K+S Aktiengesellschaft

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the KplusS second quarter 2023 earnings call. We hope you had a chance to review our posted slides as well as our Q2 documents available on the website. After some opening remarks by Dr. Lohr, we will directly jump into Q&A. Just 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 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 and welcome to our Q2 earnings discussion. After my opening remarks, we will directly start with a Q&A session and I will answer these together with my colleague Christian Meyer, our CFO. We have good news for you. The potash market finally found the bottom and the worst is behind us. We thought that we would see the turnaround already with the Chinese contract, but MOP selling price in Brazil initially continued to fall and only, but finally, bottomed out at the end of the quarter. If the positive demand and price trend continue in the further course of the year, EBITDA would reach the upper end of the 600 to 800 million euro range. Free cash flow will see a significant working capital inflow and therefore a range between a strong 300 to 450 million euros is what we expect. So and now we are ready for your questions. Julia.

If you would like to ask a question, please use the hand signal in Teams and write your name and the name of your research house in the chat function. We will then call you individually and you can address your questions to us live. Please switch on your camera if you start asking a question. 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 other questions. This brings us to the first question of Markus Meyer.