Volkswagen Ag Unsp/Adr

Good day and ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Volkswagen AG live audio webcast and conference call on the first quarter financial results 2020. For your information, today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mrs. Helen Beckerman, Head of Group Investor Relations for Volkswagen AG. Please go ahead, Madam.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the call. Firstly, our apologies for the slight delay. We had some technical difficulties, maybe due to Corona, like we're having every day, really. Yeah, we'd like to say a warm welcome to you all and welcome our investors and analysts. We're going to speak today about the results from January to March 2020, based on the interim report we published earlier this morning and to follow up on the ad hoc release, which we published on the 16th of April. For today's conference call, I'm delighted to be joined by Frank Zitta, member of the Board of Management, Volkswagen AG, who is responsible for finance and IT, and also our Director of Group Sales, Dr. Christian Dahlheim. Most of you will have followed the webcast from this morning's press conference. Our focus now is to cover your specific needs as investors and analysts. Following the presentations, we look forward, as usual, to taking your questions. So let me now hand over to Frank.

Thank you, Helen, and a warm welcome to all participants on this call. First and foremost, we sincerely hope that you, your colleagues, and your families are remaining healthy during these ongoing and precedented times. You were already given a heads-up on the preliminary Q1 figures in our recent ATOC statement, and the picture hasn't changed with the concrete numbers. As you are well aware, the automobile retail network largely came to a standstill during Q1. The resulting decline in customer demand caused our deliveries to customers, especially in China and Europe, to be down by 600,000 units year on year. The knock-on effect caused revenue to decline by over 8% year on year to around 55 billion euros. The operating result came in at 0.9 billion euros, which corresponds to an operating margin of 1.6%, very low numbers, which we haven't seen in quite some time. The turbulent raw material and financial markets led to significant fair value impacts from commodity derivatives and negative currency effects, which burdened the first quarter in 2020 result, by 1.8 billion euros versus Q1 2019. For the three months period, profit before tax came in at 0.7 billion euros. Automotive net cash flow after diesel outflows and M&A came in at a negative 2.5 billion euros, reflecting the weaker underlying operating result and negative effects in working capital. Automotive net liquidity amounted to 17.8 billion euros, still at a robust level. I will take you through more details shortly. Let's take now first a closer look at the sales side, so I'll hand you over to Christian.