Prosiebensat1 Media U/Adr

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our second quarter first half 2023 results conference call of ProSiebenSat1 Media SE. This conference is being recorded. Today's call is hosted by Mr. Dirk Vogtlander. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining ProSiebenSat1's Q2 and H1 2023 results conference call. I'm very happy to have with me Bert Harwitz, CEO of ProSiebenSat.1, as well as Martin Miltner, our new CFO. Bert and Martin will first take you through the financial and operational performance for the reporting period. Bert will conclude the presentation with comments on the group-wide transformation and cost savings program, as well as our outlook for the current financial year. As always, the presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. With this, I now hand over to Bert.

Good morning everyone, also from my side, and thank you for joining our results call on the second quarter and the first half of the year. Before we go into details, let me give you a quick overview of the most important developments and results of the last months. As expected, in the German-speaking region, the still high inflation rates and weak economic development continued to impact our group with our most important financial KPIs being below the previous year's level. Especially, our TV core advertising revenues declined in the second quarter, although to a somewhat lower extent than in Q1. On a more positive note, we were able to compensate for the decline partially with the growth in advertising revenues from our digital businesses in the DAG region, like Join or Audio. In our commerce and venture segment, the revenue growth of our digital platform and commerce business more than offset the decline of Seven Ventures advertising revenues. This was especially thanks to Verivox. The development of our dating and video segment was impacted by regulatory headwinds in Germany, as well as the continued consumer constraint in the DACH region and lower usage of video services in the US. In this environment, we strongly focus on cost efficiency. As already indicated, we initiated a comprehensive cost optimization and efficiency program which we expect to translate into annual growth savings of 100 million euros in 2024. Most importantly, in line with the forecast of the Economic Research Institutes, we expect the macroeconomic conditions to improve in the second half of the year compared to the previous years, with the corresponding impact on the DAG advertising market. Based on this assumption, we are confirming our financial targets for the full year. With this, I hand over to our CFO, Martin Mildner, who will guide you through our group financials for the second quarter and the first half of 2023.