Hello, and welcome to the Fastned 2021 Annual Figures and Q1 Trading Update. Please note this conference is being recorded and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. This can be done by pressing Star one on your telephone keypad to register your question. I will now hand over to your hosts, Michiel Langezaal, CEO, and Victor van Dijk, CFO, to begin today's conference. Thank you. Thank you, operator. I'd like to say welcome to everyone on this call, as well as to our webcast viewers. Today, we'll present the trading update for the first quarter of 2022. The presentation used during this call is also available on our investor relations website, which is ir.fastnedcharging.com. Slide 2, please. With reference to the information provided in these slides and discussed during this call, please take note of this disclaimer. Slide 3, please. My name is Michiel Langezaal. I'm the CEO and one of the Founders of Fastned. Victor van Dijk, our CFO, as well as Hugo Vink and Francesco Mazzanti from Investor Relations are also present in this call. Today, I will elaborate on the highlights of the first quarter of 2022 and the full- year of 2021. I will discuss the recent tender win with SANEF in France, and we'll give an update on our progress in the U.K. After that, Victor will take over and take you through the top-line financial results for the first quarter of 2022 and the full- year 2021. He will also elaborate on the developments on the electricity markets, which have been, as you know, turbulent. At the end of this presentation, we will share our outlook on station openings and upgrades for this year. We will take one hour for this call, which will include our presentation, and then some time for questions from analysts. Slide 4, please. 2021 has been an incredible year for Fastned, a year of records. More than EUR 12 million in revenue related to charging. We sold more than 21 GWh to our customers. We enabled more than 134 million green km, and we completed more than 1 million charge sessions. When looking back at when we started, 1 million charging sessions really feels like a big milestone. Our mission was to provide infrastructure to allow people to switch to electric cars. Having last year delivered 1 million charging sessions really is something to be incredibly proud of. Furthermore, the fact that in Q1 of this year we did deliver 433,000 sessions shows the exponential growth that we are realizing. We continued to make steady progress towards our goal of 1,000 stations. In challenging circumstances, we built 44 brand new stations, including our first stations in France, reaching the number of 188 stations in operation year-end. We also focused on upgrading the existing network to cater to the growing demand for Charging services. The number of fast chargers reached 759 year-end, implying that on average, each of our stations is equipped with four fast chargers. Upgrades also meant more stations with 150 kW or even 300 kW power available. By now, more than 50% of our charging stations are having 300 kW chargers available, allowing for faster charging for more customers and more sales. More customers buying more kWh not only led to close to doubling our revenues to EUR 12.4 million, the operational leverage of our business model led to the operational EBITDA growing even stronger with 171% from EUR 0.9 million- EUR 2.4 million. 2021 was a year of great results, and this year might be even more impressive when looking at the results of the first quarter of 2022. Revenue related to charging almost tripled in the first quarter to EUR 5.7 million compared to the same quarter in 2021. This puts the annualized revenue run rate at EUR 23 million, again, showing the exponential growth we are realizing. In Q1, we also progressed on our roadmap towards the goal of a network of 1,000 large scalable charging stations throughout Europe. In March, Fastned won 18 locations on the SANEF network in France, reaching the number of 353 locations acquired, including 198 stations in operation. We continued to add more and faster chargers and grew the number of installed chargers to 846 by the end of the quarter. We continued to provide freedom to an increasing number of customers. Last quarter, we served 128,000 customers, an increase of more than 130%. Slide 5, please. As you might have seen from the press release of last week, Fastned has won a prime lot in the first charging tender organized by the SANEF Group, Société des Autoroutes du Nord et de l'Est de la France, the French toll road operator active in the north and east of France. In total, there were three lots, and Fastned, by winning this prime lot, secured 18 very high-traffic motorway locations in the north of France. In total, 52 locations were tendered out. Fastned got more than 1/3 Of those locations. This one tender batch results in Fastned winning an additional 5% market share on the French motorways for more than the coming decade. Another big step that I'm very proud of which I think our French team can be incredibly proud of. Just think about it for a second. Fastned was the only international company capable of securing locations on this network. The other two winners were Total and Engie, two corporations that are among the largest of French conglomerates. With this win, Fastned further increased its coverage on the French motorway network, providing electric drivers freedom in the north and east of the country, creating an almost continuous network of stations from Amsterdam to Lyon. All the locations won by Fastned so far in France are located along key strategic arteries of the French transport system, and the stations that we are building here are capable of charging hundreds of vehicles per day. We expect many more opportunities to come from the French market over the coming years. We expect more tenders, more partnerships, and deals with private landowners. Slide 6, please. The question that you might ask is, how does Fastned secure so many great locations in a market that is not its own and with such large conglomerates competing? Well, we believe that a key and unique differentiating factor allowing us to be so successful in tenders is our fast charging concept. We see four key areas where Fastned's expertise and focus is best expressed. One, Fastned station design. Fastned stations are designed by our own internal team of architects. This team has more than 10 years of experience in designing charging stations in order to provide customers with the best possible charging experience. The layout of the spacious stations allow cars to easily enter, charge, pay, and leave the station without having to make difficult maneuvers. Furthermore, for each service area, an implementation plan is to be made. Our architects by now have designed hundreds of service areas that will be retrofitted with charging facilities and whereby existing traffic situations have to be altered to accommodate the new infrastructure. No other company has the experience that comes close. Electric drivers and service area owners see this. Next to that, great-looking stations also supporting the visibility of the infrastructure that we built. In the beginning, we did this to make sort of people aware of charging infrastructure being there and allowing them to make the switch to an electric vehicle. More and more, we also see toll road operators seeing the value of these landmarks. Two, Fastned is an experienced builder. Fastned has 10 years of experience in building fast charging stations across different countries. We've internalized most of the construction management functions, and one station is built by a group of suppliers that is each vested in its expertise. One could say Fastned is its own main contractor. This vertical integration makes that we know the bill of material and each of the cost items very, very well. In turn, that allows us to be much more efficient than other charging companies when it comes to CapEx. We simply can build better and larger stations or more stations from the same amount of money. Also, a lower investment level means one can have a better ROI or the same ROI at more competitive price levels for customers. This vertical integration, in combination with the pipeline of locations that is under development, allowed our team to optimize the construction process. Often, we can limit the actual works on the service area to less than four weeks. The quality of what we build and the speed and efficiency of the construction process is something that tender authorities value, and our CapEx efficiency allows us to hand in a very competitive bid. Three, the best customer experience. The customer is at the center of our operation and digital product strategy. We provide support to our users through the entire charging journey, from finding the stations, through our in-house developed app, to answering any questions electric vehicle drivers might have upon arrival at our station or while charging. Our customer support team has extensive experience, technical and non-technical, on both the chargers and the vehicles. We realize that charging will be a new experience for most drivers in the coming years. That's why our customer care agents know the ins and outs of the electric cars on the market, so they can help our customers whenever they need assistance at our stations. This is why Fastned rates higher than any of its peers in Google location reviews. Four, Fastned is a tech company. This is the best charging experience is something that we started designing when building our first charging stations in 2012, and we've been honing that for more than a decade. At that time, we had in our minds the idea of a large control room like Houston calling Apollo to ensure the uptime of our digital charging infrastructure. This mindset that we have to ensure the uptime of our infrastructure and deliver a flawless charging experience has been core to our success, and has since led to three things. One, to the development of a network operating center managing the digital infrastructure. The team that monitors our chargers remotely manages things like the rollout and testing of software patches. Just as an example, one might think that this is a straightforward implementation job, but just imagine the value of this function when knowing that we have seen the reliability of chargers in delivering a charging session varying by 30% depending on the software patch applied. Not always the newest version is the best. More work with the supplier is needed to make that next step. When we hear from charger manufacturers that they didn't know, and the majority of their customers simply installed the newest patch, we've again found another part of the explanation why Fastned is rated so high. Moreover, this network operating center also steers activities like sending out our maintenance engineers when predicting maintenance needs well. Instead of repairing chargers when faulty, we again increase our uptime. This is why we also set up our data team. With data, we support the finding of root causes to charging bottlenecks that our customers experience. More and more, we also see that logging of data also helps in finding the solutions to these issues. Data and analyzing that is another important element of delivering such a high score. Last but not least, we decided to develop, own, and operate our own software back end because we believe it's crucial for delivering a great charging experience. Some might think that a charging station is nothing more than a wall socket for electric cars, but it's not that simple. There is no communication, for example, between a hairdryer and its wall socket. Between chargers and electric cars, there is communication both ways, and getting communication right is not a given, as we know from our interactions with others. To conclude, operating charging stations is, in our view, a Tech business, and we see that what we've built over the last decade is delivering us a significant competitive advantage. Slide 7, please. Over the past few quarters, we've put quite a bit of focus on the development of our business in France and the tenders being held in the country. We've made progress in other parts of our company too. For instance, in the U.K., where we've claimed success in growing the network in a different way. The U.K. market, the U.K. motorway market is generally closed by limited competition in the service areas. In contrast to the European mainland, these sites are privately owned, and the options for the government to support the build-out of charging infrastructure with concession tenders for such locations is therefore limited. Moreover, there are simply relatively few motorway service areas in the U.K. Therefore, for now, Fastned's focus in the market has been more on sites just off the motorway, such as locations along A roads or directly on motorway exits. Often, these locations are not secured through tenders but via bilateral agreements with individual, often private landlords. This means that over the last year, we've been growing our network site by site. What I wanted to share with you today is the result that we will see over the coming year or so in terms of stations in the U.K. Last week, with the support of the Scottish Government's Low Carbon Infrastructure Transition Programme fund, we opened a large charging station along the M74 near Glasgow in Scotland, a location with amenities such as a Costa Coffee and burgers close by. Each day, 43,000 vehicles pass this junction that is an economic gateway for the region. Maybe you've seen some pictures of it already on Flickr, the Oxford Superhub. Our Fastned station, together with the supercharger from Tesla, form the biggest charging hub in the U.K., a site that will be opened next quarter. Energization of this location is through a private wire connection from Pivot Power, a subsidiary of the French electricity conglomerate EDF, who are installing a 10 MW connection over a distance of several kilometers. These projects are sometimes painfully slow to develop and construct, but these supply lines are very important to us in order to continue to cater to an exponentially growing electric vehicle market. In the coming weeks, we will open station number 200, which will be our first location in London. Again, a very high traffic location with 52,000 vehicles passing by each day. That was just to mention some of the projects which we're currently developing. In total, there are more than 10 of such large charging stations currently in our construction plans for, let's say, the coming 12 months or so, all across the country. This ramp-up of construction in the U.K. is a consequence of the growth path that we put ourselves on after the equity raise of last year and the hiring of a larger team to grow our portfolio of sites faster and accelerate the build pace of stations. Slide 8, please. This time, I don't wanna spend too much time on the electric vehicle market. I just wanna provide you an update and say it continues to show very strong momentum. That brings us to discussing the financial results, and therefore, I will hand you over to Victor, our CFO. Victor? Yeah. Thank you, Michiel. Also from my side, welcome all. I'll take you through our first quarter trading update and 2021 figures review. Starting again with how our sales develop versus the increase in electric vehicle stock. We're very happy to see that revenues and sales are outgrowing electric vehicle stock growth again. Before Corona, we always saw our sales outgrowing the growth in electric vehicles, driven by us adding more and more stations that each generate revenues, but also by revenues per station growing, driven by people fast charging more and more. During Corona, the lockdown measures significantly affected charging needs of the electric vehicle drivers, including their fast charging needs. Because of that, during the second half of 2020 and the first half of 2021, sales grew slower or more in line with electric vehicle sales, as you can see in the graph on the left. Over the last two to three quarters, however, we saw sales outpacing electric vehicle growth again. Only part of that is due to corona-related traffic reducing measures, actually reducing. As in Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, the Netherlands was in a quite severe lockdown for the most part of these quarters. We see a return to the trend that our fast charging sales outpaced electric vehicle sales growth again. Overall, the latter fits with our general expectation that the fast charging share will rise. With newer adopters having less ability to charge at home and fast charging readily becoming a better proposition, with charge speeds increasing and more stations being available in relevant locations. This is, of course, very supportive for our business case. By now, everybody agrees that electric vehicle sales will grow strongly. If we're able to grow fast charging sales faster than that, we're obviously on the right track. As always, you need to have high traffic locations to capture this demand, as we see that people want to fast charge where they drive. Overall, electric vehicle sales and increasing fast charging demand will continue to be the main drivers of Fastned sales over the coming years and decades. It's crucial to have the right high traffic locations to be able to continue to capture the growth. Next slide, please. When looking at the station economics, we clearly see the effect of demand growth. Revenues for Q1 2022 are considerably above Q1 2021 levels, both for our average station as for a representative top five station. We think our stations should be able to make more than EUR 1 million revenues by 2030. Looking at these numbers, to us it remains quite clear that the potential is there. In the first quarter, 2.3% of the vehicles on the roads were fully electric in our markets. By 2030, this should be around 10x higher, with for instance, Germany and the Netherlands each having a more than 20% fleet penetration target for 2030. This tenfold increase should directly drive station revenues as the cars that are driving by become more and more electric cars. The station revenues are currently already above EUR 100,000 annualized. Dutch research agency TNO forecasted a 2.5 GWh fast charging demand on average across the Dutch motorway service areas by 2030, which is in line with more than EUR 1 million revenues per station. As mentioned last time, note that by 2030, fast charging is an even better proposition with average charge speeds expected to triple or fourfold, which should drive demand further. Also, last quarter's analyzed revenue figure is probably still dampened because of the corona measures. Gross margin in our station economics is currently affected by the general market power price increases this winter. We expect when looking at forward prices that most of the increase is temporary. In response to the power price increases, Fastned increased its sales price from EUR 0.59- EUR 0.69, including VAT, in most markets in Q4 2021. What is also good to see is that the utilization of the top five station was 23% in March, coming from 22% in December. This utilization means that on each of the six chargers of this station, for more than five hours out of the 24 hours a day, a car was charging, and that's the average over the full month of March. Again, for our top 15 stations, we currently see similar or even higher utilizations between 20%-40%. We think we can run the network at a 30% average utilization. These utilization figures to us confirm that this is possible while keeping a very good customer experience. Next slide, please. We're very happy and very much focused on the top line growth, outgrowing the market and showing that fast charging is crucial in providing electric vehicles or EV drivers. At the same time, wholesale energy prices are currently affecting margins. As discussed in the Q4 call as well, wholesale energy prices have seen an unprecedented rise across Europe, up from around EUR 0.04 per kWh over the past years to over EUR 0.40 per kWh on certain days in the last quarters to around EUR 0.21 per kWh currently. As mentioned, in Q4, we raised our sales prices because of that, and this sales price increase had a revenue effect of around EUR 0.08 per kWh, excluding VAT. In Q1 2022, the revenue from renewable energy credits per kilowatt-hour sold was lower than in previous quarters due to a change in the factors to calculate the renewable energy credit generated per kWh, having an impact of circa EUR 0.04 per kilowatt-hour. As a result, the gross margin is at similar levels as in Q4 2022 at EUR 0.36 per kilowatt-hour. When looking at the future prices for electricity, prices are expected to come down again in the coming years. Note that Fastned sells directly to end customers, giving us nearly full control over our sales price, albeit with a lag. In the last quarter, we have shown to be able to adjust prices when needed, with no noticeable effect on demands, showing we have pricing power. We will adjust prices again if and when needed to maintain a healthy margin. Next slide, please. Looking at last year's P&L on Slide 12. As mentioned, revenues related to charging nearly doubled to EUR 12.4 million. In the first quarter of 2022, we are at an annualized run rate of EUR 23 million revenues related to charging, showing a strong growth continues. We're already at nearly double of the revenues of 2022. Gross profit was up 67%, but was affected by the energy procurement costs in the last part of 2021. Network operating costs increased, but network operating costs per charger, the more relevant metric, decreased slightly, showing we have We're able to experience disciplined growth. Operational EBITDA per station overall was up more than the respective revenue numbers, showing the intrinsic operational leverage in our business. 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're gearing up the organization for increased growth in network development. This increase in network expansion, in the network expansion organization has led to continued growth in the number of stations added to the network, as Michiel already explained. We built 44 stations in 2021. Average cash CapEx for a typical highway station was around EUR 500,000 with four charger station. Underlying net profit was negative at EUR 16.4 million as planned in the current phase of EV adoption. Next slide, and then I'll hand it over to Michiel again. Yeah, thanks, Victor. To complete our presentation, I would like to take a moment to share our expectations for station construction and upgrades for the coming year. In 2022, Fastned expects to build at least 65 stations across its markets and accelerate the growth of its network by almost 50% compared to 2021. Additionally, we continue to work on scaling our construction and capabilities on that to prepare for further growth next year. On top of station construction, we plan to add around 190 chargers to existing stations, something we do in anticipation of continued strong development in demand for fast charging. This is, we don't want to have waiting lines in front of our stations. As a result of this plan, Fastned's network will count more than 253 stations operational by year-end, with more than 1,200 fast chargers installed. A huge step up from the 759 at the end of last year. This is evidence of our ability to scale rapidly based on our strategy of acquiring large sites with ample room to expand. This brings me to the end of our presentation, which I would like to end with the note to say today we are at day one of an exponentially growing market. Today, less than 2% of cars in our markets are electric, and most governments plan to phase out combustion engines by around 2030, with the consequence that all car sales by that time will be electric. From that moment onwards, it will take roughly two decades before the entire car stock on our roads is electric. This will be a growth market for decades to come. To serve all these cars, a tremendous amount of charging infrastructure is needed, and Fastned is one of the parties contributing to that need. Next slide, please. This finalizes our presentation, and herewith, I would like to hand the word back to the operator for questions. Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question or make a contribution, please press Star one. The first question comes from the line of Axel Stasse of Berenberg. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Do you hear me? Yeah. Good morning, Axel. Good morning, Michiel, Victor, and Francesco. Thank you for taking my questions. I have three on my side. My first question is on the number of stations that you would like to open in 2022. Out of these 65, how many stations do you think are allocated to France? Actually follow up to this, should we consider the 65 as the new run rate going ahead? That's my first question. My second question is, given the number of stations that you would like to open this year, have you seen any improvements, I would say in delays that you previously saw in grid connections, or have you seen any improvements in construction or labor costs? Last but not least, have you seen any change overall in your competitive landscape? Do you still compete with the similar players during tenders, for example? If you can give us a bit more information on this, that would be highly appreciated. Thank you very much. Thanks for the questions, Axel. I think station openings. The reason why we think that we can realize more than 65 stations this year, because we have significantly more projects on our, let's say, planning. There's of course risks related to these projects in terms of delivery of the grid connection, in terms of delivering of some permits, stuff like that. There will be a significant amount of them in France. But of course, they're not all of them in France in that sense. These 18 stations, for example, that are in the SANEF tender, we did apply risk to that, but we plan to realize them very quickly. Related to sort of the run rate, I think the idea that Fastned has in that sense is to scale that sort of, yeah, growth pace of this network up and up year- on- year. We've been investing heavily in our teams that can build stations and acquire sites. We scaled that up this year. We scaled it up last year, and we do wanna scale it up next year. Of course, that challenge will become yeah harder in that sense and probably in sort of relative terms, maybe more difficult. We do plan to yeah in that sense increase the run rate year on year. If we talk about sort of the, let's say the construction hurdles, I think what we see with grid connections in countries like Germany and France is that it remains at the moment easier, I would say, than in the Netherlands. We see in the Netherlands in that sense that the map of the country starts to become quite red in terms of like areas where grid operators have difficulties to deliver capacity to the electricity grid. In the Netherlands, our existing connections in that sense are surprisingly good. On the other hand, we also see that these grid operators are heavily investing to take away these bottlenecks, but that will take some years. I would say it's probably more difficult than in the past, whereby the Netherlands is the biggest issue in that sense, combined with the U.K., given its somewhat older infrastructure. Of course, to this, it adds that we currently have a war in Ukraine and that supply lines are disrupted because of that in combination with starting up post-corona. That all interplays in that sense. When we talk about sort of the competitive landscape in tenders, I think we continue to see sort of roughly the same parties in that sense, although it of course varies per region. In the U.K. we do see different parties than in France. In France we see different parties than in Belgium or in the Netherlands or in Germany. I do think in the end it is a combination of some of the oil majors, some larger utilities and companies like Fastned or Tesla or Ionity that have a focus on fast charging, and that remains to be the case in that sense. Does that give you a bit of color on these topics, Axel? Yes, it does. Thank you very much. I have a follow-up question on that. If I understood correctly, during the presentation, you do not expect to increase the prices even further this year, right? Well, I think in the end, I don't wanna say that we have an expectation on that. We follow the market on a, well, you could say daily basis. We will act accordingly when needed. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Axel. The next question comes from the line of Johannes Boersma of ABN AMRO. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, everyone. First of all, yeah, congrats on another nice quarter. I have a couple of questions as well. First of all, maybe there was one sentence in the press release that you issued today in the morning that stated that, yeah, you saw a strong increase, despite basically a relatively weaker demand and less traffic. I was wondering what exactly does that refer to, and is the weaker demand and the less traffic versus the first quarter in 2021 versus the fourth quarter in 2021? Yeah, let me take that, Johannes, and good morning. In last quarter, I think by now or today, everybody feels corona has passed us. That puts some light on the last quarter as well. I think last quarter, at least in the Netherlands, compared to other countries, was still in lockdown for a large part of the quarter. Schools opened earlier in the quarter. Work from home advice was reduced in mid-February to 50% and only lifted fully by mid-March. Of course, a lot of the drivers are corporate lease car drivers. We still think there was an effect from corona and from corona-related measures. That's why we mentioned that in the press release this morning. That's your question? All right. Understood. Maybe on the pricing. You just described that you may be willing to further increase prices if electricity prices rise further. On that, I have two questions. On the slide that shows the revenue per kilowatt- hour, why do I see EUR 0.62? Although when I go onto the website, you are selling at EUR 0.69 to drivers per kilowatt- hour. That's the first question on that. The second question would be, if you would further raise prices, do you basically target a certain gross profit per kilowatt- hour that you aim to earn? If the prices of electricity rise, do you adjust according to that? Yeah. The first one is due to VAT. The price you see on the website is at EUR 0.69 including VAT. The revenue per kilowatt- hour that you see here is excluding VAT. The revenue per kilowatt- hour that you see here includes renewable energy credit sales. That explains the difference. On prices going forward, we don't provide guidance or give guidance on what gross margin we want to adhere to. I think it's very important to realize that it's also looking at the forward prices. This is a very temporary situation on the scale we are looking at. That we're building infrastructure like I said that should. We're building stations that should generate more than EUR 1 million in sales by 2030. By that time, energy prices are a lot lower. I think also at the value or the valuations you run, it's not based on this year's gross margin, and to the contrary. That being said, of course, we manage this year's gross margin. We will look at what happens to the energy markets, what happens to the prices currently, and we'll strive to maintain a reasonably and a healthy margin. That could mean that we change our prices again. All right. One last question from my end. You also mentioned in the guidance that you're looking to upgrade quite a number or add quite a number of chargers at existing stations predominantly in the Netherlands and Germany. I was wondering at what sort of utilization rates for a given station do you basically make the decision to add an additional charger? Yeah. Victor, do you wanna do or? Yeah. I think, let me start at least. I think, yeah, for us, what we see coming is that with the current growth rate of electric vehicle stock, especially for our busy stations but also our less busy stations, a small number of years later, we're actually. Yeah, the challenge for us is to be able to keep up with demands in the not too distant future. I mean, I mentioned the top five stations having utilization of 23% in March. We know that next winter, that utilization will be significantly above 30% if we don't do anything. It's really something where, in an exponentially growing market, we need to keep on adding capacity. We will do that as much as we can right now because we know in a few years down the line, it will be very hard to keep up with demands. I think maybe to add a bit of sort of my angle to it, Johannes. What we see is that in that sense, faster chargers and more chargers, it attracts traffic to some extent. With sort of a larger financial capability, we see value in having a significant row of chargers in that sense at our stations. I think as Victor says, like we want to prepare, we need to prepare ourselves for these millions of electric cars. If you look at that sort of, when we see stations hitting 20% or 25, 30% sort of utilization figures, knowing that, the average sort of growth is roughly 100% or 200%, those locations will have Basically, to double sort of utilization if we don't do anything, in a year's time. Yeah, basically, that's a moment when we start adding chargers today and we manage that utilization in that sense, yeah, with a year outlook, you might say. Does that give you a bit of cover on that topic, Johannes? Yeah, most definitely. Thanks for taking the questions. Cool. Yeah. Bye. Any other questions? We have two more questions on the line. The next question comes from the line of Marc Hesselink of ING. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you for taking the questions. I also have three. Firstly, on the opportunities to acquire new stations. Could you update on the situation in Germany? I think looking at the absolute numbers that are out there, that still remains the biggest opportunity in Europe. But there seems to be some delays in that, in getting to those locations. Could you update on that one? The second question is a bit on the cash flows for the capacity rollout for this year. I tried to get to all the moving parts. You gave the numbers of new stations, you gave the numbers of active chargers to be added. But there's also, you're gonna get some subsidies, especially in France. Also in France, half of the financing is provided by debt financing. Would it be possible to give some rough numbers on what you expect for CapEx, the subsidy level and the debt financing? The third question is on the BEV penetration. Obviously very strong, and I think you also sent out earlier an update on those estimates. Are they only increasing, especially for the 2030 period? That looks very healthy. However, if I look to my forecast, the number of active clients that you have is lagging that a little bit. Or more or less, it's following that trend. Whereas I always model that it would grow much faster than the increase in electric vehicles. Do you have an explanation for that? Is that maybe a bit of a timing lag that if you get further down the line and when people cannot charge at home anymore or there is less availability for roadside charging, that we're gonna see that step up? That your active clients is going to outpace the increase in electric vehicles on the road again? Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for the questions, Marc. Yeah, let me start with the opportunity on new sites, your first question. I think when we look at Germany, I think the, let's say the marketing around the Deutschlandnetz, which I think you're referring to, I think in that sense is marketing of a lot of locations. I think we also need to be aware of that. In the end, it's not a location tender in the larger sense. It provides subsidies like some other subsidy programs. I think it's more of them being very vocal of number of sites that they wanna subsidize than that there's actual sites in there. There's one part that, of course, could deliver a great amount of locations, and that's the Autobahn tender that's part of it, and that is planned to deliver 200 locations to the market. Why we haven't put it in the Q1 update, because there's, in that sense, relatively little news at the moment. We know that there's debates ongoing about sort of the freedom that they wanna give operators in terms of, like, whether or not they can have toilets there, whether it's one charger with a branded roof or whether it's a standardized roof. In that sense, they are listening to the market, but they're also trying to see what to do with that. I think we have good faith in that sense that it's moving in the right direction, but there is little news on this topic. We still see that there's an opportunity of 200 locations and of course we'll look into that. That could provide us with a good pipeline of locations in Germany for a period to come. If we look at Belgium, then I think yeah we previously said what we see that is in the Flanders region, so the north, the majority of project calls that we expected have happened have taken place and provided us with a great pipeline. We're working on the development of those locations. They're in the 65 target and in a more long-term plans. That means that in that sense, our focus is more shifting on more the city locations and the Wallonia area of the country. I think if we look at the development in Switzerland, we still have a significant amount of locations that we're working on that motorway network. The team is mostly focused on rolling out those locations. In that sense, you could say that the scaling of our pipeline is very much coming out of France, the U.K., and Germany in the coming years. Of course, we're looking into, let's say, regions beyond these countries. There is stuff happening in countries like Denmark, Italy, Poland, Spain, when it comes to sort of policies to set up charging infrastructure. Yeah, it would be very strange if we wouldn't have our eyes on that. Whether or not that will materialize into an opportunity for us and whether it will be interesting, that's of course to be seen. We're definitely keeping our eyes open. Maybe then to Victor on the cash flow. Yeah. On the cash flow for the French stations. Yeah, there we have the financing arrangement with Banque des Territoires. Indeed we have subsidy opportunities both from the French state as from the European government. As to starting with the subsidies, we expect that around 20%-30% of the CapEx we can get in terms of subsidies. Maybe even 30% is the better number. The remaining part of the CapEx, yeah, we will finance almost half of that with Banque des Territoires. The rest is financed by Fastned. Does that provide you with enough detail, Marc? Yes. Maybe quick, just, out of modeling purposes, how would that go into your numbers? Do you pay out the full CapEx and then you get a subsidy back or? The subsidies will be later, will come later indeed. The financing will come almost simultaneously with building. It could well be that by the end of the year, we've finished those stations, and then the subsidies come next year. Okay. Clear. Maybe then your third question, Marc, on active clients. I think what we see there is in that sense that effect that Victor was talking about sort of our view on the world that we currently feel that corona is over to a large extent, but the numbers still contain sort of a period of working from home advice. If an active customer is a customer that has charged in that quarter, that there is people that simply don't need that charging infrastructure that quarter if they stay at home instead of driving around. Your active clients in that sense base is also impacted with simply less usage of electric vehicles that are there. Does that make sense for you? Does that. Is that. Am I explaining that? Yeah. Or? No, no. It's, I mean, yes, I can understand. But I understand that it's not fully normal yet, but it's if I look in the earlier years, you this was really outpacing. The active client base was, like, strongly outgrowing the electric vehicles on the road. Now it seems to be very close to each other. I think yeah it seems to be a bit of a lagging effect. Does it take some time for clients to find, to really find you and start using you, or is it just in your view purely the corona effect? I think it has more to do with the definition of an active client. I think that is in that sense sort of what the effect is that you see. No, it's also, I have to provide a bit more color. Just before corona, we had around, in the Netherlands, only we had about, around a market penetration of around 40%. 40% of the BEV drivers charging with us at least once a quarter. When corona hit, that went down to, close to 20% or a little above 20%. Then that gradually increased again. Last quarter, we saw that penetration to above 40%. Clearly corona had a big impact. Also last quarter, like I explained, we feel corona still had an impact. That's, yeah. That growth in penetration should come again when corona is fully gone and we adding more stations and more newer EV adopters having less ability to charge at home will make use of Fastned stations. Okay. That's very clear. Thanks. Any other questions? The next question on the line comes from the line of Emmanuel Carlier of Kempen. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi, good morning, all. Thanks for taking my questions. It's mainly a few follow-ups that I have. The first one is on the gross profits per kilowatt- hour. It's down from EUR 0.42 in 2021 towards EUR 0.36. I appreciate your comment that, yeah, the forward prices are coming down and that you see that as a kind of temporary effect. On the other hand, why, yeah, if demand is that strong, why are you not just raising prices and trying to keep the gross profit per kilowatt stable, because also in 2021, it came down already something like EUR 0.6 Or EUR 0.5, if I remember well. That's the first question. The second one is on the utilization rate. I would like to get a little bit more color on the performance, let's say, with restrictions in the Netherlands and since the restrictions have been lifted. Maybe what could help is give a kind of indication on the utilization rate since the end of the restrictions in the Netherlands. Because if I look at your revenues, Q1, it's strongly up in a percentage, but if you look sequentially, it's up something like EUR 1 million. If that trend would continue, it looks like consensus sales for 2022 is quite ambitious. The final question is on the construction costs. We live, of course, in an inflation environment. Any comments on what that means to your construction costs and how you can pass on higher costs would be appreciated. Thank you. Yeah. On the gross profit margin, I think I tried to explain it earlier on, so we could well still look at price increases. I think on the other hand, we're also building a market. It is a very nascent market, and I think there's a lot of value to provide clarity also to customers on price levels, et cetera. If we would put through every temporary price increase, then yeah, that also has an impact on how customers view us. We try to be a bit sensible there, and try to look at the long- term while realizing that this is an extremely nascent market, and that the real value creation is in the second part this decade. On utilization rates. Yeah, there it's also what you see is that that's especially big corporates and maybe your own corporate as well. What you see is that they have work from home policies, and they follow corporates like that, they follow government advice, basically. If the government lifts the restrictions mid-March, there's also a lag in those work from home policies being lifted. And there's a lot of companies that only did this from the first of April. What we do see is that from the early weeks of April that utilization is significantly higher than. On your remark on sequential growth, I think what you're missing there is the adding of stations. The number of stations we have right now in this quarter is, of course, I think it's on the last slide. It's 1/3. We intend to increase that by 1/3. All those stations will add to revenue growth. If you look, and maybe it's good for you to look at the revenues per station, for instance, and where that can go to. Also look at the increase in the number of stations. Sequential looking at sequential growth is not the best way to look at it. Then on construction costs, what we see there is that overall one important thing is that a lot of the construction costs consist of labor costs. The civil works, the electricity works, building the stations. A lot of that is, I probably call it half of that is labor costs. Labor costs, we haven't seen increase that much. It could come in the future on the back of inflation, but right now it's been relatively limited. That is reducing the effect because indeed, we do see on the raw material prices, like wood, like steel, like other things, that is increasing, of course. It might also lag significantly into 2023 or even later, because for example, grid connections are regulated by tariffs in most of our markets. These tariffs are set by the Authority for Consumers and Markets in the Netherlands, for example. Those tariffs, they make up, let's say, 15% or so of the station construction cost on average across the countries. Such a grid tariff is regulated. It won't change this year, but it might change the year after. In that sense, you see sort of what's currently happening in the supply line. Some things have a very direct effect, either in delivery times or in price hikes. Some price changes in the longer term will be related to, as Victor says, like personnel, and more built-in price rises in that sense. The same for chargers. The chargers, that's very much an industry that's ramping up, and that's experienced a decrease in cost curve. On the charger side, we actually see charger manufacturers releasing newer generations of chargers with more utility at a lower price. Of course, chargers are also an important part of the construction cost. Maybe finally on construction costs is that what we are doing now is that we're building bigger stations. Our minimum setup was four chargers per station. Now, more and more we're building eight chargers per station. That's in the Netherlands, basically, the default now is eight chargers per station. In other countries, it's in between. That also leads to on a per charging station on efficiencies for two efficiencies. Does that answer your questions, Emmanuel? Yes, sure. Thank you. Perfect. Are there any other questions? We have no further questions on the line. We just finished in time, so that's a very good thing. Thank you very much. I would like to end the call with this, on this note. Thank you all for listening in. Thank you. Bye-bye.