K+S Aktiengesellschaft

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the KplusS first quarter 2023 earnings call. We hope you had a chance to review our posted slides as well as our Q1 documents available on the website. After some opening remarks by Dr. Lohr, we will directly jump into Q&A. Some technical notes. Please refer to our disclaimer on page 2 of the presentation. Then a note on data privacy as always. 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 content 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. Good morning and welcome to our Q1 earnings session. After brief opening remarks, we will directly start in the Q&A session and all the three of us will answer. And you have not seen him so far. On my left side, Dr. Christian Meyer, our new CFO, will also be part of the answering team. We had a good start into 2023 with an EBITDA of 454 million euros and an EBITDA margin of 38% and a free cash flow of 130 million euros. To put the free cash flow into the right perspective, You have to look at our trade receivable volume. This was still unusually high and saw no release from the year-end level of 1.1 billion euros. This should happen during the next month. Some words about the potash market. The wait-and-see attitude of customers has lasted longer than expected. This was partially due to the lengthy Indian negotiations, which were finally done at the beginning of April. In the northern hemisphere, this meant that deliveries were not in time for spring application. We expect demand to pick up in the second half of this year, and this is base for our outlook. We also expect overseas MOP prices to moderately recover from today's level in the second half. This would translate into a full year average selling price for our product portfolio tangibly below the level we saw in Q1. And now we are happy to take all your questions.

If you would like to ask a question, please use the hand signal and write your name and the name of your research house in the Microsoft Teams chat function. We will then call you individually and you can address your question to us live. Please switch on your camera. One more request as usual. We would like to answer your question 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 the first question of Christian Veits.