Hello, and welcome to the Fastned Half Year Results 2022. My name is Jess and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. For the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, there will be the opportunity to ask questions. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad to register your question at any time. If at any point you require assistance, please press star zero and you'll be connected to an operator. I will now hand over to your host, Michiel Langezaal, CEO, to begin today's call. Thank you. Thank you, Jess. I would like to say welcome to everyone on this call as well as to our webcast viewers. Today, we'll present Fastned's results for the first half of 2022. The presentation used during this call is also available at our Investor Relations website, which is ir.fastnedcharging.com. On the title page, you can see a picture of construction works from last week of a big charging station that we're currently realizing on the outskirts of the city of Bochum in Germany. A charging station with 10 charging positions close to a motorway junction that handles more than 100,000 cars each day. Also, there's a large restaurant and will have a big fenced playground for kids nearby to make a fast stop over for families a great experience. This station is exemplary for the many, many stations which we will be commissioning in the coming months, and that is why I wanted to show you this. Slide two, please. With reference to the information provided in these slides and discussed during this call, please take note of the disclaimer. Slide three, please. My name is Michiel Langezaal. I'm the CEO and one of the founders of Fastned. Victor van Dijk, our CFO, is also present in this call. Together, we will today present you our webcast. Today, I will elaborate on the highlights of the first half of 2022 and talk you through some market developments that are relevant to Fastned. Of course, I will give you an update on our progress over the past months. That said, I will keep it light given the short amount of time since we presented a deep dive on our pipeline on Charging Day. Victor will take you through the financial results of the first six months of the year and elaborate on the developments on the electricity markets, which continue to be turbulent, as you know. After our presentation, we invite analysts to ask live questions, and we intend to take for this call roughly an hour until 12:00 noon. Slide four, please. The past six months have been very exciting but also challenging. We held our first ever capital markets day. Charging demand reached new record highs. The volatility on the energy market increased even further, and our construction team has been readying itself for a record-breaking year. The battery electric vehicle market continues to break records, with 2022 not being an exception. This growth drives our revenue, which almost tripled compared to last year. Half year revenues are already at the level of full year revenue of 2021. To capture this market growth, you need many large charging stations. In the first half of this year, we worked both on the many and the large aspects. We built 23 stations, and we installed many additional chargers at existing stations, which brings the average number of chargers per station now at 4.5. Large stations allow for a better customer experience and have better station metrics. The stations that we recently opened also tell this story. Hamilton is the largest charging hub in Scotland, and another example is the recently opened Energy Superhub Oxford, Europe's biggest charging hub. Utilization increased from 7.2% in the second quarter of last year to 10.1% in the second quarter of this year. This increase is driven upwards by the rapidly growing number of electric cars on the road, and vice versa, driven downwards by the additions of chargers to our stations to prepare Fastned for future growth. When compared on a like-for-like basis, utilization of Q2 this year is even higher at 12.9%. The last highlight I want to mention here is the bond issuance we did. In June, Fastned raised nearly EUR 23 million with the issue of new bonds. In addition, investors have extended over EUR 7 million worth of investments from earlier issues, bringing the total issued amount in this round to nearly EUR 30 million. Slide five, please. Looking at the share of new cars sold in each of the markets we operate, we see the following. The percentage of electric cars among new cars sold is increasing in all Fastned markets, and the Netherlands continues to lead the pack by about a year or more in time. The fact that the Netherlands is a leading market provides Fastned with a competitive advantage. In a leading market, customers have a higher expectation earlier. This puts us ahead of others in the learning curve. Important to note as well is that although the car manufacturers have put in place massive electric vehicle production targets and are constantly releasing new electric vehicle models to the market. They have underestimated the demand. Several car makers are signaling to be sold out for the season. Although I know that in the short run, some production is impacted by the UKraine crisis, there is fundamentally more demand for EVs than supply. This is putting in place the basis for an even further accelerated growth path. Yes, we're very bullish on the number of electric cars we'll see around in the coming years. Handing you over to Victor, who'd like to say something about slide six. Yeah, thanks, Michiel. Also from my side, welcome all. Where are all these cars coming to the market going to charge? We talked about it on Charging Day. We know people are and will be fast charging more and more. This is due to newer adopters having less ability to charge at home, hence fast charging becoming more convenient because it becomes faster and more available because there are more stations. Where does all this fast charging happen? As we said on Charging Day, we can draw some lessons from the Netherlands as it is the most advanced charging market in Europe with the most chargers per electric vehicle available, both fast and slow. We firmly believe that people want to fast charge where they drive because it's simply convenient. It's the same reason as why petrol stations on motorways sell way more volume than petrol stations off motorway or in villages. Let's look at some data. If we look at fast charging locations in the Netherlands, the top right pie chart, Fastned operates about 130 stations, about 20%-25% of the fast charging locations in the Netherlands. There are also others that also operate fast charging stations, either off motorway, at hotel locations, at McDonald's locations or at petrol stations on or off motorway. Fastned has 20%-25% of the fast charging locations, but we actually do more than 60% of the fast charging volume in the Netherlands. This means that Fastned locations do around five more sales than the average locations of others. This is to a very large extent driven by the fact that we operate the highest traffic locations in the Netherlands, which are the Dutch motorways. With our canopies, we are visible for literally millions of drivers passing by our 130 stations each day, and we are very easy to reach. Of course, we also offer an outstanding charging experience, which enables and amplifies sales. People want to charge where they drive. That is why you need high traffic locations with visible stations and a great concept to capture this market growth. Awesome. Thanks, Victor. Locations are key to running a successful charging business, but there's more to it. The charging concept or charging experience you offer is a big differentiator. Summer traffic with many people that just started driving an electric car, going on their first long distance trip, puts even more emphasis on this. Just imagine, you recently got a Volkswagen ID.4 as a new lease car, and you put the French Riviera in your navigation. With fewer charging stations in some of the regions on route, this can mean getting stuck at a charging station that is out of order or having serious difficulties to start a charging session. When the next stop is a Fastned station delivering a flawless charging experience, this leads to very happy faces and great customer feedback. I will not go into detail here on what delivers this great service. For those that are interested, I would like to invite them to watch the Charging Day presentation that is on our investor relations website. For those that just like to hear the summary, Fastned scores a 4.4 out of five on Google location reviews, and that score is the best in the industry. This is the result of the many elements that together make up a great charging experience. A unique in-house design team that has designed hundreds of service areas to include charging facilities. A tech and data-based approach to network operations. An in-house software development team with more than a decade of experience and knowing every nut and bolt of the stations we build and operate instead of outsourcing realization and maintenance to contractors. We go to slide eight. To capture the upcoming growth of the electric vehicle market, Fastned is investing in bigger and larger charging stations. We're picking up speed when it comes to our building base. This year, we will build at least 65 new stations. Halfway in the year, I can confidently say that we will meet that goal. In the coming years, we want to further increase our build base to 100 stations per year, and those stations will be bigger in size. Just take, for example, the stations at Oxford Energy Superhub or that of Hamilton in Scotland, as I mentioned earlier. These recent openings offer eight and 10 chargers respectively, where cars can charge up to 300 kW. This means that it takes on average about 15 minutes to charge enough electricity for 300 kilometers of range. Slide nine, please. There are more such stations in the construction program for the coming months. I already mentioned the opening of a large station in Bochum in Germany a couple of weeks from now, and our construction teams are working hard to open many new stations in France before the end of the year. For instance, this one on the right of the picture, Aire de Vémars Ouest, a very large service area north of Paris, which as you can imagine, has thousands and thousands of cars passing by each day. Slide 10, please. At the end of June, we had 358 locations acquired. 208 of those locations have been realized and have stations in operation today. Our goal is to have 400 stations operational by the end of 2024 and 1,000 before 2030. How do we get from those 358 to a thousand? That is something we talked about in depth on Charging Day. Here, I would like to give a quick update on progress in some of our key markets. France, 2021 was about private highway tenders. This resulted in a 20%-25% win rate for Fastned. Great result. Currently, we're focused on the realization efforts of these stations, of which we'll see a lot in the coming half year. This year is about developing relationships with real estate owners and getting traction on the public highway network. We're very happy to report the first results, two large charging stations on the outskirts of Paris. Germany, as mentioned before, two big tenders ongoing, one for charging on 200 currently unserviced rest areas, and the second one for 900 fast charging stations across the country off-motorway. Important to note is that these tenders are not the typical off-the-shelf concession tenders. The first one is more of the construct, operate, and maintain type, whereby exposure to kilowatt-hour sales is more limited. The second tender is about the market delivering locations whereby the government is providing financing. We expect decisions on both these tenders in the final quarter of this year and the first quarter of next year. Of course, in parallel, we continue to work on other ways to develop our network. In order to accelerate, we're running a project that aims to make more advanced use of data and location scouts to increase the number of leads. For the U.K., investments in long-term relationships with real estate owners and developers are starting to pay off with a very healthy pipeline of leads to be converted in the coming months. Additionally, we're pursuing the first freehold acquisitions, so buying a location, and this will contribute to reducing the rollover risk of the portfolio of locations. On that note, I would like to hand you over to Victor, who will dive into the financial results of the first half this year. Victor? Yeah. Thank you, Michiel. On slide 10, by looking at station economics, we clearly see the effect of demand growth. Revenues for Q2 2022 more than doubled vs Q2 2021 levels for our average station. This is mostly driven by corona recovery from Q2 last year and by increase in the number of electric vehicles. We guide for revenues per station of more than EUR 400,000 in 2025, and Q2 station revenues are along that growth path. This growth is driven by electric vehicle fleet penetration and therefore electric vehicle traffic about two-and-a-half-fold between now and 2025, and driven by station sizes considerably growing due to increasing charge speeds and larger batteries. Our top five stations give a peek into the future. This already has three times more BEV traffic as it's located at a motorway with three times more general traffic than the average station. This results in close to EUR half a million in annualized revenues for this station. We guide us for operational EBITDA margin of over 40% by 2025. Operational EBITDA margin is going in that direction with an increase to 26% in the second quarter vs 19% in the first quarter of this year. Also there, the top five stations shows the potential. With higher revenues and a higher utilization, its operational EBITDA margin is at 47%. Slide 11, please. On energy prices. We know that energy prices are spiking currently, which has an effect on our current price to customers and our margin. What is important, however, is that any impact on our margin has a limited impact on our investment case, as the vast majority of volume is several years ahead of us. We expect margins to increase again in the medium term. That is what we show in the left graph. Energy prices are elevated currently, but are expected to come down over the next few years, as shown by the forward energy markets. These forward prices are underpinned by the renewable energy production costs continuing to decrease, and current renewable energy cost levels are below the long-term forward prices shown here. We also know that our current sales volumes are relatively low compared to later years, so any impact right now has a small effect on the investment case. I just wanted to highlight that metric. At the same time, there's value and relative price stability from a location acquisition perspective and from a customer brand perspective. We balance those elements in our price decisions. Also, further energy prices, price increases in recent months, we increased our price from 1 August by five cents per kWh, excluding VAT on average. Further price increases will be evaluated on a monthly basis going forward. Slide 12, please. Looking at last year's P&L on Slide 12. As mentioned, the revenues related to charging nearly tripled to EUR 12.6 million. In the second quarter of 2022, we are at an annualized run rate of EUR 27 million with revenues related to charging, showing the strong growth continues. Gross profit was up 120% year-on-year, despite being affected by the increase in energy procurement costs. Network operation costs increased, but network operation costs per charger, the more relevant metric, was relatively stable. Operational EBITDA per station and overall was up more than the respective revenue numbers. Again, showing the intrinsic operational leverage in our business model. Revenue growth leads to more operational EBITDA growth as the network operating costs are relatively fixed and we have spare capacity. Network expansion costs increased as we are gearing up the organization for increased growth in network developments. This increase in the network expansion organization has led to continued growth in the number of stations added to the network. We built 23 stations in the first half of the year and are gearing up to increase that number significantly in the second half of the year. That came with a CapEx outlay of EUR 23 million. Underlying net profit was negative at EUR 10.4 million as planned at the current phase of EV adoption. Handing back to Michiel. Now, slide 13, please. To complete our presentation, I would like to reiterate the targets that Fastned included for 2022 and repeat the longer-term objectives that we communicated on Charging Day. We go to slide 14. This finalizes our presentation, and I would like to thank you all for listening during this hot summer day, and we're looking forward to hearing your questions. Now for that, I would like to hand the word back to the operator. Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure your line is unmuted locally as you will be advised when to ask your question. Once again, that's star one, if you would like to ask a question. The first question comes from the line of Emmanuel Carlier from Kempen. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi, good morning, all. Thanks for taking my questions. I have three to start with. First of all, on the new station openings, in H1, you announced 20 through 23 station openings vs the guidance of above 65 station openings. I know that it is always a bit seasonal, and so typically you have much higher numbers in H2. I hear you say that you are very confident to reach the 65 stations, but I would be happy to hear a little bit more reasoning behind why you are so confident to make that number. The second question is one on the gross profit margin. If I look at July and August, based on my calculation, I think the gross profit per kilowatt-hour would drop towards EUR 0.31 vs the EUR 0.38 in H1. I'm just wondering if my math is correct, why you are not raising prices more or is it just a timing thing? The third question is a quick one on the financing. The EUR 50-75 million financing that you target. Is there any update you could give on your current thinking on type of financing or timing of financing? Thank you. Thanks, Emmanuel. I'll start with the one on new stations. I think I already mentioned a bit about it in France. We won a lot of tenders in France, and we built a lot of stations in France in the second half of last year. What we're basically seeing is that in France, our construction this year is basically completely back-end loaded of the year. That is a very large chunk of the amount of stations that we're gonna build. Secondly is, if we look at the acceleration, let's say, of our building phase that we started to work on after the fundraising in Q1 2021, we see a lot of the results of an elevated, let's say, build phase. We see them in this year and especially later in this year because of the procurement sort of period for grid connections often being six months or even longer, up to a year, leading to connections basically coming online now. If we look at the construction pipeline, so the whole schedule that we say we basically see a significantly larger list than that 65. We're very confident that we're gonna make that. It's a very practical list of sites over the coming months leading to that figure. Maybe to Victor on profit. Yeah, on gross profit margin, indeed, we've seen in Q2 how we expanded our margin a bit vs Q1 with energy prices being lower in May and June. Over recent months, weeks, energy prices have gone up again, and we increased our prices in response on the back of that. We will review prices on a month-by-month basis. Definitely there is an effect of a time lag there. Victor, if I may ask, Go ahead. Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but if I may ask on the margin, what is the reason you didn't put up the price more? Is it basically that you increased the price because you thought, okay, based on the July average price, with the price increase, you would recover the gross profit margin, but then in August, the price went up even more? Is that the reasoning or is there anything else, like maybe the company feeling that. It's also- It could be an impact on volumes or something? I think it's not that simple. It's only related to wholesale prices, right? We've also seen VAT changes, for example, in the Netherlands. We yeah we basically try to take into account several things when looking at price adjustments. I think it's also good to mention we did increase the price in August. We didn't see an effect on volumes. There's also value in sort of staging price increases and not doing it all at once. Also because it's unpredictable where the price levels will go, and they could recede again. Sort of doing a price increase all at once in one go is, it's probably too simplistic way to look at it. That's why we said, we've increased our price in August. We'll evaluate every month and that's so that could lead to further price increases going forward, depending on the energy price situation. Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks. Maybe then the final question on the financing. Yeah. I think basically we don't have an update vs what we said on Charging Day. We're looking at various options, various timelines, various combinations. Yeah, I can't give more of an update than what we said on Charging Day. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. The next question. Any other questions? The next question comes from the line of Hans Pluijgers from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning all. Also a few questions from my side. First, looking at the network operating cost per station that went up from EUR 9,000 to EUR 24,000. Is that purely driven by additional chargers per station, or do you also see of course some inflationary impact there, which gave me maybe some guidance for the second half? Second, going down the P&L, the guidance for the network expansion cost also, there are quite significant increase. You added quite a lot of people. I can imagine that you're of course investing a little bit ahead of the growth, but also could you then give some guidance for the second half of this year, maybe also into 2023, how do you, let's say, see the expansion of your personnel in that field? Looking at Q2, you added nine wins in Q2. Could you maybe some background there precisely on the activity? Were there, let's say, any material tenders on the market which you were involved in, but you didn't get anything? Let's get maybe some background about around the nine wins in Q2. Yeah. Yeah. Let me start on network operation cost, network development cost, and then Michiel takes over on the wins. Network operation costs, we really look at it at a per charger basis. We think that's the best way to look at it. There, we increased the number of chargers on our stations considerably. As a result, the network operation cost per station increased. Yeah, on a per charger basis, it increased by about 4%. That's relatively in the margin and relatively stable. On that network expansion costs. Maybe I could add there. I think important to know that a large part of that network operating cost is grid fees, right? That's regulated and inflation on that, yeah. You will see that significantly later. The question is, of course like how much? It's not gonna be this year. Yeah. That's about a quarter of those network operation costs. There's half of that is basically the staff running the network, and office costs and associated costs. Yeah, there's Costs in there. We don't see at this stage inflationary costs that could happen at some stage, but we haven't seen it yet. On network development costs, also there's if you look at, for instance, on a last 12-month basis, network development costs are divided over the number of stations we've built over the last 12 months. That's probably the better way to look at it than just dividing those costs over the 23 stations we built this year. So indeed there is an expansion of the workforce that will deliver stations at the second half of this year and more stations next year. If you look, the network development costs divided over the number of stations built were about EUR 150 thousand-EUR 160 thousand. Yeah, that could go up a bit, but nothing dramatic. Hopefully that gives a bit of guidance there. Then maybe on the pipeline, on the one end, I think it's important to note that the signing of those deals comes in a bit volatile. In the Q1 figures we saw, those big sort of tender result deals in France. In Q2, we see several sort of one-on-one location deals coming in. I think if we look at that for the second half of this year, there's of course several large tenders ongoing. Take for example, that's in Germany. I think if we look at what we have in the pipeline, we see a very healthy pipeline in the U.K., which we're working hard on to materialize towards contracts. That's mostly sort of a one-on-one site-by-site risk. We expect, yeah, we expect good numbers there. I think if we look at let's say new markets that we put on the agenda, so France, Italy, Denmark, we're working hard on let's say the discussions with authorities on shaping those tenders, what needs to happen, preparing for that, but that most likely won't lead to contracts in the coming months. With these tenders, they often are published, then they take a couple of months to let's say to be about the application process and the handing in. We're gonna see more of that probably in 2023 than in the second half of this year. Does that give you a bit of color on the tender and wins topic? Well, yeah, maybe a follow-up on that one. That means in principle that, let's say in Q2, there were no major tenders where you were involved in, which you didn't, let's say, had success. And so on also in France, I understand there are no material new tenders coming up in the coming months. No, we haven't seen much in France. That might happen in the second half of this year, of course, because there's always stuff coming up. But I think it's also important to note that there's a time lag. Depending on what means winning and the application process, what's in our lead flow, let's say, that is not in the list of signed sites, right? Yep. I understand that. Okay, thanks. Cool. No. Thanks. Any other questions? The next question comes from the line of Marc Hesselink from ING. Please go ahead. Yes. Thank you. First question on the coming back on the gross margin. I believe in the past you said there's a bit of a sort of a target to get to a gross profit per kilowatt-hour of EUR 0.45 around that number. Is it still fair to assume that maybe with a time lag and maybe with sometimes the benefit of prices going down, you're still targeting that level? Whenever prices move down, you might move down a little bit less to move towards that number. The second question is on the revenue trend that we're seeing. In the past, you also tried to normalize a little bit for the impact of COVID. If I'm doing that, I think that from the revenue growth, you can more or less split it between 50/50, COVID recovery and to the just the improvement of the underlying business. Is that also the way you look at it? Then, third question is on actually on the working capital. You have a bit of a working capital outflow. Normally, I always assume that the business is more or less working capital neutral when you grow, given that a lot of people just pay immediately. Just, can you give an update on that? Is that the timing why you had some outflow there, or is there something changed there? Thank you. Yeah, let me start on the gross margins. Indeed, in the past we had sort of EUR 0.45 per kWh levels. In Q4 last year, Q1 this year, we had EUR 0.36 per kWh levels in the current energy markets. I think also on Charging Day, we indicated that we expect when prices come down again, energy prices come down again, that we'll expand our margin from there. We haven't provided a guidance whether it's EUR 0.45, EUR 0.40 or something else. We do think when prices normalize to levels we see in the current forward prices for 2025 and onwards there is way to expand that margin again. Maybe on revenue trends, yeah, I'm wondering if that sort of split between COVID and non-COVID, whether that is still something that we can make and also want to make. I think it's, you know, we basically look at the revenue progress that we're making, and I think we're happy with that. But yeah, making a special split between COVID and non-COVID, I'm wondering if that's still possible. Yeah, I can maybe add something on that. I think I also mentioned part of the revenue, the main contributors are indeed a recovery from COVID and electric vehicles and more electric vehicles on the market or driving around. I think it's, yeah, fair to say that's probably 50/50 between those two things. I agree more or less there. There's other things like at the revenue our sales price increase, but that's a much smaller amount. Capital. Yeah. Going towards working capital, I think, yeah, if you look at our working capital, it is a relatively low number. It is to a small extent driven by revenue growth right now. It's more driven by specific time lags. I think right now, in the end it will be. I agree with you, it will be relatively neutral. But it's hard to read anything out of sort of the fluctuations we see right now. Those have very specific causes. It's hard to determine a trend on that right now. But overall, I agree with you. It should be relatively neutral because our energy is billed after we sell it. Also we bill our customers, either they pay directly or we bill the charge card operators, also, after the sale is made, and it's on imbalances relatively neutral. I hope that answers your questions, Marc. Yeah, it did. Thank you. Thanks. Any other questions? The next question comes from the line of Axel Stasse from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the presentation and taking my question. I have a few on my side. Can you please elaborate a bit more maybe on the tenders and the pipeline in Germany? How confident are you basically and how positioned is Fastned to the 200 unserviced areas and 900 stations off highway? Any more information on this would be highly appreciated. The second question is more related to the larger stations that you're currently installing and building. Are you afraid to see utilization rates going down on a group level, which then can, I guess, affect group financials in the short term and hence you know, increase your requirements of funding? And then the third one was the following up on Emmanuel question on electricity prices increases. If we look at the forward curve in 2023 and 2024, can we, you know, expect still further price increases going forward? Because if you look at the Q1 presentation earlier this year where forward curve for 2022 were at 0.24 EUR/kWh, and today for Q4, we are around 0.45-0.47 EUR/kWh. Can we, actually fairly just assume that if you will increase prices, tariffs even further? Last but not least, with regards to EV charger manufacturers such as ABB who have, you know, struggled a lot to deliver these chargers to operators. Is this, you know, something that Fastned has seen with Alpitronic, for example? Also have you know, has Alpitronic, for example, increased prices for these chargers recently? How is Fastned negotiation power here? Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Axel. Maybe to start with the energy markets, huh. I think if you would have asked sort of people last year, like what do you expect is gonna be sort of the price for electricity a year from now? I think it would have been basically a crystal ball, right? I think saying what's gonna happen in the coming six months, I think that, yeah, that is not necessarily a very good idea. I think we've seen what the forward prices are. I think we should, on a regular basis, review that. I think we've also said like with what kind of metrics we're looking at that review. I think that's probably a more sort of realistic way of looking at the future than saying what we think will be the future, given the geopolitical climate and what is affecting what's happening here. Maybe Victor van Dijk, do you wanna add anything to that? No, I think it's no. That is sort of a bit of color on that. I think. If we look at Alpitronic chargers and maybe more broadly, the whole supply chain of, let's say what is needed to build these stations. I think, let's say from operational perspective, we do see issues and we're working on that. the UKraine crisis, the post-pandemic start-up of supply chains globally, definitely puts us to some challenges. On the other hand, I think what we've done is building over the last decade, all these supply relationships, and we know those nuts and bolts of our stations very, very well. We work with these suppliers very long-term already. What we see is that up to now, we're well able to manage these sort of difficulties. I think operationally, we think we will be able to manage. I think when we're looking at pricing, I think, yeah, what we see with all the inflation elements basically, or the majority of them except energy purchasing, that they are lagging. We do expect prices to go up on some elements of our stations. We're tracking that where we don't see it, yeah, let's say at a direct level today. Alpitronic is working on future technology as all charger manufacturers. We're discussing prices with them, but it's very difficult to say much about it today. I think, yeah, if we look at tenders, and especially Germany, to give you a bit of, you know, to try to give you more color on that. I think what the difficulty with Germany is that this tender isn't an off-the-shelf tender. I think we're very well-positioned to take part of it. We see very positive messages from people we talk to. We would love to have you be part of the build-out of infrastructure in Germany. I think if we look at the positioning, it's a tender that is quite complex in how it's been constructed. There are several lots. You cannot have more than so many lots, and they want to have so many parties in there. The construct is that by the definition of the tender, they already need at least so many parties in the market. If we then compare that to how many parties are active in the market, that gives us a very good winning position. On the other hand, the question of course is where in the end the sort of the metrics of that tender will lead to, and whether that's something that we really want to take part in. We're under discussions to push this into the right direction. We will have to see in the coming six months how that materializes. Does that give you color, Axel, on that topic? Yes. Thank you. I know it's not a sort of a carved in stone story, but it's, as you might say, sort of something that the government really wants to see happening. But they maybe made it a bit more difficult, which doesn't help them at the moment. The question is what can they do at the moment to resolve those things? Okay, on the last question we go, which regards utilization rates and then group financial in the short term. Yeah. We already indicated on Charging Day that we're building bigger stations. The last budget was about seven charges per station. So that's already taken into account. I think it's a reflection of the fact that we expect certain utilization. We try to optimize it. When we build a station, we don't wanna be expanding it within five years. But it also means when we build bigger stations, we do think that the utilization within the first five years goes to a certain level, and then after that utilization might drive us to expand it. We're basically optimizing based on our expectations on utilization. I think, yeah, the fact that we're building larger stations is because we expect basically more sales per location, per station, in the current phase of the transition to electric vehicles. We see it as a positive thing, and of course we need to fund that. Yeah, the indications we gave on Charging Day, we took that into account. Okay. Very clear. Thank you very much. Cool. Thank you, Axel. Any further questions? The next question, it comes from the line of Hans Pluijgers from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes. Some follow-up questions. First of all, coming back on the German tenders. Yeah, I understand what you're saying, that still the discussion's also going on and still let's say the condition a little bit maybe to change in your right direction. Do you also then maybe not see a risk that this, the tenders or the outcome will maybe be delayed somewhat? Could you give me maybe some feeling on that? Yeah. I think delays are many tenders get delayed in this industry, and I think that is partly logical because if we look at the French example as an example, those toll road operators have in total 360 highway service areas. On average, they give out concessions of 15-year lifespan. They do normally, let's say, 30, 40 contracts for a petrol station at maximum in a year. Last year, they needed to do more than 100 for just the charging sort of environment. I think that is sort of largely the problem that we see in Germany as well. They knew that they needed to create a tender. They did that. They're trying to manage timelines. Yeah, the feedback that they're getting from the market is that, yeah, there with hindsight are maybe some things to reconsider. That, of course, puts the timeline under pressure. I think that provides you a bit of color on what we're expecting to see there. Yeah. Maybe then. Does that answer, Hans? Yeah. Not that much, but I understand. Of course, it's very difficult also for you to precisely predict on that. Then coming back to new markets. You mentioned Italy and Denmark, but also the Spanish flag is in your presentation and also discussed during the capital markets day. If I look at currently a lot of tenders or a new construction is going on, or licenses have been given to existing locations, so mainly along also petrol stations. Could you give maybe us some feeling how do you see the Spanish market going forward? Or do you see anything changing in that approach by the government? Another follow-up question also on the rollouts for second half. You mentioned that previously that grid connections, especially in Netherlands, there could may be some delay with the rollout. How do you see that at the moment, also potentially impacting your plans for the second half? Maybe start with those new markets. I think if you look at, for example, Italy, we've been working on that, let's say on the consultations with authorities on policy development for charging stations on those motorways. What we see is that a lot of input that we're providing on how a good tender system could work, that is resonating. We see that those toll road operators are currently being issued with regulation on needing to tender out these rights for charging stations, and there have to be public open tenders. Basically all parties have the same options to take part. There is markets where we see that other things happen. For example, Spain, making it obligatory for petrol stations to put down a charger. We do have a lot of public affairs work to do there to explain sort of the yeah the logicalities for open public tenders to issue those concessions and the value that that brings to accelerating the energy transition. Because if you basically allow someone or say to someone put down a charger then they call a local let's say in the most extreme case a local installation company and that screws the whole box down. Then yeah what do you do? That's what we've seen with a lot of petrol stations in the past. We've got work to do there. I think, if we look on a European level, the policy landscape, I think we see step-by-step that that work on accelerating transition and open and public tenders that is getting traction, and that is very, very good for Fastned. Yeah. I think maybe one thing to add on Italy is, for instance, in that policy framework, they focus a lot on quality of the charging infrastructure. 70% of the tender outcome is related to that. I think we think that's extremely good for the market because quality is a big issue in fast charging throughout Europe. We're very happy that that is the leading selection criteria. I think also Fastned scores very well on those criteria. Like Michiel says, we're trying to develop policies in countries helping governments with that and we make a big step. Okay. Delay on grid connection to discuss, let's say in previous presentations, how is that? How do you see at the moment? Can you repeat that again? Sorry. In previous presentations you discussed or as you point out, that you see some, especially in the Netherlands, maybe some delay in connections to the grid. How are you seeing that that's developing over the last few months, and how do you see that for the second half? Yeah. We've been pushing a lot for connections in the Netherlands. I think that's also why we see that maybe construction in the second half of this year will be more than the first half of this year because of connections being ordered a year ago. I think going forward, this will be an issue in many countries simply because the energy transition is putting a strain on the grid. Vice versa, with our experience with all the work that we've been doing, we've been creating very good relationships with these grid operators that put us at an advantage compared to parties that wanna start maybe with that development now. It is in that sense, that cable that we created to those sites today, that is a scarce resource, and that allows us to deliver exponentially, kilowatt hours to that market. Does that give you a bit of color on that topic? Well, a little bit, but thanks. What are you looking for more than this? No, yeah. Well, yeah, indeed. What you're saying, what's that, of course, you provide in detail on the grid connections request or license for the second half have been already re-requested about a year ago. So in principle, it means that you don't see any issue for the second half on the grid connections in the Netherlands. Is that a little bit how we should read it? Maybe for the future, indeed, there could be still an issue or? I think we will expect issues with grid connections in the second half, vice versa. We created a significant buffer in our projections. Yeah. We're managing that, and basically became even more prudent in our outlook in that sense. Yeah, that makes it more clear. Thanks. Good. Thanks. Thanks, Hans. On that note, I think it's a good moment to round up, and I would say, enjoy the last weeks of summer. Hope to see you all in the third quarter call. Thanks all. Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect your line.