to Q&A. As mentioned earlier, you can type in your questions by clicking on this tab. Alternatively, you will be able to dial into the conference call. If you choose to dial in to the conference call, please mute your webcast to avoid any feedback issues. We propose we now take a five-minute break to allow you to dial into the call should you wish to, and we'll reconvene for Q&A in five minutes time. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question at this time, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. Please make sure the mute function on your phone is switched off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press star two. Again, it is star one to ask a question. I will pause for just a moment to assemble the queue. Our first question comes from the line of Haley Tam from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Thank you very much for taking my questions and for the very comprehensive Capital Markets event you've given us today. Could I ask three questions, please? First of all, could you just quickly tell us what assumptions you've made a bout further lockdowns or COVID-19 impact in terms of your 320 store ambition for this year, just especially given the comments you made around the infection rates, and I guess lockdowns in the Czech Republic and Italy? The second question, just in terms of EBITDA margin, obviously that did expand slightly last year. I just wondered, could you help us think about your expectations for that this year? It sounds like you could benefit from things like self-checkout and the supersize stores, but potentially offset by re-accelerated store rollout plans. Any guidance you can give us there would be appreciated. I guess the final question. You mentioned, I think, that the net debt to EBITDA fraction is now 3.9% times on an IFRS 16 basis. I just wondered if that was correct, and whether you could help think about what would be the right level for that going forward. Thank you. Okay. Sander, do you want to maybe take the first one, and if Joost deal with the second two? That's probably the best way to pick these up. Yes, we will do that. My understanding was, what do we think about further lockdowns and restrictions, and how is it going to impact our expansion for the rest of the year? That was my understanding. From an operational perspective, we currently assume that we will still be impacted by COVID till the 1st of August, and that is basically based on the statements of the various governments. COVID will not be gone after the 1st of August, but we will be impacted by COVID up until, let's say, the middle of the summer because the vaccination and better weather needs to help us. However, we believe that as it looks now, that that is not going to impact our store expansion plan. Yes, there might be a little bit of a delay of, for instance, the opening of our pilot stores in Italy. It might be a few weeks later, but ultimately, we are confident that we will open pilot stores in Italy. There might be some delays in some other countries because construction might be delayed. As it looks now, we feel pretty comfortable with our ambition to open 300 stores by the end of this year. It is not a guarantee because COVID is a very tough virus and it sometimes behaves unexpectedly. The ambition is 300+ stores, and we think we can do it with COVID. That's the reason that I also made the example of the Czech Republic. That's the toughest market from a COVID perspective, and still we're going to open five stores in the next few months. That's my reaction to this first one, and I'm handing over to Joost. Yes, your second question related to our EBITDA margin, which in the past year came in at 10.9%, indeed this was an improvement over the prior year. Your question was, do we expect a further improvement? I should start by saying in general, we want to be very careful with an outlook or guidance, because of the obvious reason that we're still experiencing the impact of COVID-19. Having said that, I think what I've tried to shown in my presentation by singling out the period in between lockdowns is that we do indeed have a good operating leverage, and that we are able to translate that into an increased profitability. I cannot tell you what this will mean for the full year as it will turn out because of the impact in certain periods. I can tell you that we are very confident that once the restrictions have been lifted, the recovery will be very strong, and that you will also see in the EBITDA margin. Your third and final question was about the 3.9 number that I mentioned when I discussed IFRS 16. This was actually not our overall leverage. This is only the kind of leverage that you get when you calculate the lease adjustment of EUR 202 million over the lease liability of EUR 784, and that's how you get to the 3.9 that I mentioned. Having said that, our overall leverage, if you calculate that in accordance with our financing agreement, ended in 2020 at 3.6 times. The 3.9% for the IFRS adjustment is actually quite close to the 3.6 where we ended overall. Thanks, Joost. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Philip Middleton from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you very much. Again, thanks for the presentation, which is very illuminating. Couple of questions. Firstly, you mentioned the EBITDA and your leverage, which is lower than it has been at various points. Obviously, you won't do a leverage recap with conditions like they are. How are you thinking about the structure of the balance sheet, and how might that evolve if and when, hopefully, we do get out of this? You do seem to have actually been building up cash. Secondly, do you have any real visibility on how customers will behave when we're sustainably out of this situation? Do you think in the very strong bounce back period you saw people were just making up for lost time, or do you think that's a more sustainable level of activity once normal life resumes? Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Philip. Why don't I deal with the recap EBITDA type question, and Sander can talk about his views on customer behavior rolling forward. I think it's pretty clear that we have a track record of this company using refinancings at a regular intervals and de-gearing pretty rapidly after each of those refinancings and those refinancings being used to make distributions to the shareholders. I don't see us moving away from that. Clearly we're not going to do anything while we have the unpredictability of the current situation. We had perhaps talked about a distribution potentially happening in Q2 this calendar year. I think that's unlikely given the level of the virus across continental Europe. I do expect us to continue to see us de-leveraging and at the appropriate time, once we're through the worst of this crisis, that subject will be very much back on the agenda. Sander, do you want to do the second question? Well, first of all, what we see in retail, separate from Action, is that COVID is really accelerating trends, underlying trends, which were already there. Customers are becoming more digital, online is growing, and the value segment has been growing in the years ahead of us. In that sense, we actually see that this behavior has accelerated, driven by COVID. That's one. Secondly, we also know that we have a structurally a very competitive and distinctive positioning, and we actually believe that post-COVID, we're going to benefit from that and also from the circumstances. Customers are really eager once stores are fully reopened to be released. I think many customers have actually been saving a lot of money. They have not gone on holiday, they have not gone to the restaurant, they have not been able to shop properly. We can already see with the reaction once we reopen, that customer's eager to shop. That is kind of one. Secondly, it could very well be that certain groups will feel pressure on their budget because of the economic development. Those people who are on a budget or the first location to go to is actually a discount store. Thirdly, we believe that our assortment and our pricing is very up to date and makes us a very attractive place to shop. I'm really confident about sales development going forward. What we do see, that driven by COVID, that the behavior has changed a little bit. Shopping frequency has come down, but once a customer is in a store, they are spending significantly more. 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, depends a little bit on the country and the week in terms of incremental spend per customer versus the prior year. In that sense, a shopping behavior has made this a kind of a change. I'm really optimistic once COVID is behind us or under control about this. Okay. Thanks very much. You're welcome. We'll now take our next question from Luke Mason from Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. It's Luke Mason from Exane BNP. Just one question, please. Firstly, on Germany, been some good progress in terms of sales per store. I'm just wondering how you expect this to progress going forward, given kind of the increased brand awareness and Like-for-Like you talked about there. Secondly, just another question on kind of the pace of store rollout. Just wondering if you're still on track for 2,750 stores stores target by 2023. Aside from COVID, what are kind of the big risks, in terms of the store rollout of greater than 300 stores per year? Just lastly on the newer regions, still early days, but in Spain, Italy, and in Czech Republic, can you give any indication on the potential size of these markets in the long term? Sander, do you want to take those? Yes, Simon, I will take the questions. I'm not entirely sure if I fully could hear it rightly, but I will give my answer based on what I think I heard. The first question was about expansion in Germany and what do we think about the opportunity ahead of us. That was my understanding of the first question. I think it was really about the development of sales per store in Germany. Do you see that continuing to grow in the way it's accelerated? Well, then the answer is simple. I showed a little graph in the presentation about the average sales per store in recent years in Germany. I've not shown you the two years before, so before 2017. Actually we've had a few years behind us where the average sales per store came down. As you could see in the past two years, average sales per store has gone up, and I expect that trend to continue. Why is that? First of all, because like-for-like is going to help. That's one. Secondly, because the quality of our new stores is really starting to contribute as well. That is because we are, let's say, more selective in our location process or location search process, but also because we are looking for more stores in urban environments. We had a little bit of an over-representation in rural stores, but now we also started to open more aggressively stores in Cologne, in Düsseldorf, in Berlin, in Stuttgart, in Munich. Those stores are bringing higher sales. They are also a little bit more expensive from a rental perspective, so we need to find the proper balance. Optimistic about the sales development per store in Germany. Secondly, today we actually have 1,739 stores up and running. Like Simon said, in 2023, we are aiming 2,750 stores stores. If you do a little bit of a math, if you would add another, let's say, 275 stores for the remainder of this year, so that will bring us close to the target of 300 stores. Then we will cross the 2,000 store mark in Q4. In order to hit 2,750 stores stores, we also need to do roughly 300 stores in 2022 and roughly 300 stores in 2023. We believe that the combination of the markets which we currently operate in, plus particularly Czech, Italy, and Spain, there will be enough supply. Otherwise we would not reconfirm this ambition 2,750 stores stores. To dive into the market specifically, in the Czech Republic, I think it was also on one of my slides, 11 million people. We have 10 million people in Belgium, and we will soon open store 200 in Belgium. I feel quite comfortable to state that for the Czech Republic, with 11 million people, that we could open at least 150 stores. That's less than Belgium, so maybe in the long run it could even a little bit more, but Czech is also a bigger market with a lower GDP per capita. When you look to Spain and Italy, it's too early to have a strong feeling for a number because we haven't opened any stores yet, but there are 60 million people living in Italy and there are 43 million people living in Spain. If you would make the comparison with some of our other markets, we believe there is enough potential for, let's say, 500 stores, 600 stores, 700 stores, 800 stores, 900 stores. I'm giving a pretty big range because we first need to test the temperature of the water with opening our pilots. So far, in all the markets where we've opened stores, eight countries so far, customers have reacted very positively, and in all cases we've been able to outperform our opening ambitions. I believe that those three markets, plus the markets which we have, are going to help us to get to 2,750 stores, and then we will not be done because there will still be significant opportunities in those markets and there will be opportunities for new countries. Thanks, Sander. Great, thank you very much. Thank you. As there are no further questions in the phone queue, I would like to hand over to the questions over the web. The first question from the web is, does the larger XL store concept create complexity, and does it create more value in terms of sales density or margin? Sander, do you want to pick that up? Well, first of all, often when retailers open bigger stores, they also are going to increase the assortment, or they're going to add different departments, and we are not doing that. We are selling the same range. By the way, that is already the case today. We are selling the same range in 1,100 sq m store in France as we're doing in an 800 sq m store in France. Also in this 1,600 sq m store in France, we're selling the same range with the same prices, the same promo, and the same external communication. From that perspective, it doesn't create any complexity in the organization. In the store, it's actually helping because the reason we're doing this is that the sales pressure per square meter, the intensity per square meter in certain French stores is so high that it creates complexity both for the customer, it's not a convenient shopping trip, and for the store operators to operate that individual store. Because basically, in an XL store, we basically present more facings of the same article. In that sense, it's going to help us to operate the store. From a financial and a contribution perspective, we have not made that evaluation yet. I already said sales is developing really well at EUR 365,000, for instance, last week. Also we are paying more rent, we have a little bit more housing costs, we have a little bit more energy. The net financial evaluation and also the returns, we still need to do a little bit of that work. With EUR 360,000 of sales, it's pretty difficult not to create incremental value. I'm quite optimistic about that. Thanks, Sander. The next question from the web is, regarding the app, can you give more detail on its capability and the anticipated benefits? Sander, want to take that? The app. Yeah. Well, first of all, I already have the app. The audience can't see it, but I have my phone here because we have an internal version, which we're testing amongst employees. What is the app doing? Well, first of all, it is providing, you could say, a lot of the information which also sits on our website. It shows what is the assortment which we have. It's up to date, it also shows new articles which we are launching every week. It shows prices, it shows the weekly promotions, it shows the geographic locations of our stores, and it also provides background and company information. These are all, you could say, relatively standard features for an app. In that sense, we don't have an ambition to deliver the most innovative app. Basically, we want to comply, you could say, with the retail standards in the market. The idea is also that if a customer is in a store, that he can also use, at a certain point in time, the app to start paying. By that payment, we are actually also going to collect more customer data, and that customer data is going to make us much more knowledgeable about the behavior of our customers, and we can use that data and that intelligence into our commercial decision-making. The intention is also, and it was being written down on the slide, but I've actually not described it. The intention is also that once the app is live, that we also are going to launch a certain loyalty program. Basically, if the customer is going to spend more in our store, he can, again, scan the app. He gets a certain reward, either a point-based system or some other rewards. With that loyalty program, clearly, we want to increase traffic. We also want to increase the basket size. That program is still, I would say, under construction, and we won't launch that at the same point in time. We would like to launch that a little bit later. That's a little bit more in an embryonic state. Thanks, Sander. Okay, the next question is, could you please give us an update on margin guidance for 2023, which appears increasingly conservative? When will you give updated like-for-like sales, store, and margin guidance beyond 2023? Could you also update on timeline, thinking around refinancing Action balance sheet? Do you want to take the first part of that, Sander? I'll go back to the refinancing point. Well, unfortunately, I'm not going to be very specific. We are currently, let's say in the second quarter, we're going to update our long-term plan, our business plan, and also let's say our financial ambitions beyond 2023. Well, clearly, we do not want to disappoint neither the shareholders nor ourselves. Clearly, we're aiming for more, more sales, more stores, potentially more countries, and certainly more EBITDA. Today is not the moment to, let's say, to disclose specific numbers or ambitions beyond 2023. I think that's kind of my answer for the first question, Simon. Okay. There's another question which was partially answered, but it's a bit more color on the Spanish opportunity. Hold it. Can I come back to the refinancing, Silvia? The thing to understand about Action is once we have some calm water and we're out of this choppiness, you all know that cash builds up in this business very rapidly, and if anything, from the experience of last year, it's probably going to be even more rapid. We will be very alive to the appropriate time to do a refinancing and to make a distribution. At the moment, it's just very hard to call when precisely that will be. We're not going to sit here with a company with an embarrassment of cash on its balance sheet. That's pretty clear from our past behavior. Okay. As I was saying, the other question was partly answered, but it is about, again, more color on the Spanish opportunity and if there are any differences against other markets in terms of structure in Spain? Well, we are in the process of discovering that. We made with the team, including myself, a few trips to Spain in recent years. We also already have a small team on the ground, so we've hired, last year, a very experienced, seasoned Spanish expansion manager. We have seen in the market, clearly, Spain historically has a structure where the hypermarkets were kind of the first to come. In the past 10 years, 15 years, supermarkets, particularly Mercadona, Lidl, Aldi, have also penetrated and developed a national network. We also know that drugstores are really kind of absent in Spain, or it's a relatively young concept. We know there are do-it-yourself stores. That's all kind of known to us. The only thing what is really different in Spain, and we see the same in Italy, is the existence of the Chinese. Basically, every Spanish town or Spanish neighborhood has a smaller or a bigger Chinese bazaar store, which is operated very often by a Chinese family, and you can buy all of general merchandise, non-food items in those stores. That is different. We have seen the same in Italy. We like to believe that the market characteristics are, I would say, very suitable for Action. We want to do it step by step, so therefore we want to start in the Catalunya area. It's a wealthy part of Spain. I think there are roughly 10 million people living in greater Catalunya. One of the reasons why we're working with this concept of pilot stores is that we also want to discover and explore it step by step. So far, nothing strange, as what we've seen in Spain. Other than that, it's a year from now before we're going to open the first store. First, I would like to see how the Italian customer is going to react to the opening of Action. I think clearly the geography is quite complicated in Spain, which is why the initial focus will be very much on the northeast of the country, the adjacent part to France. Correct. Okay. The next question is, the evidence from consumer businesses that have allowed their margins to expand too much is that this has allowed competition in. Costco in the U.S. has kept reinvesting marginal gains back into price. Is there an argument for capping Action's margins and reinvesting its scale advantages into lowering price to increase its barriers to competition over time? Sander, do you want to take that? It's something we talk about a lot. Well, actually, this is exactly what we are doing. We are protecting our core margin. If you would open up the Netherlands and you would look to the underlying gross margin in the Netherlands, that margin has actually been flat in the years behind us, and it's also flat in the years ahead of us. There are only two reasons why our gross margin is going up. The first reason is because we are expanding the proportion of direct sourcing. We're sourcing articles directly in the Far East, and we make significant improvements in cost price. A significant portion of that improvement, we are actually reinvesting into quality and lower prices. A smaller portion of the benefit, we are using to basically invest into the infrastructure of the company to facilitate, let's say, this direct sourcing part. The gross margin is a little bit enhanced by that. The second reason why the gross margin has gone up in recent years at Action, is that we have a price line by country. In France, our prices are slightly higher than Belgium, and in Belgium, they're slightly higher than the Netherlands. In Germany, are kind of the same as in the Netherlands. We have a different line per country, and therefore, we will also have a slightly different gross margin by country. Particularly, because of the rapid growth of France, that has basically pushed up our margin a little bit. The underlying gross margin is flat in the years behind us and in the years going forward. Similar to Costco, we want to reinvest, and we also don't want to create a margin opportunity for another player to undercut our prices. That's a fundamental belief in our strategy, and it also sits in our DNA. It's fair to say that every year we regularly check prices against competitors for each of our 14 categories in all countries to ensure that our prices are very competitive with our competitors. Well, Simon, it's not even every year, it's actually every day. We currently have technology. We are scraping the prices of all our, let's say, relevant competitors in all markets. In this case, technology and digitalization is allowing us to be on top of, let's say, on top of prices. Which is also necessary because we operate in eight markets with different competitive dynamics, and we really want to protect the lowest price in town positioning of Action. The next questions are actually probably for Simon because they're on the broader 3i portfolio. Having given a clear indication of the strength of the performance of Action and the rest of the private equity portfolio, how should we view the performance of your infrastructure assets and Scandlines? Well, we gave an update at the end of January. Essentially, the infrastructure portfolio has probably been the most level and balanced performer across this entire piece, i.e., it's had the least impact from any COVID ups and downs. They will be making a trading statement at 3iN before the end of the month. In terms of Scandlines, like other travel assets, it's obviously been impacted by lockdowns and closed borders at various times, but it has remained a very cash generative investment for the group. There's another question. Following your portfolio reviews, are you still happy that there is scope to see the valuations of some of the assets hit by the valuation decisions made last year to recover strongly at the full year valuation process this year? We've got Julia here. Maybe Julia can make a comment about that. As we talked about, we talked around some of the conversations about Q3. We've seen very strong performance in a number of sectors across our portfolio. We've seen the market multiples in those sectors also expand considerably. As we come into our valuation process, we will be thinking about, is this the moment to actually be able to move a small number of those multiples on, underpinned by the very strong performance that we've seen going through this period. Obviously, we're about to embark on that process, and we'll be talking about it in detail in May. The other complication in that process is while we will see, at a gross portfolio level, perhaps some good movements in the valuations of those various investments, we are going to have a very big foreign exchange headwind in this last quarter. In translation terms, that is something that we will obviously face. Clearly, the foreign exchange dealers have a more bullish view about this economy than I do. Looks like we have no further questions. Okay. All right. Thank you everyone, and thank you to Sander and Joost for taking the time. I hope you found the briefing and the presentation helpful. Thank you