Hello, and welcome to Fastned Trading Update Q3 2022. My name is Sarah, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. 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. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Michiel Langezaal, to begin today's conference. Thank you. Thank you, operator. I would like to say welcome to everyone on this call, as well as to our webcast viewers. The presentation used during this call is available at our investor relations website, which is ir.fastnedcharging.com. The picture on the title page of this presentation says a lot about what is keeping us very busy at this moment, a massive amount of construction projects. That is the theme of today. As we speak, there's roughly 20 construction sites open and another 20+ are planned to be opened in the coming months. Since the beginning of September, many of our teams have been working long hours and driving long distances to each and one of these construction sites. The result is that in the coming months before the year ends, we expect to be commissioning several new stations each week and surpass our target of more than 65 new stations built this year. 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. As mentioned, Victor van Dijk, our CFO, is also present in this call. Together, we will present this webcast. Today, I will elaborate on the highlights of the Q3 of 2022, and we'll talk you through some market developments that are relevant to Fastned. Of course, I will give you an update on our progress. Victor will take you through the financial results of the past quarter and elaborate on the developments on the electricity markets, which continue to be turbulent, as you know. We intend to take 1 hour for this call, including Q&A, and it ends at 12:00 noon. Slide four, please. Looking back at the last quarter, we continue to see great momentum in the electric vehicle market. More electric cars means more charging demand, and it therefore has a direct impact on Fastned's top line. As a consequence, revenue more than tripled compared to last year, and the annualized revenue run rate in Q3 came in above EUR 40 million. Fastned again captured a lot of the market growth. This summer has also been momentous for the charging industry in several ways. Charging prices changed significantly for the first time ever. This as a consequence of the price surges on the electricity markets. The charging industry got to know much more about price elasticity and how crucial the infrastructure is to its users. Important as well, it showed how price leaders and laggards acted on changing prices. In the first months of this year, we maintained as much as possible a stable price, which supported us in winning new locations. For example, in tenders whereby governments value price stability. We accepted a slightly lower margin for the time being and continued our focus on acquiring locations. Over the summer, the price, the energy price surged to levels that were affecting margins to a point that it could start hampering a healthy business case. Building stations without a healthy business case would hurt our mission, and therefore, we decided that we needed to change gears. Fastned is agile and can move fast, and we started implementing price changes on a monthly basis. This approach and our position in the market makes us a price leader. Furthermore, it allowed us to learn more about the price elasticity of charging, or as some investors have also asked, is a fast charging company an infrastructure type of investment? Based on what we knew and know now, this should be answered with yes. Also, from an operational perspective, these regular price changes really changed the way the industry operated until then. We even had MSP platforms complaining that they were not able to cope with such regular updates. Within only a few months into this new territory, we can say that taught us a lot. Charging at great locations is very price inelastic. We see basically no impact on volumes, which we tested by raising prices earlier than some competitors. Our customers didn't go to the competition or stop driving. While some feared the risk of the big oil majors or utilities to absorb negative margins, the opposite happened. Step by step, they followed Fastned and other price leaders. Let's now quickly run through the other highlights. Revenue related to charging is up by 217% versus Q3 2021, reaching EUR 10 million. Only 68 percentage points of this revenue growth is related to the price increases in the quarter, showing that Fastned continues to capture market growth. Important to mention, it is capturing more market growth than others when one compares our growth to the BEV stock growth. Network utilization increased from 8.3% in the Q3 of last year to 10.8% in the Q3 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 Q3 this year is even higher at 14%. Slide five, please. When looking at the share and number of electric cars sold in each of our markets, I would like to mention the following. About the percentages, the share of electric cars among new cars sold is increasing in all Fastned's markets. It is exciting to see markets like France and Germany develop. Last year, these would in most months hover at around 10% of new cars sold being electric. This year, there are months approaching the 20% landmark, and the Netherlands continues to lead the pack by about a year or more. At a more macro level, and in relation to the current energy crisis, the following two things are important. Because of this crisis, the EU is now more committed than ever to energy independence and to accelerate the transition to green economy based on electrification. On the other hand, we also see messages in the media suggesting that driving a petrol car will be cheaper than an electric car, given the current high electricity prices. This is definitely something we see very different. From a total cost of ownership perspective, an electric car continues to be cheaper. Continues to be a cheaper alternative, and the difference will, in the coming years, only get bigger. Electric cars are year on year becoming cheaper. They are cheaper to keep due to lower taxation, cheaper to maintain, and they last longer. Last but not least, residual values for electric cars are becoming more solid than those of petrol cars. Even if you take all of this out of the equation, we believe it's a short-sighted view as the medium and long-term outlook on electricity prices is still significantly below petrol prices. All in all, we continue to be bullish on the number of electric cars we will see around in the coming years. For the short term, order books are filled and demand for electric cars is, in many cases, higher than OEM production capacity, and many OEMs are communicating to be sold out for the season. Slide six, please. As we mentioned when we kicked off today's meeting, today is about building stations. Our construction team is now on its year-end rally, working relentlessly to deliver on our target of 65 new stations delivered into operation in 2022. Given the somewhat slower build pace of the last months, which include the summer holiday season, the question whether or not we would be able to attain our goal for this year is a valid one. Therefore, I thought it would be worthwhile to show you this slide with all the projects currently underway, as well as those still starting this year and all plans to be opened before year-end. In total, we are talking about 21 stations under construction at the moment, which are expected to be opened in several weeks from now. In the coming two months, more than 20 new construction sites will be opened, and all these stations are planned to be finished and opened up for business before the year-end as well. In total, we are looking at more than 46 new stations planned to be added to our network in the Q4. Given that there are always risks with regard to planning and construction projects, we don't expect we will be able to open all of these projects before the ends. But G Iven that we've opened 29 stations up until the end of this quarter, we are confident that we will surpass the 65 stations as planned for. This ambitious and almost production-like planning is possible, thanks to the capabilities and experience in designing and building fast charging stations we developed over the last decade. What we build and how we build is to a large extent standardized. This allows us to start construction in week one and commission an average station in week three or four, depending on the location and the size of the station. To conclude, before year-end, Fastned is going to make an end to the situation in the north of France being a charging desert. This includes several really large stations, such as those two just north of Paris on the Sanef network that are both having no less than 16 chargers, each delivering up to 300 kW. This is what I'm very, very proud of, and something I think our team can be very proud of. This is what delivering on our mission looks like. Slide seven, please. Next to building stations, we have also been adding lots and lots of chargers to our existing stations over the past several years. We add these chargers when the projected charging demand on the location leads to a utilization that is so high that the customer experience could start to be affected. One of such locations is Limburg Zuid, on the route from Cologne to Frankfurt. We opened this location in 2018 with two 175 kW HPCs and one 50 kW charger. At the time, the best and fastest chargers on the market, in a setup that would allow all electric cars to charge. In the summer of 2020, the station got an upgrade, replacing the 175 kW chargers with four chargers capable of delivering up to 300 kW, more than doubling the capacity of the station. The utilization of the station continued to grow. Even higher power than before and more charging positions next to a great Italian restaurant attracted even more customers. Logically, we are very happy with such great utilization, but even better is helping out even more customers. With utilization last year in the high 20% figures and on some days with holiday traffic towards 50% with waiting lines, we knew we needed to take action. This in order to be able to continue to support all customers coming to our site. This is why our team decided to further expand Limburg Zuid this year. Last month, the remaining four available charging positions have been equipped with 300-kW chargers. Over the coming months, the station will get another four additional 300-kW charging positions, in total, roughly tripling the charging capacity. The Limburg Zuid example shows the success of the Fastned charging concept and why it's so highly valued. We ensure that stations have several high-speed chargers at minimum. Great locations provide a natural charging demand for infrastructure that works. On top of that, a great concept attracts traffic. We build large and often well upgradable and expandable charging stations on such locations. When traffic increases, we can continue to cater to the growing demand by adding chargers. The site is designed and built for purpose. Fastned is managed like a tech company, and our experience and data capabilities allows us to manage timely upgrades. Knowing when to upgrade the station is absolutely key. If we did not take the decision to upgrade Limburg Zuid last year, we would have started saying no to customers soon. Slide eight, please. As you can imagine, I quickly wanted to show you what this will look like. Here you can see why Fastned scores best in class on Google location reviews. Last week, I read in a newspaper about a journalist who used a Volvo C40 to drive to the South of France with a caravan, and he was complaining about the hassle of charging. Every time decoupling the trailer and then finding out the charger is not working, so he needed to drive elsewhere or maneuver to another charger on the same station. With Fastned, he could just have spared the hassle. No decoupling and chargers that always work. This is what all proper motorway charging stations should look like. About the picture. As mentioned, in the coming months, we're going to expand the canopy at Limburg Zuid, as well as installing the additional chargers. This will bring the station to a total of 12 chargers, all capable of delivering up to 300 kW. As utilization increases in the future, Fastned will be able to further expand this station to bring it to a total of 16 chargers, a huge station capable of serving hundreds of customers per day. On that note, I would now like to hand you over to Victor van Dijk, our CFO, for the financial review of the quarter. Thank you, Michiel, and welcome all. Slide nine, please. Slide nine, please. I'll take you through our Q3 trading update financials. I'll start with the station economics on this slide and discuss the effect of price increases on volumes and gross margin in more detail on the following slides. Annualized megawatt-hour sold per average station grew very, very strongly again. At +88% year-over-year, it nearly doubled. The main driver of this is an increase in electric vehicle fleet penetration, followed by a recovery from COVID year-over-year, and lastly, by an increase in fast charging in the charging mix of newer electric vehicle adopters. Importantly, this volume increase was achieved despite our retail price being more than 40% higher than a year ago. I'll discuss that in more detail later. Second point of notice on this slide is that the representative top five station sales were over one GWh annualized for the first time ever, which is a great result. Again, this station is a top five station because it is located on a motorway with more than 90,000 daily general traffic versus 30,000 on our average location. Meaning three to four times more electric vehicles passing by than at our average station. This means that when electric vehicle fleet penetration three to four folds, we expect also our average station to reach these sales numbers, which is obviously very promising. Again, high traffic drives sales growth. Third point of notice on the slide is that the time-based utilization for this station, this top five station, was 31% on average throughout September. This is for a drive-through station with six chargers. We saw no meaningful congestion at the station and the customer experience was unhampered by the high utilization. This makes us increasingly comfortable that we will be able to achieve an average utilization of 30% across the network, especially when stations are larger than six chargers. Larger stations allow for more utilization. Note that our drive-through concept is key in achieving these utilization numbers. We expect to be able to achieve higher utilization numbers than others in the industry, as many parties still mostly choose for parking bay charging, which reduces utilization potential in our view. This especially when charging times shorten in the future due to higher charge speeds, leading to more maneuvering time relative to charge time. Concluding, drive-through stations, in our view, will allow for higher utilization. Next slide, please. We have increased our retail prices considerably. Question is, how does it affect our sales volume? The short answer is, it hasn't. We increased our Dutch retail price from EUR 0.62 per kWh at the start of the quarter to EUR 0.83 per kWh at the end of the quarter, an increase of about a third. Note that public slow charging prices were still at around EUR 0.40 in this period, and home charging was somewhere between EUR 0.45 to over EUR 1 per kWh in the Netherlands. The public slow charging was considerably cheaper than Fastned's pricing, about 50% cheaper. We assess the impact of the price increases on our volumes from a number of different angles, including number of sessions per customer, session sizes, performance versus local competition, and capture rates. Out of all of this, we were not able to detect a negative effect on sales volumes. This, in our view, confirms the infrastructure-like nature of our business. Our business is high traffic routes fast charging. We also think this nature is amplified for fast charging businesses with very high customer satisfaction, like Fastned. Next slide, please. Slide eleven. On energy prices. We know that energy prices are spiking currently. What is important, however, is that any impact on our margin has a limited impact on our investment case, as the vast majority of our volumes is several years ahead of us. We, as well as the market, expect energy prices to decrease again in the near to medium term. This is what's shown in the left graph. Our gross margin in Q3 came in at EUR 0.31 per kWh and was affected by a time lag effect in putting through energy, increasing energy prices. As we increase or decrease our prices on a monthly basis based on the then prevailing energy price, an increasing energy price environment will have a negative effect on realized margins. A decreasing energy price environment will cause the opposite. Importantly, our September margin was back at EUR 0.41 per kWh, and our last two weeks margins were higher than that due to lower market energy prices. As Michiel already said, we will decrease our prices again if energy prices allow for it. That concludes my part of the presentation. Next slide, please. Yeah. Slide twelve. To complete our presentation, I would like to reiterate our 2022 targets and express my gratitude to our teams currently working hard on delivering the many stations that we discussed in this call into operation. Slide 13, please. This finalizes our presentation. I would like to thank you all for listening and now hand the word back to the operator for questions. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question or make a contribution on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star two. Please ensure your lines are unmuted locally as you will be advised when to ask a question. The first question comes from the line of Emmanuel Carlier from Kempen. Go ahead. Yes. Hi. Good morning, all. Thanks for taking my questions. I will do it one by one. I have two questions on the network expansion first. I'm just wondering why you are so confident that you can realize more than 65 operational stations because some of the things you don't control, like the grid connection, et cetera. I'm just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on what is driving the conviction. Yeah. Shall I just do them one by one, Emmanuel? Yes, I think that's easiest. Yeah. Makes it maybe easier. Yeah, I think about expansion on network. If you look at that, in the end, what we're looking at is the planning of construction. All these works that we've shown in the presentation, that is projects that are contracted, projects that, yeah, where the civil work contract will basically start works next week or a couple of weeks from now in the planning. We have gotten confirmation from the grid company that that cable will be laid in the coming weeks, and the transformers will be delivered in the coming weeks, and/or it is already on site. Many of the sites actually already have a transformer and a cable connected to the grid. That is, of course, the works that we've been so busy with, let's say, over the summer in Q1, Q2. It's really a consequence of all the scaling up to get to this level. Okay. Understood. That's helpful. Thank you. It's really in this sense, a pragmatic look of it. It's what the works are. Yeah. Okay. The second question on network expansion is on the stations acquired. In Q1, you had a lot of stations acquired, but in Q2 and Q3, you only had three. I just want to check if this is driven by just having less tenders, or have you won less tenders the last two quarters? On tenders, the answer is very simple. We saw the result coming into our books of the tenders in France in Q1. Currently, there is basically no serious volume in tenders. That wouldn't allow for any big results in that sense. Of course, there is a German Deutschlandnetz tender ongoing, but those results, yeah, I don't expect them to be in the books this year. We might see results late this year, but that would be yeah, that would be a very quick result from the German government. I don't expect that in that sense. Beyond that, there is basically no immediate tender outcomes at this time. There's of course a lot happening on the public affairs side and the shaping of tenders, but that will most likely happen and lead to tenders and results in the coming year. It's in that sense very much sort of a batch-oriented approach. On top of that, we see that decisions for lease contracts and things like that, it's very much year-end and before summer-driven. Basically, let's say in the H1 and the H2, people work on it, and before they close the half, then they finalize decisions on those. We expect significantly more like one-on-one deals to be signed in the coming quarter. Okay. Thank you. On the pricing strategy. You mentioned during the presentation that there was a limited, but even not really a negative impact from the higher prices on the volumes. Since September, we start to see electricity prices dropping and that even accelerated in October. I'm curious actually how you see the volume effect in September and especially October, because today, if you charge at home or you charge at a super fast charging station of Fastned, the gap has only increased. Yeah, maybe on that one, I think what you see is we see indeed wholesale prices dropping over the last weeks, maybe months. But what you also see is that home electricity prices you don't see that effect yet. I can't recall any message that home electricity prices went down. It makes sense because energy companies put that through often in a time span of weeks or months. At that, I definitely don't recognize what you're saying there. I think still home electricity prices are very much elevated. A lot of people are still at EUR 0.70 levels in the Netherlands, or and new contracts are even above EUR 1. You know, we don't see that. I think in terms of September volumes, if you look intra-quarter, September was really, really strong, especially in the Netherlands. Basically people returning from holidays and going to the office again and start driving. Their community can and charge more and more again. Also there we don't see, you know, we only see an acceleration in September. How should I be thinking in terms of pricing actually? Because I calculated the October margin, and I think the conclusion was that the gross profit per kWh I think was up towards 60, close to EUR 0.60, I think over the first week or something. Should I kind of assume that pricing will get adapted, but that there might be a one-month delay, just like we have seen in the upturn as well? I think in the end, we've seen in the last weeks, we've also seen sort of the discussions in the Dutch cabinet about you know, let's say the price cap for consumers, right? I think what you see there is that most parties debating these topics still accounts for an elevated price level and a significantly elevated price level over the winter period. What is currently happening, let's say in the first weeks of October, I think it's maybe a positive bump, but I think we should you know, we should not take that as a sort of a forward for the coming quarter. I think that's probably maybe what Victor's trying to say, I think. Okay. Understood. Does that give you an answer? At the same time, I think. Yeah, yeah. At the same time, I think, yeah, if this persists these low prices, yeah, then naturally we'll reduce our prices again. Okay. I have a final question, just a financial one. Maybe I did the calculation wrong, but the network operation costs looks to be lower in Q3 versus Q2. Is that correct? Or if not, it probably has to do with the revenues and the EBITDA that you provide purely on charging, and on top of that, you have some other revenues. The network operation costs, you mean in the station economic slide? Yeah, we simply take the, Yes. H1 costs there as proxy. That can't have changed versus H1. It is H1, right. Yeah. I'm just checking it. It's the same number, 49 and 68. Okay. Yeah. No, I will have a look at it, and I take it, we'll take it offline. Thank you. No worries. Any other questions, Emmanuel? No. That, that's it for me. Thanks a lot. Thanks. We go to the next question. Operator. Operator, can you look at the line? ABN for us. Hello, operator. Do you hear us? Are you in a call? Yeah. Okay. Please go ahead. Thank you. Please go ahead. I think we're missing our operator for a sec. Let's go. Yeah. This is Thijs Berkelder of ABN AMRO. Thanks. Very good. You hear me? Yeah. We hear you loud and clear. Go ahead. Very, very good. Just some clarity on what to expect for Q4. I would say opening stations at least 39 then in Q4, of which I've understood, let's say 37 with four chargers and two with 16 chargers, is in total, let's say 180 chargers. Next to that, what should we expect from extra chargers on existing stations in Q4? I don't know whether I have that data available here right now. I think roughly speaking, I think there is. You're saying, like, there's charging stations with four chargers and two with 16. That's what your calculation is, right? Yeah, because you said, two French stations will have 16 chargers. I then assume that all other stations have the standard four. No, there's already stations in there with more chargers, so the mix is gonna be higher. Yeah, on average, we're pushing towards that six or even higher. Yeah. Well, it's maybe what. On the number of additions. Yeah. That's because, let's say, last quarter, you primarily added in the Netherlands. In Q4, will you still be adding more chargers in the Netherlands? That's, by the way, also my second question. Looking at the Netherlands, average utilization over the past few quarters has been more or less steady at 12%. Looking at the potential of economic recession, what is your rollout planning for the Netherlands in the coming 12 months, roughly? Yeah. There's several stations being added in the Netherlands over the coming months. There's a significant amount of construction works in the Netherlands. I think compared to that, I think the number of added chargers to stations is not gonna be very significant. We are doing some projects, for example, the Limburg Zuid example that we mentioned, which will also lead to some reconfigurations in the Netherlands, but it's not gonna be massive in terms of numbers. We're really focused with the team on building these stations. Okay, very good. Next question is in Germany, especially there, we see utilization rates rising rapidly. Can you confirm that Germany now is also operationally EBITDA positive? We haven't published that, and You said the utilization rate of 8.5% that Yeah. -more or less should be the- Yeah. We haven't published that, to be honest. At this time in the quarter, in Q3, we don't have the full P&L available also internally. Actually, I can't confirm that. Yeah, I'm just thinking. Okay. No problem there. So far prices in France were far below European average. Can you maybe explain what you expect going forward from French retail prices in your network? Well, in basics, you can expect similar ways of working as in the other set of networks, because we see it as the same way of running our business. That said, there are some special regulations on French motorways. That's step one. Step two is that in France, we started with, let's say, a handful of stations. We built those nine stations and they were on a fixed energy contract for a period. We could just have lower prices there, and resume business for the time being. How that is continuing into the coming year, we will have to see. That is currently being contemplated. Let's say large Paris stations will be pricing at a more or less similar tariff as in rest of Europe. I think what we've said before, we will defend a margin that we think is healthy, right? Depending on how new electricity purchasing in France is done, that will affect the way we price these stations as well. Okay. Clear. So- Yeah. Do you see? It's about managing margin, I think. That's, I think, the key message here. Yeah. Do you see any risk that your retail prices will be capped by governments in one of your countries? On a temporary basis, there might be rules that we have to adhere to in France. In other countries, that is basically non-existent. In France, it's more a temporary thing. There is price adjustment mechanisms that basically delay this process. Okay. Clear. Thanks. Getting back to your operational EBITDA in Germany. In Q2 we were positive already. Nice. I can from there. Good to hear. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Thijs. Thijs, maybe I just got the data in because there's other people listening in as well. The average number of chargers in France that we're building on the stations there is a little bit above 7.5. It's even higher than the six. Nice. There's gonna be a lot of chargers at these stations. Thanks. Okay. Any other questions? Can we unmute or mute people automatically? Marc Hesselink, I think you're on the line from ING. Can you unmute yourself? Because, we would love to hear your questions, but we're missing an operator, I think, at the moment. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. That works. Perfect. This is what self-management works, right? Very good. Taking back control. Yeah. Save some cost there. Maybe, first, on the pricing strategy. Actually, the fact that you're highlighting that you see no effect on the volumes. My sort of thinking in the past was always that A, you had a sort of a soft target between something like EUR 0.40-EUR 0.45 gross profit per kilowatt hour. Given where you are today and actually that you don't see any impact on demand, why can you not take the opportunity and keep those margins higher for a while? Yeah, I think we're trying to achieve a number of things. We're trying to achieve our mission on accelerating the industry transition. With that, we want to have a pricing strategy that is both fair to the customer and also delivers a very healthy business case. That is our general strategy. I think it would be a bit short-sighted to try to milk that out, so to say, over the short term. I also think that business-wise, probably not the best strategy, because in the end, customers will understand what is going on and that would sort of transpire negatively on our image out there. I think right now we have a very, very positive image with the EV driver. I think that's also very, very worthwhile. In the end, we wanna have a fair pricing that also allows us to provide a healthy business case and expands the network. Yeah. The market. Okay. The long-term gross margin, gross profit per kWh, is that $0.40-$0.45, that's still the sort of number to calculate for the long term? Yeah. We haven't communicated that. That's the number we achieved in the past, indeed. Okay. Thanks. The second question is actually on inflation, given that you're building so many stations and extra chargers this quarter. Do you see a significant change in the CapEx per charge or the CapEx per station versus what it used to be? That's been going on for the last one to three years already. The raw material pricing decreases. We see that, of course. What you see is that basically our station cost is a combination of raw materials, but also labor. There's basically a lot of people working on those stations. If raw material prices increase by 30%, that doesn't mean our CapEx increases by the same amount. Overall, we've seen the effect of inflation is to the tune of 5%-10% on our total CapEx. One additional element is that we see in the charger costs. We actually see that that's more of a downward trend with the industry scaling up rapidly. Yeah. In the long term costs will probably go down on charging, so that also helps. Yeah, by and large, we see an effect of 5%-10% on our CapEx. Okay, thanks. No worries. Maybe. Sorry? Maybe to add, yeah, I think in the general markets, over the last weeks, months, we see raw material prices decreasing quite strongly again, so that at some stage should be a positive again. Okay. Thank you. Maybe something I've, I think we also discussed it in previous calls sometimes. The effect of having very large intraday volatility in energy prices, and given that you're such a large user of it, is it still something that could be part of your business plan to take advantage of that? To maybe add batteries to these stations to take that opportunity? I think there are definitely ways to take advantage of it. Of course that volatility today, I don't know whether you can count on it for years to come. I think that is one of the ways to look at with batteries. Basically anyone with a grid connection can put a battery down there, so that's not necessarily something we would have a big competitive advantage to. Battery is something we look at, but it's not something special for Fastned in that sense. I think what is important with these prices is as well that that volatility you could also pass it on to the customer, right? There might be a group that is interested in that. It allows you to manage price perception as well. People could, for example, get a happy hour in sort of around lunchtime in the weekends when the sun is up. These kind of things are things that we're looking at as well. There's various ways we can work with it. That said, we also see that stable prices, so any form of way of using a network that is stable pricing that is seen as very, very important by toll road operators, government. It will be a combination of these things. It's maybe not a complete answer, but it's more like a bit of color on the topic. Does that make sense? Yeah. Sure. Final question is actually on the funding needs that you earlier elaborated on, the EUR 50 million-EUR 75 million. Given that today, probably both equity and debt markets are not as open as they used to be. What is your thinking around it? I mean, in the past when there was not funding, you scaled down the CapEx plans for a while, so that you can manage it for a longer time. Do you already thinking about contingency if this situation is the case for longer? Yeah. I think you always have scenarios. But I think right now we're focused on filling out that funding need. I think the answer there hasn't changed. We're looking at various options, various combinations of options, potentially, and various timelines. Yeah, I don't think I can be more specific than that. Of course, we're looking to fund this EUR 50 million-EUR 75 million and keep up the build pace. Like communicated before, we're funded until more than 300 stations, and we're busy building those stations. That yeah, that keeps us busy for quite some time still. Okay. Very clear. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Marc. Thanks, Marc. Yeah. It could be that there's a question from ABN on the line still. Thijs, do you still have a question? Do I get that correctly? Yes, there is a line open from ABN again. Please go ahead. Thank you. Thijs Berkelder, ABN AMRO, ODDO BHF. Developing your retail offering in Belgium, can you update us on the progress? Yeah, we're working on that. We're scaling up the team. We are working with partners on that. The plan is in that sense that Fastned will not have people on these sites. It will be operated by a third party. I think, by and large, we're looking at sort of a portfolio of ways to get access to more sites, right? If you look at finding sites and you want to have a minimum, there have to be amenities, then you're basically not allowing yourself to look at sites that don't have amenities. That is why we're looking at this. We are developing ways to build and operate shops with partners. We also do this in cooperation with other parties. For example, in the U.K., we work with parties like Starbucks, and others, where we develop sites in conjunction with them. Yeah, I don't know whether that's what you're looking for, Thijs? Yeah. To give you. Yeah. In the end, it's of course all about what kind of extra gross profit per kWh you expect to make, thanks to a decent toilet and retail offering. Yeah. I think in that sense, at the moment, we're really working on piloting sort of this first shop. That is really our goal for the coming period. Yeah, building that, getting it into operation, learning from it, and then sort of based on those learnings, optimize and scale. That's one thing. On the other hand, in parallel, we don't wanna only do it ourselves, right? with those partners. We don't wanna only do it under the Fastned brand because we think scaling up the number of sites that we add to our network is more important than having always a Fastned-branded solution. Yeah. Okay. That's clear. I think the in that sense, if you're looking for, like, what does it do to the business model? I think the most important thing is that we find more sites and that we own these sites, deliver a better customer experience so that's yeah the best place to go to for people. Yeah. Thanks. Cool. Yeah, any other questions on the line? Maybe back to the operator, because I think she's online again. Yes. The next question comes from the line of Hans Pluijgers from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes. Morning, gentlemen. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Hi, Hans. Okay, morning. Yeah, most questions have already been asked, but one question is that, looking at your SG&A, you have been expanding your employee base quite significantly. Again, in Q3, how should we look at, let's say, the cost for expansion, especially the station expansion cost? Could you give maybe some feeling on how we should model that in the near future for, let's say, for this year and probably also into next year? Could you give some feeling on that? Do you have, let's say, more hiring plans or significant hiring plans in the coming months, quarters? Yeah. We still have more hiring to do and more hiring in the pipeline. We're currently close to 150 people. Likely, we'll go towards the 200 level somewhere during next year. Yeah, that's headcount will increase. I think, yeah, last year we had per station built network development cost of EUR 154 thousand. I think what we're doing is, of course, increasing the build pace from 65 this year to 100 by 2024, like we communicated. At the same time, we're building up our organization. I think that the right level for that network development cost per station built will be around that level. It might be a bit higher, but not yeah, it will be in the same sort of tune. It's hard to put an exact figure on that, but. Maybe not cost related, but maybe sort of a bit of color from my side on the topic of team growth. I think it's very, very crucial at this moment in time to attract talent, to develop these locations, to find sites, to continue building on the backbone. Parties that can attract that talent and are able to put it to, yeah, to value. I think that is really what's key to deliver the growth in that market, in the end, to capture the growth. Because if you don't have these people, you just simply can't do it. Okay, thanks. One follow-up question also on the network expansion. Entering into new countries, anyway, let's say, news on that or visibility on deals, let's say, coming next year? Give maybe some feeling on that. We definitely have a visibility on a lot of deals in the current countries that we're operating in, so the six countries. That is also really what's high up on the priority list in our view, expanding out the network there. So that's what's worked on at the moment, with a lot of work to get that finalized with a lot of deals before the year end. If we look at sort of countries adjacent to the network, so let's say countries like Poland, Italy, that we said we're gonna investigate, that is really something we expect to materialize into tenders and things coming next year. That's just not going that quickly. Looking at competition for, let's say, tendering or let's say not directly tendering, but more or less for discussions on individual sites. Of course, all majors also stepping up their efforts and other players. How do you see the competitive landscape and that you're really gearing up to your competition increasing and on what, let's say, dynamics do they compete mainly? I think the answer there hasn't really changed from what we said in previous calls or during Charging Day. The competition is for the sites. I think that is very clear and that still is the case. I think, yeah, in the end, there is site owners that will simply go for an offer they have, for example, from an oil major that already delivers, petrol to their site. But we also see a certain percentage of location owners that actually evaluates the offers on the market, and then, searches for great charging concept. That is where we shine. In that sense, you also don't wanna win every deal. You wanna win deals on locations that have great amount of traffic that are large. You wanna put down a number of chargers that is delivering a relevant charging proposition, and you wanna be able to grow. Yeah, I think the message in that sense hasn't really changed that much. The market is still the same. There is competition, and that's for the sites. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Hans. Maybe it's 12:00 noon, but we had some problems with the call. I heard there's still a question from Berenberg. Yes. Axel, do you- The next question comes from Axel Stasse from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Good morning. Do you hear me? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. No more questions, actually. Everyone has answered my question. Thank you very much. Perfect. Well, then, great to hear. I think then, we came to the end of the call. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect your line.