Hello, and welcome to the Fastned Q1 trading update. My name is George, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this conference is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your line is in listen-only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions towards the end of the presentation. 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'd like to hand the call over to your host today, Mr. Michiel Langezaal, CEO, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator, and welcome to everyone on this call, as well as to our webcast viewers. Sorry for the delay today. The operator of the call was experiencing some technical issues. The presentation used during this call is available at our investor relations website, which is ir.fastnedcharging.com. The cover page shows a project that I'm very proud of. This is a picture of the opening of the first Fastned shop, located along a high-traffic motorway in Brecht, Belgium, on the route from Antwerp to Rotterdam. We've worked on this project for five years, from winning the concession in 2019 to finalizing the build early this year. Logically, building the very first and developing a concept together with an operating partner takes a lot of time. In our view, this is an investment that's crucial for the coming decade, whereby service areas will go zero emission and the ability to offer a tailored, proven concept in conjunction with the charging station sets you apart from others. Moreover, being able to integrate the shop offering into our concept also allows us to develop greenfield locations, something that significantly expands our fishing pool for great sites. Which brings me to slide two, please. The reference to the information provided in these slides and discussed during this call, please take note of the disclaimer, which brings me to slide three. 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 quarter of 2024, as well as the full year 2023. We'll look ahead on how we foresee the market and Fastned developing in the coming periods. Among other things, we will discuss the developments in the car and charging market. We will elaborate on the progression of our location pipeline and take a look at the results from our construction team, as well as their plans for 2024 and 2025. After that, Victor will take over and take you through the top-line financial results of the first quarter of 2024 and the full year 2023. He will also update you on our station metrics again. After our presentation, we will answer your questions. Please limit them to two questions per analyst to give everybody the opportunity. We intend to end this call in one hour. Moving to slide four, let's start with the highlights of the quarter. About revenue growth. Revenue and kilowatt hour delivered grew rapidly and in line with our expectations. Revenue related to charging reached EUR 18.9 million in the first quarter of 2024, up 42% versus the same quarter last year. And sales volume grew by more than 40%—by more than 50% to 31.4 GWh. Our growth in terms of revenue, people employed, and the size of our network, which is reflected on our balance sheet, makes that Fastned is now categorized as a large business. Only 1% of businesses are categorized as such. As you can imagine, I'm very proud of this milestone, as in 2012, Fastned was only a handful of people embarking on a grand mission. In early 2021, we raised EUR 150 million via institutional investors for the first time. This was a big step up for Fastned, and it allowed us to initiate the scaling of our rollout. Since then, we've been hiring and onboarding a large number of staff. It ain't evident that these people start contributing, and before that happens, you easily need to invest a year or more. I'm therefore extremely happy to see our secured locations in Q1 hitting 52, which gives me confidence that the milestone of 100+ new locations a year, the basis for us to get to 1,000 sites by 2030, is attainable. While stock markets are still depressed for companies with free cash flows only becoming significant several years into the future, the demand for bonds is high. Last quarter, Fastned again raised EUR 27.9 million via its well-established and attractive retail bond program. This more or less funds the current construction base, whereby we see potential in the market to fund even the higher construction base foreseen later this year and next year. As such, we're planning to ramp this up. Another key highlight is the signing of our first power purchase agreement with a large solar park. Up until recently, the vast majority of electricity volume was purchased on the wholesale market against spot prices. With Fastned sales volumes becoming significant, it makes a lot of sense for us to purchase a solid part of our electricity needs at pre-agreed prices in our long-term contracts. In the last years, we've seen the value of stable pricing for electric drivers, and therefore also for Fastned. power purchase agreements allow us to deliver on that, while at the same time warranting our margins. Overall, we almost doubled our sales in 2023 and achieved positive EBITDA for the first time. Given the massive investments in network expansion, this is a financial metric I'm very proud of, and it gives a lot of confidence of what is to come. As we should not forget that only a couple of% of cars are electric, and logically, we are making these investments to build the infrastructure for millions of cars on our roads to be electric. So that's about looking back. Let's now look at the charging market and our outlook. Moving to slide five. EV sales are still strong, despite some concerns. In all the countries we operate in, sales percentages are double digits, and our charging market therefore continues to grow. Belgium, for the first time, surpassed 20% of new cars sold being electric, and France is showing a steady growing share of electric cars quarter after quarter. Also, in the Netherlands, our home market is remarkable, with more than 25% of sales being electric. That is an astonishing achievement, given the significantly reduced incentives for electric cars in our country. To which, by the way, a serious improvement was decided upon this week, with road tax rebates for EVs being prolonged longer than initially planned for. Germany very suddenly stopped the subsidies for EVs in Q4 last year, which they initially planned to prolong. This was a consequence of the verdict by higher courts that their budget was not lawful. The lack of incentives to make people choose the sustainable option is hurting sales in this country, unfortunately. This brings me to a generic theme across all markets. Analysts and the media generally expect it even more. This news is fueled by situations like Germany or the Netherlands, where sales percentages stopped growing. The CEOs of OEMs logically are voicing their concerns that they are in dire straits as they are required to make the switch to electric and are investing billions in factories and research and development, while at the same time being confronted with strong competition from China. How can they sell these cars if consumers don't want them? So what is happening? That brings me to market trends. Moving to slide: sales of EVs that are moving from their initiation phase to their scaling phase, especially in countries such as the Netherlands. This is what is causing a temporary slowdown. The fundamentals that drive the transition to electric cars haven't changed, or even better, are constantly being confirmed in their development track. In short, battery prices continue to improve, making it possible to put more batteries in a car and give it more range, or make electric cars more affordable and offer an EV in a lower price segment. Lower battery prices are scaling this market. Technology continues to advance. How many consumers have put aside the idea of a battery electric car because charging would be way slower than going for gas? This is like the photographers initially saying no to the digital camera, as it would never provide the same image quality as traditional 35-millimeter film. Just a few weeks ago, I saw a video passing by of the updated Zeekr doing a charging test, whereby it delivered a top speed of over 500 kW, adding 60 km of range per minute of charging. The entire charging session was finished in under 12 minutes. That hardly leaves time for grabbing a cup of coffee. This car is now on the market in China and will make its way to Europe in the next one or two years. And for those of you who are scared about rare earth materials, this is the new CATL battery, based on its latest LFP technology. So cheap and no nickel, manganese, and cobalt needed to deliver high charging speeds, plus the longevity of lithium iron phosphate. It is technology driving this transition with only one outcome. All cars will be electric, and rather sooner than later. So what is it with these incentives that are hurting our perspectives on BEV sales? Only a few months ago, at COP 28, we agreed on the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era by laying the ground for a swift, just, and equitable transition. It is the equitable part that is causing this. Until recently, many countries had subsidies supporting the sales of electric vehicles. With percentages of new cars sold hitting double digits, the scale of these subsidies is becoming an issue. In the Netherlands, for example, the tax rebate for company cars being electric became quite small. This led to news popping up that one could just as well choose for a petrol car again. Governments across the EU are looking for new ways to support people in making the sustainable choice at scale. These incentives are more norm-based. A great example to this end is the ESG regulation that has come into force recently. This regulation requires companies to set ambitious targets for their CO2 emissions. With the basic charging infrastructure there, and electric cars roughly at price and range parity with fossil cars, switching the company fleet to electric is a logical and easy measure to take. For many corporates, electrifying their fleets will be among the low-hanging fruit in their ESG plans. The short-term negative effect is the changeover from one system to the other, whereby car drivers, media, market analysts, companies, and fleet owners need to get their heads around the new reality. Moreover, the ESG implementation at many companies is just getting started. ESG, luckily, is not the only example of such a norm-based incentive system coming in place and taking over from subsidies. France is a great example of this. Several media wrote about the negative effects that would result from the government stopping the EUR 3,000 per EV ecological bonus. That, at the same time, taxation on new cars was made again more strict on CO2 emissions, did only make the headlines later on. Choosing a new company car in France to be fossil-fueled is now simply an expensive decision. This change in incentive methodology is creating a feeling of fiscal instability as companies and consumers are to be informed and educated. Only after that period of changeover, one can expect the full effect of these new incentives. So, that's about market trends, which brings me to our outlook. When discussing the highlights of this quarter, I already mentioned being extremely proud of the pace of our location acquisition, 52 new locations signed in one quarter. This number does contain the outcome of a significant tender, adding 34 sites, which is not to be expected every quarter, but the remaining 18 private sites shows an increase again for private locations. We reported five per quarter in 2022, and a bit more than 10 per quarter in 2023. All in all, it shows that the ramping up of our investments in network expansion are starting to pay off. The result of several years of hard work. This provides a solid basis for us to deliver on our goal of 1,000 big charging stations at eight plus locations by 2030. That said, we also see that the ambitions from tendering authorities, partners, and grid operators have been higher than their ability to deliver on these. Tenders have been delayed several times, and connections to the electricity grid are not realized faster, despite the desires of so many. So the will from all these stakeholders is there, but the ambitions do not always materialize as planned for. A conservative view on the coming two years, therefore, is that overcoming these bottlenecks in all these projects will lead to a softer construction pace for Fastned in 2024, but pace again, increasing in the years thereafter. With our secured pipeline hitting 483 locations, we estimate that by the end of 2025, our network will have grown to 420-450 locations. To that end, it's worth noting that 95% of our secured locations historically translates into stations built. So we're more or less talking about timing, but not about whether or not they're built. Moving to slide eight. During the highlights at the start of our presentation, I already mentioned that it is going very well with our pipeline. Here, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the growth drivers behind us, signing 18 private sites this quarter, which is again, a step up from the level of previous quarters. What is driving the change in acquisition pace for private deals? In our view, it's a combination of two things. One, a significantly bigger network development team that is starting to become effective at scale. This is something I already talked about before. Two, Fastned realizes market-leading station economics. This allows us to offer better rents than other charging companies, or maybe even more important, it allows us to play in the real estate market and pay leases for strategic, high-traffic plots that are starting to match those from fast food players such as McDonald's, do-it-yourself stores, or any other retailer. This effect does scale our fishing pool for locations significantly, and often not competing with other charging companies, as many suggest, but more generic other parties that have an interest in strategic plots of land. After all of this on private opportunities, let's move on to slide nine and do a quick update on tenders as well. On this slide, I would like to start with a remark about disciplined and selective. To this end, I will use the example of the Deutschlandnetz tender. We last year communicated that we had won two prime lots in the regional tender, and some people asked why we were so positive about that result, as there were also others who won more. But is just more locations the measure of success, or should, for example, the NPV be the actual measure for success? There's a very sharp bid that practically zero returns might win you lots of sites in a tender, but their cumulative value remains low. Disciplined and selective is about using our great concept to invest in infrastructure that creates returns, and use those returns to invest again. For this, we select where we can make our concept deliver winning tender scores at proper hurdle rates. So we focus on the selection. The opposite extreme of this is spraying chargers wherever the opportunity is provided. This allows one to scale its charging network fast and deploy loads of capital. Only given that the environment of tenders provides competition, the returns in this segment will therefore be low or negative in a bearish scenario. Our approach is about to spiral upwards, scaling something that works, sign deals that create value and only clog up our construction teams with those projects and nothing else. Sites that create value allow us to invest in the customer experience and deliver an award-winning concept to our customers and to many customers. This success lingers for more. Which brings me to elaborating on a few of the tenders out there. The Netherlands, no news, and we're awaiting a new government to decide on next steps. France, Belgium, and Switzerland all have tender projects ongoing or announced, but nothing very significant. We're talking about a handful of sites, country by country. Key here is that France still needs to make the step to initiate tenders on its public road network at scale. This is where our PA efforts go to. Interesting, in our view, is the Places for London tender, organized by Transport for London. We currently have one medium-sized station in London, and it performs like crazy, given the lack of infrastructure and space available to develop that. The ambition of TfL to support this development by making places available through a public-private partnership is applaudable. Currently, the project has five large sites concrete, but its aim is to scale this to 65 over time. The situation in Italy is questionable. Great work was done by the administration through a public consultation process last year, with the need for tenders and open market and competition well understood. How these needs were translated into directives from the regulator and tenders is only less fortunate. In our view, the key issues are: two charging companies per service area being a requirement, sharing a revenue stream, and contract tenures are maximized to 12 years, in line with concessions for petrol stations. This makes serious investments in charging infrastructure difficult, given the very low EV adoption levels today and for the coming years. For this reason, we decided not to participate in the far majority of cases and provided our feedback to authorities, the regulator and the road operator. From all we can see, many market players have done the same. Lastly, I want to mention tenders in Poland and Austria. These could be interesting opportunities for Fastned, the latter being the largest opportunity at the moment, potentially adding up to 60 sites. Which brings me to slide 10 and handing over to Victor Van Dijk, our CFO, who will start with our award-winning concept. Thanks, Michiel. Slide 10. This is a slide we have shown before. To us, this is the proof that our concept works. We insource all that matters, which leads to market-leading charging experience and also an efficient operation. EV drivers choose Fastned because of things like a recognizable design, a 99.9% uptime, and very good in-house customer service. Where others struggle, at Fastned, it simply works really well. This all, this all leads to outsized usage of Fastned stations compared to others. We keep on repeating this, as the importance of this is really not well understood by many in the market at this stage. Going to the next slide. The importance shows here. Since Fastned's inception, more than 10 years ago, we have been focused on building large, great, and efficient charging stations on high-traffic locations. These stations have canopies to provide our customers with the same weather protection petrol drivers have. The canopies make the station very visible to all drivers, so EV drivers are able to find them, and petrol drivers see that they are able to make the switch to electric vehicles. Doing all this is hard. You need to secure locations on regulated motorway service areas or on crowded, private locations along high-traffic local roads. For the latter, you compete with the Starbucks and McDonald's of this world for scarce space. You need to secure large grid connections with long lead times, arrange for building permits for the developments and the canopies, also with long lead times, and design and build the stations in a scalable and efficient manner. What we see most others do is avoid all or many of these important elements and resort to putting down chargers on parking lots of other retail businesses, or adding a couple of chargers next to a petrol station, or trying to avoid realizing serious grid connections by using chargers with batteries, or trying to avoid building permits and larger construction by not having canopies and not having a big station, or accepting short contracts, potentially linked to petrol stations, when that was still allowed to motorway service areas. To us, these strategies allow you to put down a lot of chargers and put dots on the map, but do not translate into the best solutions for EV drivers and the transition, and do not translate into the best business cases. We have been scaling the hard thing, and by now it's clear that this is paying off. Building great and large charging stations on high traffic locations and operating them really well leads to predictable high session growth that scales with BEV fleet penetration, relatively independent of what other charging companies do on low traffic locations. You can see that in the graph, which shows sessions per station per day growth, where we're clearly on a different trajectory than many others. This, in turn, leads to Fastned by now being a top three Western European fast charging company in terms of sales. Not in terms of chargers deployed, but in terms of customers helped, kilowatt-hour sales, and revenues. We actually see the effect of this. With many of the top ten fast charging companies increasing pricing over the last quarter well above Fastned's pricing. That is because they have lower sales and therefore lower profitability. This all while Fastned pricing remained relatively stable, remained stable, and our profitability grew at the same time. Ultimately, Fastned scaling the hard thing leads to high customer value, giving the ability to charge where they drive, on high traffic roads at reasonable cost. It drives the transition by showing petrol drivers on these same roads, seeing our visible canopies, that the charging infrastructure is there, and they can make the switch to electric vehicles. Going to the next slides. Knowing that we have one of the highest number of sessions per station in the market, as we saw on the previous slide, it is very likely we have one of the best station metrics in the market. This provides financial flexibility by being in the driver's seat when it becomes, when it comes to price changes and tender and rent bidding, whereas others still have to deal with negative to low profitability. We saw stations, sales per station increase by 27% year-on-year. This is slightly below BEV fleet penetration growth of 32%. We don't have full visibility, but suspect this is related to AC charging pricing and home charging costs in the Netherlands being relatively high in Q1 2023, and later on in 2023, in the wake of the energy crisis, and normalizing again over the last months and quarters. This could have shifted some volume to fast charging in early 2023 and back to those markets now. In terms of fast charging market share, and we do have visibility on other fast charging companies, except Tesla, as they are not on the open system. There, our market share was stable over the last quarters and years, actually. With station sales going up due to BEV penetration going up, and with a high operational leverage, our operational EBITDA margin increased to 44%, above our 2025 targets. With EV penetration expected to double by 2026 and fivefold by 2030, we continue to track towards our target of EUR 1 million revenues per station in 2030, and more than 40% operational EBITDA margins. In 2023, we reached positive EBITDA for the first time in our existence. We are proud of that because it proves we are on the right track, and we see the operational leverage at work here. As we explained and expected ahead of our equity capital raises in 2021 and 2022. Since 2021, revenues have fourfolded, driven by BEV fleet growth and by capturing the fast-charging amounts by having the right locations, having a great concept, and by new station openings. During the energy crisis, we showed that demand is quite inelastic, which always has been our conviction, and gross margin even expanded a bit since then. With that, our operational EBITDA, which includes all the costs to operate the network, tenfolded since our capital raise in 2021. Note that we have significant room for upsides beyond this, with utilization only at 13.5% currently, due to significant capacity expansion over the last couple of years. And charge fees continuing to increase so that we can deliver more kilowatt hours over the same investments... So we are able to cater for new EVs coming on the road and drive that operational leverage further. With pipeline growth increasing, as Michiel explained, we intend to capitalize on the station growth potential and increase network expansion efforts, which leads to network expansion costs to roughly double in the next two years. All in all, these financials prove that we are definitely delivering results in line with the strategy that we explained during our capital markets day two years ago. Next slide. We update our CapEx drivers. The main increase is coming from the fact that we install four 400 kW chargers now instead of 300 kW chargers. More and more cars come to the market with high charge speeds, as Michiel explained, which obviously is beneficial for financial station metrics. Then to funding. We have built a strong funding base, based both on the equity and retail bond sides. We are EBITDA positive now, which means being free cash flow positive is a choice. This provides us with a lot of financial flexibility. We have a unique, self-developed retail bonds program with about 10,000 investors that want to support us and that we provide with a good return of 6%. This is a very valuable program for us as it provides significant volumes of funding, but does not limit our financial flexibility, that is, as it has no financial covenants. With that, for our 2024-2025 station rollout, we expect current cash levels and continued retail bond issuance to fund the up to 450 stations operational by year-end 2025. Yeah, that concludes our presentation for today, whereby on this final slide, slide 14, we have summarized our guidance for 2024 and 2025, as we already discussed during our presentation. Our final comments on the car market would be that the electric vehicle sales slowdown that everyone talks about is a slowdown in comparison to mighty ambitions. When looking at the numbers, generally speaking, they are still growing, only maybe not as quickly as expected by many. And the reason? Shifting the methodology of incentive schemes. What hasn't changed are the fundamentals. An electric car is simply a better car, and that is why sales continue growing. On that note, I would like to thank you all for listening, and I would like to hand the word now back to the operator for questions. Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you wish to ask an audio question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please also limit yourselves to two questions. Operator, are you there? Yes, sir, I am speaking. Our first question is coming from. We will wait a minute for. One second, please. For the operator to come back. Nikita Lal, please go ahead. Hi. Can you hear me? Your line is open. All right. Hi, Michiel. Hi, Victor. Can you hear me? I think I could not hear the operator, so. Nikita, please ask your question. Yeah. Can you hear me? Your line is open, Nikita. Okay. All right. Thank you for your time. So, I would have three questions, if I may. My first question is regarding the PPA contract. So, it started in February, if I understood correctly. Which impacts can we expect here, and will this help to keep the gross margin above 70%? I can't complete my answer. No, no, no. Gentlemen, please, the line is open. Please respond. Nikita, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay. Nikita, everything is good. We're just gonna wait for the speakers to respond. All right. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, the speakers are just gonna check their equipment on their side. Hi, the operators seem to be having some operational issues today. No, sir, I hear you. Sir, your line is open. Trying to get the questions through. So please hang on. Ladies and gentlemen, please, just stay with us. Nikita, are you still on the line? Yeah, I can still hear you. Okay. Nikita, please stay on line. Your line is open. We're just waiting for the speakers to come in. Nikita, what was your question again? I think that they're having problems hearing you, but what was your question? Just speak slowly and try to chat with them. All right. Yeah, sure. It's about the PPA contract, which kicked off in February. So my question here is the impact, especially on the gross margin, if this can keep up above 70%. Okay, once again. Everyone else has left the call. Ladies and gentlemen, just please stay online. It looks like no one else is going to join this call. Please stay online. Goodbye. Ladies and gentlemen, just please do stay connected. Do not disconnect. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, please do stay connected one moment. Great. Can everyone hear us again? Your line is open, sir. Great. Let's go to the first question. Nikita, please ask your question again. Sure. Hi, Michiel. Hi, Victor. I hope you can hear me now. Yes, I can hear you. Great. Great to hear. Yeah, perfect. Let me ask my two questions quite quickly. So my first one is about the PPA contract, which started in February, correct? So which are the impacts here? What can we expect, especially for the gross margin? Can we expect something above 70% for the longer term because of this? And my second question is regarding your construction team. As we will see lower building rates this year, how do you want to manage the personal costs? So I start with the construction team. Yeah, I think, I think basically what we see there is that a construction team that is working extremely hard on, yeah, let's say, setting up the supply chain, all these new markets that we start construction for the first time. So there's a lot of, let's say, one-off work that needs to happen, building the relationship with new suppliers, yeah, making, making our way towards new grid operators, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say probably it's the opposite, that we actually need more hands than we actually potentially have at the moment in comparison. So that's, that's really how I would look at the construction situation. It's basically, you know, costs, and, and being an investment into the future. Yeah, maybe Victor, about PPAs. Yeah, on PPAs, so it's by and large the impact on the margin will be minimal, unless we see big price increases again in the energy market. The way the PPA works effectively is that our purchase price is capped, and we pay a very small premium for that of less than EUR 0.01 per kWh. And so if we have an energy crisis again, our price is capped. And on the other end, if prices go down, then we profit from price increases. But if you look at the 70% gross margin, it will have a minimal impact on that, assuming that the prices yeah are in line with what we see more or less today. It's basically about stabilization of margins, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Does that, yeah, does it provide an answer to your questions? Yeah, sure. Maybe one additional question regarding the construction team. So I understand that this is helpful for new markets, but what about the existing ones where construction is like, yeah, pausing? It's basically the same thing. So these construction teams. So I think maybe it helps to explain that if we're talking about construction teams, it's people basically working on preliminary work, right? So contacting grid operators, putting the supply chain together, requesting building permits. So all these activities need to happen to make sure you can get started. And then the final part is basically that they supervise the construction. So that supervising, the volume is somewhat lower. But because we want to get the volume up, we're basically, we're basically putting a lot of projects in that preliminary phase. And you can see that as well when you look at that pipeline of 480 sites, so there's ample projects for them to push through. Okay, understood. Thank you. Great. Thanks a lot. Sorry for that. Thank you very much, ma'am. Our next question is coming from Hans Pluijgers of Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes, morning, gentlemen. Two questions from my side. First of all, on the seasonal impact in Q1, it's always, let's say, somewhat better season for you due to the weather, but maybe give us some flavor on how did you see, let's say, the seasonal impact of this year? Of course, it's very dependent on the weather. Do you see, let's say, it was really a normal season, or was, let's say, any differentiating factors compared with what you normally would have expected? And secondly, on your expansion for this year and next year, this year clearly slower than you initially indicated. You gave already some flavor, but give maybe somewhat more detail why pace so much slower than you, let's say, earlier had indicated, and especially because, let's say, the tendering process is, yeah, we have to accelerate a little bit with Germany and everything. So it's really, I'd say, the connection to the grids becoming a big issue, and especially why then you expect for next year such a tick up in expansion. And combined with that, let's say you are now, let's say, seeing the financing for next year secured, or let's say, including still some additional retail funding, but how do you see the funding after that? Do you believe, let's say, you can do it from also again, from purely debt funding, or do you still believe to have require equity funding after 2025? So I'll start with the last one. Yeah, so on funding, indeed, the 2025 rollout we can fund, we expect to be able to fund from retail funding. And then the rollout 2026, 2027 is... It's too early to call, so there's a couple of factors there. It's how successful we are in retail funding, so there's upside to that. It's obviously also cashflow development and also pipeline development, so we have- we see a growth in pipeline. Yeah, if that continues, then of course, that has also an effect on the extent we need to fund. So those are basically three moving panels that we will need to assess next year again, and we can't assess that truly right now, so it's hard to give an answer to that. Maybe then on the seasonal effect, if you... So we see the seasonal effect there, so we usually see Q4, Q1 being higher, the higher charging needs in those quarter because of lower temperatures. We see that similarly now. I think Q1 is a bit higher temperatures, for instance, than last year, Q1, so that has a bit of an impact. I think the biggest impact we think is what I explained before, is that, AC charging in the Netherlands, so very low growth or even negative growth over the most of last year, with pricing being very high, and similar to home charging. And we expect that there's a bit of a reverse of that going on, which has an impact. Maybe to put it simple, Hans, I think what we basically expect, and we've seen messages of people doing that, that charging at home became, during the crisis, expensive. Public charging at some point late 2023 as well, due to the concession systems in the cities. Yeah, basically, people took decisions, "Hey, I have a charge card from my boss, and at home I pay it myself." So we've seen people shifting charging volume. How big that is, it's difficult to assess, but if we look at the data, this is the preassumption that we take, and we see basically our market share being very similar in the DC markets and the fast charging market. So we don't see it being a consequence of competition. It's just what the development of the entire fast charging market is. Okay, thanks, Hans. Does that give you? Yeah S ome more color on it? Yeah, that's, that's clear now on, indeed on the expansion. So question. On the expansion, yeah. I think, I think maybe there, what I would say is we learn every year, and I think last year we've, we've already made our, let's say, yeah, pipeline outlook, significantly, yeah, more detailed than, than the year before. And I think we've been doing that again this year. So basically, yeah, we, we became stricter in, in the way we, yeah, we, we make our prognosis. And, on top of that, we see basically that these projects, that the requirements to build them this year, on, on many of them are, are doubtful, putting them basically, on, on the roll for the year thereafter. So it in the end, it's, it's simply delayed. I think it's good to stress that basically what we do is we introduce a lower range in our target setting, and a range that is at the low end of that range is much more secure because building permits are in place for those stations. And also grid connections have a very high visibility, so basically reaching that lower range is fully in our hands. And then the upper range is more comparable with the target setting we did up until this year. Introducing these ranges, and especially the lower end of the ranges, we think it's a much more prudent way to show the markets the potential we see for station building this year. It's also a bit of system change. Yeah. Okay, I understand. But at the same time, you still, let's say, see quite acceleration for next year, and you said that there are some, let's say, delays in things and in the whole planning and everything. So, and on the grid connections, you know it already for this, the things you have now, let's say, where they started up the whole process, but why aren't you sure certain for next year? Or, yeah, so how should we see, let's say, the certainty of your guidance for end of next year? I think for next year it's also it's a different level of certainty, yeah, and that's why also why we have to range. We make the range better. And so everything for this year is already full in planning, in construction planning. And like I said, for the low end of the range, we have building permits in place. We have very high visibility on grid connections. Next year's guidance is more based on pipeline developments, which we see improving, well, yeah, improving very favorably. But it's yeah there is by definition more uncertainty on next year because yeah it's not fully in the construction planning yet. But we do want to give an outlook there based on what we see in the pipeline now and the throughput we expect in terms of building permits and grid connections. We do want to give an outlook for next year. Okay, thanks. Cool. Any other question? Yes, gentlemen, we do have several more in the queue. Our next question will be coming from Thymen Rundberg, calling from ING. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you for taking my questions. Just going back on the question asked previously about quarter one seasonality charging volumes. So we saw that charging volumes in quarter one, they grew 52% year-over-year, but they were still slightly down compared to the fourth quarter in 2023 in absolute terms. So usually we do see that quarter-on-quarter improvement. So you already mentioned that it was also due to AC charging, maybe home charging, becoming more attractive in terms of pricing. So if you look at your own pricing, you had quite high growth margins in close to 80% also in quarter one. Is that a consideration in terms of could you lower your prices to make it more appealing to drivers with AC pricing coming down? The second question that I have is actually about your shop strategy. So you opened your first shop in Brecht as well. Could you give a bit more information here? Like, how many of these shops do you expect to open, and what do you expect in terms of top line contribution margins? And as well, in terms of CapEx, how much does it cost to build such a shop on top of regular station, and as well, the OpEx impact? Thanks. Yeah. Maybe to start on pricing. Also, good to mention that if you look at that top ten slide we sometimes show in terms of fast charging companies there, by now, we are cheaper than most, except Tesla, that is, again, cheaper than us. But what you've seen is that in many of the large similarly large fast charging companies, they have actually increased their prices. And that is, we think due to them having lower station sales, having low to no profitability, and pricing at demand being inelastic, so they raise their prices. That's what I explained also during the presentation. And so that puts us in a favorable position towards them. If you look at AC charging pricing, we think overall with increased usage with increased charging speeds the business case for fast charging will be better throughout over the next couple of years than AC charging. So that does allow us to reduce pricing based on profitability increasing. So that is something that will happen at some stage. But that's yeah that's not imminent. But it is yeah pocket volume that is in the future within our reach and available. So that's that provides for a very nice pocket of volume growth over the next couple of years. I think if we talk about Brecht, yeah, so it's a pilot. It's a first time that we do this. We, for coming year, have planned more pilots, and then we're talking about scaling up from this one to, let's say, five-10 locations with also smaller versions of this. Sites in Belgium, in Germany, and, yeah, a couple of them have been announced already, yeah. So Gentbrugge, for example, the A27, if I'm correct, is a location we talked about before. Big service area on both sides of the motorway with also a shop. So basically, it's, yeah, it's part of expanding the pilot. Probably later next year, we're probably gonna decide on a more significant rollout plan, because we wanna learn from these first pilots and also see where to evaluate and where to improve. Maybe your question was also related to, like, what we're investing? Yep. Yeah, that's quite a range, I would say. We see smaller shops in the order of, let's say, EUR 250,000. These bigger shops can go up to EUR 1 million or maybe even more. But of course, yeah, that also leads to a different retail area and different revenue. And when it comes to sort of like, yeah, sort of the exploitation of the shops, we work with that with operators. Yeah, often it's basically a revenue share-based partnership. But again, all in the pilot phase, I would say. So evaluations to come. All right. Does that give you a bit of color on the topic, Carl? Yep, thanks very much. Sure. Thank you very much. Further questions? Thank you, sir. When I move to Paul de Froment, calling from Bryan Garnier, please go ahead. Yes, thank you. Two questions for me. The first, could you come back on the grid connection lead times? How do you see, how do you see them, evolve, over the next 24 months? So that's my first question. And my second question is, what's your view on the consolidation of the sector, and would you have any interest in M&A? Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I can comment on that. So grid connections, I think what we see there, I think in the Netherlands, congestion is, is definitely an issue. So, yeah, there is locations where timelines are long. That said, the majority of our network expansion activities is, is, yeah, is currently in all these other countries. So in that sense, yeah, the lead times that we see there are more, they are still more normalized. And then we're talking about, yeah, around 40 weeks for, let's say, delivery of transformers, and often around sort of 30-40 weeks to get a quick connection in place. So I would say probably, yeah, let's say for 10%-15% of sites, there is some sort of impact. And, yeah, that is, yeah, that is in the Netherlands, somewhat in the U.K. as well. And probably, yeah, if you would ask this next year or the year after, it's probably gonna start happening in other countries as well, but we'll have to see then. So that's basically about grid connections, and maybe about consolidation. I think, yeah, we keep our eyes open in that sense. I think what, you know, the way we look at it often is, like, we are looking for large strategic plots of land along high traffic roads. And what we see is that that probably is something that's easier to attain in a real estate market, where you're basically yeah talking to yeah it doesn't matter which party, but basically a party that owns or or wants to lease out those plots of land. While yeah let's say other parties in the charging market many of them are still spraying chargers, and yeah then that that doesn't really make you a great takeover candidate, I would say. So I think I think maybe that's a bit of a high-level view, but maybe Victor can comment to it. Yeah, I think it's because of our location strategy, yeah, private locations, as we discussed in tenders, we see a limited number of other charging companies pursuing the same locations there. We see a lot of charging companies have a different location strategy, and there we're not, yeah, we're not interested in those sites. So with that, it's actually quite unlikely that we do any meaningful M&A. So it's not that we're not interested, we keep our eyes open, but we haven't seen a deal that, yeah, let's say in a market where expectations are significant, that we would like to, like, to go for. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you very much. Sorry, yeah, go ahead. No, no, no, just if you could just give more detail on the bottleneck from the grid connection. I mean, what, what's your explanation? Is it coming from substation transformer delays from administration? Just if you could give us more color on the nature of the delay. Ah. It could be very helpful. Thank you. So sorry for making the assumption, because I think I talked about this before. But yeah, so the issue in, let's say, most of the Netherlands and the U.K., is that the energy transition with more wind, solar, heat pumps, gas furnaces being changed over to electric furnaces, basically changing from a fossil fuel system to an electrifying system, that is causing the electricity grid to be of, yeah, to deliver the need to deliver significantly more capacity to many more parties, from wind parks to charging stations, but also to households. And that strain, basically, is something that's in the Netherlands and in the UK. They have been keeping up with it for close to a decade now. So we're already on the way for more than a decade. But they're basically hitting some barriers, where their investment plans and their, let's say, pace of improving that grid to cope with that increased demand is just not possible. So you see areas in the Netherlands turning red, sort of basically saying these areas you can't get capacity anymore for the coming, let's say, two to three years... because we need two to three years to upgrade our grids. Does that give you sort of a more technical. Yeah. Back, backend? And I think, yeah. Thank you very much. If I look at it, I think for us, in the Netherlands, this is also, it really gives us, it creates also a valuable position for us because it means that it's also difficult for a competitor to enter that market, because the capacity is scarce. Okay, great. Thank you. Moving on to next questions. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Our next question is coming from Thijs Berkelder, Berkelder. Sorry for pronunciation, from ABN AMRO - ODDO BHF. Please go ahead. Yeah. No longer good morning, but good afternoon. I have. Welcome on the call, Thijs. Three questions. First, can you be more explicit in the cost outlook for 2024? You're indicating, in the slides, your cost per charger, network OPEX per charger is going up to EUR 16K. I saw it from something like EUR 14K, but and I heard Victor saying that network expansion costs were to double in the coming two years. So if I assume +50% to EUR 23 million or so in 2024, is that the right assumption? Second question is on the guidance. Your guidance for 2024 is for positive underlying EBITDA. Well, your underlying EBITDA already was positive in 2023, close to EUR 8 million. In Q1, your operational EBITDA is already up 46%, despite these home chargers, let's say, switching back to home charging. So why not guide for a higher underlying EBITDA instead of just a positive underlying EBITDA? Third question is on your target of 1,000 stations before 2030. Can you explain what you expect from the Netherlands in terms of win rate, when existing older sites need to be re-tendered in the coming years? Yeah. Yeah. Shall I start with that one? And then you take over, Victor, on costs and so on. Yeah, I think if we talk about the win rate in the Netherlands, I think it's still to be seen, you know, what kind of new policy environment they will, the government will decide on for the new service areas. I think the, let's say, the design that's on the table now, and that's up for decision for new government, I think is very, very good. We're talking roughly about, let's say, losing, or let's say, 50% of our locations on that network are up for renewal before 2030. And on these sites, we would expect to see win rates which are similar than we see in other countries. So we will, in that sense, lose sort of a significant amount of sites there. The way we look at it, if you look at it, the micro level is, you can't sort of, let's say, push for a policy that, that doesn't have competition in there. So I think we accept the fact that we would lose sites here to basically convey the message of a competitive and open market in the Netherlands, to be something that should be everywhere. And then you basically have that same win rate you can apply to many more markets, and that's the, that's the bigger win that's in there. On the cost outlook, indeed, as on operational costs, we look at it on a per charger basis, EUR 16,000 per charger this year. And then on network expansion costs, we look at it on an absolute basis, so a doubling from roughly doubling from 2023 to 2025. So indeed, the at a 50% growth assumption you make makes sense in that sense. On positive underlying EBITDA or even revenue side, there we think we don't have the level of predictability yet on revenues, EBITDA to really give a guidance with a certain range and a certain certainty. I think that's. Yeah, and we wanna also, yeah, we wanna be prudent there, that we, yeah, we start doing that when we have that predictability. I think. The positive underlying EBITDA is. It means that we're, we expect to be positive again. Of course, we expect to expand this from last year. But we didn't wanna give more guidance there at this stage. I think it makes a lot of sense, given what I already explained. We're in sort of a year of, let's say, changeover from an old system to a new system, especially in the Netherlands, one of our important markets. Like, I couldn't have foreseen that, let's say the road tax adjustment played out as it played out in the last weeks. And that will have a significant effect on market growth in the coming one or two years. So maybe that is a. Yeah. Yeah, addition from my side. Yeah, maybe add-on question there, because you primarily explain, let's say, the year-over-year comparison with the, let's say, the home chargers clients going back home. Isn't it maybe also a big impact that a lot of EV lease cars have been brought back to the dealerships and are standing idle somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but officially still are part of the Dutch EV fleet? Isn't that also a big proportion, especially Teslas I see with hundreds, I would say, standing in the middle of nowhere? I would say on a 200,000, let's say, electric cars out there, I don't expect that number to be that significant that it would have a serious impact. But yeah, it will be there. I think it's definitely, it is one of these things that is impacting it, yeah. Is it not that taxi drivers are switching back or so, something like that? No, taxi drivers are a small part of our sales. So it's really, if you look at charging volumes in the market, so there's yeah, there's simply more than 400,000 cars on the road, that's indeed, some of them are impacted, like you say. But yeah, the charging happens, and by now still a lot of it at home charging. AC charging has significant volumes, so when there are small shifts in those other drivers' behaviors there, then it has an impact, a more significant impact on fast charging. So we think that is the yeah, that is the reason for a slight underperformance versus the fleet growth. Yeah, then you said, coming back on pricing, and that you see competitors further pricing up to at least limit the losses they make. We're now entering the summer season, so normally grid prices or let's say power prices coming down mid-season. Isn't it logical to simply expect gross margins to go even higher than the current level in Q2, Q3? And yeah, that's why I'm still puzzled. Why not just expect higher underlying EBITDA? Yeah, so if you look at energy costs, they, they've actually been quite favorable in the first quarter. So it's already quite positive. What we see in the summer, we benefit a lot from solar production because a lot of people charge at those hours when solar production is high. So we actually, our pricing is lower than the average market price. So yeah, that could be a positive impact indeed. Okay. Clear. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thijs. Thank you, sir. The next question will be coming from Joren Van Aken, calling from Degroof Petercam. Please go ahead. Yes, good afternoon. Just a quick question from my side. It's on Poland. It's a new country for you guys. EV penetration seems relatively low there. So the question is: Is there actually sufficient demand for charging to get those stations actually profitable or get a nice return on capital for those stations? Or do you anticipate an acceleration in the penetration there? Some color on that would be helpful. Thanks. It's a good question. So we looked at that, let's say, in more detail. I think we also need to learn in such markets. What we see, I think, with Poland, is that, compared to other countries, the car fleet stock is significantly larger, with a larger, let's say, duration of cars staying in the country, so they're older. We're talking about, let's say, 40 million cars with an average lifespan of 40 or 50 years. On the other hand, we also see quite fast economic development, whereby there is a certain percentage of these cars is new. So there's actually new car sales, which are higher than the Netherlands. And what we also see is that those cars are more expensive cars, more often. What we see generally across our markets is that more expensive cars are more often electric. So yeah, what we see is basically that there is an environment whereby, let's say, with lower EV penetration, we could actually see very favorable economics at our stations. And that is why we think we actually should invest in a country which has a lot of traffic, a lot of cars, and has significant economic development. So that's that, basically sort of, yeah, a bit of an overview on how we look at it. Yeah, and yeah, and of course, that needs to come with long tenors. To be able to to make that investment, and then, then it's again securing sites in a market that you know at some, you know, it's a big market. That is, you have a huge amount of cars, and that at some stage will transition, maybe later than others, but the transition will be there, so we... Then, then it's favorable when you've secured those sites. Is there already some information on the tender in Poland? Yeah, we're talking mostly about sort of 20 plus five, plus five order of magnitude, sort of, let's say, concessions that they're aiming at. Okay. Very clear. That's, uh. Thanks. That is really, I think, a very different story in that sense than Italy, maybe if we compare the two, because both have adoption levels, which are currently quite low. You need to have some time to await the hockey stick. But I think the ingredients to the hockey stick are very good. Yes, makes sense. Thanks. Thank you very much. Any further questions? Yes, sir, we do have one question remaining, and the last question today will be coming from Wim Hoste, calling from KBC Securities. Please go ahead, your line is open. Yes. Hi, Michiel and Victor. It's almost lunchtime, so. Hi, Wim. Wim. Great to have you on the call. Yes, I hope you can hear me. I've just got some quick follow-ons. A lot of things have already been discussed. One is on the bond issue, which you will do in your like private placements. Can you say anything on how you decide on the conditions, as we see maybe interest rates going a bit lower, maybe also your business risk declining over time? Is that fixed at 6%, or do you think that you could, let's say, improve for yourself? Yeah, so we started out six years ago with 6%. We went down at some stage to down to 4.5% when the rate environment was really low indeed, and after a couple of the equity raises. We went up a bit because banks are now offering a bit of returns on savings accounts, which is for a lot of people sort of the comparison. So yeah, it depends on a bit on how that develops to see whether we where we can change our pricing. I think overall, if you look at a 6% coupon, it's yeah, for us, it's very favorable. To the consumer, it's also a nice coupon. Yeah, especially if you compare it to what people make on their savings accounts. I think probably it's well balanced at the moment, I would say, and I think the spread is in that sense similar to, or maybe even lower than historically, right? Yeah. Does that give you, Yes, sure, sure. It gives a feeling of what you're planning. Then something I read recently is that, I think the EU is gonna force fast chargers to accept all bank cards, and I was wondering, is, is that something that, yeah, would be a, like, big investment to adapt? And do you think that could also change some of the competition dynamics as you, you have these loyalty cards now, and then you could basically stop at any place and just charge with your bank cards? Yeah. We've been really an early sort of advocate for this, because in our view, it's in line with our mission, accelerating the adoption of EV. You know, creating that freedom for people to choose their payment method then. You want to charge, and why would you put a barrier in place? So we've been implementing bank card, let's say, terminals very early on. And in that sense, we're pretty happy that that is becoming regulation as well. We see some other parties in the markets having different, yeah, sort of opinions on this. I think it might shift a bit volumes, but in the end, yeah, I think it's more an enabler. I see it more as a positive enabler to develop the charging market as a whole, than that I think it will have a very big competitive influence. Okay, all right. Thanks. Then, maybe just on the PPA, something that I've been noticing in some, let's say competitors of yours, which also operate as utilities or as grid players, they have an advantage in a way when, suppose lately we've seen energy prices going negative, that they can offer very sharp conditions. Is that something because now with the PPA, and I think Victor, you also mentioned that you will benefit from lower prices? But suppose that we're in this period during holidays with lots of sunshine and wind, that energy prices go negative, that you can also follow those sharp promotions from these more facility-like competitors. Yeah, no, but in that sense, the energy market is extremely transparent, huh? So, everybody has access to those low prices, yeah. The wholesale market is extremely efficient, so we have no little more access to those low prices than people who produce them. It's just one market price. So in that sense, I don't see the advantage for people who generate. And then if you look at our PPA, it's indeed effectively a cap structure, whereby we do benefit from low prices. I think it depends a bit as well, Wim, on what you believe works as an experience to the end user. So we've seen some parties that very much believe in variable pricing to the end user, some with apps on screens and then saying, "Yeah, the wind is up today, so the pricing is low." What we see from basically, you know, our analysis of the market is that, yes, there is a smaller group of, let's say, technical, fuzzy enthusiasts that is very interested in that. But the far majority, especially the fleet owners, they are much more about stable pricing. And we've also seen that, for example, in a deal recently that we signed with Arval. They really like the fact that we're transparent and that we have stable pricing, much more than other parties in the market, and that we don't differentiate it that much between locations. And I think, yeah, in that sense, I would say that, you know, let's say trying to grow based on a very small percentage of users that is interested in variable pricing, I don't see that as a very successful strategy at the moment. Okay. Lastly, just something that tweaked my attention when you spoke about the German manufacturers, and they all are looking to these Chinese cars that are piling up on our shores. What can you say what that impact would be if the Chinese producers with low-cost cars, is it something? Would that be neutral or positive for you? Because, yeah, maybe they don't drive long distances because often they have shorter ranges. Or was that just, you know, was there no, let's say, sentiment attached to that for yourself? I think the sentiment in our view is great that the Chinese are there, because they put competition in the market. They, yeah, they accelerate the transition towards electric mobility. More affordable cars scales the market, so that helps, and that in the end, scales our market, and therefore, yeah, accelerates our company growth. I think I do see, let's say, the issue that some of the, let's say, European OEMs have, and there are several solutions to that. But for Fastned, I would say, any competition on that market that accelerates the growth scaling and of that market and prices going down is great. Okay. Right, that's clear. So that's all done for me. Thanks for taking my questions. Cool! I think that leads us to the end of the call. Sorry for the technical hiccups, and thank you very much all for listening and being there. Looking forward to see everyone next time. Thank you. Thank you much, sir. That will conclude today's presentation. Thank you for your attendance. You may now disconnect. Have a good day, and goodbye.