E.ON SE

Hello everyone and welcome to our 9 months 24 results call. Thank you for taking the time to join us. I'm Björn Siggemann, part of the IR team and will be moderating the call today. Unfortunately, Iris is not able to join us due to sickness. I'm, however, pleased to be here together with our CFO, Nadja Jacobi, who will give an update on our financials. As always, we will leave enough room for your questions after the presentation. With that, Nadja, over to you.

Thank you, Björn. and a warm welcome to all of you from my side. Let me walk you through our solid nine-month financials. To start, here are my three key messages for today. First, in the first nine months of the year, we have achieved an EBITDA of €6.7 billion and an adjusted net income of €2.2 billion, both in line with our expectations. These results cover 75% of the respective guidance midpoints for the full year. This puts us in a comfortable position to achieve our guidance, which we fully confirm. From an underlying operational perspective, our results show a year-over-year EBITDA expansion in the low triple-digit million euro range. This is a continuation of our operational delivery in H1 and puts us well in line with our full-year growth targets. Second, investment-driven earnings growth and operational execution remain the key underlying growth drivers across all our segments. Our planned investments are developing well and increased 20% year over year. Our supply chain strategy, which entails high standardization and long-term visibility to our diversified supplier base, it continues to be the right one. We procure the right materials and components at competitive prices and remain confident in our ability to meet our capex targets. Third, our nine-month E&D outturn of around 41 billion euro provides a solid foundation not only for our current investment plans but also for future potential increases if returns are sufficiently attractive. Let's now move on to the details of our nine-month EBTA development. Our adjusted EBTA reduced by €1.1 billion because of positive timing and run-off impacts in 2023. Adjusting for these, we see a solid low triple-digit million increase building upon the growth trajectory we have already seen through H1. Looking into the nine-month year-over-year drivers, let me start with energy networks. We have seen significant EBITDA growth driven by our accelerating investments into the regulated asset base across all regions. In our largest market, Germany, additional growth came from positive inflation indexation of our regulatory revenues. The underlying growth is compensated by various timing effects, both in 2023 and 2024. In our second largest market, Sweden, WAP-driven growth was supported by the significant increase in regulatory work in 2024. The impact from these two continuing positive drivers was slightly dampened due to the end of network loss recoveries, which we received in 2023. In Central Eastern Europe, investment-driven earnings growth was offset by the adjustment in accounting for our Slovakian operations to a net equity basis, resulting in a technical EBITDA reduction. In South Eastern Europe, our successful regulatory management led to year-over-year growth largely due to further network loss recoveries. To make our underlying operational performance more visible to you going forward, we are currently considering to adjust for the value-neutral timing impacts in our energy networks business. If and when we will introduce this will be decided in the next coming months. Moving on to our energy infrastructure solution business. Our investment-driven growth is progressing well in this segment with a 48% increase in investments compared to last year. On a nine-month basis, underlying growth is still overcompensated by the 2023 runoff earnings, as well as lower volumes in our district heating and cooling business due to warmer temperatures, both related to H1. In energy retail, we have now already achieved slightly more than €1.7 billion EBTA in the first nine months of this year, and we are well on track for our full year guidance. The year-over-year drop in EBITDA is caused by last year's positive one-offs, which were concentrated in the first nine months of 2023. As a reminder, the 2023 one-offs came from procurement optimization benefits and the UK tariff deficit recovery. Our B2B performance in the UK remains particularly strong this year, slightly overcompensating for the lower volumes due to warmer temperatures in H1. Let me conclude by reiterating that our nine-month results put us well on track to achieve our 2024 guidance. Moving on to slide four. No surprises in the adjusted net income development for our nine-month results. The bottom line essentially follows EBTA development. All earnings elements below EBTA are in line with our expectations. When looking at our underlying adjusted net income, we are well on track for our promised underlying growth for the full year. Let us now move on to our economic net debt development. When it comes to investment spending, our execution remains strong. Our group capital fill rate now stands at 65%, which is around four percentage points ahead of nine months 2023. Economic net debt turned out broadly flattish versus H1, driven by operating cash flow more than covering investment spending. In the third quarter, pensions moved up by a low to mid triple-digit million euro, mainly due to the fall in rates between the end of Q2 and Q3. With a year-to-date cash conversion ratio of 73%, we are well on track for our full-year cash conversion expectation of around 90%. Our pension provisions and asset retirement obligations are sensitive to the movement in risk-free rates. If rates were to stay unchanged at the end of Q3, I would expect economic net debt to come in slightly above $41 billion at year-end. To conclude, our solid E&D path continues to confirm our view of having strong balance sheet capacity to fund our current investment program and a potential future upgrade provided that regulatory conditions improve. Finally, I would like to close the presentation by fully confirming our guidance. The key points you should take away from today are, first, our solid nine months performance supports 2024 earnings expectations, particularly within the energy networks and energy retail segments. We continue to expect the energy infrastructure solution segment to be in the lower half of our 550 to 650 million euro guidance range due to the lower district heating and cooling volumes driven by warmer weather in H1. However, we also continue to expect the other segments to compensate for the temporary effects in energy infrastructure solutions. To sum it up, we still see the midpoint of our group guidance range as the best estimate for our full year results. Second, our investment ramp-up is progressing well, which fully supports the delivery of our mid-term targets. Finally, our balance sheet remains healthy. We will continue to focus on attractive value creation via organic growth opportunities while rewarding our shareholders with a growing dividend. With that, back to you, Björn, for the Q&A.

Yeah, thank you, Natia. Just a few words in the beginning, ahead of the Q&A, as usual, two question rule per person, and then let's kick it off. I'm just being told that Harry Weybert from Exxon, you're the first one. Please.