Volkswagen Ag Unsp/Adr

Welcome to our first part of today's agenda, the Volkswagen's conference call for investors and analysts for the full year results 2020, based on the annual report we published early this morning. For today's conference call, I'm delighted to be joined by Herbert Dees, our CEO, Frank Vitter, our still current CFO, and our incoming CFO, Arno Antlitz. And also Christian Dahlheim, our Director of Group Sales of the Volkswagen AG. Of course, we look forward to taking your questions. Most of you will have followed our Power Day yesterday and this morning's annual press conference. Our focus now is to cover your specific needs as investors and analysts. So let me now hand you over to Herbert, who will open today's session.

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Helen. Welcome to everybody. Shortly resuming a little bit the main messages from this morning. I think despite the challenges of the pandemic, Volkswagen Group has proven to be robust and powerful in 2020. I think we managed well. We started our BEF ramp-up in the volume segment and at the end tripled our BEF sales to 230,000. Also, we had a late launch in the year. I think it was quite successful, and the momentum is continuing, and we are very confident that MEB is the right concept, and we will be very competitive with our BEF lineup. In terms of digitalization software, I think we have laid very important groundwork to become a software-enabled car company. Software.org is really gaining shape. The first updates into our electric platform MEVs are just happening this year. This will go into, let's say, 12 weeks continued update and upgrade of the car. So you will really experience a new customer experience in those cars. And we are learning by the day and becoming better and faster. Within two life cycles, gentlemen, the car industry will change dramatically, radically. Profit pools will shift from conventional cars first into EVs and then radically into software. This has a lot to do with the automated driving, which is going to happen in that kind of period of time, and we are preparing for the shift. I think this first transition, we are well on the way into EVs, and there are even signs that EV business could be at least as good as the business with the conventional cars. We are also confident that following this transition or going through that transition afterwards, Volkswagen can be an even stronger company. We can even gain market share through that transition because it's also a game of scale. Our ICE portfolio will broadly finance the transition and open those new profit pools for us. And I think this year, touching a little bit on this year, it will be a difficult year because of supply. But still, we are confident that we will recover from COVID and we should have a good second half of the year. And that should once again become a decent year for Volkswagen. And I'm also very happy with the new team on board now, a little bit enlarged. and we are committed to unleash the value of the group further. I think we will in 2021 accelerate the transition journey with additional decisions to come, speeding up, gaining momentum. And as you may have noticed, our share price has taken a little bit of momentum. As we are passing through the proof points, electrification, and then later on software, I think there's still a lot of potential in this year. Ellen.

Yes, thank you very much, Herbert, for the opening. I'll pass over now to Frank, who will briefly take us through some of the highlights of the financials.