Fresenius Medical Care AG

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Natalie, your chorus call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Fresenius Medical Care Report on the third quarter 2022. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touchdown telephone. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dominik, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Natalie. As mentioned by Natalie, we would like to welcome you to our earnings call for the third quarter 2022, which is a day earlier than originally planned. I do apologize for the inconvenience that might have caused. We will start with our presentation followed by a Q&A session. As always, I start out the cautionary I start out the call by mentioning our quotient language that is in our safe harbor statement, as well as in our presentation, and in all the materials that we have distributed yesterday. For further details concerning risks and uncertainties, please refer to these documents, as well as to our SEC filings. We are aware that this is a call on short notice in your calendars in the middle of the reporting season. Therefore, we will try to keep the presentation short and leave time for questions. As always, we would like to limit the number of questions again to two in order to give everyone the chance to ask questions. Should there be further questions and time left, we are happy to go a second round. It would be great if you could make this work. The call is scheduled for 16 minutes. With us today for the first time is Carla Krivis, our new CEO and Chair of the Management Board, who has started less than a month ago. Carla will share with you her first impressions of the company and initial strategic thinking. Of course, also with us is Helen Gieser, our Deputy CEO, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Transformation Officer. Helen will give you an update on the business development, financial performance, and outlook. This quarter, only Helen will be available for the Q&A. I will now hand over to Carla. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Dominic. This is a perk for me to say hello and welcome everyone to our Fresenius Medical Care Earnings Call. Thank you for joining our presentation. I'm very excited to be here today as CEO. Throughout my first month with the company, I've seen firsthand the incredible commitment of our employees around the world. The patient-centric mindset and clinical excellence is truly inspiring. and it is just one example of the many great assets we have to build on. At the same time, there's a clear urgency for bold interventions to drive business turnaround and to position Fresenius Medical Care for future sustainable and profitable growth. I would like to share what I'm focusing on and will begin on slide three. Our FME25 transformation program is already underway and on track to deliver much needed financial transparency and simplification. We are currently transitioning to our new global operating model centered around our business segments, care delivery and care enablement, and supported by global G&A functions and our global medical office. Furthermore, Our execution plans are on track to deliver 500 million Euro of EBIT by 2025. Within care delivery, we have already started to address the substantial labor challenges. We are employing bold measures to fix our clinical operations to drive higher efficiency and productivity without sacrificing patient care. In addition, we will further consolidate our footprint. For care enablement, we are introducing mitigating initiatives, including pricing actions to address impacts from inflation and supply chain constraints. We are advancing measures to reduce our costs of production, including platform strategies and optimization of our manufacturing footprint. Furthermore, we will regain innovation leadership and are developing a winning digital strategy that will leverage our unparalleled patient data sets to deliver unique value for our patients and customers. In SG&A, we are reducing overhead costs by optimizing shared services, utilizing automation, and transitioning basic operational tasks to low-cost locations. We will leverage business partnering and centers of excellence. Finally, we are reducing operational complexity by eliminating duplications. We are defining our future strategy with priorities becoming clearer. We will optimize our care delivery and care enablement business portfolio, allocating capital to growth areas with higher profitability. This also means that we will exit unprofitable businesses and apply a strict investment and return on invested capital discipline. We are planning additional structural savings beyond the current FME25 program derived from competitive benchmarks. At the same time, we will capture growth opportunities in attractive segments, such as value-based care, home, self and assisted care, upstream CQD, critical care and pharma. We will inspire around our vision and global strategy to foster a OneFME winning high performance culture while ensuring role model accountability and teamwork at all levels. Finally, compliance, sustainability, inclusion and diversity are all key requirements for our success. We will remain a mission-driven company, striving to improve the lives of our patients. You will understand that one month is not enough time to have a full strategic plan detailed out, and I will not be in a position to answer questions today. And we need to present this to our economic council first. But I want to be very clear that speed is of utmost importance. There is an urgency to address our operational performance now and interventions are already underway. I look forward to sharing more details with you in February when we present our results for 2022. At the same time, I will be very open to answering your questions. For the rest of today, I would like to hand it over to Helen, who will walk you through the developments of the quarter and will handle today's Q&A. Thank you. Over to you, Helen.