Volkswagen Ag Unsp/Adr

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Volkswagen Group Investor Analyst and Press Call Six Months Last 8, 1-20-23. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions, and if you'd like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. Let me now hand the floor over to Sebastian Rudolph, Head of Global Group Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Emma, and good morning, everyone, and a warm welcome to all of you to our half-year conference call. It's a joint media and investors and analysts call, and the investors and analysts call will be moderated by my colleague, Rolf Wöhler, head of treasury and investor relations, and myself, Sebastian Rudolph, responsible for global group communications. With us today is our CEO, Oliver Blume, and our CFO, Arno Antlitz. Welcome to both of you. Good to have you in this call. Before we start, let me give you some remarks. We have already published, and you should all have received the press release, the interim report for the first six months, and all other PR-related materials. If you do not have them yet, you can also find them on our website, volkswagen.com, or just give us a call and we send them to you directly. So now let me hand over to Rolf, who will give you a brief rundown of the next minutes, hours.

Rolf, the floor is yours. Thank you, Sebastian. Welcome to everyone also from my side. We will start with Olli, who will talk about the highlights of the first six months. and the second quarter. And after that, we have Arno. He will take a closer look at the financials, as always. We will host a Q&A session for the investor and the analyst community, moderated by myself, followed by the Q&A session for the media community, and that will then be hosted by Sebastian. As already mentioned during the pre-closed call, we have extended today's Q&A session for the analysts and investors, so that any question which has been not answered at the CMD will have enough room for an answer today and obviously also your questions which might have arisen on the latest press announcement here on Xiaoping and Volkswagen partnership. After the session, we will have then a brief break and then continue with the media Q&A. As a reminder of the safe-haver language and other cautionary statements, that will govern today's presentation, which you will find on page 2. I would like to encourage you to read the disclaimer carefully, since all forward-looking statements are qualified by this language. I, however, do not want to read it in order to have enough time for today's presentation, and with that, I hand over to Arno.