Hello, welcome to the Fastned first half 2023 financial results. Please note, this call is being recorded. 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. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. 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 CEO Michiel Langezaal to begin today's conference. Please go ahead. 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 also available on our investor relations website, which is ir.fastnedcharging.com. To start with the title page, this is the station Baraque de Fraiture in the Belgian Ardennes. On the typical Black Saturdays with crazy summer traffic, there were serious waiting lines at our station. This station was commissioned just before summer started. Already it often appears in top five rankings, with hundreds of visitors each day. For years, people have asked me how we were planning to make money while looking at the handful of early adopters making use of our stations. Well, this brings me to the theme of today. For the first time in our history, Fastned is reporting positive underlying company EBITDA. As you can imagine, this is something I'm extremely proud of and an important milestone for me personally. When people ask me when Fastned would start earning money, I've always said, "It makes no sense to build a gas station for a few hundred gas cars in the country. The same is true for a charging station." We are here for the long run, supporting the millions of drivers that want to go electric. Moreover, it confirms that our strategy of cost efficiently building large and visible charging stations at high traffic locations is paying off. In the same way that winning prizes for the best charging network in several countries confirms our great customer experience and concept. We've entered the phase of development of our company, whereby our earnings step by step, are starting to fund a larger portion of the CapEx needed to build out our charging network. Fastned is not anymore only providing freedom to electric drivers, but also freedom to itself. Slide 2, please. With reference to the information provided in these slides and discussed during this call, please take note of the 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, is also present in this call. Together, we will present this webcast. Today, I will elaborate on the highlights of the first half of 2023. We will give you an update on the development of our business and touch upon the developments in the car and charging markets. After that, Victor will take over and take you through the top-line financial results for the first half of 2023, and as always, he will update you on our station metrics. At the end of this presentation, we will share our outlook on station openings and upgrades for this year. We intend to take 1 hour for this call, including Q&A, and end at 12:00 P.M. Slide 4, please. Next to reaching a massive profitability milestone, this first half of 2023, our growth continues to be stunning. Revenue is up by 108% compared to the same period of last year. We delivered 110% more electricity to electric drivers and grew the number of active customers by 84%. Considering that the stock of electric vehicles on the road grew by 32% in the same period, it is clear that we again outgrew the charging market by a very significant margin. Growing our network continues at pace. We built an additional 28 new stations in the first half of 2023, bringing the total to 272 charging stations by the end of the period. As always, we are ramping up towards year-end, and today I can report that this figure has already risen to 278 stations. Let's look at the pipeline of new locations. There were no outcomes of any large tenders during the first half of 2023. Therefore, we do not yet see a serious batch of locations being added to our pipeline. We've been gearing up our deal flow on private developments, and we're very proud to report that we acquired 20 additional new locations for the first half of 2023, bringing us very close to that magical number of 400 locations in our portfolio. This brings me to utilization. During the Q2 of 2023, our net- versus 10.1% in the same quarter of the previous year. This number logically goes up as a consequence of more people charging with us, while at the same time going down as a consequence of Fastned adding more chargers to its stations. It is also interesting to note the like-for-like utilization. In Q2 2023, this was 14.4% with respect to the 10.1% of Q2 2022. showing again the massive growth in number of customers visiting our stations, which in my opinion, is the more relevant business metric here. Before moving to the next slide, I'd like to come back to revenue growth for a second. It might seem repetitive to report again and again that we're outperforming the market. Some might even think it's boring, but I'm sure our investors find it interesting to see us outperform the market again and again. Note that the charging market in itself already is an exponentially growing market. Slide 5, please. In order to outgrow the market, we grow on two axes at the same time. One, we only do large fast charging stations. At our stations, we can welcome new customers and grow our revenue. For example, at the station, Baraque de Fraiture, I showed you on the title page, we can help a new car roughly every 3 minutes. Note, this is very different from parties that do chargers on parking lots, where parking is the deciding factor on dwell time, not charging. 2, we acquire new locations to build new stations and welcome even more customers in order to grow our revenue. This slide is about pursuing the second access, building more stations. I wanted to highlight 3 important drivers for network growth. In all countries we operate in. In countries we have on the radar with our new markets team, we work with authorities on policy reform. Firstly, we make them understand the importance of creating a dense, fast-charging network to drive the transition to electric mobility. The best way to do that is to issue concessions for large plots of land along high traffic roads to charging companies, so that the market can build this infrastructure. Second, is about competition and market access. Building charging stations isn't and shouldn't be the privilege of petrol stations. Every company that wants to contribute to the energy transition should be able to compete for these new permissions to sell charging services. Let's make sure that the best and most ambitious companies build our charging infrastructure. Allowing petrol stations to just add fast chargers would cancel out any competition. Moreover, it will put the transition to electric mobility fully in the hands of those parties that have a significant business interest to slow it down. That's why for years, we've been advocating for public tender procedures, fair competition, and equal market access for all players to these plots of land. It's paying off. Let me mention a few important recent developments. Early in the year, the European Commission solidified its infrastructure targets in the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation, AFIR. It requires member states to ensure that there will be a serious charging station, at least at every 60 kilometers along their motorways. This is regulation that paves the way for tenders. Tenders in which Fastned can participate, which will drive our network expansion in many of our target countries. Another example is Italy. The input of the market, including our input, has led the regulator to publish new policies for road operators, requiring separate tenders for charging infrastructure independent from petrol concessions. This new regulation opens up the market and gives us the opportunity to show our great concept. If needed, we do not shy away from reaching out to independent courts in cases where policy reform is slow or access to the charging market is not open and competitive. In the first half of this year, we've seen quite some media attention for the case that we filed against Autobahn GmbH, the German road operator and a subsidiary of the German state. We are of the opinion that the issuance of concessions to build large charging stations is a material extension of the existing concessions that the German state issued to the later privatized company, Tank & Rast. Competition laws, in our view, do not allow for such very material extensions to happen without consulting the market first and allowing competitive bids to be made. Luckily, we are not the only ones willing to speak up. Together with Tesla, we have voiced these concerns in court. Courts have now referred the case to the European Court of Justice. This could support German authorities considering other routes to develop the needed charging infrastructure and open up tenders for these locations. I would like to mention Denmark, where we recently won our first set of locations, making our entry in country number 7, with 3 charging stations on high traffic corridors. As always, we ranked very high on quality, supporting an overall winning score for this tender. During earlier calls, we've updated you on the status of 2 important tenders in Germany, the Deutschlandnetz tenders. As you know, we see these tenders as important developments for the charging market and potentially interesting for Fastned as well.... The tender for 200 sites on the motorway would provide the winning charging companies an operate and maintain contract for 1 of the 6 batches of locations. It is noted that the exposure of these concessions to the charging market is marginal, as parties are remunerated only with a small percentage of revenue. The tender for 900 locations is primarily a financing scheme to build charging stations in search areas that the government defined earlier. That said, it could offer an interesting opportunity for Fastned. The central government will be allotting concessions to charging companies, and as a consequence, local authorities will potentially be more supportive to swiftly provide the winning party with a location in their community to build that charging infrastructure. Logically, we'll update you in more detail when we can. Slide 6, please. After having talked a lot about growing our network, I wanted to spend a bit of time on what we do to make people choose our stations instead of those from others, because this is another way for us to outgrow the market. I want to give you three examples that form an important part of the work we do to continue to make sure Fastned is the best charging concept out there. We make our own software and run our network on our own back end. For many EV drivers, their charging experience starts when navigating to their destination and deciding where to charge on route. This is why we are incredibly proud to announce that the Fastned app is now also available on Apple CarPlay, making it safe and easy for EV drivers to use our app and navigate to our stations. EV drivers love this. Therefore it also supports our growth. Second example, we pick up the phone ourselves, something that is unique in the charging industry. In this way, we can learn from our customers experiencing bottlenecks while charging. Our customer support team is therefore also closely connected to our technical teams, operating our stations and building our software. This ensures a swift improvement process. Again, in H1, we have continued to hire, train, and expand our in-house customer support team. This team needs to scale along with the growth of our business. Hiring and training these people takes time and effort, but we believe that this is key to maintaining a leading concept. Note that many charging networks have outsourced customer support. They don't need to worry about scaling and picking up the phone. As a consequence, they also get industry average support. It is that simple. Last but not least, I want to mention our efforts on field operations. Here we take the same approach as with the previous topic of customer support. We continue to hire and train our own teams, because well-trained engineers are scarce and are key to deliver a stunning network uptime. Again, the opposite of what many other parties do. Again and again, we hear from customers that they choose Fastned because of quality and reliability. That is why we continue to focus on training the muscles that are needed to deliver on that. Which brings me to talk about electric car sales. Slide seven, please. For the first time in history, an electric car tops the world rankings of new cars sold. In the first half of 2023, the Tesla Model Y was the best-sold car in the world, outselling the Toyota Corolla that for years topped the rankings. This is a clear sign of the transition to electric cars accelerating. When we look at EVs sold as a percentage of all new cars in the markets we operate in, EVs are up again in all of our markets. The Netherlands is topping the ranks, with almost every third new car sold being electric. The European average is 15%, which, when looking at the historical figures, gives the Netherlands roughly a 3-year head start. With the transition accelerating, this gap is closing quickly. It is these car sales that drive our revenue growth. More cars on the road need more kilowatt-hours to drive around, giving us the opportunity to deliver that charging need. Let's look a little deeper into the EV market, beyond just these sales figures. Slide 8, please. There are 3 fundamental drivers for a rapid transition to electric vehicles. 1, consumers preferring electric over fossil cars because of the things like ease of use, supporting the battle against climate change, and total cost of ownership. 2, public policy supporting the choice for clean over polluting fossil vehicles. 3, as battery prices are coming down, the purchase price of electric cars is moving towards and surpassing price parity with petrol cars. Electric cars will, in due time, be cheaper to buy than fossil cars. During the first half of this year, we again have seen very positive developments on each of these drivers. The European Commission solidified its 2035 target to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines. We continue to see more attractive EV models entering the market at more competitive prices, driving sales, with a great example being the Tesla Model Y. Just look at the graph showing the price point for the Tesla Model Y in comparison to its fossil counterparts on the right side of the slide here. Tesla has invested heavily in lowering the cost price of batteries, enabling them to make such a competitive offering. On the bottom right side, the recently launched Volvo EX30, a car sitting on the platform developed together with Geely. Here you can clearly see the benefit Geely has from having invested in scaling up the production of electric cars and their batteries. The link to the Chinese desire for rapid electrification of their car park is well visible in this example as well. You might ask, Michiel, have you then not read the news about the challenges VW and other car makers are facing with filling their order books at the moment? Yes, I have, but I do think it is important to read those news articles in the right context. In my view, that context is, is the challenge they face a consequence of a slowdown of EV sales, as some of the articles are suggesting? Or is it about consumers choosing a different brand? As I said, Tesla was a newcomer that invested early on in the production of capacity for batteries, which today enables them to offer cars very competitively. Just as importantly, they're they revolutionized the user experience in a car with their touchscreen approach. The Chinese players that are now entering the European market have similar offerings, and we're going to see much more of that, looking at the success of the Tesla Model Y. This could very well pose a serious challenge to EU legacy car makers that are late with their investments in making cheap batteries and are plagued with software issues. For Fastned, this development and the outcry of the European car industry is only positive, or maybe even better, it is the perfect scenario for acceleration, because this race for the consumer drives the industry as a whole. To bring to the market, EVs that are even better at better prices, this drives sales and our sales, and we don't care whether our customers drive cars made in China or Germany. Lastly, I would like to make a comment on messages that sometimes appear in politics and media about Tesla only being available for the rich, whereby a Tesla is then the acronym for a desirable EV. Last decade, these people were correct, and that is how most transitions driven by technology innovation go. Products are introduced at higher prices in the premium segments. Scale drives down costs, and offerings become available in lower price segments. A few minutes ago, I mentioned the Tesla Model Y being the best-selling car worldwide. This is in the C or D car segment, and it is a mid to high-end offering in the segment. By the way, please go to slide 9, please. 5 years before that, it was the Tesla Model S and Model X trumping the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW in the premium large car segment. With the industry accelerating, it will not take 5 years, but significantly less, to see a very competitive EV offering in the A and B car segments. That could be cars like the Volkswagen ID.2, the Fiat Grande Panda from Stellantis, or take a look at these stunning Renault 4 and 5 concepts, all aimed at that magical EUR 2,000, EUR 20,000 introductory price. I haven't even talked about the Chinese entrants then. All in all, for those who are wondering when electric car makers have something interesting to offer, for example, for the typical French car owner in the countryside, I want to say that might be sooner than you think. Exponential change is difficult for the brain to imagine, and I'm convinced that by 2025, new electric cars in all segments will be available in abundance, and in 2030, that might well be the case for second-hand EVs as well. Fastned is building the infrastructure that will allow people to make that switch to owning an EV, while at the same time it benefits from the rapidly accelerating switch to electric cars. That's why I found it important to provide you on our outlook on how cost curves of batteries and battery prices will drive this shift and how I expect it to develop. On that note, I would like to hand you over to Victor van Dijk, our CFO, for a look at the station metrics and our financials. Victor, go ahead. Thank you, Michiel. Let me take a wider perspective first. On this slide, you see the top 10 fast charging companies in the six countries Fastned is active in, ranked by overall sales. This is based on aggregated data, Tesla data are estimates, because Tesla doesn't share their data with these aggregators. Fastned has one of the highest overall sales, second only to Tesla. Perhaps more importantly, we have one of the highest sales per location. We currently have, on average, more than 30 sessions per station per day, while many others have less than 10 sessions, sometimes far less. Our high sales per location is driven by having a great concept and targeting high traffic growth only. High traffic growths lead to a high natural demand. Our stations have on average 30,000 cars driving by, while a supermarket or a McDonald's has around 1,000 customers, leading to less natural demand for charging on their parking lots. Here you can see that others who also target highways, like IONITY and GRIDSERVE in the UK, also have high or medium sales per location. In contrast, putting chargers on parking lots of retailers or adding a couple of chargers to a petrol station on or off highway, leads to low sales per location. Why is that important? High natural demand on a location leads to the ability to invest in a large charging station, in turn, leading to a high customer satisfaction and utility. Customers like big stations. This leads again to a higher demand, a positive spiral. Large charging stations lead to cost and utilization efficiencies, and therefore lead to a great business case. A great and efficient concept deployed on high traffic locations leads to a great business case, which we'll talk about next. Looking at station economics, we see strong sales growth. We have on average 30,000 cars driving by our stations, and more and more of those become fully electric, leading to sales growth. Sales per station grew by 43% year-over-year. With that, we outgrew the BEV fleet penetration growth of 34% year-over-year. Note that quarter-over-quarter sales per location, so Q1 to Q2, was negative, and this is natural and due to seasonality. Normalized for general market growth, charging demand in the winter is 20%-30% higher than in the summer, because cold weather leads to more consumption. For instance, in the Netherlands, quarter-on-quarter station sales growth was -6%, while the BEV fleet grew by 9%, a 15% difference. This difference can be attributed to the 20%-30% lower demand in the summer. Also means that most of our growth is in the second half of the year, and this is a very usual pattern for us, with overall first half revenues being 35%-40% of total year revenues over the last couple of years. We've also had a strong growth margin per kilowatt-hour increase, and that is driven by the electricity prices normalizing. We also increased our station capacity by increasing the number of chargers per station by 24% year-on-year. This is important to cater for demand increase, with BEV fleet penetration expected to double until-- more than double until 2026, and sevenfold until 2030 in our markets. Like-for-like utilization, so utilization, if we would have not enlarged our existing stations, was 14.4%. Capacity increase obviously also leads to operating costs per station to grow, as you see. All of this leads to operational EBITDA per station more than doubling to EUR 1,000, to EUR 80,000 annualized per station, and it leads to an operational EBITDA margin of more than 40%, already at our 2025 targets. Next slide, please. The strong growth in operational EBITDA leads to the underlying company EBITDA to be positive for the first time in our history, a very important milestone. In the end, our sales and profitability are driven by electric vehicle fleet growth. We've come at a point in the electric vehicle transition, where there's a large demand for fast charging, and where fast charging, if done well, produces a positive EBITDA. This is at a point in the transition, where still only 3% of the vehicles are fully electric, which in itself is a low number, but this number is expected to double in the coming few, few years and sevenfold by 2030. This will drive strong revenue and profitability growth for Fastned. Our cost growth has always been considerably lower than revenue growth. Therefore, we expect EBITDA to continue to expand from this point onwards. Turning to funding, our current funding allows us to build to more than 400 stations operational, which we expect to have in 2025. On cash flow, we've also reached another important milestone, with operating cash flow being positive for the first time in our history in the Q2 of this year. This allows us to start self-funding part of our capital expenditure. Next slide. Yeah, thanks, Victor, for this drill down on the financials. Let's have a quick look before we get into Q&A on the guidance we have provided with the Q1 presentation. We are well underway with our construction activities. We want to communicate that from all we see today, we are well on track to deliver on these targets. Which brings me to the next slide, finalizing our presentation. I would like to thank you all for listening, and I hand the word back to the operator for questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question from the queue again, please press star two. Again, that is star 1 for your questions today. Our first questioner today is David Kerstens from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for the presentation. Congrats on turning EBITDA positive. I've got 3 questions, please. First, on your operational EBITDA margin target of at least 40% for 2025, you said you already realized that in the first half of this year. How do you see this develop in coming years? What is offsetting the operational leverage in your business model to remain at this at least 40%? You're guiding for somewhat higher operating cost per station. Are there any other factors that we should take into account there going forward? The second question is around similar question around the network expansion cost per station. They seemed relatively stable in the first half of the year. Is that correct? How do you see the development of this cost item for the full year after you have recently expanded the teams? My final question is on the securing of new locations. You said 20 in the first half, I think 7 in the Q2. Is that at the right pace? With regards to the court case with Tesla against Tank & Rast in Germany, when do you expect more clarity from the European Court of Justice, and how could that impact the securing of locations going forward? Thank you very much. Let me start with, with a couple of those questions. Then I think we wanted to mention that we'll do two questions for analysts, because we have a lot of analysts. We'll grant you three, David. Thank you. Good morning, by the way. Operational EBITDA margin, indeed, we're at our 2025 target. Yeah, we, we wanna exert some, some prudence in that target, huh? Of course, there's operational leverage, so that, that will have a positive effect on, on operational EBITDA margin. With sales continuing to grow, that, that drives this, this margin upwards. At the same time, we, we have had a very good growth margin over the last half year, and we want to be prudent in our margin expectations towards 2025. I think that's the, yeah, that's, that's the simple answer there. Second question on network development, network expansion costs per station. I think, I'm not sure how you compare it, but I think, what we see is that, that, that will, on a per station basis, will increase, and that's also what we've indicated earlier. That is, simply because, we're ramping up our, private location, expansion, which, comes in, in, in smaller batches than the tenders, and so. Unloaded as well, huh? You first need to hire the people, and the results come a bit later. Yeah. That, so we, we expect actually, year-on-year, an increase on network development, network expansion costs per, per station build. Roughly by how much? Can you give an indication how much that cost item will increase per station? Yeah, we, we haven't given guidance on that before, and, yeah, at this stage, it, I think, yeah, to me, it's difficult to, to give that to give that indication. I think if you look at it, if you look at on network expansion costs on an absolute basis, the, the growth in, in that sense is, is relatively, yeah, linear in that sense, if you understand what I mean. It doesn't follow revenue line. It doesn't follow revenue line. It's... Yeah, we haven't given guidance on that, and I don't want to do that right now, or being too, too specific about. I hope that's okay. Maybe, maybe then to your third question, I think looking at the pace, and so Victor already said we're ramping up our private developments. Logically, then first you need to invest, find a team and, and, and get that going. We're very happy to, to, to see those 20 new sites being added to the pipeline. Next to that, we expect also a large portion of the, the growth of our pipeline to come from, from larger tenders with, with authorities, but they come in batches.... I think we're very happy to see that pace ramping up. We haven't, let's say, seen the full result of, of the ramp-up of that team yet. We want to get that to, to a base of over 100 sites per year, combined. And we're working towards that, but that's needed to get in the end to that target of 1,000 stations in the long run. When we look at the court case, you were asking, like, what do you expect there? It's very difficult to say. I think, I think one is, what we do know is that the European Court of Justice is not very quick. Generally speaking, they take a year, maybe even two years to provide feedback. What that will mean for the outcome of, let's say, the problem why we went to, to courts, is really to be seen. It could very well be that, that the German government knows this timeline as well and, and could, yeah, propose other ways to resolve the situation. There's various ways in, in, yeah, that they can tackle this. I think it's, it's duly noted that the European Court of Justice is not a very quick decision maker. Does that give you some answers to these questions? Yes. Thank you very much. Cool. Any other questions? Thank you. Yes, we're moving on to our next question from Nikita Lalwani of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, Michiel. Good morning, Victor. Thank you for taking my question. First of all, congrats for your positive underlying EBITDA. I think it is great for your business case. I have two questions, please. My first question is around your pricing policy. I mean, we appreciate your increase in gross margin. One of your closest competitor now lowered its prices for standard chargers yesterday in Germany and France, and is now on the same level like you guys. Do you intend to decrease your prices also to regain your competitive power, or what do you see there? Indeed, IONITY decreased their prices, actually, to exactly our level. I take that as a compliment. That they referred it to our level, so that currently we act as a reference in the markets. I think IONITY was a company that had one pricing EUR 0.79, throughout the last couple of years and didn't change their pricing at all. I think it was about to change, and they changed it to our level and we don't expect that to have a significant impact on our sales. If you look right now at the main driver for customers, choosing a charging station is where my battery is empty, what is the closest charging station? Then, then do I like the network or do I skip one at one service area? Then thirdly, yeah, it's, it's about the customer experience, et cetera. The price is, is not the most prominent in, in, in the decision that the customer makes. Hope that answers your question. Yeah, yeah. To my second question, it's more strategic. Another peer of you has introduced a fast charger, which has a built-in battery, so to be independent from limited capacities in the grid. I mean, we just talked about network operational costs. Would this be also a way for you to decrease grid fees? Yeah, I think, I think it, it could very well be. I think what you currently see is that, in the countries we operate, I would say that the grid fees that we, that we pay, are still most often cheaper than using a battery. I think the reason to use a battery probably is more to solve congestion issues, that will in, let's say, the coming years, step-by-step change with prices of batteries going down as well. You know, with charging powers going up, there will be an intersection point where it becomes more and more interesting for us. Given that we will need serious supply lines to our charging stations anyway, it makes a lot of sense to today invest in that, because that becomes a scarce good, while batteries are becoming cheaper and are not scarce. I think the right strategy to follow here would be first, big cables to the network, to the stations, and then potentially batteries. If you do it the other way around, then you create yourself a problem. Does that give you a bit more color on the topic? I don't know whether it's an answer to the question, but... Yeah, sure. Yeah. Thank you. All the best. Cool. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, we're moving on to Joren van Aken from Degroof Petercam. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. First, 3 questions, if I may. First, another timeline question. Do you have a timeline for the Deutschlandnetz tenders? Any information there would be helpful. Secondly, I thought I heard you mention that today you were at 278 stations. Could you confirm this one? Finally, if I look at the segment revenue per country, I see that France and the UK are pretty similar revenue-wise. If you look at the number of stations, there are twice the amount of stations in France compared to the UK. What is the difference here? Is there that much charging in the UK compared to France? Thanks. Thanks, Joren, for your questions. I think on the timeline for Deutschlandnetz, I think we confer, we communicated earlier that there is some delays on that. I think it's difficult for us to to give a very clear outlook on what is happening there in the coming months. The government planned earlier to to to come up with a result on that tender year-end last year. I think it would be strange to expect that it will go beyond this year. Of course, that's to be seen. There's 2, there's 2 of them, the regional tenders is in full work. People, parties have put in their applications and are awaiting the outcome. That is, that is definitely in the works and on the highway tender, that has not been released yet. That's, yeah, that's. Because of that, we also don't know the exact timelines, that is probably unlikely to have a result still this year. The regional tender could, could, could, could be this year. Yeah, the 278 stations, I can confirm that, so that's correct. Then maybe do you want to say something about station, revenue segments, Victor? Yeah, I think, I think there, France is, we have more stations there. France is a bit behind in the adoption to the UK, indeed. That's, that's one element, but the other element is that they're all new stations. They're on roads that are dependent on or more dependent on holiday traffic. That is what, yeah, what concentrates in the summer over the, over the Christmas holidays and, and over the Easter holidays. We've seen a bit of that already, but if you look at current figures in July, so after, so in Q3, we see those stations in France ramping up extremely quickly. That's more of a ramp up topic in, in, for the French stations. I hope that answers your question. That is very clear. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah, we're moving on to a question from ING, from Marc Hesselink. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you very much. First question is actually on what you said last, the summer. You're very hard to hear, Mark. Sorry. Can, can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yeah, that's better. Yeah. Go ahead. Okay, yeah. Maybe first question, on this traffic and also the usage. If I look at some of the stations, you see that in the weekend, it's actually more busy than during the week. How do you get, like, the normal day-to-day traffic at the fast-charging station? That trend is maybe a bit slower than I earlier expected. When do you think that this will really start to change and you also get to the day-to-day traffic? You want to say something about patterns? Okay. I think, I think, Marc, I think basically what you see is that it depends, first of all, on the type of station. Let's say if we look at, Baraque de Fraiture, location we opened in the Belgian Ardennes, that is, on the Autoroute du Soleil to, yeah, to the south of France. That is a station that, that does very well in those Fridays, Saturdays, when people go to their holiday destination. We've already seen that doing quite well in, in, let's say, the May periods where, where people took a, a weekend to the Ardennes or so. That is a very different station than a station which is on the A4 from Amsterdam to The Hague, where people on a regular basis charge their car when they're on their way home, or to work, or to an appointment or whatever. So I would say, yes, there is, there is patterns, but they differ from station to station. The mix of locations will also therefore define a bit like how that, how that in the overall portfolio will look like. So I think, does that give you a bit of color on the topic? I think it's, there's no one single answer. Okay, okay, great. Then maybe the second question is maybe a bit broad, but, we hear a lot of news flow on all kinds of technological things. I, I think in the past, you were very clear that this is the, the way forward, that this, this kind of batteries, but things like happening with, with solid-state batteries or even some renewal, stories around, hydrogen, and maybe especially for trucking, but maybe just your thoughts very broad on how you see those technological developments and how it will impact Fastned. I think we should be extremely happy to see the message from CATL this morning about their 4C lithium iron phosphate development. They, they published that this morning. If you, if you, if you do the calculations, you're roughly talking about an average car having 400 kilowatt of charging power and charging in little, little less than 10 minutes, and having a range of 400 kilometers, and that on being able to do that on lithium iron phosphate, so no rare earth materials, long cycle life, relatively cheap battery. That is, I think, it super development to, to underpin that growth of more electric cars on the road. It also, basically, makes clear that charging will be like going for gas quite soon. Now, they have a timeline in mind of basically delivering them to the market next year. That really accelerates, yeah, the, yeah, the timeline on faster charging, I would say. We look at solid state, I think that's a little further out. I think all of it in the end, comes down to batteries that can charge quicker, have more range and are cheaper, and that in the end, drives the transition. Whether or not it's solid state or lithium iron phosphate or what kind of technology it is, I think we see the developments that drive that transition, and that is what is important to us. Maybe to add, is also important for our business guys. This CATL battery does 400 kilowatts for 10 minutes. That's a huge step change, and it also means that our average charge speeds in our network is now 60 kilowatts. It's a different one that grows considerably. That means that you can sell more kilowatt-hours over the same investment in the same amount of time, and considerably more kilowatt-hours. Yeah. Yeah. It, it also means the stations can handle more customers. I'd mentioned, but at the Fraiture, 8 charger station, we can help basically a customer every 3 minutes, and it becomes 300 or 400 kilowatts, roughly, then you can help every minute, the new customer. That, that makes a massive difference. Then maybe lastly, about H2. I think for trucks, there seems to be a bit of a media, let's say, flow again. I think for cars, it's basically decided, and I think for trucks it's probably going to be very hard to see H2 being a significant part of the market, because in the end, the, let's say, the chain of energy delivery to making kilometers is just 4 or 3 times less efficient than the battery electric version. You either need 4 times as many windmills or solar panels, and I think no one is up for making 4 times that investment or paying 4 times the price per kilometer. Let's say the word is out there, and it, it's not for Fastned, not a very big thing. We're very much focused on the passenger car vehicles, on the big charging stations along the motorways, and providing, let's say, chargers at logistical depots or so. That's more an operate and maintain business that we're not really targeting. I think, it's not very much of influence to us if there would be a move to H2, which I don't see happening. Does it give you a bit of answers to, let's say, color on these topics, how we think about it? I think it's not really an answer that I can give you. No, no, I, I, I absolutely realize that this is, this is really interesting. Just want to know your view on this kind of stuff. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for asking, because I, I think it's very important as well. I think these developments, they drive as well, that becoming available of cars in the A and B segments, and in the end, that we know that these segments are the biggest car segments. That really makes the transition something for more and more people, and that drives, in the end, again, sales for Fastned as well. Very important. Any other questions? Thank you. Yes. Up next, we have a Thijs Berkelder from ABN AMRO-ODDO BHF. Please go ahead. Yeah. Good morning, all. Congratulations. Beautiful performance. First, a small administrative question. Is correct that I'm not seeing the number of chargers per country? Second, question is more relevant, maybe Italy. You expect tendering to start, let's say, in the second half. Can you give any ballpark, ballpark number in terms of number of stations to be tendered? How many will be more or less right for Fastned specifications? Related to that, how you now have 400 locations in portfolio. In principle, the funding you have is for those 400 stations, let's say, adding Italy or winning Italy, will that potentially then trigger also a new funding round? That's, that's the, nearly the only question I'm getting from clients. Last thing is, at the start of the year, I think you guided for an OPEX of EUR 12,000 per charger. Now it's more than EUR 13,000 due to rising grid connection costs. What is the other logical explanation why H2 should be lower than H1? Right. Start with that one. Yeah. it's, yeah, true. The increase is actually related to, in these, at the start of this year, we indicated EUR 12,000 per charger operating costs, that now looks to be for the year, full year, around EUR 13,000. The reason is actually mainly increased grid fees due to increased capacity charges, that is, these grid fees consist of different parts, one is volume-based, and another one is a capacity-based. The peak rate that you use the grid connection as in a month comes at a certain cost. Now, the cars are getting faster and faster. The batteries are getting faster and faster, that also means that we have higher peaks, that leads to higher grid fees. The fact that those grid fees are, are there, and, and, what we will see in the, in the second half of the year is that will increase the number of charges, so that will dilute those, grid fees. That, that is a reason why a second half is, slightly lower than the, than the first half, when we get to 13,000. Okay. Over the whole year. Then maybe, the administrative question. I think, you're mentioning sort of whether or not there's slide in the slide deck with number of chargers per country. Am I correct, Thijs? All right. All right. Yeah, let's, shall we, get back to you that, separately, because I don't have the exact numbers, handy here. Yeah, it's duly noted. We'll, we'll look at that. Okay. Italy, I think, I think it's difficult to give you a ballpark figure now, but, but I would say, let's say if I would have to, let's say if I would have to model it today, looking at it, I think we're not gonna see sort of a, let's say, tender like in the Netherlands, where all the, let's say, 400 or 500, petrol stations, service areas, the, the motorway service areas along the motorway network in Italy will all be tendered at the same time, and the reasoning is they're all governed by different road operators. I think given that some of them are quicker, than others in replying to that regulation and are taking action, and also potentially can take action earlier, I would expect probably, maybe less than 100 in the first year in a tender or so, but that's, that's just putting a figure out there. I think, I think we're probably gonna see sort of, yeah, that total of maybe 400 be tendered out in a couple of years' time, and potentially not all of them. That's, that's one way to give a bit of a view on that. The win rate, yeah, I think we would be very happy to see win rates like in France, being, being amongst the winners, is would put you in a sort of the 20%-25% win rate. Maybe to be prudent, I would put it a little bit lower, but that's, but that's really what we're aiming at. Yeah, in terms of funding, that is, depends very much on indeed, how quickly will those tenants come to the market, in what size, and how quickly do we need to build them. Those are all factors that are, at this stage, not certain yet. They're big factors in deciding on when to fund. The sort of good thing there is that once the tender comes out, there's always time to respond to that. The timeline on the tender, once it comes out and till the time you get the results and eventually build the station, can be 1 to 3 years. That, in that sense, we have time to determine our funding plans. On funding, there we will continue our retail bonds, then they have proven to be very attractive and also very high in demand. We, we saw in June this year again, and we'll continue that. That will definitely also partially fund these type of tenders. Yeah. Looking at the time. Sorry, Thijs, go ahead. Yeah. Maybe one add-on. There's a financial income of EUR 1 million in the first half. What is it related to? That is actually interest on cash. As you see, the cash balance on our balance sheet of EUR 136 million, and at the end of the half year, sorry, EUR 132 million, and that's these days, deposit rates are becoming quite attractive actually, with the interest rates going up. That, that is an interest on the cash and balance sheet. Yeah. Okay, thanks. Cool. I think we can have one more question, maybe, because we're a bit over time, but I think it's good to to to allow for that if we can. Shall we go up for our last questions? Certainly, yes. Our last question for today comes from Hans Pluijgers from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes, two questions from my side. First of all, looking at the gross margin, and the absolute numbers was EUR 0.47 in Q2. Could you give maybe some feeling on how you see it through the year? Let's say, it's currently ahead of what your normal range would be in absolute terms. You're a little bit anticipating some underlying price increases, the input price, and therefore, you keep it a little bit higher at the moment, so you can better adjust through the year. You get maybe some feeling on your policy there. Last small question, you also registered in Spain. Does that mean that you are also, let's say, expect in Spain to get some stations awarded there in the short term? Maybe on Spain from my side. I think we are registering entities because we plan on doing things in these countries. Sometimes it's very helpful to register early on because of, let's say, support during policy reform discussions, so being part there. Spain is definitely on the agenda, which we find interesting. Yeah, we'll, I will have more on news on that when the news is there. I would say, pay attention. On the gross margin, I think there, like you say, we see electricity prices normalizing. That is one, one element. There, of course, when we go into the winter, those electricity prices are input prices, are likely to go up with less availability of, of, of solar production, mostly, and more demand for, for, for gas. That's one part. That, the margin will, as a result, decrease. The other part is our price setting, and there at this point in time, like we, like we discussed before, we look at it on a monthly basis. Does it make sense to increase or decrease our prices? We're, we are very happy with our price point currently. We're in, basically in the middle or maybe even low end of the markets, versus a lot of DC fast chargers. Yeah, that's what I can say on the, on the pricing part. That's, that's more likely to be relatively stable over the, over, at least the short term. I hope that gives color. Yeah, but still your, let's say, your normal range of between EUR 0.40 and EUR 0.45, that's more, let's say, applicable, we should look at for, let's say, on an annual basis. Sorry, I, I didn't, didn't catch that. Normal range? Let's say, your normal range, you had also communicated in the past for your absolute gross margin, which was more, let's say, EUR 0.40-EUR 0.45. Is that something we should look at going forward, or has anything changed in that field? No, I think, I think that's, I think that's a good number. I, I, I don't think we actually communicated or gave official guidance on that. 40 to 45 is, is, if you look historically, probably more on, on the higher end. Of course, if we see opportunity to, yeah, to keep it at these levels that we see today, then we will also do that. We're a bit dependent on, on, yeah, on the energy prices there. Okay, thanks. Perfect. Thank you very much all for listening and, herewith, we're, then ending this call. See you next time. Thank you all. Thank you. That concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect. Everyone else.