K+S Aktiengesellschaft

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the KplusS Q3 2022 earnings call. We hope you had a chance to review our posted slides as well as our Q3 documents available on our website. After some opening remarks by Dr. Lohr, we will directly jump into Q&A. Please note that today the Q&A session on the quarter and the outlook should not take longer than 20 minutes to leave enough time for the presentation and questions on our WERA 2060 project afterwards. Some technical notes. Please refer to our disclaimer on page 2 of the presentation. Then a note on data privacy. Please note that the Teams session will be recorded, webcasted and be available as a replay on our homepage afterwards. People asking a question in the Teams session have to be aware that by turning on their camera and microphone, they give consent to saving and replaying video and audio sequences. Now I'd like to turn over to Dr. Lohr for the opening remarks.

Thank you, Julia. Good morning, everybody. A warm welcome from my side as well to our Q3 video call. And before we step into the Q&A, I would like to start with some opening remarks. First, again, a good quarter, strong results and a record. quarterly free cash flow of 580 million euros. Our sales volume was negatively impacted by logistical challenges. To give you one example, we had one vessel supposed to leave the harbor by the end of September. It slipped into the beginning of October and we've lost in the quarter, but of course not for the full year, 50,000 tons and roughly 30 million euros EBITDA. Second, Now, as we are close to the end of the year, we are more precise with our forecast. We are expecting an EBITDA of about 2.4 billion euros and a free cash flow of a good 1.2 billion. And this is the upper end of the former range. And even our unadjusted free cash flow will reach 1 billion euros. So you see a very good cash generation. And the final remark is we are seeing normalizing pricing, which is good because we will end up in a very healthy level of pricing with a stronger demand. And before that is achieved, we see the wait and see attitude of our customers. But with a new price level, which is again on a very healthy level, we should see a strong demand in the first half of 2023 because profitability in the ag markets is intact and at the same time we expect a shortness in supply. So that was the brief opening remark session and now we are happy to answer your questions.

If you would like to ask a question via Microsoft Teams, please use the hand signal and write your name and the name of your research house in the chat function of MS Teams. We will then call you individually and you can ask the question live. Please switch on your camera. one more request as usual we would like to answer your questions one by one so if you have multiple questions please ask one question at a time and we will answer it first after that you will have the opportunity to ask further questions this brings us to our first question from christian fights from kepler