Deutsche Post AG (DHL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, hello, and welcome, everyone out there. Thank you for joining us on a new series of thematical deep dives format that we have seen being a very proven and well-accepted format. And for the month of June, as you have seen, we will take you through the big topic of digitalization and what does it mean to the progress of Deutsche Post DHL as a group. And today, we are starting off in a way to sort of slice the elephant and starting off with how is digitalization supporting our ESG efforts. And just have a quick look at the upcoming events, mark your diary. We will have the next week's Friday continuing this series looking at how digitalization and automation go together. Week after that, we see how our e-commerce business is benefiting, and we are looking also at the customer experience aspect of life. Now that's the program for the month to sweeten your Friday afternoons going forward. Today, we are starting with a deep dive into the ESG efforts, and we will have now a quick series of update, starting off with Yin Zou, our Head of Corporate Development, who is introducing you to our overall approach to the topic. And then, we will have real-life showcases, good examples of how that is going to be deployed into the practice, and what does it mean for operations, for customer relations. And I would hope that this is going to be helpful for you. After that, we will have time, I think, for Q&A. So if you're following this out there on the webcast, you'll find this little text box. So punch in any questions that you have, and the team will make sure that we are getting it here into our little studio. If you want to be mentioned by name and firm, please share that with us. And without any further ado, I would now like to hand over to you, Yin.

Thank you, Martin. Thank you, Martin. It's really good to be here. So good afternoon, good evening or good morning to wherever you are based. My name is Yin Zou, and I'm responsible for the corporate development. So I'm pleased to be here to give you a bit of introduction about our digital path to our sustainabilities. So, if we look at -- so if you look at when we develop 2025 strategy and we capture a couple of mega trends, and the trends of digitization and the trends of sustainability are so important. Therefore, they are in very essential part of our total 2025 strategy framework. So, this is our framework for our 2025 strategies. And you can clearly see, other than our vision and our mission and our profitable call, and we have digitization as a strong powerhouse for overall strategy. And you can also see that ESG is a very, very important agenda for our total strategies 2025. So what does that mean? So if you look at our digitization strategy, digital is no longer a showcase or no longer kind of like a dog-and-pony show. So we're looking for digitization for three purposes. Either they can significantly enhance our customer experiences or they can significantly enhance our employee experiences or can significantly enhance our operational efficiency. So in that case, we can see the three purpose is driving our digitized agenda and last but not least, in the end, also drive our sustainabilities. So looking at that, so we have been through a really a long journey for our digital technologies. And from the corporate center, we are also set up a couple of center of excellences try to capture what are the latest technology trends and see how they can use in our company, service our customer and also make our employee working better. So there are a couple of examples. For instance, we have data analytic, data solutions. And they're starting with doing the algorithms for a lot of business cases within our organization to optimize the routing and really have developing algorithms to make us smarter service our customers. And also, one thing to be mentioned is the latest topic about the generative AI was also coming from this group. And the next week, you're going to hear from one of my colleague Torsten talking about how we are able to capture this trend and use this into our daily life. And API was another center of excellence, and this is basically -- it was started 15 years ago, and now it's almost become a requirement for all elements in our business applications within internally and also externally. And it will significantly enhance our income operability and give customers a very much different experiences compared with the traditional EDI or all the other manual interfaces. IoT is another element for the connectivities. They're connecting all the devices or all the assets together and give us a very different view how to tracking our assets, tracking our shipment and also give us and also give our customers a much better visibilities. Blockchain was a very hot topic a couple of years ago, and we are still exploring the usage of them. And I'm happy to see a lot of applications, especially when we involve a multiparty transactions in these areas, and the blockchain can help us to handle the topics, for instance, like facilitating the 2 customs clearance and the shipment tracking and also facility trade. So we saw a lot of usage around all the other areas in the different regions, and I'm happy to see the development for that as well. And also for the automation, and we're talking about robotic automation, we're talking about picking -- moving automations. And because as logistic providers, we do no more than moving goods and also moving data. So therefore, looking at all these center of excellences, you can see how much we are committed to do this digitalization and how we can have this to really change the way we are working and service our customers in a much better way. Digitalization will have also significant support to our sustainability agenda. So here are these examples will be showing how digital is going to support our sustainability agenda. And I'm also very happy to have our colleague Gee, Katharina and also Patrick to talking about some three of the examples we are using for sustainability. And then later, you're going to hear from them, how is that going to work? Now coming back regarding our overall sustainability journey. So we started actually in 2008, that we are probably one of the earliest industrial practice to start GoGreen initiatives to reduce the carbon. Because we believe that as a global logistic providers, and we are responsible also to gradually reduce our carbon footprint because we ship goods moving from A to B. And we have a significant exposure for the air aviation. So therefore, we feel responsibility also need to reduce the carbon footprint for the better of the future. So, we also made a commitment. And by 2050, we have a net 0 and by 2030, reduce our carbon footprint by 30%. And this year, our target has been approved by science-based target approved, and this is one of the most strict target setting in the world organization. And it's showing how serious we are and how sort of steps we are taking on. And one last point, I want to mention also that we also started launching our GoGreen plus products, which means when customers buy our GoGreen plus products, it's not only that they can get a carbon footprint reductions. This also through in-setting, customer can get a certificate. Therefore, they can recognize this as official Scope 3 savings. And the ESG is not only for the decarbonization, which I just mentioned about on the left side, is also talking about how we are able to be a great company to work for all as S side and also on G side, become a trust -- highly trusted company. So for each element, we have very specific KPIs to measure. And these are all in our top executive and also management KPIs for their own incentive goals. So this is through that, we get very, very strong commitment from whole organization for our total ESG agenda. I think these numbers, probably some of you have seen that in the -- it's a public number, and we've been communicating for a lot of occasions. And the last was in Valencia, we have a very big customer event and talking about our commitment. So our carbon footprint now is around 39 million tons, but we want to achieve 29 million tons carbon emission -- less than 29 million tons by 2030. And also, you can see the 30% of our incentive [indiscernible] bonus was based on all these incentive targets. And then, until from now on until 2030, and we're going to spend up to 7 billion for the decarbonization. And I mentioned about the GoGreen plus products, and this is a list of all the GoGreen plus products we have ever seen and thus through all divisions. And we can see almost all the divisions have the products, and we offer customer up to 0% to 100% carbon saving. And this customer also can put into their Scope 3 savings for that. I think I give enough introduction for that. So I would like to invite my colleague, Gee from DHL Express to give you our first example how digital is going to support our sustainability agenda. Gee, please.

Thank you Yin. Also a warm welcome from my end, and I'm really very excited. So my name is Gee working for the global aviation programs team in Brussels and really also part of the DHL Express division. So I'm really excited today to talk about our fuel optimization system because I think with the support of digitalization, we really significantly reduced our CO2 emissions. And when we talk about DHL Express, where our workflow, we also talk about aviation because aviation is playing a key part in our DHL process. And the reason for that is that because we are operating a network for more than 600 flights and they are taking the responsibility of making sure that all these time-critical shipments are delivered on time for our customers. But we also know that when we look at the overall CO2 emissions for the DPDHL Group, air, the transportation mode air is responsible for 69% of the footprint there. So the focus is on air. The focus is on aviation. And what is our approach really to sustainable aviation? We really look at 3 pillars. The first one being new aircraft technology. DHL has been and will still be investing in the latest fuel-efficient engine, when we're buying aircraft. We are also within DHL Express very excited about the way DHL invests in future technology like the electric plane. In a couple of years' time, we're going to introduce Alice, a short-range aircraft, electric aircraft into our network. The second pillar is sustainable aviation fuel. DHL committed for the year 2030 to replace 30% of our jet fuel with sustainable aviation fuel, again, saving a lot of CO2 emissions. And last but not least, the reason why I'm here is to talk about our fuel optimization program, really to make sure that we drive operational efficiencies, we really have been able to reduce our footprint in terms of CO2 emissions. And this is all powered because of digitalization. So before I talk about how we do this, maybe I can explain a little bit first what we really try to do with our fuel optimization program. And this is all geared about these 8 standard operating procedures. We call them SOPs. And these 8 SOPs, they really cover the entire end-to-end process from planning a plane and flight to landing a flight. And we're really talking about, for instance, loading an aircraft, where we make sure that when we want to save fuel, we have to make sure that we put the most heavy containers towards the back because that's saving us fuel. Until the end, when we land the aircraft and with taxi, then the captain has an opportunity to switch off one engine. Again, we are saving fuel. So all these 8 standard operating procedures will cover the entire end-to-end cycle gives us a lot of opportunities because if we multiply these by the 600 flights we operate, we achieved up to 4,800 opportunities per day, where we can save fuel and also where we can reduce the CO2 emission. And this is exactly what we are doing with our fuel optimization program. So let me explain now how we do it. It's all about liberating all the data that sits in the aircraft and making it available for the right people. That's what we exactly do. We have fully automated all the data sources that we need to drive these policies into an automated solution and feeding it into our fuel optimization management system called FOMS. We are taking data sources from the flight dispatch, where we plan the flight in terms of how it should fly, how much fuel it takes. We take that automatically into our FOMS system. We're also taking weight and balance systems and data from there in terms of how we load the aircraft. But finally, the most important data source is our flight data recorder. We call it cockpit data. Here, we're talking about every second we fly the aircraft, we take valuable information regarding fuel into our system. We are talking about almost literally up to 1 billion data elements that we feed into the fuel optimization management system. In the past, we were using the flight data recorder for safety only. Now, we're using it to save fuel. And I'll talk about the fuel optimization system in detail, a little bit on the next slide. But then we also make it available for the audience, for the people. We're using data analytics to do root cause analysis. We're also making it visible in dashboards. We're creating up to 100 reports automated to the audience, flight crew, flight dispatch, network control people, load control. All these get automated report either on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. And finally, we introduced pilot app. Pilots love data. They're really so happy with this because for the first time, they can see their contribution to the network optimization team. And what that means is they can see their own fuel burn savings. They can also see how much they saved in terms of CO2. They love it. At the end, this is all about making sure the digitalization is getting the right data to the right people at the right time, in order to drive these processes. So this is what we exactly again do with fuel optimization. So the other thing, I would like to mention is what exactly do inside the fuel optimization management system. I'll give you two examples. Again linked to our SOPs, the first one being taxi. So, when we arrive at the final destination, we have to taxi. What we are able to do is after a while, we can shut down one engine in FOMS, in our system. We're not just keeping a switch, yes, no. No, what we are doing is we're running algorithms to do simulations in terms of best-case scenarios. What it means is we calculate the total duration that is possible to switch off that one engine and the amount of fuel we potentially can save, all of that through an algorithm. But at the same time, when the captain decides to switch off the engine, we are also able to see with the FDR data automatically how much we save because we can see the difference between when he shuts down the engine how much we save versus what before the fuel consumption was. All of that for each landing we do within DHL. And then, the planned payload closest versus the actual. One of the things I'm trying to say there is we also provide insights, inputs to make people's life easier to make decisions. A good example is to predicting the payload. Each time we have to create a flight, we have to create and make sure that we think about how much fuel we have to burn. How much fuel we have to burn is highly dependent on the payload, in terms of how much weight we have to plan. That prediction of that planned payload is very important. So, what we have done is in the past, we took historical data. Now with our detailed shipment -- real-time shipment applications, we are able to identify automatically the difference between what is certainly on the flight versus what still needs to be forecasted. And this is something that we really have done with the support of the data group and the data science people within DHL. So that prediction has giving us a lot of confidence in the forecast. So having said that brings me almost like to the end of the presentation. What is the impact and the result of our fuel optimization program is, first of all, the savings in terms of fuel burn. We have saved over 43 million U.S. gallons, 43 million U.S. gallons, since the year 2020. So the other thing, of course, we saved was the emissions, the emissions in terms of the savings in kilograms, 550 million kilograms of saving of fuel because of fuel optimization program. And the only thing, I can say is we couldn't have done it without digitalization. So I'm handing over now to Katharina from supply chain. Thank you very much for listening.

Yes. A warm welcome also from my side. My name is Katharina Tomoff. I'm SVP for Environment, Social and Governance, also known as ESG, and I work for DHL Supply Chain. As the name indicates, we manage supply chains for our customers. Our core products are warehousing and transport. But as you can see, we also do packaging, LLP, service logistics and e-commerce and returns. We operate across a variety of sectors. But, if you take about half of the revenue that we make, it's in retail and consumer. I want to talk today about the E in ESG, environment. And you can see here the things that we do. And I want to start with carbon because it's the biggest impact we as DHL have on the environment. Like we indicated, we're very concerned to reduce our carbon footprint. So that's why we have the toughest targets around carbon, net 0 carbon warehouses and also reducing our transport emissions. We offer GoGreen solutions for two reasons: A, we want to contribute to our customers' savings in the environmental area. But of course, also, we want to generate some income for the investments that we do. Now beyond carbon, there are also other environmental aspects that might be more relevant for some of our customers for whom that the carbon is not the major or most significant impact. So we also work with customers on zero waste to landfill projects and on packaging, where I want to introduce two examples to you today. But before I come to that, I want to mention one thing that is very close to our heart, and it's the culture around sustainability. We can do a lot with data, and it's important. But if people don't buy into what we do, if they don't know, if they don't feel part of it, then we will not have the results that we want. So that's why we train all our employees to become certified GoGreen specialists. We have already more than 70,000 of them. And if we think, we can train more and more and we can potentially -- we can use that potential in our employees, this will be an even bigger success. So coming to packaging. If you think about sustainability and packaging, you can look at the material to make it more sustainable. You can say we want to reuse the packaging. You can design it from the beginning more sustainable. You can work with automation and optimization of the packaging and other packaging innovations. The two examples I want to introduce today to you go across all of these. So, I'm sure all of you have received a parcel or a package before. So usually, it looks similar to what you see now. It's the item that you ordered or that we ship. And then around that is air, which we fill by void-fill. And then you have the carton. It's not ideal for many ways. A, we, as a transport provider, we transport air. So we fill our trucks half with items and half with air. And second, if you look at the pricing model, if you ship something and also if we work with other providers, it's often volume-based. So the volume does matter. If we could only package every item just like the item needs it, yes, we can. We have introduced a solution that is tied very much to our warehouse management system. And it folds and produces the carton exactly in the size we need it. So this is how the item will look like afterwards. And the cool thing about it is once the item has entered and is scanned already through our warehouse management system, that data is fed to the machine to say, this is item X, and it has this side -- size, and the machine will produce the carton, so it's ready when the item comes. It's especially good, if you have operations where the item size varies and also you need some space for these big machines. What we get is an average 20% less cardboard and 60% reduction in void-fill. Now, we do also have other operations where the size of the items doesn't vary that much. And we have introduced a solution called DHL Opticarton. It's an in-house developed AI solution, and it does three things, and I'm going to quickly guide you through it. So first, it has all -- again, it's connected to our warehouse management system. And in there, let's assume a warehouse. You have all the items with their sizes. So for all the items, we have the sizes. Then the intelligence calculates what would be the ideal carton sizes for these items that we process in the warehouse. Second, it will tell us how to best split the orders in terms of deciding, do we pack as much as we can in a bigger carton? Or do we split it in 2 or 3? And last, it will also guide the person doing the packaging in telling the person how do you best arrange the items in the packaging, so you can optimize the space in the package. An example. So let's assume we have toys that we want to ship. Here you see it, the carton size that normally you would use. You would say, okay, it's lots of toys. We take a bigger carton. But actually now after the optimization, what you can see, a smaller carton is -- works as well. So, A, we would need to have these carton sizes then at stock, in the warehouse. And then also B, there is an example for the order splitting. You might think -- so in this example, you have a record ball and a helmet. Let's put them all into one that saves carton and maybe also shipping cost because it's only one carton. But you can see here with the intelligence of the system that it tells you it's better for both the environment and for the cost, if you put the helmet separate and the record and the ball in a separate ship -- in a separate package. And the utilization of the packers go up to 90% -- 80%, 90% in these cases compared to what it was before. Now, the last step is then what I mentioned. This is a visualization that the person doing the packing will see. So we'll see, I first need to put in item 1, then item 2, then item 3. It's real taken from how they see it. And it's a little bit like optimizing Tetris. It's a bit like playing Tetris for the person. Now there's another good thing about this is we don't only do this how we stock the things, the items into the package, but also a similar thing is done then how you put this on a pallet. And why do I mention the pallet? Because a tidy pallet doesn't necessarily need shrink wrap. Shrink wrap is widely used in operations. It's just very handy because you can almost wrap every shape with it, and it's secure. Now, if we have a really clean, stocked pallet, we can use reusable wraps around like this big belt solution that we have. And the numbers here are quite impressive. 80% material cost can be saved and 95% in carbon reduction for solutions like this. Now I want to close with showing you how this would look in the truck. So you can see that the truck has more air. But of course, we wouldn't drive it like this. We would fill the rest with more items. So, for the same size of the truck, we can transport more items. We do this currently in 42 projects across the globe. The carton utilization increase is from single digit if it's already pretty optimized before we -- because we have a basic optimization in all our warehousing management systems, and it can go up to more than 90%. It's good for the environment, and it's also good for the savings with an average of around 8%. So we are working on growing this solution, across the globe. And with that, I would like to close and hand over to Patrick, who will talk about carbon accounting and carbon dashboards for our customers. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Katharina. Exactly. So my name is Patrick, and I'm heading our ESG reporting team at Deutsche Post DHL Group. And today, I'm going to talk a little bit about our DHL GoGreen dashboard. An integrated solution for carbon reporting to our most important customers that we just launched earlier last week. So, when it comes to carbon reporting, we always look at different angles. So what we are doing with carbon reporting in a company is always very much determined by regulations and standards that are out there in this field that enable us, and ultimately also our customers to really prove that they have reached their climate targets. Because all of the great solutions that we have just seen earlier only can really become reality, if we can prove the effect that these initiatives have on carbon reduction in the supply chain. Many of our customers are using data for strengthening their vendor selection to strengthen their supplier management and to optimize their supply chains. You as our stakeholders and shareholders are also very much interested in data. So we are putting all of this together to enable us and our customers to analyze hotspots in their emission supply chain to enable their company reporting and to strengthen their operations and supplier management ultimately. When it comes to emissions reporting at Deutsche Post DHL Group, we have been on a journey that was almost 15 years old. On a divisional level, every of our business units, be it DHL Express, DHL Global Forwarding, supply chain and all of those business units, they have calculation tools in place to report on carbon emissions to customers. These come in a variety from very low tech Excel-based reportings to very highly sophisticated automated live dashboards and analysis tools. But what all of those have in common is that they typically look only at a part of our business, the part that the respective business unit is catering for. And we thought about this 2 years ago to start an overall group-wide project to streamline all of these reporting demands into one single source of truth, into one dashboard that we can offer to our customers all across the business at Deutsche Post DHL Group. And this tool that we have been putting together offers realistic and integrated view of all of their operations and all of their operational emissions of the business they are doing with Deutsche Post DHL Group regardless of the business unit they are in. We thought that putting everything together makes it easy to also compare cross-divisionally and to have everything in one place. So we set together and pulled data from all of the divisional systems that we have in place into our corporate data lake and build an intelligent dashboard on top of it, that provides an automated and interactive reporting for our customers in a dashboard style. This dashboard is a one-stop consolidation for all the business that you're doing with Deutsche Post DHL Group. And it offers certain splits amongst time, amongst business units, amongst transport modes, amongst different part of the emission that you're doing with our company. And because this is such a big adventure that we've been going on, we have been putting lots of data sources together. And we've been harmonizing all of that in our corporate data lake and really harnessing the power of big data and putting everything in one place with an automated front end on top of it to also enable our customers to go into the reporting front end, at whatever time they need to have the data, they need to have the visibility, they can log on to the tool and get the data in a self-service way whenever they want. We are offering multiple views and charts and table views for downloads that are possible to be filtered and slice according to the needs of the customers. All of the data that we are having in the dashboard is automated -- is updated automatically on a monthly basis. So, we are having an ingestion pipeline in place that fetches data from all different systems, puts it in one place, harmonizes it and puts it out for the reporting. The data we are having in the tool is easy to export and to download. And we are managing this on a central platform for everyone to access. This data that we're presenting here is adhering to different standards and frameworks that are out there in this field and is meeting industry standards, and is in compliance with all of them. So some of you might have heard about the ISO 14064 or the greenhouse gas protocol, which are de facto industry standards out there for aligning greenhouse gas emissions according to those standards. But we are also going one step beyond and look at transport mode specific data and frameworks. So for the logistics, those standards that you see here, they have established over the past few years. Most notably, the recently published ISO 14083 standard, which was just published in March earlier this year, and which provides a first global basis as an ISO standard how greenhouse gas emissions accounting and reporting should be done in the logistics industry. Taking all of these frameworks together, we are producing a number of indicators that can be viewed in the dashboard that include the energy consumption and the absolute CO2 emissions as well as emissions intensity KPIs such as grams of CO2 per ton kilometer or per item, alongside an indication of the data that we are actually using to calculate this data because for a lot of our emissions portfolio, we are relying on transport partners, on subcontractors. And all of those partners are usually not disclosing direct fuel consumptions to us. So wherever we have fuel consumption available, be it from our express fleet, from our supply chain fleet, from all of our fleets that we run worldwide, we take fuel and energy-based data into account to do this reporting wherever we are taking model data into account. This is then largely for the outsourced bit of the transports that we are providing. We get all of this together in our dashboard and provide this alongside the reporting of the actual indicators. Where are we on the time line with that? So we have presented the tool to the public in our large customer conference that we had in April in Valencia. We are now launching the access also to the outside world. So last week on Monday, on May 22, we actually opened a beta version to our interested customers who signaled interest in looking and deep diving into the data. Roughly 30 customers have now been onboarded to the tool for testing and feedback process that we are now starting with them. Because we also want to learn how our customers want to use the data, how they want to explore the data and how all of this is going forward. We will enhance this and launch a first release in early July of this year, when we will onboard the top 100 cross-divisional customers of our company onto this dashboard. The dashboard and the version that we will be launching in July will then also include an improved user experience and design and will include the monthly data update up until May of 2023. So being able to do this and also being able to do these monthly refreshes will enable our customers to make more timely decisions and more deep dive and detailed decisions on the emissions that we are doing with them. But we are not at the end of all of this. So after July, we will be continuously improving the product. We will be releasing new versions of the dashboard. We will be including new features and refinements, and we will also expand the scope of our customer base. So we will be rolling this out to more than 1,300 top divisional cross customers later this year, with the potential to further enlarge that scope later on in the process. So this is just the beginning of this. And all of the initiatives that you've just seen today will play an important role, in how we improve our performance and also how our customers can improve their performance. And all of this only comes together if you also seeing the change in the data that we are actually providing to our customers.

Excellent. Thank you, Patrick. And, I think that was the promised quick series of showcases, actual cases. For the Q&A, I'd like you to stay, Patrick, and ask the colleagues joining me here for the Q&A. [Operator Instructions] Before we get to that, we will deal with a couple of questions the team handed me already, during the presentation. You mentioned the center of excellence sort of being the initial incubator of a certain topic. How do you come to the decision that the time is now right to sort of roll it out and take it out of the centers of excellence and start making this available to the broader organization?

Yes. So the whole concept of the center of excellence is so whenever there are new technology trend or the applications that we're looking through and we see they have potential usage for the wider perspective. So what we do is that we are formulating a very small team and build a proof of concept, and working very closely with the business divisions. Some can be with operation and some also with the customers. And in their case, to test this POC and if it works out and try to really developing the minimum viable option -- viable products and then start to get it rolling out. When they get to really scale out, for instance, like data and the lack data solutions is getting really, really quick growing up. And then, we'll turn them into the service line and can provide more scalable service to the whole organization.

All right. Thank you. And we got one question probably for you Gee. I mean, if you run this program of optimization, as we are all aware, we are currently living at time where forward visibility is very limited, and we see quite some fluctuation day-by-day, trade lane by trade lane. How timely are you getting the data in order to feed your model in your system? How do you deal with the fluctuation in volumes on a given trade lane or outbound lane?

Yes. First of all, a good question. So I think, when you look at it from a capacity point of view, we have different models from looking literally 1 year out, which I think is a challenge, of course, to 6 weeks out. And then every week, we have -- are running a forecast for our network. But I think the fluctuations, especially out of China, where we see massive fluctuations coming out of the biggest trade lane from U.S. -- from AP to U.S. and AP to Europe, we have a system which is calling real-time visibility. I think today, we have opportunities from the moment the shipment has been picked up, we can link it to our network and gives us a lot of visibility and proactive management in order to manage that capacity. So I think, from a data point of view, I think it is very important that we become a little bit more proactive with regard to that visibility in terms of capacity management. So -- and by looking at that system where, like I said, from the moment shipment has been picked up and moving, we keep track on how it's going to end up onto a plan.

Okay. Yes. So a very dynamic environment. Another aspect, also talking about dynamic environments. I mean, Patrick, we are serving a global customer base. And as we are all aware, there are quite regional differences with regards to the reporting requirements that our customers may have. Do you sense this being a real challenge in your work?

Well, yes and no. So there are lots of legislations out there that make demands towards common reporting for our customers. That, of course, varies by region. I wouldn't even say that there is a focus on Europe, on Asia or on the Americas. There are different legislations locally available in some countries. Like 10 years ago, already, France introduced the legislation on making it mandatory for logistics service providers to report emissions to their customers. That has been now going on for 10 years. It has developed. There are also certain legislations in Asia, in California on the way that make it mandatory to use, currently discussing schemes. So at the moment, I would say we are still in a situation where this is a lot like the Wild Wild West. But luckily, all of this is coming together. And our hope is that also -- for example, with this new EU legislation that will be coming in this field, they will be taking into account what we have done with the ISO 14083 standard because ISO as a global standardization organization has the power to bring all of these things together. So whenever we have the chance to make any recommendation is like follow the recommendations that the ISO gives and make it a unified world because most of logistics is global. And it does not make sense to have different isolated national approaches. So we would like to bring this, all of this together globally, and have it calculated in the same way globally. And that's also the approach that we are promoting with the dashboard.

Right. Yes. So I'm afraid you're right, it's going to stay a very volatile set of requirements out there with the whole ecosystem they're evolving. Katharina, we got a question on your whole packaging approach. What's your main priority, reducing packaging material or better usage of any capacity, say, in a truck?

Do I have to decide between both? I would say, as I try to bring across, I think it has many aspects, positive aspects. Of course, packaging material also costs money. So I think it's good, and not all of it, unfortunately, can at the moment be reused. So some of it goes to -- into recycling, but it's -- and then reused but cannot be reused at the first stage. So of course, the more we can reduce it, but also, I mean, it just feels wrong to transport air in a truck. I mean, be it in half-empty truck because we are not optimizing our customers in a way that we can fully fill it. But I think in the past, that was much more prominent. When we talked about environmental things, it was like, oh, there are so many half-empty truckloads, but what we are not discussing is how much air is still in one of the parcels or of the packages. So we're very much focused on the space we see, but not the space that is also there, which could be equal to the one that we see. So that's why I really like the optimization part around it, and that it's digitally tied to our systems that we use anyway because only then it's scalable, and it's doable by everyone. And I think only then it will change.

Yes. Makes an awful lot of sense. So again, the sheer fact that there are customers out there, who care about carbon emissions and have realized that they have to report it and probably more and more of them having their own ESG agenda, what does that mean to the willingness that you see with customers to do some sort of burden sharing, when it comes to green solutions, which may not be the cheapest solution?

Yes. So -- and we see that if we want to achieve our green agenda, look, our own company alone, I think it's impossible for us to achieve. So therefore, we need to really working with our partners, with the customers together which share the common vision, a common mission and then we can do together. So we launched green plus products. We first launched GoGreen products, and we also launched GoGreen plus products. And these GoGreen plus products give customer possibility. They can also in setting, and they can also take our offering to -- as a Scope 3 deduction for their -- realize their target. So this has been all became fully audited, and I think it's fully credible. And it can reduce up to 100% of carbon emission. Of course, green doesn't come with a cheap price. At a certain time, because of payment costs, there will be premium. But I think, there are other elements more than the money value. We have to measure that as well. That's the reason why we are so glad to see more and more customers, including private customers and business customers and even other associations, government are working together, together with us to make this as a more common agenda standard for the future license to operate a business.

Okay. So we are getting closer to the point.

Sure. Yes.

Okay. And one more for Patrick actually. So also having a global supplier base. Again, when it comes to measuring Scope 3 type of carbon emissions, do you see a progress in all parts of the world at the same space, when it comes to the availability of that data? Or is there -- are there regional differences?

Yes. Again, as this is largely global and transportation is largely global, I see more differences in the mode of transportation that we're having. So if you look, for example, at the topic of ocean freight, there is only a limited number of carriers that carry a lot of the containerized ocean freight volumes worldwide. And most of them got together in an initiative 10 years ago, which is called clean cargo, where they are also sharing data already. And the ocean freight space is maybe like the most advanced sector in that. We would have also a significant opportunity with air freight because there are also only a limited number of airlines, a limited number of airports worldwide, but this is already becoming a challenge. And then, we look at road freight market. We at Deutsche Post DHL Group, we have more than 40,000 suppliers on the road freight market alone. And this market is so fragmented that even the top 2,000 suppliers only make up a very small fraction of our emissions. Most of them are today not sharing the information on fuel use because also they deem that information to be sensitive because it directly relates to the fuel consumed. And they are also partly afraid that we are making pressure in price negotiations and so on. At the same time, we are being asked for that information by our customers. So at the moment, to bridge that gap, we have built calculation models that take into account certain truck models by certain truck manufacturers running on certain fuels, running certain geographies, uphill, downhill and modeling the emissions for those trucks with calculation models that have been established. These calculation models are okay to estimate the technical efficiency of a truck, but the human factor is still not part of these considerations. Whether the driver is trained, whether he drives carefully, whether he accelerates properly, all those things also that relate to aviation that Gee mentioned, we are not sure if all of our suppliers have these measures in place. So there will still be a need to go from these model-based calculations to actual data. But depending on the mode of transport, this is a longer or shorter way to go still.

Right. Gee, I mean, the aviation industry is around for a longer while, and is known for trying to squeeze out every bit of cost that there is. And still, the approach that you have introduced here to us is still quite unique in the industry, you would say. Do you see interest of other, at least cargo airlines to adapt a similar approach?

I believe so. But the only thing I can say really is that when we talk about our pilots will come from other operators, they're very impressed with what we currently do with our fuel optimization program. They have never seen such a program in their previous job. So I think, I believe we're on the leading edge now with regards to what we have done with our fuel optimization program. But I also believe that other airlines will definitely follow because I think, like you said, every penny counts in the industry. So we really have to make sure that we take advantage of what we currently have done and first of all, get it better because I think I still believe today, with our fuel optimization program, we have done a lot of good work. But I still believe there is potential, and this is something that we definitely want to explore more.

Excellent. So I think that's for now dealing with all the questions that we have on hand. Of course, for you out there, if over the weekend or at any point in time, something comes to your mind where you want to ask, just drop us a line, we get the right answers for you. At this stage, I would very much like to thank you, Patrick, Gee, Katharina and Yin for taking the time and explaining to our IR audience, in particular, to where we stand in digitalization helping our ESG road map. So thank you for that. I hope it was about useful for you guys or to your liking even. And therefore, I would recommend to rejoin us, next Friday afternoon. When we look at how digitalization in the field of automation is going to ensure further progress for our group. Until then, wishing you a good weekend, and see you next Friday.