Deutsche Post Ag S/Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome and thank you for joining the DHL group conference call. Please note that this call will be recorded. You can find the privacy notice on dhl.com. Throughout today's presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. If you've dialed in, please select star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. Instructions will also follow at the time of the Q&A. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Martin Ziegenborg, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and a very good morning from my end to everyone participating in this call. Thank you for your interest. As the title says, I have with me here our Group CEO, Tobias Meyer, and our Group CFO, Melanie Kreis. We will start with the presentation, starting by Tobias and following with the Q&A. With that, over to you, Tobias.

Thank you, Martin. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for Your interest in DHL 2025 turned out to be a bit different from the macro assumptions than many had told us, but despite that, we delivered on guidance, particularly through effective cost and yield management in all of our divisions, so that for the full year, EBIT increased to $6.2 billion, and we have an 8% year-on-year growth in the earnings per share. We continue to generate good cash flow. You will have seen that cash flow, free cash flow, net M&A increased to 3.2 billion and execute our policies, our finance policy to provide good shareholder returns. As it relates to the outlook, I think 2025 really made us in many aspects a better company, and we have a more solid base to tackle the opportunities that our industry offers. That's what we will stay focused on, on the one side resilience in a volatile world, and we expect 2026 to remain volatile but execute on our growth initiatives. With that, on the next page, you see some key numbers that you will already have absorbed on EBIT, ROIC up 20 basis points, free cash flow I mentioned. We also delivered on the non-financial growths that we set ourselves with employee engagement of 82, realized decarbonization facts of 2.1 million tons. That's slightly above our target as well. And the cybersecurity rating at really top of the range, top of our peer group with 785. We do remain committed to attract the shareholder returns. On page four of the presentation, you see our historical dividend increase. We thought that after waiting through the period of post-COVID normalization, it's now the right time to get back into a gradual increase of the dividend and stay on top of the corridor that we set ourselves in terms of the payout ratio. We also stay committed to our share buyback programs. We have 1.5 billion euros remaining to be spent, so also continuity on that side. As it relates to the development of the operating environment, page 5 gives an indication of what we dealt with in the year of 2025, the example of the Deirdre Express, the weight per day development on the destination U.S. lanes. It stands at minus 26 for the entire year. You obviously see the significant drop after the changes in U.S. tariff policy, the so-called Liberation Day, and the impact that that had. But it's also important to note that the rest of the world has been very resilient. So we do see growth out of several origins in Asia. We're very engaged to also increase our competitiveness on inter-European trade. So that worked out well. But it is a world that is quite heterogeneous as it relates to growth trends and the resulting actions we have to take as it relates to capacity management. We do believe that Strategy 2030 on the next page is still a very fitting answer to the challenges that the world poses to us. Our top-line growth accelerators remain extremely relevant from an industry focus, but also from a geographical focus. Our GEO Tailwind 20 set of countries are really those where things are happening in a positive sense, so we remain very committed to that program. But also the profitability accelerators obviously had to be a big focus in 2025 as it relates to the adjustment of capacity, but also our structurally orientated Fit for Growth program really delivered very, very well. They're very happy with that. And also the group set up, the alignment of the legal structure is very well under way. To deep dive a little bit into some of those profitability accelerators on the following page seven, you see a fit for growth execution. We were faster, also needed to be faster on some measures, aviation, air freight, particularly significant structural reset in Europe and the US through network redesigns, air to truck, but also structural levers in the optimization of our fleet and aviation setup, which partners we operate with that all made us more efficient. The fleet renewal obviously being the part that many of you are familiar with. On the ground side, ground operations, warehouse sorting and handling, similarly and more broadly as it relates to the divisional relevance, we executed that very well. P&P in the first half, significant adjustments also given the flexibility of the new postal law that were executed very swiftly and I think overall very well. There's the longer-term trend of standardization, automation, and robotics, which remains very relevant for us across the divisions and will deliver additional benefits. Support functions, a lot, and I deep dive on that a little bit on AI. The digitalization we have been driving for many years provides an excellent basis for that. We continue to be frugal as it relates to discretionary spend and especially overhead. We do this in a very continuous way to really create lasting, sustainable impact. For us, this is not a short-term exercise. We want to create a better company, and I think that's what we did in 2025. Again, this will continue into this year with some additional benefits to be seen. As it relates to the deployment of technology, AI is also very relevant for us. I think we are very excited by this technology, but we don't get carried away by that excitement, but have, I think, a very clear focus on where we deploy own resources, where we have in-house engineering. These are particularly areas that are bespoke to us or have high opportunity for deeper integration of AI functionality. So we're working on agentic multimodal models. I think the entire industry is excited about the deployment in customs. That is definitely the case for us as well, customer service as well. What's important to us is efficiency is great, but the opportunity is way beyond that, that we get in customs better compliance, better documentation, a better value proposition for our customers. In recruiting, similarly, great efficiency gains by helping the process, but what we're really looking forward to is hiring more fitting people for the respective roles. In vehicle maintenance and repair, this is an area where we will have double-digit million impact in Germany alone by just having AI know the condition of the vehicle, know what we can bundle when we do repairs with maintenance and execute that in a much more stringent way with the repair shops. So, these are those areas which are not so often talked about but really have significant impact. What is a big program for us into 2026 is the delivery body. to bring AI onto the hand scanner of the courier and thereby provide better guidance about specific locations, share the experience that we've collectively built up in the organization about the specifics of a premise of a location of a city. That's something that will make our service not only more efficient, but also truly better. And that's the part where we deploy own resources to really deeply re-engineer the process and integrate AI into our platform. Under number two, we are more opportunistic deploying what is offered to us. We have great partners. Not all partners in this space deliver great value, but we found some, and that's developing very well. And then we also spend a lot of time on people and culture to ensure we have great engineers, we have great managers that know how to make use of this technology, and we have a workforce that is ready to adopt it. We want to have our own value add in this space. This is why we're ramping up resources. as it relates to AI practitioners on use case implementation, as it relates to AI-trained experts in our IT services, shared service functions, with also deep technical expertise that can help us to make this part of our journey. So that's what we're looking forward to, integrate AI deeply on an industrial scale into our processes, and this is why we're looking forward really to a decade of AI-driven improvements across multiple processes where we are very focused from a group perspective on some projects that are of broader relevance for our divisions across. In terms of top line accelerators on the following page, update on the programs that most of you will be familiar with, e-commerce, our focus areas remain the same, which means for Express, the top end of the spectrum in terms of value, in terms of urgency. whereas P&P and e-comm play in the standard parcel space, which is scale-driven. We have changes in the year 2025 in our European footprint. We continue to drive that. We want to be part of the consolidation play in Europe and offer a really great pan-European service. There are few that span that entire spectrum. Geographic tailwinds I talked about. It's 20% of group revenue, and there are some countries where we really want to further broaden our footprint. Life science and healthcare, great progress in terms of the setup. You will see significant investments in equipment and infrastructure. This will take time to execute. This is an industry that is rather conservative due to quality reasons, but this also makes this a sticky business once it's converted. So that's something that we remain very excited about. but also know it takes time to build this unique offering that we are shooting for. Data center and new energy, more opportunistic in the sense that we have a lot of those capabilities that are needed. Significant growth with hyperscalers in 2025 and also with new energy. particularly in those specific areas like battery transportation, also battery storage solutions, which have high requirements when it comes to safety and compliance. Those are areas we particularly grew also in wind energy, which is more an industrial projects type of engagement. That's an area that developed very, very positively in 2025. This is also why we are confident, despite the geopolitical turmoil, that 2026 will be a good year for us. On page 10, you see the guidance for this year. We are shooting for EBIT for the group in excess of $6.2 billion. You see the sliver for DHL, P&P, and group functions. Free cash flow in excess and around the $3 billion mark with gross capex between 3 and 3.3 and the tax rate, as per usual, around 30%, and also our midterm outlook unchanged. So overall, a year behind us that surely had its volatility and changes in the macro environment. I think we can say that we adjusted well to that and enter 2026 with a platform and business base that gives us confidence to execute along our strategic priorities. And with that, over to Melanie for some more details on the divisional performance and the financials.