Postnl Nv

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the post NL fourth quarter full years 2023 results call. At this moment, all participants are in a listen only mode. And after the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Now, I would like to hand over the conference call to Miss Inga Laude, manager investor relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today in our full year 23 analyst call. With me here in the room are Herna van Hagen, our CEO, and Pim Berenson, our CFO. As usually, we will start with the presentation, which you can find on the website. And after that, we will open up for a Q&A. Herna, over to you.

Thanks, Inge. Let's start with the key messages that were operating in a challenging environment in 2023. In many aspects, it was a challenging year. The political and economic conditions were again uncertain and also had an impact on our operating environment. High inflation and deterioration in macroeconomic conditions put real pressure on consumer spending throughout the year. Combined, these developments negatively impacted e-commerce, putting pressure on the sector and on PostNL, leading to lower results than we had expected. In this environment, we took swift and firm mitigating actions throughout the year to navigate this turbulent environment. We took, for example, smart yield management actions, which included price increases, but also scaled our network capacity by, for example, optimizing our routes, by planning our fleet better with algorithms, by being very critical at our overhead costs and not filling staff vacancies. And in this way, we reduced direct and indirect costs. Last year, we announced the reduction of 200 to 300 full-time equivalents in overhead, which has been finalized by the end of 2023 with a positive impact on 2024. It was crucial for us to stay resilient in volatile times. On this slide, you find our key results. Some of them already published on January 26th, when we published our preliminary results. I would like to focus for a minute on the non-financials, And Pim will take the whole financial part when he presents the year 2023. I think important in the non-financials is our continuing efforts and also success in having consumer accounts in our app. You see an increase of more than a million accounts in the year 2023 to almost 9 million at this moment in time. And that's an important element because those 9 million consumers do give us the opportunity and entrance to their personal preferences. We also scaled our out of home options in 2023. And I'll come back to this topic later in the presentation because we do think that out of home remains to be important or even becomes more important going forward. By the end of the year, we had 903 automated parcel lockers, which is a huge increase compared to 2022, where we ended the year with around 500 lockers. We also opened our lockers to third party operators. Last point I would like to emphasize is, of course, our carbon efficiency. We're a very green company. Our carbon efficiency improved. with 24% of CO2 emission free last miles, and of course, a 10% carbon efficiency improvement on our own fleet. An important part of our strategy going forward. Let's quickly move to our business performance in 2023, and I would like to hand over to Pim.