K+S Aktiengesellschaft

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the KplusS first quarter 2024 earnings call. We hope you had a chance to review our posted slides as well as our Q1 documents available on our 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. 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 would like to turn over to Dr. Lohr for the opening remarks.

Thank you, Julia. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our Q1-24 earnings discussion. We had a good start into the year with a strong European and specialty business, resulting in agriculture sales volumes of more than 2 million tonnes. IndustryPlus also showed a nice performance. In total, Q1 EBITDA reached 200 million euros and was even better than Q4 last year. Free cash flow amounted to 111 million euros. For the year as a whole, we continue to expect EBITDA to range from 500 million euros to 600 million euros. Although the good first quarter has made the lower end of the range less likely, It cannot be ruled out as long as contracts have not yet been concluded by major competitors in China and India. So these were my short opening remarks and now we are happy to take 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 function. We will then call you individually and you can address your questions to us 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. That brings us to the first question of Konstantin Wichert from Baader.