Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 2025 BMW Group Annual Press Conference Analysts and Investor Call. I'm delighted to be here today. My name is Ritu Chandi, Corporate Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations for BMW Group. I'm delighted to be joined by our CEO, Oliver Zipzer, our CFO, Walter Mertl, And given the dynamic sales developments across our regions, our board member for customer, brand and sales, Jochen Goller. You've heard from Oliver earlier how BMW's robust strategy and technology openness, attractive product portfolio and a resilient global footprint allows us to forge our own path. as well as setting new paradigms when it comes to tech design and user experience with the Neue Klasse. Walter has shared how we've navigated 2024, closed the year and delivered on all our guidance parameters, updated guidance parameters, despite the IBS headwinds and subdued China situation. We have also provided a comprehensive and reliable guidance for 2025 factoring in all known and decided aspects of uncertain geopolitical backdrop and tariffs to start off i believe you all have the technical instructions for the analyst and investor call and to get this call started we have the first question from patrick homel ubs good morning patrick please go ahead good morning and um

Thanks for taking my question. Good morning, everybody. If I may, I will have two questions for you. My first one is in regards to your capital allocation. I think it's well appreciated you're increasing the payout ratio for 2024. But you've also talked in a quite bullish manner in the past few months about the upside to capital allocation. Now, the formality is to get the AGM approval for the 10%. share buyback but of course i think what we and and many investors were hoping for is to get a bit more granularity how the actual cash return in the next couple of years is going to look like what's the run rate of share buybacks is it going to accelerate from the one billion per annum level or is it going to remain at this one billion per annum level and why did you not decide in favor of increasing the payout ratio i'm just wondering uh with the free cash flow guidance you've put out i mean you did five billion almost five billion last year you got for more than five billion this year um You don't want to build on your net financial asset position. That was my understanding, at least. So why haven't you just provided a framework for more generous cash return? That's my first question. And my second question, I just want to hear from you. Yesterday, there was a news out about Frank Weber's departure. I'm well aware of the age limits, but it's nonetheless quite unusual just ahead of Neue Klasse, which I guess is the biggest project in the company's history from an R&D standpoint. You execute such a management changeover. If you can just give us a little bit of background on that decision and the timing right now. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Patrick. We'll start with the first question on capital allocation, payout ratio, share buyback run rate with Walter. Over to you, Walter.