Fresenius Medical Care AG

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Ander, your chorus call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Fresenius Medical Care Q3 results conference call. 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 touchtone telephone. Press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Dominik, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Okay. So, unfortunately, we had some technical issues, but I've heard the introduction has happened. Thank you, Andrea, for the introduction. As already mentioned, we would like to welcome you to our earnings call for the third quarter 2023. We appreciate you joining us today to discuss the performance of the third quarter. I will, as always, start out the call by mentioning our cautionary language that is in our safe harbor statement as well as in our presentation and in all the materials that we have distributed yesterday evening. For further details concerning risks and uncertainties, please refer to these documents as well as to our SEC filings that have already happened. As we have a hard stop at 4.30 CET, we have prepared only a short presentation to leave time for questions. regarding the quarterly earnings and for our new CFO to introduce himself. As always, we would like to limit the number of questions to two in order to give everyone the chance to ask. Should there be further questions and time left, we can go a second round. I'm aware that there is, with GLP-1, one dominant topic in healthcare research overall, which we fully understand, but we would appreciate if we could focus in this call on the quarterly business developments. With us today is of course Helen Gieser, our CEO and Chair of the Management Board, and as just mentioned for the first time, Martin Fischer, our CFO. Having joined the company on October 1st and after quarter end, Martin will share a bit about his background and focus areas in his new role, but he will not answer questions today, but for sure in our call in February. Helen will provide an update on the business development, financial performance, and outlook, and will then be available for Q&A. And with that, Helen, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Dominic. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining our presentation today and for your continued interest in Fresenius Medical Care. I'm very excited to talk to you today about the meaningful progress we made in the third quarter as we executed against our strategic plan. However, before I begin the presentation, I wanted to update you on two changes to our management board. As announced earlier this week, Craig Cordola will succeed Bill Valley as care delivery CEO as part of a planned transition following Bill's plan to retire by the end of the year. Craig has many years of proven track record of operational management experience and successfully driving profitable business growth in different companies in the U.S. healthcare services industry. He will be a very valuable member of our management board and will continue our turnaround and transformation while leading care delivery into its next chapter. The second change is that our new CFO, Martin Fisher, started on the 1st of October and I would like to say how thrilled I am to be joined here today by Martin, and I'd like to hand over to Martin to introduce himself.