Deutsche Post AG (DHL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ready For More. Exactly. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Capital Markets Day 2025 here in London. I welcome you here. It's a pretty packed floor. I also welcome all the participants out there who open -- who follow us via Open Exchange. We'll come to that in a little moment later on. Those of you who attended our site visit yesterday are already used to it. At the beginning of everything we do, there's a little safety moment. So let me take the opportunity for the participants here in the room. To remind you that the emergency exits are to the left-hand side of you. You back home there, you may watch out where your individual exit may be. We have an agenda for you today that basically picks up where we left it in September '24, last year, when we introduced Strategy 2030 in Frankfurt. We had Tobias, we had Melanie setting the overall framework. What we did not do at that point in time was the divisional deep dives, what does that Strategy 2030 framework actually mean for the divisions? Guess what? That's what we're going to do today. So as for agenda, we will start off in a second with Tobias, sort of, setting the stage, and that will then be followed by a sequence of fairly condensed divisional presentations, starting in the usual order that you know from the reporting. So we start with John on Express; Tim, on Forwarding, that will then have taken us 1.5 hours into the morning. So a great opportunity for a first Q&A round with the two divisional colleagues, Melanie and Tobias. And a short coffee break later. We continue with Oscar, Pablo and Nikola on their divisions, before we then hear from Melanie, the financial wrap-up and what all that means in the context of ROIC. For the Q&A, we have you here in the room, of course, for the participants online via Open Exchange. If you follow now in the right-hand side window on your screen will be your opportunity to place your questions. And I think with that, we're pretty much ready to go. Tobias, may I ask you on stage, please?

Thank you, Martin. Very warm welcome. Good morning from my side. I think, we couldn't have picked a better day, sunny spring day in London. So thank you for your interest in our company. And our review, Martin said it, on where we left it off in September. So what can you expect today? When I talk about is that we see ample opportunities in the global logistics market, and that very much remains valid after what we heard yesterday evening. The trade patterns are changing, but that also brings opportunities for us, and we remain confident that we can leverage our position as DHL Group to deliver GDP plus growth. We have a strong and experienced team, not only in the room but also out there, a proven track record of dealing with volatility over many decades. I think, especially in the COVID pandemic, we have demonstrated that, and we have clear plans to improve the business further to drive profitability next to growth and a strong commitment to deliver increasing returns on capital and attractive shareholder returns. And that's what we want to talk about in great detail today. We do that against the backdrop of five trends that are particularly relevant for our business, starting with global trade, which I'll deep dive in a minute on. E-commerce obviously remains very important for our portfolio as well. It's a structural growth driver that had increasing importance for our business over the years. Nearly 30% of group revenue is now connected to E-commerce. Climate change is also something that remains very high on our agenda. We talked about that in September, with the introduction of the fourth bottom line being green logistics of choice, and our ambition remains to be a front runner in the decarbonization of logistics. Digitalization is something that is part of our quality drive, but it's also part of our efficiency drive. It helps us in many ways, and we're going to show some examples of that. And lastly, Evolving workforce. We are and will remain even with the use of technology, a labor intensive business and industry, and this is why having the best talent in the industry being able to attract and retain their talent remains very important to us. Now talking about global trade. We have obviously seen two waves to booms of global trade in recent decades: one, driven by the decrease of transportation costs relative to the value of goods, the introduction of the container, significant improvements in aviation that was in the 70s and then the long stretch of globalization. For many of us, I think the ascension of China to the WTO is one of those moments in 2001. And we obviously do not expect that trade continues to outgrow GDP, but we expect it to grow in line with GDP. Now with what we heard yesterday, a lot of that is still to be digested. There are some important details, what tariffs stack, what tariffs are substitutive of each other is one of those examples. And we, more importantly, also have to see how our customers react to this, whether this will really lead to investments in manufacturing capacity in the U.S., for instance. This will depend on whether our customers see these things as temporary or permanent. So a lot to be seen. I think what is clear is, those tariffs would stay in, it has a detrimental effect on the volume of U.S.-related trade. About quarter of global trade is related to the U.S., a bit more on the importation side of the U.S. than the export. So we have to see how this unfolds. Some of that will shift, and that's not necessarily bad for DHL. Our exposure, our market share in U.S.-related trade is significantly lower than our market share in the rest of the world. And we have seen a clear commitment of other nations to further trade. So it's not easy to see how from a volume perspective, this will play out for us. As it relates to the second effect this has, which is the increase of complexity of trade, we have one very practical example, which is a Brexit, probably a very appropriate example to mention here in London. It clearly reduced volume, particularly the trading of SMEs with Continental Europe came under massive pressure. I think this was also felt in the broader economy that not being a very positive impact. And also the volume, you see this here on the left side, the weight that we transported decreased. However, from a profitability point of view, it was basically a wash given that more volume came into the types of trade that we accommodate, which especially has the element of customs clearance. So that is something that we are traditionally very strong. It's an integral part of our Express offering. We offer it as a stand-alone service through Global Forwarding and Freight as well. So overall, this was a balance. Now this is only one example. And the analogy is obviously not ideal as it relates to the U.S. But just to highlight, we clearly see the potential adverse effects on volume, but there is more to it, trade tends to shift elsewhere and trade continues also under complex conditions. Now looking at our portfolio overall, a portfolio that spans across multiple types of logistics businesses. Some of those are more exposed to the volatility of the economic cycle, particularly in Global Forwarding and Freight. That's clearly the case. The airfreight market is more volatile, more a multiple of the fluctuations in GDP. So we obviously recognize that. On the other hand, we have some businesses that thrive more on structural growth drivers, especially the structural shift to a higher share of online retail. Overall, we think this is a strong portfolio, which is very resilient. We have different business models, and we cater for these business models through the divisional structure. And overall, this structure also allows us to stay sufficiently agile which we deem important in the environment we live in. Now looking at each of the divisions and much of that, you obviously know, the strength of each of them, starting with DHL Express, we regard this a highly attractive business with high returns on invested capital throughout the cycle. We have obviously invested heavily in DHL Express over the last years, upgrading our air fleet, but also our ground infrastructure. We do so with a backdrop of E-commerce being a structural growth driver, but we see, particularly in this business, a lot of opportunity through what we call geographic tailwinds, which is especially where trade and manufacturing activity is going. And if we wouldn't have had that initiative already since September, we would probably have to invent it now, given that we will see an accelerated shift in global trade. Global Forwarding and Freight, we particularly like as many of you do, because of its asset-light characteristic and it's organically very high return on invested capital. Again, there are similar trends, digitalization, probably being even more important than for Express. Supply chain is a business that has evolved very steadily, and we would expect that to continue. It is highly domestically centered business in nearly all geographies where we are present. That includes the United States, which is the largest single country by now that we operate in with supply chain, and it contains not only the stationary part, the warehousing part. Some of you were able to visit one of our sites here in the eastern side of London, but it also has distribution and transportation elements. That's what we do in this space, and this provides a great level of resilience. E-commerce, we want to grow into a full division. So that is a growth phase and investment sales that is self-financed, but it will not contribute in the same way than the other divisions to the free cash flow of the group. I think that's obvious. And also for P&P, we are in a transformation from a letter-centric business to a parcel-centric business. We are basically half through that now, with parcel now being the majority of revenue and with a structural trend of E-commerce and also the German economy still having to make a long way to reach saturation levels. That's what we continue to focus. We do that, and that's common across all business with a strong focus on our workforce. We are -- and we want to be the quality provider in logistics, and we can only do that if we have an engaged workforce and particularly with the aging of nations, it is even more important to remain attractive as an employer. And I think we're not only talking about that. The talking is the easy part that many do, but we are really on it. There's external validation from that. I also had the opportunity when I was in the U.S. 2 weeks ago to half basically back-to-back site visit with DHL supply chain. And then a site that was not managed by DHL and it's really a very remarkable and very visible difference. So I encourage you also to do that. You really see that we take good care of our people. The economics of the workplace are much better, also other elements like Centene. And it does pay off. It does pay off through higher productivity and better quality. And that's why we're fully committed and we'll stay on that path. Also, as it relates to the leadership team, I'm blessed to lead what I clearly consider the best team in the industry. And what I'm particularly grateful for, also the last 6 months weren't the easiest when it comes to the day-to-day. Obviously, these changes that we see have consequences in the setup of our operations, and that needs to be looked after. But we have the time and we'll continue to have the time going forward to work on strategic initiatives, and a lot will talk about that today. So we manage the day-to-day in volatile times but we have sufficient management capacity to push also our strategic agenda, and that's why I'm confident that we'll also deliver against that agenda. That agenda we laid out in September of last year summarized in this chart. On the left-hand side, our strong foundation. We talked about that. We talked about our purpose, our values, our commitment to quality and logistics and also our four bottom lines, starting with employer of choice, provider of choice, investment of choice, and green logistics of choice. What we very much want to focus on today is the right-hand side, the Ready For More. The mindset for quality and growth, but also our doubling down on structural tailwinds that are relevant for our industry and the space we operate in as well as our set up for success. We want to do that consistently for the group and then for the divisions to first talk about our top line growth accelerators, what we do there, and why we're confident this will deliver above GDP growth for the group. And then our profitability accelerators both from a return on sales perspective, but also from a capital efficiency perspective, how we structurally set ourselves up for success. So starting with the top line growth accelerators for the group. And then, again, we'll have divisional deep dives on this as well. We've communicated for the group, five group initiatives that drive top line growth, starting with Life Science & Healthcare. Life Science & Healthcare is already a substantial business for us, north of EUR 5 billion annual revenue in 2024 with a good trajectory and a good profitability. And it's really something where the entire portfolio of the group comes to bear, where we are able to deliver solutions for our customers that really make a difference. You could argue that the logistics industry has neglected what pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies need. When you look at temperature-controlled transport, especially the integration of such transport with local warehousing and distribution. So that's what we're working on from an organic perspective, building new facilities that help to integrate that supply chain and make repackaging, recooling and so forth, obsolete. A great proportion of the spend that our customers have when you look at the distribution cost is in packaging and the transportation of that packaging. And that's why there is a significant opportunity to increase the efficiency of such transport, reduce the amount of packaging that is required through better temperature control, active or passive and thereby, also use the transportation cost for that packaging. So that's what we're on. And we will -- we have talked about that in September, do that through also acquiring certain capabilities, capabilities that we can scale. That's what we're looking for. We don't want to buy scale. We have that ourselves, but if there are specific capabilities that are faster to buy and scale we will do that, and that will start the integration of Cryo PDP, which is an acquisition we announced just a couple of days ago. On New Energy, that's the field that ranges from wind, solar, the whole EV chain, battery, grid infrastructure and then probably a later stage relevant alternative fuels and hydrogen. So we're focused currently on the six that you see on the bottom. Alternative fuels and hydrogen, we expect to come later with volumes that are relevant for our global portfolio. We make really good progress with this. Again, pretty nascent requirements, a lot of inefficiencies, a lot of setups currently that are single projects when it comes to wind turbines, for instance. So there the opportunity is to create more standardized, more constant delivery of logistics services for our customers and thereby bring also efficiencies into these supply chains that applies across these different product categories and types. They're all very specific, particularly when it comes to batteries, you have a lot of local regulation. So that's where also our value proposition lies that we can globally deliver and have the local expertise to handle these goods. Structural tailwinds contains geographic tailwinds, and this is exactly our response to what we saw and anticipated in terms of changes in global trade flows. This is Chinese companies internationalizing not only their distribution footprint, but also the manufacturing footprint and with the U.S. taking the decision to distance its economy from the rest of the world, we will see shifts from that activity. If you have a global distribution center in the U.S. to distribute spare parts, for instance, some of those goods will be imported if the rules, the trade policies, the tariffs that were announced yesterday would stay in effect for longer. It would not be viable to have such distribution infrastructure in the U.S. that would relocate to other countries. So this is our response to that. We have selected 20 countries that we think will benefit from these shifts and double down in those countries to proactively contact customers that are likely to -- that I've already set up shop there or would benefit from operations in these countries. Again, something that has been going on since September. And I think we had a very good start to really double down to investments ahead of need. When it comes to supply chain, for instance, to do land banking. We have done this successfully in India, Malaysia and Mexico. So we have a good track record with that. We now have experience on how to do this, and this is what we now replicate in 17 more countries. E-commerce, very important already for the group. I mentioned it, 29% of our revenue related to this. We want to be present in some more countries as it relates to last mile activity, especially, but also fulfillment. Our acquisition of Monta, again a capability that we acquired, the capability to serve small businesses, small online business effectively. That's what Monta has figured out in the Netherlands, and we've scaled this now across multiple geographies. Turkey was an acquisition or MNG kargo in Turkey that gives us another country that we cover through own last-mile operations. Again, there are some more countries on our list. It needs to be countries that have a reasonable geographic complexity, so that you also have economies of scale and barriers to entry and thereby a healthy industry structure. So we don't want to be as it relates to E-commerce and last-mile operations of E-commerce-related shipments. We don't want to be in all countries. There is a defined list where we want to be. Also, our value chain coverage we want to extend. This is especially on the return side. We did an acquisition in the U.S., Inmar, who is a specialist in returns, the initiation of returns from the platform of the e-commerce, retailer, and then the processing of those return shipments either back into the inventory of the seller or into other channels from recycling to resale. That's the specialty we have there. And again, it's a capability that we acquired that we also want to scale globally. What's important when it comes to last mile, we are keenly aware that this is a scale play. So we only want to be in last-mile as a top 3 player. If we can't reach that position organically, we'll reach it through partnerships as we are now pursuing, for instance, in Iberia, with CTT Expresso, a subsidiary of the Portuguese Post. Digitalization, a lot going on in that field. So it's not only our initiative to digitalize sales and provide our customers a better digital access to the group. It's also our ongoing efforts of process automation, the deployment of AI. As it relates to AI, we have three focus areas where we want to deploy agentic AI, not only for efficiency but also for greater effectiveness. This is in the area of customs, customs clearance in customer service. I think the most obvious area of application, but also in HR, the hiring process. We believe that, again, we cannot only achieve efficiency gains here, but also have better outcomes, hire people that are more suitable for the job and thereby show a higher productivity, but higher loyalty to our company, and thereby reduce administrative cost. So these are some focus areas that we're working on. Next to automation and robotics. You will hear a lot in the divisional presentation, especially in Oscar's presentation on this. And we obviously continue to focus on areas like simplifying our IT architecture and having a keen eye on cyber security. Our portfolio is a portfolio that increasingly shows connectedness also from within. On European Parcel, I think that's quite obvious with P&P having a strong position in Europe's largest economy, which also happens to be geographically quite Central, and that is obviously an important anchor point for our pan-European parcel network that we continue to build where we also see a disproportionate growth of the international flows on the back of efficient domestic last-mile. So this is an area where E-commerce and P&P are increasingly connected. We see this in the air capacity management where Global Forwarding is now by far the largest customer of Express, and we are increasingly working on joint solution to develop lanes that allow them the deployment of larger, more efficient aircraft, co-used by Global Forwarding. We have the integrated approach to our top customers, which we had for many years, but now particularly extending to some customers in Asia, especially Chinese manufacturers internationalizing their footprint. So that is an area where we see great opportunity for us. So also the collaboration on the e-commerce imports from China. We've been on this for a while, and we are very selective in this, as you know. We have reduced our exposure on the Transpacific, for instance, very targetedly. So but there are obviously areas in the world where this is an attractive play that we want to participate in. We're going to continue to have the expertise for some areas in group functions and also and increasingly so have good success to leverage best practices across the group, especially or as an example, when it comes to pricing and yield management. Now quickly on the profitability accelerators that we have from a group perspective. These are three. We have the Fit for Growth program. We talked about that on March 6. We have the alignment of the legal structure to align the legal structure with our management structure, and we also want to allocate all central cost to the divisions. This has been asked from investors for a while to increase comparability with some of our peers, but also to have some healthy dynamics in terms of discussing these costs where we're already committed to reduce our group functions cost from EUR 450 million to EUR 400 million, as we mentioned on March 6. So Fit for Growth very briefly. And again, the division is going to provide more details on the actual measures. What it is? It is really a drive for structural cost improvements that are sustainable, changing of setups, changing of structures in our aviation setup, for instance, but also very operational things on how we operate last mile, for instance. It has also to do, I mentioned this earlier with the digitalization and deployment of technology in many areas. What it is not? It's not the usual flex that we have over the season or the economic cycle nor is it a compromise on quality. And we also will not bring this in any conflict with our ambition to grow. The alignment of the legal structure of the group, which is a process we laid out in September of last year, that's fully on track. It is a bit of work given that we are not only having the carve down of the P&P activities that is a substantial TP, as you would call this in the U.K. to change the employment structure for about 175,000 employees who would transition into the new legal entity that would then carry the name Deutsche Post AG. We also have the untangling of the DHL divisions in the international space. We have multiple interim holdings that currently cut across, and we want to streamline that, so that all, for instance, subsidiaries of DHL Express under one DHL Express Holding. That is a process that continues and is fully in line with plan, so that we will get an aim for final approval of these measures in the 2026 Annual Shareholder Meeting. With that, our formula for growth remains the trade environment and economic environment that we currently see. We do not feel this encouraged by the trends we have seen. There have also been positive elements. It was mentioned over dinner yesterday, multiple times that Europe seems to develop some form of more positive action, Germany included. We have our strategic approach, which we'll talk about in more detail today, which would lead to us growing our revenue 50% by 2030 on top of our 2023 baseline, this being paired with an increase of divisional margins and an increase of ROIC as well. What you will hear from my divisional colleagues is how we deal with short-term volatility. I think that's important to set that in context, because we need to obviously deliver for our customers every day. That's the basis of the business that we have, and we need to keep our customers loyal to have that as a basis for growth, will show how we intend to grow, which measures we have to grow in excess of GDP and do so with structurally higher profitability and thereby deliver strong returns on invested capital in all divisions. We are very much committed to deliver as a group out of this portfolio, strong free cash flow and attractive shareholder returns. And I think we've taken some additional step on this path also with what we communicated on March 6. With that, it is my great pleasure to hand over to my dear colleague, John Pearson.

Thank you, Tobias. Good morning, everyone, and hope you enjoyed last evening. So in terms of the outlook for Express, that Tobias and Melanie has already commented, left you with in September, I think you can see what that outlook is. I think, if I just go backwards for just one slide and show a little bit where we've come from, I think it adds some credibility to what our outlook is going forward and it reminds you of the moving parts of our business over the last 10 years, which has had two significant variations in it, pre-pandemic and the pandemic in itself. So if you allow me, I'll just go back one page. The 10-year TDI retrospective is as strong as it is stable. And you can see that from this slide in the sense that we've grown our business over that decade over 7%, a little bit of a CAGR over 7%. That in turn has enabled our market leadership to increase to 47%, which is 20 percentage points over our nearest U.S. based competitor. We'll talk a little bit about -- more about our competitors in a minute. And during that time, and for those reasons and other reasons, we've been able to grow our EBIT, as you can see there, at a 10% CAGR, pre-pandemic; and at an 8% CAGR, during the pandemic consistently, which is in line with the forward-looking aspirations that you saw in our outlook, which is to grow EBIT faster than achieved volume growth. In fact, that EBIT growth is just about double. And our volume growth was around 4% to 5% at the time. In our outlook, we have 4% to 5% and to grow faster than that, you can start to piece that all together. Now you might well look at that slide and say, well, the question now is, can you? Well, how can you keep that trajectory going through the next strategy cycle? And I think, that relates to one rather unique and not easily copyable point of differentiation, which is our global network ourselves. And this is absolutely the global network that global trade requires and depends upon more so now going forward than ever before. And it's the network that E-commerce depends upon. 219 countries and territories, the vast majority of which are owned offices run by DHL people that have read the focus brochure. They have the CIS passport and a very little dependence on agents who have much lower brand awareness and much lower alignment with our strategy. So that's the first key thing. And practically speaking, as I look at that map, and I remind you that there are more differences between us and our competitors at the minute. There really are more differences and similarities. And the international aspirations of our competitors means that on great sways of that map, we actually operate alone. We operate maybe against an agent that has several other things to deliver on newspapers, milk. But nowhere significantly in Africa and a lot of those contents to -- continents, do we operate against a significant FedEx and UPS business. And going forward, as trade adjusts as it is adjusting yesterday, today and tomorrow, then continues to adjust through the next strategy cycle. I think it's fair to say that DHL Express and DHL Group is uniquely positioned to capture the shifting sands of global trade as Tobias referred to. Coming along with that global coverage, though, is as many challenges as there are opportunities. And the fact that we've grown through those challenges by seizing the opportunities talks to the strength of the network, talks to the strength of our quality and talks to the strength of the people in the network. So whether it was the ash cloud crisis where for much of that month, there was only two aircraft flying in European airspace. You can see it here, they were both DHL aircraft, whether it was the wrenching changes in trade brought about by Brexit or whether just one month later, it was the pandemic itself. We've seen it all. We've managed through it all, and we've grown through it all at 7%. But the real catalyst for that growth, you see on the bottom of this slide, is the focus strategy itself. The strategy is in its ninth iteration of the brochure. Great Place to Work, #1 ranking, where we've been first, second or third in the last 5 years, and I stand here today, we're #1 Great Place to Work to the native English speaker, that means the greatest place to work. I say that's an award for all won by all. It's not a senior executive high-fiving exercise. This is something that all our people get involved in. And then coupled with that, the CIS International Passport, the program by which we have every one of our 112,633 people indoctrinated into the school of quality and how to manage an international business. And lastly, you will see a very simple slogan there, P plus Q equals G, people plus quality equals growth. That slogan, that logo, that formula and all the dependencies underneath it are as much in place in the Philippines and Fiji as they are in the U.K. and the U.S.A. And it's really that infrastructure on the bottom of the page that is driving our success going forward. So whilst the -- our focus on TDI is singular, the product portfolio is actually very diversified. And it's that diversification that has protected us and safeguarded us against the volatility that we've all come to know particularly so recently, but has been there for the last 20 years, but at the same time, has presented us that unique coverage has presented us with opportunities to grow -- to grow faster than our competitors. And as you look at this landscape, you'll see it really is a case of all regions, all countries, all sales channels, all industries, all customers, both within B2B and B2C and within account and non-account business. So the way in which we grew around that network from 1969 and Fiji and Tahiti and into Australia, into the U.K. in 1974 really has put us in this position where we really are covering all the industries, all the channels, all the customers and we're finding growth in some areas, some years and in other areas and other years. So that talks to our stability and our ability to grow faster than the market. So we looked at how the performance was over the last 10 years. We looked at where we've been finding the growth from. I think now we move to how can we accelerate that growth going forward. And the case there is about continuing to strengthen a profitable core. I'll talk to that, capturing those tailwinds from global trade that Tobias spoke about, we'll give quite some detail because as I read the events of last night, I think we're even in a better position than we might have imagined there and continue to double down on quality. The story on quality in Express is retention, is the key to growth and quality is the key to retention, and that underpins all our activities. In terms of B2B and B2C, those of you that know us well know that 80% of our revenue is on this page, 75% on the left-hand side, 25% of lighter weight B2C on the right-hand side. In terms of B2B, we've been growing at a very solid trajectory, nearly 7% CAGR during the pandemic, through the pandemic and into last year. I think, the question here is, how can we secure that level of B2B growth, 75% of our revenue, considerable contribution to our profit margins going forward. I'd say there in terms of the heavyweight volumes that fell into our lap during the pandemic. Our weight per shipment went up by 30% or 40% during the pandemic. We expected that to normalize at the end of the pandemic, and those weights to go back to the forwarder community. It absolutely wasn't the case mainly for reasons of transit time advantage, pricing stability or customers customer satisfaction. So we're still sitting at an all-time high weight per shipment, which is some 40% higher than we were in 2019. So we continue to attract attractive weight profiles into our network. That's very much a focus going forward. You could also imagine that price and yield activities drive into B2B. Secondly, during the end of the last MI study, we put together a sort of bone deep review of our go-to-market SME offering that is much more comprehensive and complementary right through from identifying the market dynamics and prospecting, using AI to attract these customers, better ratios of winning these small- and medium-sized customers, better understanding of who the attractive small and medium-sized customers are and better retention of them. And I think we have to be good at that, because in -- it's 40% of our overall revenue. It's a GP of more than 40%. In some countries, it's up to 50%, 60%, 70% of our revenue. And in any one country in the world, if you list the identified customers, with paid up capital in any one country, 99% of them are SMEs. So it pays us to be good at that. And that's what we're becoming very good at. On the right-hand side, the driver there has really been the active customers that have come into B2C. 30,000 more active customers during the pandemic. So a strong growth CAGR there of 14%. And there, again, the prognosis is good. I used this phrase that consumers are maybe browsing not buying. They're buying 1 or not 10, or 10 not a 100, 100 not a 1,000. But those active customers that came into our active customer base are all still sitting there rather nascently as Tobias suggested, but ready to grow again as the environment suggests when they will. The customer makeup is much more dependent on those customers that really require a TDI service so the merchants require TDI, the consumers require TDI. That's the picture of the handbags you see there. The Power Up -- your Potential program has one singular focus of allowing merchants to expand their overseas market present penetration. We've done a tutorial to some of you in the past explaining that. It's a big part of our e-commerce offering. It's been very successful, and we're taking markets into new markets that they never imagined was even there. And then, we have a sophisticated approach in terms of making sure that customers in our network are accretive to our EBIT and shouldn't necessarily be moving to Pablo's division, taking a deferred service or even going into the postal, which is the red and yellow cards that you see there. So that is the bulk of our portfolio. Here, this talks to our market-leading position in those markets that are projected to grow fastest over the next 5 years. Tobias alluded to it, it's called Geographic Tailwinds 20. There's 20 markets, you can see by the color coding there that they have quite a broad representation across different regions. They are identified to grow faster on an access of speed and scale over the next 5 years through until the end of the strategy cycle. And that is on the basis of three reasons. China plus 1, 6 or 7 of the countries in Asia. Those countries benefiting from inward FDI investment or high GDP, high PMI, India and other such examples, and those countries benefiting from nearshoring, onshoring, frontshoring. So there's broadly speaking, three groups -- three clusters of countries that should grow faster over the next 5 years. In those countries, we are definitely first in. We have a 3D or a 4D multidivisional presence in those locations. We are often Great Place to Work #1, #2 or #3. And we're absolutely in the best place to capture the opportunity that these allegedly fastest-growing markets present to us. And this is over 20% of group revenue. It's over 20% express revenue. We've been running at it now for 6 months. We've got good momentum in the start of this year. We profiled all those countries. We've had cross-BU workshops in all of those markets. In fact, the single biggest opportunity we have here is that it's a classic cross-BU program. So we've got a program of commercial excellence in one sense and helping those customers satisfy their own aspirations and requirements of supply chain diversification the other. So there's quite considerable focus. It sits alongside what Tim is doing with New Energy and what Oscar is doing with Health Logistics. So having identified the growth that we've been enjoying and how we found that through this rather unique nature, through being a competitor that is quite different and more different than most of you would imagine. As I said, I see more dissimilarities and similarities, how we can accelerate that growth and then how the balance of the discussion should be on how we drive the margin and the profitability going forward. And there's three areas around, two of which you're very familiar with, the way in which we continue to manage yield and pricing. The second is the flexibility of our network, which we've talked about a lot over the years. And the third is the advent and the commencement of the group-wide Fit for Growth program, active cost management, cost leadership that Express has a significant contribution to and is already running quite fast there. So in terms of yield management, our pricing and yield teams have been busy making the pricing Blackboard, the pricing toolkit more sophisticated. I presented this in Leipzig as long as 10 or 12 years ago. Some of you may be there. This array of programs is in Ecuador, in the same way it's in Ethiopia, in the same way, it's in Estonia. Now you might say, how? Well, six regional pricing leaders are taking all these programs down into the field in large markets, medium markets and small markets. That's what's giving the traction and the success of our price and yield function. You'll see DSX there at 5:00, that's the demand surcharge activity, which we put in place for the first time last year with a very high degree of stick rate. And we have the system in place to do it again. We are now in our planning phase to put it in. In September or October, we're just watching things, how things progress towards that period of time. The last thing I would say here is that my colleagues have a commentary on yield management. In their presentation, we have had, for the last 3 years, a yield and price management, Excom steering group, which I chair. So the whole group now, I would say, and summarizes on the level and on a path towards pricing excellence at a faster rate than we have been before. And my colleagues will talk about that. Then we go on to, whilst the commercial folks have been busy winning business and pricing and yield business and making sure that the right volumes are in our network and accretive to that EBIT growing faster than volume growth. The operations guys have been building the perfect network which I say, building the perfect aviation network. And the unique thing, and you've heard me use that word a few times, the unique thing about that aviation network is in itself is flexibility. It's a high level of flexibility, another dissimilarity with our U.S.-based competitors. So you can see at the bottom of the slide, we hovered between 26% and 29% of flexibility. That is still firmly the case. We would expect that to increase. That relates to operating leases less than 1 year. Overlaying that, we have the flexibility coming towards us through the increase in air capacity, belly space coming back into the market. That's another level of flexibility. And separate to that, but also building on flexibility, we now have 28 more new 777s in our network, from 2019 to the end of this year. And we have a partner network of organizations we helped through the pandemic that helped us through the pandemic that would quite honestly bend over backwards for us. This is something that our U.S.-based competitors don't have either. So the combination of those four things really tells me we are moving towards that perfect aviation network, which all of you know is very important to our outlook going forward. In terms of Fit for Growth and structural optimization in Express, this is more active cost management, being a cost leader, in the same way we're a growth leader, a quality leader and a people leader. It really is an example of a no stone unturned approach. All elements of this EUR 22 billion are under scrutiny. I would say two things about how we're getting into that, and we have been getting into that for the last 6 months. On one level, it's a classic efficiency optimization and leaner overhead program at a much faster clip than we had in place before. Secondly, a lot of these things are underpinned by AI and supported by AI. So our ability to accelerate through these programs is very important. And thirdly, I would share with you that this is including a complete reset of our European operations network, reset in terms of heavy efficiency, reset in terms of heavy optimization, reset in the sense of the network configuration of our intra-European aircraft fleet. You might say, why is that happening now? That's happening now partly because the volumes have still been subdued, so it's time to do it a little bit in the same way as Fit for Growth. It's also happening now, because the leadership change has given us the ability both in terms of the CEO, someone that replaced me and in terms of the Chief Operations Officer has allowed us to get really into that. And that's a big component part of this Fit for Growth program in Express. So as I come to -- we talk a little bit about CapEx in a minute. But as I come to, sort of, the outlook at the beginning, why we think that outlook is reasonable on the basis of past performance. A significant part of the reasonableness of that outlook is the unique position in DHL Express of being in all 219 countries, just about in all cases, with owned offices who have all been made aware of the focused strategy and are very much walking down the same path on yield management, the same path on New Energy, the same path on Life Science & Healthcare, the same path on cost management, very much in a position to get taking that cost management example as one, a message out to 219 countries, tomorrow if they were tomorrow to accelerate our efforts in that area. So in terms of our path to 2030, focusing on that profitable core, we have a DDI business in Europe that we're continuing to sophisticate and drive better service levels for. It's the only DDI business we have. Pablo will talk more about DDI and how that relates to E-commerce. Capturing those tailwinds from global trade, water somehow finds a way, trade will find a way. We shouldn't overlook the resilience of global trade and underestimate the creativity of buyers and sellers who want to do business. So whatever comes of what happened last night, there are as many people thinking that the problem out there -- for every problem out there trade is part of the solution. I'm very close to this whole global, level of global connectedness, the global trade Atlas. And I know that elements of those 20 countries, whether they're trading with a different end destination will be trading faster than they were, also know if Mexico has some level of tariff advantage that maybe it was expecting, maybe it wouldn't the significant opportunity for Mexico, one of our key markets to also grow fast. Then in terms of the accelerators, yield is a very proven competence and capability in the division. It's now more in place over the last 2 to 3 years in the other divisions than it has ever been, ever has been before, and we are on that path towards pricing excellence. We have a very flexible network that is becoming more flexible in terms of aviation. And we've overlaid on top of that an accelerated and highly focused group-wide cost program. Those two things drive the two elements that we've talked through. Now in terms of our growth and quality-oriented CapEx plan, here, we have a very prudent, disciplined but adjustable deployment of a stable and steady part of CapEx that is in the region of EUR 1 billion and slightly higher than that over the following years to ensure that we continue to make this rather significant contribution to higher free cash flow in the group, that something we have been doing is something we're able to continue doing going forward and a responsibility we know that is on us. And in terms of ROIC, I'd like to say our ability to drive ROIC forward is firmly there. And I would say it's very much a case of right volume at the right price, right CapEx at the right place, right flexibility in the right network. Those three levers of the quality of the volume on our network, the extent to which we deploy CapEx into places that either drive quality or drive growth, right place, right time. And lastly, that ongoing, literally ongoing flexibility of significantly the aviation network, also the operations network and all other elements of our network is really the guarantor of future ROIC going forward. And then, I would finish with the summary here, I'll just talk through it slowly. Our P+Q=G is really a key element of the focus strategy and the focus brochure. That strategy was first written in 2010. It's been refined and modified somewhat over the next 15 years. But that plan we have there is known by all people. And underpinning PE is obviously a Great Place to Work, our employee opinion survey that people are at the center of everything we do. Underpinning quality is that you don't need to remind people in Express to talk about quality. But our 96 transit time, we have our focus on voice of customer and our partnership with Medallia to get more sophisticated voice of customer. We have our growth programs. We have commercial excellence across growth, including with there to sustainable aviation fuel and selling GoGreen Plus. So all elements of that strategy, and I've overseen them for 15 years now, has probably a strong as they've ever been before. We have -- we're playing in an attractive segment in 80% of where we play is a very attractive segment with long-term prognosis for healthy growth and we have all the levers to continue to move our margin through into and through the mid-teens and continue to deliver on our ROIC and our free cash flow contribution. So that's the Express story. Thank you very much for your interest and look forward to taking questions later. I now welcome Tim Scharwath.

Thank you, John. So also good morning from my side here in London. And John, I always internally also get to present after John and my usual comment is, it's always difficult for a non-native speaker to speak after a native speaker. It's the one comment. But the other comment, you are bang on time, Express start. So thank you very much for that. Now to something a bit different. Now I'd like to take you into the depth into the woods of DHL Global Forwarding Freight, the freight forwarding arm of the DHL Group. And I think you've seen this slide before when Melanie and Tobias presented our new strategy to 2030, which outlines how we see the market, how we see growth from the market and what our expectations are towards growth, that we want to grow stronger then the market will grow and we see the market growing with GDP. Also a bit on the CapEx outlook and then what our EBIT outlook is for the next cycle until 2030. And based on that, how we want to do this. And the next four slides will give you a bit of a overview of what we've achieved over the last years, which will also prove in a way, the strong foundation that we have, which will help us to really achieve these goals. And I'll come then also to profitability levers and growth levers to really make the story around for you. So we have a leading position within the freight forwarding market. These are the numbers from 2024 and they show that our development over the years from '19 to '24, the last 5 years what has happened. And it also shows that we have very good market positions in the different segments being air, ocean or be it road trade. Now some of you know and all of you know, you might ask the question. So what would this look like in '25 when the big merge starts the integration of DSV and DB Schenker. Whatever the outcome will be on the market position, we are definitely, based on our size, we have critical mass to be able to do and continue working the way that we've worked. There was no big advantage from being larger in the market. These times have changed. 20 years ago, you had with size, a better buying. This has -- this is different nowadays. It's more about reliability, it's about partnership to your carrier partners, be it an air or ocean freight. We made great progress over the last decade. And you can see here three of the KPIs that we've chosen: one being higher profitability, one being which is very important for me, a higher customer satisfaction, then if we don't have good quality, we will not be able to generate the returns, the profitability that we expect. And that is, of course, based also on a higher employee engagement over the years, which has worked very well and which we are also putting a lot of effort in. Tobias alluded to this in his presentation. And I can tell you this is one of, in my view, one of the great advantages of the group that we are able to really attract people now and also nurture people and develop people within our group. Next to these three KPIs, I also like to show you a few KPIs that show how we improved our efficiency internally. So you remember that we had this bit of a nightmare situation with the IT systems that we used in the past and 10 years ago. And we brought our IT systems down significantly to 45% based on comparisons in 2014. This is really supporting us because it simplifies our IT landscape. It helps us also to work with one data pool, which gives us much better access and gives us much better possibilities to really deep dive into the data and make decisions not only based on our debt, but also on the data that supports it. And of course, it's good when it comes to IT overhead. The costs go down and the less systems you have, the less people you need to maintain these systems. We've also worked on bringing up our shared service centers, which we have in a few countries around the world. You see that in '24, roughly 17% of our workforce set in these low labor countries. The plan is not to start to increase this by to a number maybe above 30%. The idea now is to use these shared service centers and use technology, which is out there, especially AI to make sure that certain repetitive tasks can be done by AI, that we keep the number steady or bring the number even down as we grow the business. And then last but not least, which is also important for us, the share of customers who are actively using our portal, myDHLi has risen over the years. You might argue in 2014, we had a different system, but we had something comparable, which we bought up to the 27% of usage, which we see now. What we also see what is not in those numbers is the way that we're interacting with our customers has become much more digital. Almost 70% of our bookings are somewhat in a digital form, either that we get an e-mail, which we then read through certain systems that we have and the data out of the e-mail then gets transferred automatically into our systems. This makes it much easier for the clerks to only check data. They don't have to type data. And these kind of efficiencies are also based and baked in these numbers. And that, of course, based on the project, IT renewal road map or IRR as we called it, really supported us in our development when it comes to the divisional conversion rate of DGF over the years. And it's not just the transport management system that we always talk about, the famous cargo-wise system that we use. We've also deployed a new finance system over the years, which was finalized last year. So we have a unique one finance system for the entire division. And we also implemented a HR system and a sales system. And those systems together, if you combine the data, gives us much better opportunities to really have enhanced visibility, not only for the operations, but also in the interlink between the operations on the one hand side and the sales on the other hand side. It also helps us to centrally steer better with the data that we have. And of course, with that, we can optimize our outsourcing and our efficiency better by using, as I said before, the shared service centers. The space that we have with the IT system with IRR is really second to none. And I would also argue that in the industry, based on our size, we are now the company with the most modern system and the easiest accessibility for our customers also to interact to use the systems in an easy way. Our APIs that we have are very easily used and I'll come later to a few examples where this really turns out to be a great success story. So after going a bit through the base and explaining what we've done on KPIs over the last years, we have four top line growth accelerators that you see here, which we will work on, have worked on in '23, '24 already, we'll continue to work on in the strategy for 2030. On the one hand side, we want to start growing or start focusing more on what we call BC customers. I'll explain a bit later on, but a BC customer in easy words is a customer of a certain size can be very small, can be larger where the decisions are made locally in a country, in a city, and there are no large purchasing organizations which are globally set up who make decisions on which forward against the business. The second thing I would like to talk about is the strengthening of our sector approach. For that, we needed the IT systems ready, and we need expertise from people who understand these sectors. I'll talk about profitable trade lane focus, meaning that we are able now to switch our sales activities on high-margin trade lanes as trade lanes develop throughout the year. So we were able to move our sales organization away from a Transpacific trade lane, if needed to a Trans-European trade lane, if that's the right thing to do, based on the margin development and other developments that we see. We've interlinked them to be more flexible here. And you saw partially that already last year on the growth development in both Air and Ocean. And last but not least, we will double down on two special products in our portfolio, which is industrial projects. And customs, which really, of course, also with the new information that we got since the beginning of the year was also something where we see a strong growth opportunity. So BC customers, growth of BC customer segment. So here, it's all about the attractiveness of this market. We come historically from a sales channel, which is built on key accounts, global Fortune 500 companies, which normally have panels internally who make decisions where not a single person makes a decision by where a group of people mostly located around the world make decisions. This is the history where we come from. We are very good at this. And we don't want to stop doing this, because our sales organization, especially our key account organizations also geared up for these large customers. These BC customers who locally decide are for us very attractive, because normally, they have a higher GP margin possible due to the fact that they have different ways of procuring our services on the market. They do tenders, but they don't do tenders in such a large extent as the large Fortune 500 customers do. And it helps us to diversify a bit away from the larger accounts to also be more resilient if we have, for example, in the tech industry, a downturn for whatever reason, with the smaller customers, we can also then work against those trends. Now what you see here is what we want to achieve over the next years is to grow this segment by 9%. Our annual growth rate over the last years was roughly 7%. So we want to grow the GP much stronger in this segment than we've done in the past. And how do we want to do this? We've invested in the last year and the year before on local sales specialists who sell either air or ocean freight to the customers in their local markets. These are connected very closely to product representatives on the trade lanes to really support them, these salespeople in being effective and also in being able to close business. And we hope and we see that the local customer proximity and ownership will foster loyalty. And what do I mean with this? If we -- if you would ask our country manager here in the U.K. for one or two examples of these kind of customers, what I did ask him last week, and he came back with a few examples. One, for example, is a smaller customer who does spot quotes only. So no RFQ, only spot codes. We have a system in place called quote shop, which we used to really quickly work on the spot quotes. Once we've won a spot quote, it's very easy for us to just digest the information that we have based on the quote and without adding any more FTEs, any more people just start working and start serving this customer. Another customer here in the U.K. has -- it's a smaller business, they do regular RFQs. We won one of the RFQs. We use our API set up for them to bring us data, give us the data, so it's easier for us to work on these. The data that we get helps us to optimize the customs flow of this customer. And this saved us more or less for people who do this job now compared to who wouldn't use the API. And because the local colleagues here get a higher share of the profit being made in the network, they are much more innovative in making sure they find solutions, which really make a stickiness to these customers. And this is something that we saw last year and is also part of our growth that we saw last year that by focusing on locally controlled business, we are able to get more volume and also a higher GP. And that, of course, is with a streamlined onboarding process and the digital lead generation really helps us to be successful in this field. The sector approach. Now what you see here are five sectors on the left-hand side where we want to invest or have invested into systems and also into people. Be it Life Science & Healthcare, this fits very well to the new Life Science & healthcare setup that we have is across divisional growth initiative. Aerospace and aviation, normally a very high-margin business, because if you move spare up, if you move engines for airplanes, you have the opportunity to make money on those is much more than if you just move other things. E-commerce, yes, E-commerce, also large E-commerce players, there are also small e-commerce players out of China. We understand now how to work with them. We've had our issues in '23, I would say, to understand how they work. But we've gotten closer to them. We understand them. And also from an understanding of the air freight market, you need to be close to these companies to understand what they do, because they are very influential when it comes to buying and selling rates, especially out of Asia. We are specializing on the semiconductor sector and the sector we call, government, which unfortunately, in these times has come up and has become more important when it comes to dealing with governments, dealing with defense questions which come around this. These five are just five examples. Of course, we will continue to invest and work on the wines and beers sector, where we've had the acquisition of Hillebrand a few years ago, which is working very well and to make sure we start more and finding more and more of these sectors where the margin opportunities are higher than if we would be in the normal hard cargo environment. Here, we also foresee, and we saw already a CAGR of 10% over the last 5 years. And again, our average is year 7. So we are growing stronger and this we want to continue strong these sectors. Next to that, we will concentrate also on more and more on profitable trade lanes. Profitable trade lanes, what do we mean with this? It happens throughout the year, the trade lanes based on buying and selling opportunities being on changes in the market can become more profitable or less profitable. So it's important for us to understand and see these developments and also steer our sales organization in that way, that we focus their sales effort on higher-margin trade lanes in comparison to just asking them to get business for us. So it's being smart on how we let our sales organization work and they -- in order to do that, they have to be very, very closely aligned with our product organization. And we've invested into people to make sure that these roles are clear and that we have an understanding which trade lanes we want to work on, how we want to win them, what all are the winning bids we need and to make sure that we grow our margin in these lanes. And you see here examples for ocean and airfreight. The important thing is here that we are very agile in moving around. So for example, for whatever reason, a trade lane loses attractivity, we are able to redeploy the sales organization to work on other trade lanes to make sure we can bring the effort into higher-margin trade lanes again. So it gives us the flexibility, which we didn't have before. And remember, I said before that our systems that we brought into the organization was not only the TMS, but also a sales system, and we are linking the data of both of them to make sure that we have the right actions to get the right kind of results on these trade lanes. And of course, if we know we want to push the trade lane, we can also strategically bid on them in such a way that we have enough mass to be able to then work and work better on our margins from the product side. Next growth initiative is industrial projects. Now industrial projects and freight forwarding, we always joke around them. These are the cowboys of freight forwarding, because they do things outside of the box, they think outside of the box. They are the ones who moved manufacturing sites from one country into the next. So with the things happening at the moment in the world, these people -- this organization is very valuable for us to move and make sure we have these kind of things. We can move these large sites from A to B. And they work in sectors like New Energy. So we've done tremendous amounts of movements of blades, large blades for offshore wind parks. We've built solar factories around the world. This is what they are specializing on. They are building semiconductor plants, supporting those customers and bringing all the suppliers, bringing the goods at the right time to the fabrication sites. They're working in the oil and gas industry, of course. This is where this business actually comes from this, but the history of this business is in engineering, manufacturing and also in the government space. And what you see here is that they have grown pretty nicely over the last years with 8%, and we at least believe that they will continue in the same 8% until 2030. And if these are integrated solutions, they are tailor-made for customers. It's something you can't copy paste easily where you need expertise with people who really understand how these movements work. These are also the nice pictures. You sometimes see when large shipments who are CDC on trucks or being loaded on ships, this is where this sits, and this is a very interesting high-margin segment. And we also want to double down on customs. Now why customs? Okay. Today's new information, of course, is a good reason for it. But when we go back a bit, we saw already a few years ago that there's a trend in the customs industry with our customers who see customs with a higher priority based on governance and compliance topics that customers have these days. Normally, this is a very, very local business. So you have your customs representative in a country who's been doing your job for a long time, and it's also a very specialized, very sticky business. So for example, one of our main competitors who is U.S.-based started the business with -- being a customs clearance agent in the U.S. and then brought forwarding on separately later on. So here, we've invested over the last years and build a solution, which we call DHL Trade Connect, which is a database which connects to our TMS system. So customers can now get the entire customs data globally of all declarations, be it import or export declarations in one spot and one database and this database can then be used for analytics for the customer where you can oversee its flows. This might sound very trivial, but you can believe me, this is very, very difficult to do. And no one else has a solution like this in the market. We won two large businesses this year. So a large customs business is, if you have a declaration of maybe 60,000 custom declarations a year, we won two businesses with 40,000, 35,000 declarations a year this year. And the later one was very interesting because the RFQ was ongoing. We didn't know -- we knew we heard through the grapevine, the RFQ was being worked on. And we called an asset we could still present. And when we presented our solution, the customer couldn't believe and this is a medical device customer. You couldn't believe that we have this kind of a capability. We won the entire business, the 35,000 declarations and it really makes us proud and also gives us the opportunity to show expertise based on the subject matter experts in customs, but also based on the IT investments we made over the year. Took years to connect the customs data with our normal data, and customers can now really manage their flows and can see what's happening, which is of great value. And the more tariffs come in, the more these kind of solutions will be used and will be needed by the market, and we are more than ready and more than hungry to get more of these into -- to our customers, and it's a really great -- a good thing, a great thing that we have. So that brings us from the growth initiatives to the profitability accelerators. And here, we have our three, our GTOM, our global target operating model. So the question with what kind of a governance do we want to work in air, ocean, customs and IP. Yield management, which is really important because our history is being very good in revenue management or volume management, but having the right yield behind it is really important because we do want to make money, and we are a low margin business compared to Express, for example, and of course, Fit for Growth. So global target operating model, short GTOM. What do we mean with this? This is described -- this slide describes the way we want to work in Air and Ocean predominantly. And the big foundation you see to the -- all the way to the right of the slide is this one file, one operator sent. That means we believe that we have a clerk who is supposed to work from A to Z, the entire shipment. Why do we believe that's important? There are a lot of reasons. One reason is freight forwarding is not very sexy. It's an industry where you sometimes do have issues in finding the right people who want to work on this, especially on the clerk level. And this gives clerks the opportunity to do the entire shipment. So they are the ones who take the booking, they speak to the customer, they are the ones who do the documentation and they are the ones who do the invoicing. And this is a way where we believe to centralize all of this. This gives people ownership, and this ownership is something that we foster through our cultural aspects to make sure that they see and sense success. So they see how much money they make. They see how the quality KPIs are. And based on that, we get them motivated in the right way. So this is the basic of the entire GTOM model is that we say every operator oversees his files, his activities, and he is the single point of contact for the customer. And for that, we support them. We support them through three-- these are three or more functionalities, but very important functionalities. One is the workflow aspect. So the system cargo-wise shows him the tasks he has to do automatically based on a rural database. So heat comes in the morning, the system tells them what needs to be worked on, which time stamps are missing, which custom he has to invoice now, so that he doesn't have to go and search for these things. So that gives them more time. That takes or that frees up his time to concentrate them more on working with the customer or working with a supplier. We've implemented this last year. And you see already last year or to be fair in '23, and you see already in '24 that we've made good progress on the productivity and you see that down here on the bottom of the chart that in air freight, we grew the productivity by 8% and in ocean freight by 13%, almost 14%. And that's mainly based on the workflow, because the workflow engine takes away that the thinking in brackets or what I need to do and gives that information automatically. He types on the file goes automatically into the file, does everything and goes out again. That, of course, supports also the invoicing, because if you've done your files in the right way, if you finish them, the invoicing becomes much easier. We also -- and we also try to automate the invoicing by using the GSE in the background, which is supporting all of this and also by being more accurate by using databases where you see the selling rate and the buying rate and things get matched very easy on a shipment. And last but not least, the shared service center plays an integral part in this. So the 17% of our employees who sit in these shared service centers, they work on mandatory tasks which we will empower in future through AI more and more. And these mandatory tasks on brackets are more boring for the clerk to do. So again, we take time away from him. So he has more space, more time to talk to customers and to really be quicker in the way that he interacts with customers, but also in a better way to talking to our suppliers. And we believe that we can improve our productivity by 30% until 2030 starting with '24, and you see already the first steps that we made here. The second profitability accelerator is yield management. Now John spoke a lot about yield management, and I'm very impressed on how Express does that in their market. And as a forwarder, you always think, yes, pricing is just to find the right price at the right time, might be -- and then you buy better. It's a bit of a more less of a -- it's more of a gut thing than anything else. But we've also learned that we can do things differently and better. And one of the things that we are working on, which is not yet finished is what we call the strategic capacity allocation. This is an ocean freight product. This means that once we have this functionality set up that the system will automatically allocate based on margin, the shipments to the right carriers. Margin and transit time will be the important criteria. So this will be done automatically. So there are no more favors, so to say, or normal local decisions. This will be done more centralized. This will boost margin tremendously. We're also working on the profit optimization and risk mitigation in the way that in these sectors, we will be ready to really support these high-yield sectors that I talked about. And we can also then also optimize gross profit through vendor audits when we work on these special vendors that we need for these sectors that I talked about earlier. We will be able to do dynamic pricing strategies on the yield side, especially on the trade lane development, because sometimes, if you think or we believe that something would change in a trade lane that rates will go down, it is interesting to maybe price more aggressive now when you know that the rates will drop later on. And if you get support from systems doing this, this is something which you want to achieve here, because we believe will make us more successful. And of course, the entire RFQ processing, which is still a very manual way of working, we want to optimize by using pricing models and using our data to do this. We started implementing this. This is going to gradually continue until 2030, but it's really important that we put more emphasis on this. And again, we can do this now based on the systems that we have rolled out. And then, of course, Fit for Growth, you see here also the overview of our costs -- of our cost base with the purchased air and ocean freight and road freight transportation costs that we have which we constantly work on. And a big thing that we look into all the time is to make sure that we are lean in the way that we are set up as an organization that we streamline support functions and have always a view on productivity and quality, but not in the way that we overdo productivity, we always see this in line with the quality that we achieve to our customers. You can easily overdo it with productivity, which is, in our case, the amount of clerks that we have, and we want to make sure we do this in the right way where it makes sense and always keeping the quality in mind. So what is our financial path then to 2030? And you see the overview here. So we have the growth accelerators, growth of the BC segment, so the locally controlled business, strengthening the sector approach, being able to move around profitable trade lanes much quicker than in the past and really doubling down on IP, so industrial projects and doubling down even more on our customs capabilities. And from the profitability side, this will be supported by the global target operating model, which will then based on high quality, increase our productivity, working more and more on the yield management, using systems to really price differently and price more effectively and quicker and of course, the group-wide Fit for Growth initiative to make sure that our costs are in line and that we try to be as lean and mean as possible. Or as we say internally, we want to be hungry for more and this should bring our divisional conversion rate, assuming a mid-cycle year back to a 35%. On the ROIC, second last slide on the ROIC, I mean, you see the amount of investments or CapEx that we have, which is compared to what you saw on the slide from John before peanuts, so almost nothing we are an asset-light business. So the only way really for us to work on our ROIC is to just generate much more EBIT. And this is where we are very clear what we need to do. And also, where I think we just -- I just showed a very good way of showing growth and showing also how the profitability will come into the profit and loss statement. And that brings me to my last slide to summarize. So what are the main takeaways? I think, we have a clear idea, more than an idea, we have clear levers how to accelerate growth. We've done our homework. We have a great foundation where we can start to grow. We saw it already last year with the growth in both of the main products. We understand key efficiency levers to further drive or increase our GP margin. And of course, it's what it's all about. It's about the people and it's about the systems and the processes that they use that will help us to work and to enable us to get a better divisional conversion rate by 2030. Thank you very much.

Excellent. Thank you, Tim. Good job on timing also for you. Welcome. As promised to the first Q&A around with the two divisional CEOs you just heard presenting together with Tobias and Melanie, come to my side as well. A brief reminder on the many hundreds out there following us on Open Exchange Online make use of that Q&A box to your right. We got some questions there already. But we start off with the questions that you may have on the floor, the friendly IR team will hand you a mic. Example, #1.

Alex Irving from Bernstein. Two for John, please. First is on B2B volumes. It's been weak for a couple of years now. Is recovery a matter of when or a matter of if? Your target volume CAGR suggests it's more likely a question of when, A, do you agree with that assessment? And B, what gives you the confidence in that? My second question is on pricing. We've got several tools to manage price that you discussed. TDI like-for-like revenue per kilogram, set us up 14% over 5.75 years. It's below the level of cumulative inflation we've seen since 2019. Can you please explain, a, what like-for-like means in this context? And then b, why real pricing doesn't appear to have grown? Is it customer willingness to pay? Is there something else going on?

So on the -- the first question was really relating to the ability for when B2B will come back and so on. So yes, I think we don't know. I think the point is, over the last we've had that strong CAGR of 6% or 7% over the extended period of time, 3 positive years of uncertainty, you might say, and 2 rather slower years of uncertainty where we've been basically flattish. We talk weight in terms of shipments, in terms of B2B. When that's going to come back, it's not entirely clear. But I think the main message there is that we've continued to continue to grow our EBIT and the way I suggested at the front end of my presentation through the levers of flexibility and pricing finding growth, higher margin growth, better job of the work we did within SMEs. A lot of that was around finding SMEs that were less price-sensitive and bringing them into our network. So when quite the turnaround comes, I do believe that we'll find through these GT20 markets, growth that we weren't necessarily identifying so successfully before. The concept that water doesn't stop flowing, it just finds a different direction as one of my colleagues in Asia said this morning, I think that's very true. And countries are more looking at the direct orders right now and how they can find new markets. So I think that would be my first. And the second point was around how have we achieved the pricing.

Yes. I think maybe if I could chip in there, because I think that was also a bit of a technical question. You had this slide where we show the like-for-like revenue growth and the question, I think, Alex, was, what does like-for-like mean.

What does like-for-like mean and why does it appear to have been below inflation since 2019?

Yes. So first of all, on the technical side, so like-for-like is really what we call the base revenue development. So we have stripped out surcharges like fuel components. So this is kind of like really the raw element. What we have not adjusted and there it is not like-for-like trade lane shifts and underlying mix shifts. And that explains why the number may look so small. So when you then look at the core GPI and the stick rate, that is actually a higher number.

Plus, if I may add to that, what we shouldn't forget in transportation, we still have real productivity gains through technological advances. If you would compare over 30 years, the development of the rate for the transportation of containers, you would clearly see that it's not a line with inflation nor should it be, because we had substantial economies of scale in Aviation Express, we have such through the deployment of new aircraft, for instance, the fuel efficiency of aircraft has consistently decade-by-decade improved by about 30%. So this is one example why I think the comparison with the consumer price index is not very helpful. What I think is decisive is that, we are competitive in the marketplace, and we make a good margin.

And that we have a very good stick rate on the underlying GPI.

Yes. Thank you for saying that, Melanie. It's the GPI and the NPC that perhaps I'd like to finish off. 10 or 12 years ago, we started advertising our GPI in September to the market that this was happening, help people with their own planning process. On January 1, regular clockwork, you could set your watch by it. We communicated our GPI went into effect, headline rates, typically between 3.9% and 6.9%. And the NPC, the net price change simply measures the book of business that we had in November run through the GPI achievement, and we take the measurement of how much we've achieved over the last 3 or 4 years, that NPC has been in the region of 3% to 4%. If you go back a little way, it started off at 1% or 2% and have been whittled away during the course of the year as more discounts are given. So that's a significant rise in our overall margin position as measured by that NPC as a consequence of GPI stick rate, which we aim to have high. The same reason we did demand surcharge. There was no point in doing it if we weren't going to be up there at 80% plus.

Okay. With that question answered, we continue to with Andy Chu.

It's [ Mandy ] Chu from Deutsche Bank. A question on Slide 61, and this is directed at Tim, please. In terms of the conversion rate target of 35% compared to 2024, 28%. I guess there's some potential head office cost reallocation into the historical numbers. I just wanted to confirm that the 35% target takes the cost allocation into account.

Maybe I take that question. So as Tobias explained, we will now -- once we have completed the legal alignment, also charge out the group cost function bucket, which I know some of you have been struggling with for quite some time, but we haven't completed that exercise yet. And so that is something which is not included in the divisional numbers. But it's not going to have such a material impact, obviously, on the numbers which you have seen from the divisional colleagues. But we still have to work through how that goes into the different divisions.

Sorry, to be clear, so the 35% target hold or you need -- or you need to have to work -- you have to work through the numbers in terms of the cost?

We will next year, once we are done, [Technical Difficulty] we will give you full transparency of how we are allocating the group functions bucket to the different divisions. There are very different components in there. So once we finish doing it, and then we will explain that in a very transparent way.

Okay. Thank you, Andy. On further from the floor to continue with Muneeba, please.

Muneeba Kayani, Bank of America. Two questions, please. One for John. Just following up on the earlier question around TDI. Some of your competitors have suggested that customers are moving towards more deferred product. Is -- do you think there is a structural shift here? Is that something you're worried about? And kind of how do you assess that in your kind of performance in 2024? Because if you look at global trade, actually, it was a good year for global trade in 2024. And then [indiscernible] onboarding, please. So you talked about your IT system. You mentioned CargoWise. We've heard from one of your competitors who uses CargoWise, that they could be considering possibly a shift away from it. They've talked about some of the price increases they've seen on that. So what have you seen in terms of price increases from WiseTech? And how are you thinking about CargoWise in your IT system?

So on the DDI, yes, I think the two things I would say that in DDI, and we, as you all know, we only have that product in Europe is in a core supportive manner to grow TDI. So we like to go to our TDI customers and sell them DDI. There are some DDI customers that we take the TDI portfolio to and sell them that. We see very little switching. There is a time in the macroeconomic cycle where people think about down servicing their supply chain requirements and using a slower service. Most of those that I've seen in Europe have ended up with them going back to TDI, because their customers really want a pan-European overnight service for the distribution of their contact lenses through to their dealer network. And we see very little switch between TDI and DDI in our European network. FedEx have aspirations to fill their network, their aviation network to the point about our rather unique aviation network is completely different. They are different again actually to UPS, but they've been busy trying to fill their aviation network out of Asia with their international economy of product. We looked at an international economy of product when I was running commercial. In 2006 and '07, we firmly pushed ourselves back to strengthening our profitable core, which is TDI, but supporting European core in Europe with DDI.

So on the relationship with CargoWise is good. We still have a contract which runs 8, 8-plus years, I think. So there's been no negotiations about this yet. We hear, of course, also that there's -- from comments made that there are certain pressures there. The system itself is very good. It's a basic system that you can use differently. Some of the -- for us, more important functionality, for example, the functionality on how we do consolidation airfreight is not based on cargoes. We did that with these different systems. And we also have a very good transport management system, which can do an air freight in our acquisition in Hillebrand Gori, which we still use there and we'll continue to use there because it's -- the process flow in the beer, wines and spirits world is a bit different. It's a bit more complex, but we could also theoretically use if we come to a more difficult situation with our supplier.

Excellent. Thank you. And we continue on row behind with Alexia, please.

It's Alexia Dogani from JPMorgan. I have two questions as well. Just firstly, for Tobias on the growth outlook and the multiplier of trade to GDP. In the chart, you helpfully show that you expect the trend to move towards, one, by kind of 2030, but it implies that in the next couple of years, we might be contemplating a scenario of below 1x GDP. I guess, how can you talk to us a little bit about the growth outlook in the more kind of near term, given the announcements yesterday and whether we should expect some more volatility in that multiplier? And then secondly, for John, on the European network, redesign. In the past, we've said that actually flexibility in the European network is a little bit harder to achieve, because some of these aircraft movements are more, let's say, fixed to guarantee the service quality. What changes are you making to make it more flexible or more efficient?

Thank you, Alexia, for this question, which is not easy to answer, because I think we have to see three things: a, some of the details are still unclear. The stackability of certain things. The how this change in de minimis is now going to work. There's postal exception. So it's just a bit on clarity that we still need to work through. We have not heard yet what is the response of trading partners. There have been some comments made, obviously, by the EU. There have been fairly clear comments by China in two different ways, accelerating the opening in general. I think that is something that is not to be ignored, because China is the biggest trading partner for many. And on the other hand, obviously, some response to the U.S. And thirdly, how our customers are going to respond to this. Is this really going to lead to a significant increase of manufacturing activity in the U.S.? Are people going to have that outlook that these tariffs are there to stay and on a solid basis for decision-making? There was a long list of announced investments yesterday. So some people seem to have some confidence in this happening. I think, we still have to see in the real numbers, whether steel plants are being built in the U.S. where the other manufacturing activity really shifts there because elsewise, this is going to be inflationary and provide definitely windfall opportunities for some existing manufacturers in the U.S., but it's not going to change flows much if the capacity doesn't shift. So I think this is very unclear how our customers will react to this and whether they believe this is now permanent or temporary. If you invest in a steel plant, you need to have a view beyond 4 years, so that's something we simply don't know. What is the case that our exposure to U.S. trade is disproportionately low and we have further reduced it over the last 12 months? While as you have seen, we really doubled down on non-U.S. related trade lanes, those trade lanes that are going to benefit from this. Now whether with the measures we have seen now, this keeps a balance of growth in the short term to reach a multiple of 1.0x, I think is doubtful. The measures if they would come with these amounts would create some elasticity in demand and thereby also in trade volumes, even if manufacturing doesn't shift into the year so quickly. So I think that is to be expected that U.S. trade will see a dent if those volumes would stay. For us, what it means for the company is hard to say, because our market share is quite disproportionate, disproportionately higher on the non-U.S. related trade lanes. So this is something that we have to see.

And on the -- just the second part, Alexia, on the network configuration on the aviation side to which you referred, I think these are fairly classic network adjustment and configuration programs moving from one stop to two stop. There were times during the pandemic where we had a direct shot into Cluj or Bucharest or whatever, and that can be done now by a 2-stop setup. There's even locations where we can hub quite satisfactorily into Leipzig. We distressed our Leipzig hub and set up a broader tapestry of hubs across Europe, Madrid, Madrid Malpensa and Copenhagen specifically. So that brought some efficiencies. And the last point I'd probably say is that we brought more -- better gauge aircraft on the routes that -- where we have the opportunity to be more efficient. And the last comment I'd make here is, it was very important, as I said, to some of you at dinner with demand surcharge. The European service quality at the minute is at an all-time high. We have no parameters, whatsoever on our transit time standards, that parameters that were put in during the pandemic, they've all been dialed back to 0. So we're in a transit time world that operated before the pandemic. We're up at 96. That was very important to us during the demand surcharge that we delivered quality whilst this surcharge was there. And so it is the case with our Fit for Growth and our cost optimization and our active cost management, anywhere in the world that none of that comes at the expense of quality.

Okay. In the meantime, we have questions received from the outside, which are either addressed by other questions here already or thematically more related to parts still to come. So this is why we still have time for one or two more questions here from the floor. Cedar, please.

Cedar Ekblom from Morgan Stanley. I've got two questions for you, John. Can you talk a little bit about why you think weight did not correct as much as you'd expect post the pandemic? I think you made an allusion to that? So just a little more around why you think that stayed and why it's not a risk going forward, because I think that weight point has been a big part of Express's profitability over the last couple -- or defending Express' profitability? And then just another question. It seems that the gap that DHL has relative to your closest competitors is opening up in the Express market. We've seen your peers diluting their networks with economy volumes over the last couple of years. So looking a little bit more medium term, how do we think about the margin for your business when the cycle improves? Should we be thinking about much higher margins than in the past? And maybe a bit of a cheeky question. Are you leaving money on the table when it comes to pricing? Should you not be more aggressive in terms of your pricing going forward, considering the quality of your offering to the customer?

Yes, we'll come to that. So in terms of weight. That's a rather interesting story. I'll try to make it quick. But in 2018, we actually had a weight reduction program called P300, which is really focused on taking weight out of our network, but that was badly packaged weight, non-stackable weight, tires, oil drums, et cetera, things that have just fallen into our network over the years. So I had a good cleansing operation in 2018, beginning of 2019. And the pandemic, -- and that was all clean and was accretive to our EBIT. It cleaned up hubs, made our hubs move much more efficiently doing that. Then during the pandemic, our weight started moving up. I don't remind me saying this from sort of 9-ish weight per shipment all the way up to 12. During the pandemic, we had a program, a trivially called apples on the cart, where all these weights were falling into our lap. I saw customer letters saying, please use Express now for up to 300 kilos to these exotic destinations. They happened to be Africa. We've still got those volumes today. And there were many other organizations that just shifted their threshold from 50 to 100, or 100 to 150, 150 to 200. We expected to lose all of that volume as freight normalized, and we expect it to go back to our X.XX weight per shipment that we had in 2019. The research that we did suggested we'd keep 60% of it. We kept 80% of it. The absolute reason why those organizations that were already using us anyway for lower weight shipments stayed with us was transit time improvement, price rationality and the fact that if a customer is on a certain price, when we talk to them once a year, they get their GPI and we don't talk to them all year on price, and they appreciated that. So as market volatility was coming through, there was no spot rating and all these sorts of things. And thirdly, customers' customer satisfaction. I heard firsthand from customers that they got feedback from their customers almost literally and verbatim saying, it used to be 6 days, now 2 days, what happened? Are we switched because of this, because of that, we actually switched to Express. I noticed that if you can keep that going, that's very much -- it's something we'd like you to do. So that is the weight story. And it's serendipity in a way, but it's the same in B2C. Merchants that were hitherto unwilling to put an Express offering on their merchant site, during the pandemic had to, because commercial air space was less, post offices weren't delivering all around the world. So they begrudgingly put an Express offering and they saw, when they did put Express offering, how many times that was reclicked for repeat purchase. And all those merchants have still got it on there today which is why those 30,000 merchants that fell into our lap as opposed to the weight that fell into our lap, they're both still there. So it's fortuitous in that sense. Now in terms of pricing and the competitive market position, I think there, I would just say that we're very conscious of our price programs that sophisticated across all customers very mindful that we're not overpricing our small- and medium-sized customers. So we'll be very careful there, and there's a lot of focus on customer attractiveness and willingness to pay to finding those industries where they're willing to pay and customer attractiveness, where we should be getting a higher yield from our larger customers by knowing that they're in a certain industry, aerospace, aeronautics, Life Science & Healthcare. So we're not leaving money on the table there. But by and large, I think we are not leaving anything on the table, and you can tell that from our KPIs. We're even rather more conscious that, because we have a much higher stick rate and compliance rate. One of the reasons we didn't do demand surcharge over the years. One is that we have an all-in pricing philosophy. So there would be some additional surcharges like bolt-on, volumetric weights and things like that. There are other surcharges, but we resisted doing a demand surcharge for the reason of an all-in pricing. Secondly, that we knew our U.S. competitors had, had it in for a decade and at a very low stick rate. So why were they doing it if it's low. And thirdly, precipitating us to make the move was the huge volatility of e-commerce out of Asia, which just necessitated with high inflation running at the time, the ability to serve these customers with high quality, which I spoke about several times, is very important. So a long answer, but a little bit more context that may be useful to you.

Okay. Thank you, Cedar. And in the interest of well thought through time timetable, we stick to the original plan to now come to a 20-minute coffee break. There is another Q&A session later on and ample time to continue with the questions. So looking forward to have you back 10 past the hour. [Break]

20 minutes are gone so fast with so many good conversations, so many good questions. We've got a second round of Q&A and more time later on, but now let's stick to the time table. And we have the next three divisional presentations before we come to the Melanie part and the Q&A. Oscar. Please continue.

Good. So for those of you that were at to visit, obviously, we had yesterday a little warm up towards this presentation, but now we're going to go a bit deeper. So this is a slide that you've seen before. And I think there's two important elements of that slide, is that we project to grow above market, and I'll explain a bit more what that looks like and why that is the case in the presentation. And the other element is that we are developing towards a 6% to 7% EBIT in the coming years. So now about the how and a little bit of the past as well, but it explains also a little bit of the future, what you also saw in earlier presentations. So when we look at this slide, it shows clear market leadership. But it's not so much about the size, which is the story. It's about the quality, it's about the innovation, but it's also about being the sole 3PL provider that has 97% of our employees working in a Great Place to work. So a certified Great Place to Work. You tasted a little bit of that during yesterday's visit. And we also discussed yesterday, why that is so important, because that does translate into lower staff turnover, higher productivity, higher quality. So it has direct impact on the way we operate and direct impact on our customer satisfaction. The other point on market leadership, because those are external factors, is that we are already in the 5th year in a row, respected by Gartner as the leader in 3PL in contract logistics. So our employees rate us that way, our customers rate us this way, and the market rate us this way. That's, I think, what the real market leadership looks like. Now the other element which is important is to look a little bit back in history, and that's what this slide shows. So this is about our revenue growth over the past 5 years and how that translated into our EBIT growth over the past 5 years. You see that in -- obviously, the year 2020, when we had the COVID part. We continued to stay focused on our strategy and the investments that we needed to make. And that's why we also came out, out of that really strong, to be able to continue that strong top line growth and translate that in a bottom line growth. But what is more important on this slide is the right side of the slide, because that's where you see how our top line CAGR by continuously innovating in the way we operate, continuous improvement on how we operate, we've been able to continuously drive our productivity up, hence, our gross profit up. But we also have a very strong strict architecture on how we reinvest into growth in organization and we split between what we reinvest in growth and what actually then translates bottom line in towards our EBIT. And that's how you see the translation from the 6% to 10% to the 17% as an EBIT CAGR over that period of time. That's architecture on the way we operate, the way we reinvest and the way we have part of our improved gross profit going bottom line towards our EBIT. So that's important to understand our future. I'll also show you a few other numbers. I'm not going to talk you through all of these, but I want to pick out a few because those are important to understand why and how we are growing as DHL supply chain. So you see the 96% service quality. That's not delivered on time. That is the 96% of our operations deliver 100% of the KPIs that we've agreed with our customers. And that translates into a Net Promoter Score of 61, which has increased more than 20 points over the past 5 years. That's together with then, therefore, a renewal rate of 91%. And the way we calculate renewal rate is based on the actual contacts that we knew that year. That's the 100, and therefore, you get to the 91%. And that then translate that together with an EUR 8.8 billion of contract value signed in one single year, that is what we call net growth, because you keep the business, you have continue to grow with the business you have. And on top of that, you then establish a new business in new operations. And that's how we've established, and we will establish the future growth. There's another element, which might also be relevant with all the discussions that we have today is how our business is spread around the globe. Because if you look at this slide, you see on the right side, you see the number of people in thousands per region. So you see that there's actually pretty equally spread over all the regions around the globe. So size-wise from -- let's say, an operational size wise, we're pretty similar around the globe. So that means that whatever benefits there are on the various continents, we will be able on the various countries, we'll be able to capture that. But the other element of growth sits on the right side of the slide because there you see the revenue, and you actually see that a region like, for instance, LatAm you have a lot less revenue compared to the number of people that we have there, and that is simply caused by the lower labor cost, which gradually is increasing. So that is another growth engine that we simply have in those regions. We see -- as you see some of that also in Asia. At the same time, you would wonder why you see the little stripe on the Middle East, which is another growth opportunity. We signed a year ago a joint venture with Aramco, a company called ASMO, that we created together, which has a huge growth potential because it will -- it focuses on the energy and the chemical and industrial sector and it has as the launching base, the whole -- all the divisions of Aramco and their suppliers. So it has a huge customer base already right from the start, and it's already profitable from year 1. But that is also a great start to build further and to further expand our growth in the Middle East on. The other point, which I think is important to understand from DHL supply chain is how our contract -- how are we build up. So you have on the left top, you see the services we provide between warehousing, transport and value-added services. You see that how we are spread over the different verticals. So that means that we also fruit from the benefits in certain verticals when other verticals don't cost much, but we also have the more stable verticals like in consumer sector. And at the same time, you see by customer size, we clearly see a growth in outsourcing in the middle-sized customers because the higher complex -- I'll talk about that later on, but the higher complexity of supply chain drives outsourcing. We see that on the middle size. We have traditionally historically always been large -- with the large size of customers. And then you see -- which is an interesting one, because this is about complexity. So the new wins, where do we win them from? And you see that it's nicely divided almost 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 between winning from competition. So already outsourced business, winning from first-time outsourcing, which is the most complicated, most profitable business. And then new activity, and that's actually a simplest one, because there's new activity with existing customers. So you see it's nicely split between those two, and that's important also from a resource perspective and from an exposure perspective and to be able to facilitate growth. So speaking of growth, I just split then between -- like you've seen in the earlier presentation as well, when we talk about the top line growth accelerators. So the first point I was already about to make is about the growth in contract logistics. We see a clear growth in contract logistics. It was clear growth in outsourcing. And I'll show you in a second why. Accelerated Growth Solutions. We have identified specific elements of the supply chain where you will see both an accelerated top and bottom line growth, specific products that we have developed and that we will accelerate further growth on. And then the element of which Tobias already mentioned earlier, our clear strategy to make sure that where we need to extend our competency, we can do that through partnership or acquisition. So we don't buy size, but we buy specific competency which we then scale further on the basis of our customer base and our footprint. So the first one, the growth in contract logistics. So needless to say that supply chains over the past 5 years, 6 years have become ever more complex and today hasn't changed anything in that. That drives complexity, and we thrive on complexity, because the more complex supply chains are, the more value that we can actually create for our customers, the more we can benefit, the more we can grow. So that's one element. The other element is the fast-growing sectors within our business portfolio. So one, e-commerce. I'll talk a little bit more than in a second and the Life Science & Healthcare sector. And then the point of the more complexity of supply chain has another impact. The other impact is that the barrier of entry in contract logistics has fast risen, because you need to have very -- you need to be able to manage complex systems, complex processes. You need to be able to cope with having the right level of engineering, which becomes more and more complex. So there's still element of cyber security. There's the element of the investments that are needed into robotics and automation and to engineer that properly. So that means it's actually more difficult. And therefore, the growth of outsourcing leans towards an unfair benefit towards the larger players. And that's why we feel that also on that perspective, we will outgrow the market. Now I was talking about the specific products we were looking at. So if you look at inbound to manufacturing, so that's a whole supply chain towards production, which in the automotive sector is very optimized, but in sectors like healthcare and technology are absolutely suboptimal. We can add a lot of value there by optimizing these supply chains. So that's one element that we focus on. Omni channel. So this is having one stock for the traditional channels and the e-commerce channels, which is a very complicated way of operating warehouse operations, which we can absolutely offer, but therefore, you only need one stock to cope various channels. When we talk about return and circularity, so the whole returns business is a part of the supply chain, which is fast evolving, highly complex and also there are a lot of value that still can be created. Hence, the acquisition that we also did there, because we feel that we can add a lot of value in the overall returns and circularity flow. Service Logistics. That's a product that we have -- we are unique. We can provide within 2 hours a part in any Tier 1 tier city around the globe. Now for that, you need a complete network of small stock points, which we centrally manage around the globe. And it's a product that we are the only one that has that globally and which is one of our fastest-growing products. Then a fulfillment network, I'll talk about that a little bit more, has some similarity, but what that is all about is to have completely standardized processes where our customers can switch on, switch off within 4 weeks to have a fulfillment point for e-commerce, for e-fulfillment close to either the markets where they want to develop or when they want to launch new products or for small and medium-sized companies that want to start up.. Then we talk about the last two, I'll take those two together. When you take LLP, so this is about outsourcing a part of the supply chain to us, so where we manage for the customer, their supply chain. We do not need to have to physically run their warehousing or physically want their trucks. We optimize their supply chain on the base of the parameters the customer sets. That is also a growing product with middle-sized customers that do no longer want to face the complexity themselves. So that, together with the value creators of real estate, I'll talk about that in a second. Data and Robotics as a service, you'll see a bit more of that in a second as well and Green Logistics. So I'm going to deep dive into omnichannel fulfillment network and pharma specialized network. So on e-commerce, we have two elements to look at. So you see here on the right side, e-commerce and omnichannel. So that is about the dedicated larger, long-term contracts that we have with the well-known brands. We have about 20% of our new business every year is around that area. And then we have the fulfillment networks. Earlier, you had Tobias talk about Monta, which was an acquisition that we did in the Netherlands, which really taught us how to operate with small- and medium-sized enterprises, how to fast respond to that market. And we still kept Monta separately, because they have a very clear target group of small entrepreneurs that start in that market, and we have the DHL fulfillment network right next to that, which has a similar product for slightly larger customers, again, is a network operation for fulfillment around the globe. So when we talk about Life Science and Healthcare. So we did the acquisition of CRYOPDP and why is that such an exciting acquisition? Because this is a company that is specialized in clinical trials, to manage clinical trials all the way from A to Z of a multi-temperature solution. It very nicely links to what we can provide them from a forwarding perspective when we talk about airlift, when we talk about the express network that we have and when we talk about the supply chain operations from a warehousing perspective. So it is nicely the glue between those 3 services with having a clear specialization, which helps us not only to grow in clinical trials, but in the health care sector, you see a clear growth towards the more complex part of the health care sector. That is when we talk about cell and gene therapy, when we talk about biopharma. And when you are in with the clinical trials part, you're already in there, and those then actually do pass the hurdle of clinical trials. We can then actually from there, continue to provide the cell and gene type of therapy, the logistics services for that because it's actually very similar. It's patient specific, it is multi-temperature, it's a high demand on quality, it's global. All things are very nicely linked to across [indiscernible] element, but also very nicely linked to the supply chain product within health care. That's why that acquisition, while not super large, it's a competency that actually adds to our product, and we think that we can actually accelerate that growth. So I was earlier talking about real estate as a value creator. But what is really -- because what is really important is we do land banking because we can actually see where are the areas? Where are the requirements will be for new logistics centers? We create campus environments where we operate already in for other customers. And then on the basis of the growth that we foresee, we land bank, we make sure that the land is ready. And then we either build on the basis of a contract or we built on the basis of a multi-customer environment that we have and where we say, okay, if you take the 70/30 rule, if we have 70% long-term commitment, then we can actually consolidate into a new facility. So based on the risk of the market, we then see how much capacity risk you would take in through a certain market. So if you are in India, you take a bit more. And if we are in the U.K., we are a little bit more conservative. And on that basis, we've been able to continuously develop real estate, so last year we developed 500,000 square meters of new real estate owned and developed. And what we then do at the moment is contract it, we then sell it and lease back, we free up the capital, and we go for the next projects. So this 40% of -- actually 39% of the business wins that we've had are based on a real estate solution. because we can actually then already provide the real estate solution at a competitive location with a sharp time frame and at the same time, link that to logistics solution that we should offer to and that we will offer for a customer. So this is an important enabler of growth and an important element for our customer. You see a few examples on the slide around the globe and how we have been managing that. So if you then link our M&A strategy towards our overall study, so we were speaking earlier about Monta, so the nice thing of that is that since we bought that company in 2022, we have doubled the company in size and brought them into 5 new countries. So that's where you then actually buy value, buy capabilities and then we create the size. We spoke about the Inmar part because that gives us the capability in returns, which will also there. It gives us a leading position in the U.S., but that capability we can now bring into Europe and into Asia. Brandpath is an acquisition, relatively small position, but where this links us to a platform that can actually provide the front end and the checkout part, which is what the part that we don't do, but we then actually link our fulfillment towards it. So we have the exclusivity in this case with localized, where we will do the fulfillment globally to bridge so that we can actually have the possibility to talk with customers to bring them into new markets where they're not present, where we can actually then provide a full solution, both front end and back end from that basis. CRYOPDP, we spoke about. This was an acquisition in Mexico, but which gave us the last mile of health care and ASMO is a joint venture we spoke about. And as you can see, it all nicely links to our 2030 strategy, and it also is all based on competency that we can actually grow further. So when we then talk about profitability accelerators. So I'm going to talk a bit about pricing, the point that you've heard before, but then specifically what it means for supply chain. The very important element of modular standardization because that is our way on which we can scale and grow fast. I'll talk a bit more about that. Innovation and robotics. I talked a little bit about that yesterday, which is obviously a very important differentiator and not only about physical robotics but also about AI, and the elements of how we continue to balance our size with the right investment, but also the right efficiency and the right sizing to be continuously fit for growth. So commercial pricing strategy, 3 important elements there. The first one, when we talk about the pricing. When you see the value that we create for many of our customers in optimizing their supply chain is not always balance between how we price and we've been really helping our organization to do better value-based pricing so that we get a better share of the value that we create for our customers. That's where that element is about. It is also about, for instance, we've improved enormously with how we price on renewals because we've became far more aware of the downside risk for our customers to change, their risk of change was way higher than ours from their perspective because of the quality that we provide, because of the innovation that we provide, the risk of change for customers was such that, therefore, other renewals, we now actually improve our margins, while maybe 5, 6 years ago, we might actually have reduced our margins up in renewals. The 50-50 part between -- that is between open and closed book. We have a very clear approach on that one. If we do first-time outsourcing and the data isn't clear. We go open book because it eliminates the risks, but also has slightly lower margin. If we know the market well, we know the products well. We know the customer well, we know the data well, we go close book because that actually gives us a possibility to capture more value for ourselves on the productivity improvements that we create. That's how you balance that. There's another element, which is certain markets are more open book markets, North American market is more tend towards open book, while the Asian market is more tend towards close book. But we still always apply the principle that I just mentioned. And then the other point about longer-term contracts. So you saw the earlier slide on real estate solutions because we provide more of the real estate solutions, we can actually get substantially longer contracts, but also because of the innovation that we bring, because of the automation that we bring and because customers more and more understand the risk of change, we actually have been able to, by 35% increase the length of our contracts, which is another stabilizer of our business. Modern standardization. Why is this so crucial? You saw a large operation yesterday. Well, we implement 150 of those a year. So for that to be possible, you need to have modular standards in the way you design, the way you implement your operation to be able to do that with 95% delivering those new businesses on time. And by actually having a start-up performance, which is more than 100% compared to the business cases that we actually presented. That can only be done because of modular standardization because we know the systems we work with and because we have very clear processes, not only the process how we manage the project, but also very clear processes on how we approve new projects. So that's actually linked them towards the renewal rates and the service quality, as I presented earlier. Then innovation and robotics. What is really important with innovation and robotics is that you choose what to implement and what not to implement. There is great ideas around the corner every single day. But for us, it's really important is that we choose those solutions that not only are the best, obviously, in the performance from a productivity perspective but also are scalable, are part of a modular standard. So what we've done is that we identified 12 processes, which I explained yesterday. And we then in each of those blocks of those process, we identified several providers that we work with. We then embrace the provider. We help them to grow. In some cases, we actually make sure that we also get the benefit from the value creation of the value of those specific companies. But we make sure that we then scale them around the globe. So the other point which is important, so here you see how this split between the various activities that we have. The scalability is important as mentioned. So we now have about 7,500 robotic solutions around the globe. What is also important, at the same time, is that we make sure how we manage the various robotic solutions together because where the real value sits is not in the robot itself. It's actually what you do with the data of the robot and how you then actually manage the different robotics and people solutions together. I always proudly present and I'll repeat it today again that we have, for instance, an operation in the U.S. for one of the larger fashion companies where we operate a similar robotic solution as they do, but we get 15% higher productivity out of the same robots. And that's because the way we manage the system that we have on top of it and how we plan between people, robots and the various robotic solutions. And that's a very important element because that's where the value add sits for us today and in the near future. So that's the physical robots part. Then there's obviously the system robotic part. I shared on the table a very stable yesterday, an example of how we are robotizing, for instance, our transport planning. So yesterday, somebody asked the question, and we couldn't answer that question because obviously, there were people sitting there that actually doing that work, so I didn't want to obviously go in that activity. That will be obviously a bit of a problem. But when you look at planning, one of the simple activities and the activities that is not very nice to do and very inspiring to do is to make the phone calls, to make the appointments on when we can actually deliver. We've done in our U.S. transport business. We've done a pilot on that. And the surprising element is on that is that, one, if you see the demo, it's really convincing because it really comes across the talk with the person. But the other element is that, yes, you replace the people that otherwise would have made and who have done that work to make all those appointments. But the biggest element is that in one hour, we've made all the calls for the whole week because obviously, that robotics solution can do that at the same time, call all the customers, which with people would have been very hard to do. That is an impact on the actual operation and how we can then optimize the operation, which is substantial. And I can go on and on with other solutions and other examples what we do with hiring of people, with interviews and all of that. But I'm happy to do that in a separate setting. But it gives you one idea on how important physical robotics is and what you do with it and also these type of AI solutions on how we optimize our operation? And the most important thing is how we combine those solutions and therefore optimize for our customers. So the point I made earlier, fit for growth. So we always make sure that we have an operation and an organization that is nicely balanced between investing where we grow, but being lean where we don't from a geographical and product perspective. So if we then summarize, as I talked through the top line growth accelerators, so I spoke to the actual growth in the outsourcing market, in the contract logistics market. I talked through our accelerated growth solutions, where we see that we can -- because of the position that we have and the actual top -- above average top and bottom line growth that we see their how that grows, I spoke through the acquisitions and our strategy around it and how that translates into growth then and how that actually then translate into above-market revenue growth? We then looked at the profitability accelerators. We talked about how we contract, how we do pricing, how we improve our -- continue to improve our yield there? How important modular standardization is for accelerated growth? We spoke about innovation and robotics and how we scale and how we differentiate compared to any of our competitors because of the way we scale around the globe and because of the way we, therefore, copy best practices, and that actually helps customers to faster innovate. And we spoke about fit for growth, how we make sure that we stay efficient, effective with the right investments in growth. At the same time, within supply chain, we have a very thorough process on return on capital and how we have -- depending on the risk of the market, different minimum return on capital that we have to establish and how we continuously improve our return on capital on that perspective, a very important driver there as well. While you do see some increase in CapEx because of robotic solutions, we still continue to remain an asset-light model. So what I wanted to bring across to you is that we have, well, basically, the best people, a strong team, well trained, focused on innovation that we have the best operations, the best processes that we drive the innovation there. And that, that actually translates into the winning the better contracts, but also at the same time, being able, because of the customer satisfaction that we have because of the quality that we provide and because of the innovation we have, we are able to better price and, therefore, better invest in innovation, better invest in green logistics solutions and therefore, be able to on tomorrow. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Oscar. You were supposed to introduce me.

And with that -- which I do right now.

Good job. Well done, thank you. I don't if you realized, but it was very difficult for Oscar to remain standing in the cross. We were instructed to stay here but you did a good job. So good morning, everyone. Very happy to be here again, and good to see you some of the familiar faces from last night. I'm going to walk you today through the story of DHL e-commerce in September last year in Frankfurt, Melanie and Tobias walked you through our ambition to grow faster than the market, stabilize our capital consumption to reasonable levels and also improve our profitability. And today, I'm going to walk you through how we are planning to do that for the next 5 years. It is important to remind ourselves that we are a very new business unit. We created DHL e-commerce only 6 years ago by putting together multiple businesses from different countries around the world, mainly predominantly domestic parcel delivery companies, but also some deferred cross-border solutions, including the portfolio. Since then, we have been able to double the size of the business unit. We grew faster than the market in the majority of those countries. And also, we improved our profitability significantly from a money-losing portfolio to a stable EBIT year-over-year. The first few years of that EBIT journey were more about restructuring. We shut down some few countries, we rationalized some of the service offering. We were, at that point in time, doing all different type of services related to the periphery of parcel delivery, but we decided to focus on what we are really good at doing, which is domestic parcel delivery and deferred cross-border. Right after we conducted that turnaround, COVID came and we enjoyed some few years of unprecedented growth that was not sustainable because this was a business portfolio that has not invested in matching infrastructure. So yes, we enjoyed unprecedented margins and return on capital that was mainly because of extreme sweating of the assets. And that's why we decided in 2023 to embark into a phase of 2 to 3 years of investment for growth that consisted in investment mainly in middle mile and local deployment for Last Mile delivery, but also elements of technology which have been postponed for many, many years. Very important, not mentioned in this slide, but very important also is that in 20 -- only 2 years ago, we put together our limitless growth strategy, all the business units have this type of simple brochure, which is an extremely powerful element for aligning our internal teams to make sure that they understand what is our identity and what we are aiming for and what is our operating model. So that led to a phase of consolidation and focusing on the core business in the 3 main geographies where we operate. We operate in 3 geographies that are Europe, U.S. and India. In Europe, we have 8 countries with our own what we like to say, full yellow type of asset-heavy operations, but we cover the entire Europe through partners. Some of the partners are, of course, partners of the DHL family but other parties are third-party partners I'm going to be talking a little bit more about it. And both in Europe, we cover our cross-border intra Europe for all the territory and all the countries in Europe. Also we do cross Atlantic same as in the U.S. with U.S., Canada, Mexico and cross-Atlantic into Europe as well. In India, we do only domestic for now, but we're going to be soon launching our deferred cross-border solutions there as well. And this portfolio has a very interesting mix of mature countries like for example, the U.K., where we have 29% of e-comm penetration as a percentage of retail, which is one of the most mature countries from an e-comm as a percentage of retail. But still, of course, with the prospects for growing and also some other countries like India with very low e-comm penetration as a percentage of retail and significant growth opportunity in terms of parcel delivery. And in all of those countries, we of course, we look into absolute market share, but we're also looking into relative market share. And relative market share is measured as the business that we have and the relative size compared to the main player in the market because that is a very important indicator of our capacity to have economies of scale and ability to compete with those competitors in terms of capillarity, coverage and cost efficiency. So for example, in countries like Turkey, the #1 player has 20% market share, #2 has 18, we have 16 and therefore, the relative market share, although if you see in absolute terms, 16 market share might not be absolutely dominant, but it gives us a very good relative market share compared to the competition. And that's why we can command profitability in that market that is very healthy. Similar to other countries, for example, in India, where we look exclusively to the ground B2C operations, we're #3 or #4 sometimes, but we're #1 in profitability. So we look at both relative market share and ranking within the profit pool as great measures to understand our competitive position in these markets. Our portfolio is mainly centered around e-commerce, and I have already received a lot of comments, "Oh! Your name is very confusing." Yes, apologies for that. We're not going to change it for now. All of the business units that you have heard and you will hear [indiscernible] we all do e-commerce logistics in each of the different segments where we operate and where we specialize. And we, of course, do a lot of our business is e-commerce, the majority, 95% of our growth is in e-commerce parcel delivery, both again, domestic and cross-border. And as you can see, it's a very diversified also customer base. We don't depend in any country of any major customer or marketplace. If you put together all the Chinese marketplace volume that we handled across the 1.7 billion of shipments that we handle every single year, it is in the low single digits that we depend on this group of customers. So it's a very healthy customer base fueled on SMEs. We have been growing our active customers, as you can see, very healthy and steadily. And we have almost 200,000 active customers in the group -- in the company as we speak. So a very, very diversified customer base and very healthy. Our growth will come from mainly 4 sources. The first one is the tailwind and structural benefits of our portfolio focusing on e-commerce. E-commerce as a percentage of retail is going to continue growing and we are going to enjoy that growth, and we are already enjoying that growth. The second accelerator will be out-of-home and returns. We believe that the out-of-home preference in customers is going to continue growing. Today, 29% of customers prefer to receive a package if you have the option in an out-of-home local or parcel shop. The number was half of that 29%, 5 years ago. So we see that the adoption and the propensity to use out-of-home when customers have given the chance is very high, and we see that number growing, and we're going to continue investing in out-of-home network. Very closely related to out-of-home is returns. The first mile of a return e-commerce shipment is ideally done through an out-of-home, the concept of going to pick up a package for a return shipment is definitely not very efficient. Cross-border, I'm going to talk more about it and of course, expansion of our footprint. We operate today in the geographical footprint that I share with you. But if we want to grow the business, we need to continue expanding our footprint as well as we have been doing in the last 2 years. Beginning with a little bit of overview of the key geographies. In Europe, we operate a fantastic hybrid network. It is a combination of what we'd like to say, asset heavy and asset-light or dark-yellow and light-yellow, but we operate in this hybrid network in the most efficient way. Given the most optimized service quality and cost efficiency, by picking up the ideal partner and ideal capabilities in each country. We'd like to say also that this concept of trying to paint every single country, dark yellow and having our own heavy assets in every single country, we have already evolved beyond that. And we believe that by controlling the middle mile by choosing in each of the different countries, the best and ideal and the most effective Last Mile delivery partner gives us a flexibility and a cost position and a coverage that is very, very unique. And that's why we -- besides the 8 countries that we fully cover end-to-end with our own assets, we have great partnerships with very, very strong partners. Probably the #1 partner that we have in Europe is Germany with, of course, Nikola's business P&P. We inject into Nikola's business, almost 0.5 million shipments per day, we inject into all 45-plus sorting centers every single day with direct shadows from Netherlands, Poland and Italy and France. And we have the ability to do cut off times that are much better than the competition. So a strong partnership and very, very high, of course, dependency on the P&P capabilities in Germany. But it's not the only one, we do similar type of activities, not only in Europe but in other countries with our other sister business units. Poste Italiane third party is another great example of a very strong partnership. They do all our inbound deliveries into Italy. We use their capillarity and also injecting more and more downstream into their operations. They are also our -- the resellers of our outbound cross border services, which gives us the amazing opportunity to have a partner like Poste Italiane with first of all 40,000 [indiscernible] shops across Italy, but also a very strong selling capacity to sell the deferred services that we offer across Europe and international. And also we have with Poste Italiane a joint venture for the deployment of lockers and expansion of the out-of-home network in Italy. We also in December last year, we established a gross shareholding partnership with CTT. As you may have read, we acquired and we have a transfer acquire up to 49% of the CTT Expresso capital and in exchange, they are going to be acquired or they have already acquired 49% of our business in Iberia. That gives us what we'd like to say the closest that you can get to getting married without getting married and allowing both platforms to continue producing what they are good at. In our business, we will continue focusing on B2B and heavier weight. CTT Expresso is a great capability and a great partner for anything that has to do with small parcels that we are not only going to benefit from the upside on the domestic market but also on the inbound into Iberia as well. So those are some of the examples that we have for Europe. In the U.S., as I was saying, we have a great capability. We have a multiyear agreement with the USPS. We inject almost 500 million shipments into the USPS Last Mile network, injecting into 300 approximately sorting centers for the USPS. And we have our own [indiscernible] sorting centers. A lot of the CapEx was -- that I was referring to before, it was put in the last few years to upgrade in an automated capacity in the U.S. as one example, but of course, CapEx was related to some of the countries in Europe. So we have a great offering. We also leverage on the capabilities from the other business units. So for example, for services, expedited services from New York, East Coast to West Coast, New York to Los Angeles. We are using the air network of Express in the ACS capacity or air cargo capacity services that Express is offering to us. And therefore, it's a perfect combination of speed type of transportation for [indiscernible] while injecting into the USPS because a very, very unique product offering, and it is right now our fastest-growing product in the U.S. India is definitely one of our top priorities for growth. The country itself, from a macro perspective, I don't need to tell you how much transformation is enjoying and how much potential it has. We are seeing every single month more infrastructure being put into the roads and airports in India. And there, we enjoy a very strong position from air cargo perspective. We are approximately 4x bigger than our second competitor from anything that has to do with air cargo, B2B and B2C. We operate our own air network of 8 owned aircraft, and we connect all the main cities through our air network, and we are rapidly growing our surface or ground services as well, where we are #2 now for B2B with almost 20% market share, and we are growing rapidly in the B2C segment for lightweight. But in India, it's mind-blowing the coverage that we have. We do 90% of the territory, for example, of India for Express services is covered by our Indian operations, which by the way, goes by the name -- the brand name in India of Blue Dart. So you might have heard about Blue Dart as a leading logistics company in India, and we are majority owners of Blue Dart. So great capability. We are investing heavily in infrastructure in India, mainly in the surface -- on ground services, and we are very confident that we're going to be able to double the size of that business in the next 5 years. Moving on to some of the key enablers. I talk a little bit about out-of-home. Out-of-home, again from a convenience and preference perspective, is growing in acceptance from customers. And we believe that is a key competitive advantage. We claim to have one of the largest out-of-home networks, combining [indiscernible] parcel shops, and lockers in Europe. The utilization of that out-of-home network is growing very, very fast, and it's not only growing for first mile -- for last mile delivery and deliver into lockers, but also for returns, as I was saying. And a significant portion of the utilization and the volume that we have today in the out-of-home network is related to return. This also given a very unique capability for cross-border. So for example, today, we can produce a shipment and sell a shipment for approximately EUR 6 from Poland to 12 countries in Europe for predominantly local to local or parcel shops to parcel shops or C2C type of deliveries, which is delivered guaranteed in 3 days. So that is a very unique capability from a convenience perspective, from a capillarity perspective, with our 169,000 points that we have in Europe and also from an efficiency and cost perspective. So definitely, capability, in particular, in Europe, that we're going to continue investing in a big source of growth going forward. Cross border, and I would like to spend a little bit of time here to explain a little bit what is our position in cross border compared to what you heard from John. If you envision that the cross-border market is the pyramid that we have illustrated here where at the bottom of the pyramid, we have all the flows that are going through the postal networks. But at the top, we have the main carriers, DHL being the leading one. And in the middle, we have what we call the deferred networks, which are hybrid networks that utilize the line call depending on what is, of course, the commitment to the customer as well as the best last mile delivery capabilities in the respective countries. And this is a very unique capability because, first of all, it is geared towards e-commerce lightweight, different to what John was saying in the TDI network, it was mainly predominantly favor weight. So 95% of the volume that we put through this network is below 2 kilos. It is very peaky, meaning that it can spike up and down 300% so we need to have the flexibility both from a last-mile delivery as well as from a line core perspective to maximize the utilization of these hybrid networks that I was referring to. And that's why we are optimizing for affordability and reliability, meaning that we're not optimizing this nerve for speed and optimizing it for reliability and affordability. And that's why today, Manchester to Chicago shipment with this network, we can produce it for approximately 10 pounds, 2 kilos, 10 pounds, selling price and the transit time will be less than 5 days. And that's why we optimize that network for again, affordability compared to something similar with Express, which will be guaranteed to very likely arrive there in 2 days and it's going to be a little bit more expensive. So 2 different types customer needs, 2 different types of production platforms and the perfect formula for failure, we'll be trying to combine these 2. And we have seen, I think [indiscernible] alluded in the question about some of our competitors trying to combine those 2. And definitely, these are apples and oranges and we are very happy that we're seeing very healthy growth in these 2 platforms at the same time. Another source of growth, as I said, accelerator is going to be the expansion of our footprint that will include and is included in new markets. We have acquired MNG in Turkey. We even have a goal extraordinary platform, great management team. And Turkey checks all the boxes of the type country where we want to grow inorganically. First of all, it is a difficult geography to expand because you need to cover large territory with a lot of big cities. Second, it has high Internet penetration, young population, but still a lower e-commerce as a percentage of retail. So it checks a lot of the questions and it's becoming part of this geographical tailwind countries, GT20 countries, that Tobias was referring to, which we believe are going to have a disproportionate growth compared to some more established countries. So a great overall package together with, of course, as I said before, an amazing management team that is doing an amazing job for us there. Saudi Arabia is another good example. It checks also a lot of the similar boxes, and we have acquired 49% of AJEX, a smaller type of newer logistics player there, but also with ASMO delivery for B2B, B2C and also temperature control, which is very complementary to our life science and DHL Health logistics capabilities. So that is on new countries. And of course, following that criteria, we are going to continue looking into opportunities as they arise, but we're also investing inorganically in some of our existing footprint. A good example of that was a year ago, we acquired one of the largest locker competitors in Netherlands, Instabox with 1,000 lockers and we're looking for more opportunities in markets like Netherlands. And Iberia, the CTT example is a great example where we are going to be enjoying of the e-commerce growth through the 49% ownership of CTT Expresso, and we're going to find synergies to optimize both networks as much as possible. So the growth accelerators are definitely a key component how we are going to improve margin and continue achieving the aim of growing faster than the market, but we're also focusing on how we are going to improve our profitability. And that's why we have 3 key elements and accelerators to make that happen. The first one is that we need to elevate the performance of those countries in our portfolio today that are not performing at the level that they need to be doing. The second one is geo management. We're going to talk more about how we are utilizing the pricing center of excellence that John is referring to and then cost measures as part of the Fit for Growth in the group. So the first layer of improving profitability is going to and it's already in focus for us is improving those countries that are at the bottom of the range of margin. And we know how to do that. We have great success stories in many countries. We are operating at a high relative market share, high profit share and also high margin and high return on employed capital. BeNeLux, Turkey, India are examples of countries that are in that upper high quadrant of combination of those variables. But there are some others that are not there yet. And our profitability in the existing portfolio is going to improve not only by growth and yield, but also by some of the basic things that we are working on in countries like Poland and the U.K., which is more about network efficiency, out-of-home network and making sure that we have some of the basics in place. The second layer is maximizing yield practices. The pricing set of excellence that you heard all of us talking about is definitely adding a lot of value in leveraging on the expertise and the journey that business units like Express have already gone through. We have identified and we were able to see some very good progress now in consistency in the general price increase that we have all the countries applying with the same level of integrity. The propensity to pay is another type of practice that we are borrowing from Express in terms of making sure that within the 1.7 billion shipments that we manage, there's a huge opportunity to make sure that everyone is paying what they're willing to pay in terms of maximum yield. So we are working on that as well. And all the other tools that you see in the toolkit are that we are pointing to practice. And we believe that is going to have a contribution in the next couple of years of 0.5% of improved margin to the bottom line. And the last one is the margin expansion through cost measures. Our largest cost, as you can see here is the last-mile delivery, and we are implementing measures from route optimization to optimization of our networks in order to improve that cost and the unit costs. And we have seen a very nice trend in terms of the unit economics from a last mile delivery perspective. But one of the main levers that we are put in practice in every single countries, flexing our resource contracting and labor model. A good example of that and probably the best one that we have is in Netherlands, 80% of our couriers are between 18 and 25 years of age, and they work 10 hours per week. So that gives us -- and we have plenty of capacity to scale up and down that last mile delivery. Of course, we have a fixed network that we maintain almost everywhere. But one of the main characteristics of parcel delivery for e-commerce is the ability to flex up and dow within the days, within the weeks, within the peak seasons, the ability to scale up and down in a cost effective but also quality conscious way the resources in order to deliver the increase in packages. So we have covered the growth accelerators that gave us a lot of confidence that we're going to continue growing faster than the market. We'll also talk about profitability accelerators, which also gives us a confidence that we're going to be improving our margin in the next 5 years to above 5% margin. And what does it mean from a capital allocation perspective? As I said, we are exiting this year and maybe half of next year, the heavy investment phase. All the investments has been made in infrastructure, perhaps automation, of course, a little bit of IT but mainly it has been in the middle mile heavy infrastructure and all of that has been self-funded because of our operating positive cash flow. We continue -- we're going to continue, of course, selectively investing in capacity because in the growth business, we definitely need to continue doing so. But we'll see that phase is going to normalize into a little bit of a lower levels. And that, combined with the improvement in margin and utilization and yield practices and growth make us also feel confident that we're going to have an improvement, not only in margins but also in the return on employed capital. As I said, we're going to continue doing selective M&A as we see, first of all, that the countries meet the criteria for being an attractive country. And second, we find a target that we are going to not only continue helping grow but making sure there is a sustainable investment for the long run. So in wrapping it up, we are confident that we are going to continue enjoying of the tailwind of e-commerce growth and e-commerce as a percentage of retail. You saw that our footprint is very targeted towards e-commerce parcels, both domestic and deferred cross-border. This hybrid network, where we are utilizing our own assets when we consider that they bring a competitive advantage but combined with the best partners in the different geographies given us a unique balance between cost effectiveness and asset efficiency and capital requirements. And that's why we are confident that the combination of all of these is going to give us a chance to continue growing but also improve our profitability over the next 5 years. So thank you very much for listening. And with that, I pass the microphone to my dear colleague, Nikola. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Pablo. I think I'm the first to say now good afternoon. After the colleagues from the 4 international DHL divisions have wrapped up, we will now be talking about Post and Parcel Germany. It's my first Capital Markets Day. I had already good conversations yesterday at dinner with many of you. And a lot of our conversations circled around, but how are you different? How are you different than the other portals? So in the next 30 minutes, my main goal is to give you an answer why we are different. To tell you that we are also part of the growth story and remember, accelerate sustainable growth. We also have a good or well growing segment and even though we talk a lot about accelerated decrease in latter volume. This is not new for us, and this is not something where we now have to panic and think how do we transform because as Tobias also said in the morning, we are nearly halfway through the transformation, and you'll see we have made good progress, and we have levers that we can pull depending on how the volume actually develops. This is also what we left you with in September. Nothing has changed here. We talked about what are our goals? How do we look at the growth of parcel, the decline of mail? What CapEx do we need? And then we also already introduced a number of 1 billion that we are going to reach this year in terms of EBIT. And that will remain more or less stable throughout the transformation. And after that, we will continue or we will move on to growth. But I'm not going to tell you now just what are actually our aspirations, our plans. Today, the focus is really how are we going to achieve that? And before we go into the top line accelerators and the profitability accelerators, let's take a look quickly at who are we in Germany? And here, this is the densest network in Germany, the largest network in Germany and through this network, where 80% of households are less than a kilometer away from one of our touch points. Every day, we move 42 million letters and on an average day, about 6.7 million parcels. And the same network actually scales up during peak season, then to produce every day 12 million parcels. This was the record we had last year during peak season. So this is not just a large network. It's also a network that can breathe, and that's the key, especially in well-run person company. Also, we are participating heavily on e-commerce. Nearly 10 billion of our revenue is e-commerce related. And as we will see, this is also where the growth is going to come from. We're also the sustainability from [indiscernible] Germany. And the reason why I'm mentioning it here is also because our customers are demanding it. Our customers are demanding that we invest in sustainability, and we'll also see how they are going to participate in that. And I think something that we are proud of is that we are the #1 postal service or postal and parcel service in the world, together with the Swiss Post. And I think that shows you a little bit that we have done quite a bit right in the past and also have a good plan going forward. So we are moving from postal to parcel. And also, we heard already today in 2024, for the first time, we have more revenue coming from parcel than actually from our mail, from the national side of the mail. We are, at the moment, at a ratio of about 6:1 in terms of letters to parcel. And we are calculating with about 2:1 for 2030. We're also doing and running different scenarios because we have to remain flexible in our road map going forward. But this is what we are currently working with. And before we actually go into what's happening in 2025 and beyond. I just also wanted to highlight the track record we have. The track record we have on innovations, but not just in rating, but really scaling innovations that's very important, and you'll see that big numbers for us do make sense. And if I talk about the parcel share, and we'll do a little deep dive later on that one, we are above 40%. And because we are 3x bigger than the next one. This really allows us to leverage economies of scale in Germany in our network. We have Pablo talked about lockers today. We also have a lot of personal lockers and now also post stations, and we'll talk about why they are so specifically important for us, but we have now a network of about 15,000 and growing, so we'll double that until 2030. So here, we also have a certain density already in Germany and the largest network. Joint delivery will do a deep dive. And then also we are not just a German postal and parcel operator but we are connected to all the European countries to all our sister divisions and obviously also through the postal network to every single country in the world. So in terms of top line growth accelerators, being the e-commerce leader in Germany, is really our foundation for future growth. Then yield management is also something we have been very, very diligently working on and then obviously, cross for the e-commerce. So in 2014, which is the smaller one of the pies on the left side, this is how the market looks like in Germany. We had over 40% market share, and there were 4 other relevant competitors at that time. And if you look at the very left one, we still have about 40% market share. So we did not lose market share, but you will see there is a new competitor because ever since Amazon Logistics came in and also provides logistic services for last-mile deliveries, middle mile in Germany. So it did not come to the detriment of our market share. We kept our market share, but it was taken from competition. So Amazon, for us, is a partner, is a customer, but has not taken market share. And this is a fact that we should -- that we are quite proud of. And why is that situation as it is, it comes because we really provide very good and constant quality. We have very engaged people, and we have the network that stretches across Germany to every area in Germany. And even though we are a very big machine, we also kept quite some flexibility, which our customers appreciate. And speaking of customers, on the right side, you can see we have obviously top accounts like our colleagues do, medium and small. But the important thing is no customer has more than 5% revenue share with us. So we have no over dependency on a single customer. We have an incredibly broad customer base and every year we are adding more customers. And the key for us is to bring them in, ideally, digitally or through the telesales area. And then by adding more services by helping them grow also internationally, for example. We grow them from a small to a medium account and to a top account. We've customers that started with us with 2,000 shipments on the first contract. And now there are smack in the top accounts, and we have been with them all the way. So this is -- this has proven for us very successful. And you also can see all of these customer groups actually grew with us in 2024. So this is something that we really, really put focus on we don't overexpose ourselves with a certain group or with certain customers, and that will help us also when the consumer behavior in Germany is getting a bit more optimistic. Again, we are growing from a much, much broader base than some of our competitors. But that's not all, I mean having already a lot of customer obviously helps in the moment of optimism and growth spur but we also have a lot of growth levers through providing very good customer experience, both physically but also digitally. And I really want to highlight our posts and digital app, with 8 million users in Germany. It's also one of the highest rated apps in the German stores, in the German app stores. And this is where customers can interact with us on a postal side and on the parcel side. They can track their packages, they can buy online stamps and just right to code them on the letter. They can book a pick up, they can do a lot. So this is for private customers, it's heavily used and it really helps us also as a selling point with our business customers because the convenience for the end consumer is so high that they actually demand in many cases that they want their stuff to be shipped with DHL. And that's always a very convincing argument when we go to our business customers and say, look, there is an NPS score of over 65 and consumers in Germany truly appreciate the service and the flexibility we provide that helps us to further grow our customer base on the business side. Digital sales is also very important for us, 21,000 customers. We won yes, last year through the digital sales channel. That means they contact us digitally, they open an account digitally, and they can ship with us digitally in less than 24 hours in most cases. So this really is very, very successful, obviously helps us our sales force to be more productive and focused on the larger accounts. The 21,000 came in last year, this is something that we are now also sharing with the rest of the divisions and all of us are working towards these digital sales setup. Business customer portal is basically for business customers, work for the private consumers is the DHL app. We have 160,000 customers there. Also a lot of self-service and as labor costs in Germany are high, the more a customer can do in the interaction with us themselves, and they like doing it and they get the right information, the better it is for us. We also really fully integrate in the backbone of some of the platforms that makes us often their preferred provider than for these platforms and also moving away from us mix is then much more difficult. And the voice spots, also our customer service is a real partner for e-commerce growth. Through the voice spot that we have, it's a descriptive model we have saved 32% of our call minutes that come in for certain topics. And that helps us to actually grow our parcel business without adding further costs. So that was the first step, 32% of the minutes saved. The next step is obviously all the work that we heard from Oscar. Now moving to a reasoning model and having a more conversational type of voice spot but that helped us to get the cost to a minimum here in customer service and allow us to add the parcel growth that we have been enjoying. And parcel growth is a good lead over to a view of the German market. So the sales volumes of the German retail market, you see on the left side. On the right side, the bubbles that's the online e-commerce for the online commerce penetration. So in Germany of all the retail volume, 16% is being sold online. That is a number that doesn't say much by itself. But if we compare it, for example, to the U.K., they are nearly every third purchase is done online. And China and Korea have even higher rates. So for us, this is double positive. First, the whole retail market will continue to grow. And the second one is online penetration is really low still in Germany compared to some of our peers or other countries here in Europe and around the world. So also there will be an increase in the online penetration. So that means on the growth of e-commerce, we will heavily participate given that we are the leader -- the market leader in Germany. And I hope you agree with me that these are quite promising numbers also for us going forward. We heard from all my colleagues about yield management and also we are part of this. Steering Group is yield management group, and we have been since 2018 doing really stringent GPIs and really well balanced pricing. So when we do price increases, we have a nearly 100% stick rate because we treat all the customers more or less the same in a sense that increases need to come from the broad base, not just from a few select ones as some of our competitors do that. And the positive topic here is really every year, our revenue grows faster than our volume. So we have really good yield management in the parcel area. And that's in our hands, we can price there and we really have been doing a good job here. We introduced also a peak surcharge last year. Some of the competitors then try to do the same, but with much less stick rate than what we have. And we're also looking in peak, that's the time shortly before Black Friday, Cyber Monday until the Christmas period. There, we even have peak year weeks than we have in general. So we are really looking what stretches our network the most and who are the customers who actually stretch our customers the most during that time. And we are also thinking now how can we build this into our yield management so the customers really pay for the costs that they are creating when we have to scale up the network in the peak season so tremendously. As I mentioned before, from 6.7 million parcels to actually 12 million parcels in the same network. Here also mentioned GoGreen plus. You will see we are investing in sustainability, in our e-fleet, which is significant around 33,000 vehicles in Germany. But we also have our customers participate in that. So we are selling them a GoGreen plus service where we then prove to them where we invest it, what do we do with the money, and that helps them to, first of all, add it to their own accounting or use it in their own accounting, and also advertise them to their end customers that they are taking massive steps to make logistics or the value chain greener and we are working with a lot of customers here to actually participate in that and have seen quite an uptake on that also in Germany now. All my 4 colleagues very nicely already talked about how we work together. So we are in the middle of Europe in the largest economy and we have connections to all our sister divisions. If we look at DHL e-commerce, we actually share even facilities. We move where our customers are, a lot of German customers who ship to Germany actually move to the border between Germany and Poland. So we built a hub together there, actually also with our colleagues from freight. So 3 divisions sit in that hub and we share then the facility for e-commerce volume and for P&P volume, we've the same in the West, where we see a lot of the volume coming in from the Chinese shippers. Here we're actually in [indiscernible] ] together. So that is really some a way how we can grow together and not every single one of us has to bear the full cost of that expansion. Pan-European collaborations, we have talked about that. A lot of customers ship across Europe. They come to us, from Germany. They normally go to Austria, then they go to Holland, then they go to the more complex countries and we are helping them to either bring the goods into Germany or actually export them. We also work with our colleagues from DGF when they bring volume from the Far East and they're clear. We heard about their customs clearance capabilities. We pick up in the international airports surrounding Germany. We bring the goods in them, and then we do the last mile delivery. Monta is also a very attractive case. Monta is fulfillment for small customers. They can actually get a contract out also in 24 hours. We can open an account in 24 hours. So in theory, a customer could really say, this is my online shop that I want to place. They have an account with us in 24 hours. They have an account with Monta for fulfillment in a very short time frame. So they can really get their business up and running in a super reasonable time. And that's something where we have enjoyed very good collaboration, but more importantly, also good volume and good profit from it. So those were the growth accelerators. But what is really important for us, and this is where this transformation is going to be one, and we will be successful with that is the optimized network utilization. John talked about the perfect aviation network. I'm going to talk about the optimized network utilization. And you'll see it's bringing the mail and the partial network together, but also looking at indirect functions. Germany has a huge demographic change. So we will also utilize that demographic change, the baby boomers that are going to leave in terms of indirect functions. And then, of course, we are also part of the group-wide, Fit for Growth program. So you all probably heard about the postal law because we also talked a lot about the postal law because it was important for us to get a new version last year. We got that in July. It had positives, and it also had negatives. But if I look at the left side, it allows us to really have a stable foundation for good EBIT margin. So that's the first thing. And that was really crucial because we were tied to the other postal operators or to some of the other postal operators before and their profitability. So now we have a stable foundation, that's very good for us. Now I'm going to focus on what does it bring in terms of productivity? And we have since the first of January, extended delivery times in Germany. 80% of our mail volume, we previously delivered on the next day. And then we are moving now to basically delivering on the third day, 95% and 99% on the fourth day. Now we didn't use the full time frame that we would have available yet because we also need to adapt our concepts, our operations that doesn't happen from 1 day to the other. And we also wanted customers to ease into that transition. So that really allows us now to become more productive. And I will show you the 3 main levers here. And then the post stations. I talked about them before. That is really important for us. Because in the very rural areas, sometimes it's really hard to find a partner who can actually sell or be our postal and parcel partner. And now we can have our post lockers actually be recognized as one of those physical required outlets. And this is very good for us because that will help us really also bring costs down in our network. So -- but I told you that transformation is being won really in our operational processes. So I'm opening the door to 3 of them that are really important for us and A/B steering, which means basically you split the delivery tour in an A part and in a B part and you steer then the volume that you have. Now that we have longer time with the fully paid letters since the 1st of January, 60% of our mail volume -- of our volume is now steerable. And where is a transformation, one with the postal service provider? It's one when you have high density when you deliver. And if you really ensure that you steer your volume, the postal man has to go to fewer households per tour. And when he goes to these fewer households, he brings more volume. So that's the optimum that you want to achieve. And this is what we are achieving now by splitting the tour into steering the volume, keeping nonpriority volume back and making sure that we work on the most productive way out on the delivery tours. This is very unique. You won't see that with many of our competitors. And this is really where the productivity game is being won, creating the best and the highest density when you deliver Mail and Parcels together. Ready to go is the next point. It sounds a bit better in Germany, but -- or in German, but I can't help we have the translation here. So that means really, at the moment, our delivery people take 45 minutes in the morning to sort Mail. And as you can imagine, a delivery person is most productive when they're actually out on the road delivering. So we will use our mail sorting centers to pre-sort now that we have less volume have more time to actually sort deeper. And we will bring then the bundles to the couriers in the morning, and they can then go out on the road and don't have to pre-sort for nearly an hour. And given that we have 115,000 delivery people, every minute that you take out of that agenda is obviously pure cost savings. And that is another really key part. It will stretch until 2032 until we can do it fully because whenever we have a decline again in volume, we can then sort deeper again because we have more time on the machines. So that's what I meant before. We really observed how does the volume go down and then we can react, but we have answers and this is how we are going to manage the decline all the way up to 2032. Joint delivery is something that also not all or not many of the postal operators do. We have been delivering Mail and Parcels in the rural areas for a very long time. In fact, we had 68% at the moment. This year, we will go up to 72% of the volume being jointly delivered. And our goal for 2030 is then 90%. And with the other concepts that just introduced before. That also allows us to think of reverse joint delivery. Now mail delivery basically was the anchor, and we added parcels on Monday, one can also think of because they're traditionally not that many letters on Monday. The parcel courier delivery guy can then take on a few of the letters that are still there. So there are a lot of different versions and models that we can think of and all address specific situations that we have been adding to our scenario planning. Out of home, we talked about one thing I wanted to point out besides the post stations is we now have also a white label option. It's called [ Die N Fox ] sorry that I cannot translate. But this really allows also for us access locations were maybe before a city or a company said, "No, I don't want to have 3 or 4 of these lockers here. I don't want that. So I don't give it to anybody. Now we can say, but we have one box and others can put their parcels in there, too. And that has opened a full new range of locations, strategic locations for us. We are planning on putting up 1,000 this year. And that will, by the end of this year, then already be more than what we have on white label options from competition in all of Germany, for the last few years. In direct functions I mentioned before, of course, we win the game in the transformation of the operational processes, but also here in direct functions are very important for us. And here, we have helped through the demographic change, 33% of our people in that area will retire until 2030. We'll have a peak in '26 to '27. So that means we'll have natural fluctuation, which is good because then we only will replace maximum 50%. The rest we then cover through automation, digitalization, global sourcing. So we really are covered also in that area. And the labor market will be very different anyway in Germany. There will be much fewer people who want to work or who will be available for work. So we are also looking at many options. The ones that we attract, how do we keep them? We have very intense training for our people. And we see also roles that we might not need anymore. So we do a lot of upskilling also for future improving some of those roles. As I mentioned before, of course, we are part of the Fit for Growth group program. In fact, we started 2023. We have very stringent cost management and because people have this absolute bite and willingness to make this transformation successful, we have already discovered and actually implemented quite significant cost management measures. You also see all the ones that I talked about before. They all pay into one of these cost buckets of our EUR 16.5 billion of costs. And we are also well covered for the years to come. We have different measures, different initiatives year-by-year to actually keep addressing our cost base. So I talked a lot about the top line growth, which, of course, is mostly focused on the parcel growth, then also the profitability accelerators, where we try to intertwine the networks more and more. So the more room we get by the mail decline, the more we have then room for parcel. That's also the same in our sorting centers. We have less volume. We put in sorters for small parcels. So we can also use those mail sorting centers that traditionally did the letters before for our parcel network. It's a self-finance transformation. So every year, we can only invest what we actually produce in terms of profit. This is a bit how to split is for us. So every year, we invest a significant portion in the parcel growth in the parcel expansion, in parcel sorting centers, in sorting concepts for different formats. So whatever fits best into the road map, sustainability and renewal, we need to, every year, renew our fleet or a good portion of our fleet. And then digitalization, I already covered before. Bringing more EBIT then once we have made good progress on the transformation, obviously, also were reversed trajectory that we are on our ROIC and will also help us to improve in that area again. So in summary, I hope I was able to explain a bit more why we are different than other postal operators on the transition from a postal to a parcel operator that we're not just starting now with the transformation, but that we have been going on with the transformation for several years and that we have a clear plan what needs to come next, depending on how the volume on Mail develops. We do anticipate e-commerce growth. We anticipate Parcel growth, and we are also ready for that. And in general, I would think that being an anchor or a part also for our other divisions will really help us on the pan-European on the Far East to Europe trade lanes to make significant progress over the next years. And I want to highlight again, it's a historic transformation and it's a self-funded transformation. Thank you very much. And with that, I'll hand it over to Melanie.

Thank you very much, Nikola. I think there was a great conclusion to the 5 divisional presentations. I think a very clear explanation of how Nikola and the team know how to manage the transformation from letters to parcels in Germany and how there is a future vision being the leading parcel player in Europe's largest economy. But also thank you to the 4 DHL colleagues. I think we shared a lot of insights with you now on where we want to find growth also in today's environment and how we want to improve profitability. So what is left for me to say, I want to talk about 2 topics which are important from the finance perspective. I want to pick up on our finance strategy where we shared an update with you already in September with the launch of Strategy 2030. And I want to talk about return on invested capital. A KPI which we have been tracking for a while, but we have this Strategy 2030, we now put new and increased emphasis on. So starting with the finance strategy. That is actually a slide which you have seen from us for many, many years. And the basis construction of our finance strategy hasn't changed much over the last years. So we have a target rating between BBB+ and A- and then we have the 2 pillars, the business growth and the shareholder remuneration. And on the business growth, our focus has been and will remain on organic growth and I think you heard a lot of examples of where we want to grow going forward. But we will supplement it with M&A, where you heard clearly from Tobias that we're really looking for targets, which give us new skills, which allow us to increase our capabilities. And on the shareholder return side, the foundation is the regular dividend. But as we have now also shown for many years, we will supplement that share buybacks. So that's the basic structure of our finance strategy. Nothing really new here. But we added some important nuances in September of last year with the launch of Strategy 2030. So on the core part, with regard to organic growth, we pointed out what are those areas where we think we will find above GDP growth. We talked about that quite a lot today. And on the regular dividend, we said very clearly that dividend continuity is extremely important for us. And on the lower part, with regard to inorganic growth and share buyback, many years ago when we launched our finance strategy, we were very much focused on what to do with excess cash, which we generate. And that was the foundation for inorganic growth and also for the share buyback. And we have now included the strength of our balance sheet here because over the last years, we have significantly strengthened our balance sheet. Thanks to our significantly improved cash generation. And that now gives us opportunity to do more, both on the inorganic side, but also with regard to share buybacks. So that is what we said in September. Now on March 6, we actually applied the finance strategy to reality. On the regular dividend, we honored the commitment to dividend continuity even though that came at the expense of slightly going out of the regular payout corridor, as you know, we have a payout corridor of 40% to 60%. We went up to 64% to make sure that we keep dividend at least constant. And on the share buyback side, after now having announced a roll forward of our share buyback program with an increase by EUR 1 billion over the last 2 years, we actually decided to top it up to more than EUR 2 billion -- up to EUR 2 billion until the end of '26, recognizing both the strength of our balance sheet, but of course, also our valuation situation. So we have a very clear finance strategy, and I think we are also really living up to it and we are applying it. The foundation, which is enabling us to invest into growth on the business side and to create good shareholder returns is our significantly improved free cash flow generation. And that is really something that I'm very proud of. 10 years ago, when I came into the corporate board, it was the common of criticism in investor meetings that really our free cash flow generation was definitely not where it was supposed to be. So we are very proud that through all the turbulences of the COVID years and the post-COVID normalization, we have actually kept one KPI amazingly stable, and that's the red line, which you can see here. And that's our translation of gross profit into free cash flow. And you can see that we have this very stable level now. And that is, of course, something which we intend to keep going forward, and this better cash flow generation is the foundation for executing on our finance strategy. So that takes me to the next evolution step in our financial maturity journey. When I joined the company 20 years ago, we were really focused on revenue growth and the top line was the most important KPI. We then matured more towards, okay, actually, profitability is relevant. We have to focus on EBIT. Then we came to free cash flow, and we really, yes, worked it into the organization. And systematically, over many years, improved our free cash flow generation. Now it's time for the next focus topic and that is return on invested capital. And I think one important thing to start us off with the discussion on return on invested capital. We have invested quite a lot over the last years. You can see in the middle here that our Invested capital has actually increased by 7% per annum over the last 5 years. But we have also grown EBIT by 7.4%. So through all the turbulences of the pandemic, we have actually seen a very good and solid return on invested capital of around 14% and that is the starting point now. And now I come to the question, how do we actually want to grow return on invested capital going forward? And there are 2 elements: logically. One is the numerator EBIT, which by growing EBIT, we can also improve return on invested capital. And the second one is invested capital, what we do on the denominator. Let me start quickly with growing EBIT where you already heard quite a lot from the colleagues. I just want to briefly take the very long 10-year look-back time horizon. So in 2014, we were a company which produced an EBIT of just about EUR 3 billion. And at that point in time, actually, the largest EBIT contributing division was still Post & Parcel Germany. And actually in Post & Parcel Germany, it was the letter business. And DHL Express, John had just become a billionaire in 2013. Forwarding supply chain, we're still years and years away from becoming a billionaire EBIT contributor for the family and DHL e-commerce wasn't even born. So that was the family picture back in 2014. And we were striving towards the EBIT aspiration of EUR 5 billion by 2020. And then you know that during the pandemic, it all got a bit crazy, and we shot up to more than EUR 8 billion. And now in 2024, we delivered an EBIT of EUR 5.9 billion. So that is roughly twice than what we did in 2014, and we had a 7.1% EBIT CAGR this time period during which we significantly transformed the business and where we are now based on a much broader profit pool basis than what we had before. So I think we have quite a good track record with some ups and downs, but we have really managed the transformation from the postal business to the most international logistics company in the world in a profitable way. You have heard from the colleagues how strongly we are now positioned in all 5 of our operating divisions. I'm not going to go through it in a lot of detail. But just as very quick recap on what for me stands out. So when you listen to John, you clearly heard how DHL Express is different and how we are truly the global market leader in the Express industry and what is remarkable for me from the finance perspective, yes, they are the most capital intensive of our divisions. But throughout the whole cycle, they have really delivered a very strong ROIC. When I look at Tim's presentation, what you heard today, you have seen that we have had a step change in performance in Global Forwarding, but there is more to come. And Tim and the team have a very clear plan on how to further improve profitability. The firework from Oscar and what you also saw yesterday in operations, I think, makes it very clear that we are the leading player in supply chain and that we have the right recipe for future profitable growth in this division, which just became a billionaire with the results in '24. When I look at Pablo, well, this young division is in the right spot to benefit from structural e-commerce growth opportunities, and there are also clear plans on how to improve profitability further. So I think we will see faster growth in that division than in the rest of the organization, but we will also see profitable growth coming from DHL e-commerce. And then last but not least, from Post & Parcel Germany. Yes, we are going through this transformation. But Nikola and the team, they know how to manage that transformation in a profitable way. And there is a clear vision by the end of the decade, this will be a parcel company with a bit of letter business on top, very profitable in Europe's largest economy. So that is the foundation, the 5 strong operating divisions. And as you saw, we have on top of that, the group elements to our strategy 2030, the group growth initiatives we have fit for growth, and we have the alignment of the legal structure. So I think this together will give us a good opportunity for EBIT growth for growing the numerator in return on invested capital. Before I come to the denominator, I very briefly want to deviate from the main theme of today. Today is obviously about the long-term and Strategy 2030. But for good order and for completeness, just very briefly reiterating what we showed you for the short-term outlook when we launched our guidance on March 6. I think the first important message here is this slide is totally unchanged. That is what we gave as guidance on March 6. I hope that the presentations from the colleagues gave you a bit of comfort that there are good growth opportunities also in today's volatile world and that we are working on the cost base is fit for growth. There are limitations to, yes, how crazy the world can be without this having an impact on our business. That was the caveat we already made on March 6. But we feel quite well positioned to now work with our customers on how to deal with what is happening in the world around us. And then a very, very short-term remark is we have now collected the Q1 consensus from you. You can find it on our website as usual. And I would say that broadly, it reflects well what we said on March 6 with regard to Q1 not being the most dynamic quarter in line with usual seasonality. So that was a very short-term perspective. Now big -- now back to the longer term. And the question, what is happening in the denominator and how are we going to manage the denominator so that we see a good development on return on invested capital. And the first thing I want to talk about is actually what is included in invested capital. Because there is no standard common definition, competitors use different definitions. You can have a debate, do you include goodwill, do you include leases. So for us, the core focus will be on reported return on invested capital with invested capital, including PPE owned, PPE leased, goodwill, working capital and a bit of other stuff. So that takes us for the average of '24 to a number of EUR 43 billion. And let me now look at the different components. The largest component in here accounting for more than EUR 18 billion is actually the own asset component on the balance sheet. And here, we have invested quite a bit over the last years. We now had many years where actually our CapEx was significantly higher than our depreciation. Over the last 2 years, we have already managed that down. For '24, we had a factor of 1.3 between CapEx and depreciation. So this whole catch-up investment, which we had to do in some parts of the business, I think that is really behind us now. We will still see a rate where we are investing into growth, but I think we are now in a much more normal territory. With regards to leases. The first important reminder is we do leasing because it really makes sense for us on the operational business side. It is something which we do mostly in Express and supply chain. In Express, it's part of the aviation flex for the network, which John already talked about. I'll come back to that in a second. And in supply chain, it's an integral part of the business. So if you do a 7-year outsourcing deal with the customer, it does make sense to also have a 7-year lease for the warehouse, so that both things are earnings and harmonized in timing. Last comment on this page, goodwill, EUR 13 billion. That is a sizable number. And that predominantly dates back to the acquisitions, which we did more than 20 years ago before 2006. As you know, accounting-wise, it just sits on your balance sheet unless you come into an impairment situation, it's not depreciated over time. So that is just something we have to live with on our balance sheet. But it does have a significant impact on some of the divisional return on invested capital numbers, which you will see in a segment. So this is the group structure for invested capital. Now when you look at the different divisions, I think the first very positive match is the division, which is the most capital intense, DHL Express is actually the division with the highest ROIC. We have a 19% ROIC here. And very importantly, also for P&P going through the transformation and e-commerce being in the growth phase. I think we have reasonable starting points with 9% and 11%, respectively. The one number which you may find a bit surprising is actually the Global Forwarding Freight number. Because after all, that's an asset-light business. So why is it only 13% in such an asset-light business? Well, the explanation is actually goodwill. So for historic reasons, Global Forwarding came into the company to a large degree through acquisitions, with Danzas, with AI, with XL. So there is a significant goodwill portion on the Global Forwarding balance sheet. And if you strip that out, you actually see a 40% return on invested capital. And you also see that Express and supply chain, the other 2 divisions where we still have quite a bit of goodwill on the balance sheet are getting an uplift as well. When we look at leases and we exclude leases in the denominator, you can actually see that this lifts up predominantly, Express and supply chain. As I said before, those are the 2 divisions where leasing is part of our business. So this is just to give you the transparency, don't worry, we are not going to talk every quarter now about 3 different ROIC definitions. But I think it's important today for once explain how the different divisional invested capital numbers being made up. I just want to spend a couple of more minutes first on Express and then on the others collectively. On Express, we have a dedicated slide because that is obviously the largest invested capital base. And you can see here nicely this balance between owned and leased assets. And you can see that the yellow part, the aviation piece is the biggest chunk. And here, as you probably also know, we have really completed a large refleeting program over the last years, particularly with regard to the 777 buying. When you look at the other 4 divisions on 1 slide, I think the most important message here is every family member is different. You see, as I already mentioned, that in Global Forwarding, the by far biggest chunk of the invested capital is the goodwill. So if we now want to improve return on invested capital in Tim's division, well, we can do some working capital optimization, and we're working on that. But the big driver for Global Forwarding will be improvement in EBIT in the numerator. For Pablos division, you see that there is actually for this relatively young division quite a bit of yellow. So we have invested quite significantly over the last years into the growth of this division. But we are now getting more into a phase where, yes, we will still keep investing, but we are also leveraging the assets more and that is a constant adjustment process. There was one small spot the difference came in the slides Pablo showed earlier. So compared to what we showed in September for CapEx going forward for e-commerce, we have actually adjusted the number downwards. We had 300 to 500 in September. We have now taken that down to 300 to 400. That gives you a feeling for this is really a living construct where we constantly look for opportunities to better leverage the assets going forward. So from a group perspective, we have a clear plan for each of the divisions, how to improve return on invested capital on the EBIT side, but also on optimizing the invested capital. This is not a one-size-fits-all formula. So the important thing is that for each of the family members, we have a clear plan, how much capital do they need and what are the expectations? What is the right balance, for example, between top line growth and optimizing return on invested capital. And that is how we will now, for the group collectively but also for each of the 5 divisions, how we will drive return on invested capital going forward. It will be a multiyear journey. It also means that we have to take the organization along. So there is a huge educational element in here because like we did with free cash flow, we now have to explain to our country manager in Thailand, what is return on invested capital and how can you locally influence this KPI, but we are very committed to making this next step in our financial evolution. And to show how serious we are about it, we are also including it in the remuneration scheme. We will propose to the AGM on May 2 that, first of all, for the corporate board, return on invested capital becomes one of the KPIs in the long-term variable management compensation with a weighing of 1/3. And we will then also roll it out to the wider organization. So that was a quick run-through finance strategy and return on invested capital. To conclude from my side, not just maybe for my part, but also for what I would take away from what you now heard over the last hours. I think we have a very clear plan how we want to grow EBIT better than GDP, and we will stick focused to a very strong free cash flow generation. We will strengthen the focus on return on invested capital, and we are focusing not just on getting the group number up, but over time, also improving ROIC for each of the divisions, and we reaffirm our strong commitment to attractive shareholder returns, both through the regular dividend and through share buybacks. And with that, it's time for the final, final wrap-up. And I think Tobias.

Thank you, Melanie. Thank you, colleagues. I keep it relatively brief. We've come full circle from what we wanted to achieve today, review our strategy that we have communicated in September. Many of you have asked for some detail on how we want to achieve that. I hope you feel that we provide that detail both in terms of how we want to grow the company faster or growth accelerators, but also how we want to increase profitability, that including EBIT, but also return on invested capital. My wrap-up would be 3 points. As a citizen, I might find certain developments recurrable, but we have a very good track record as DHL to deal with volatility. And our relative position going into a renewed round of volatility is very strong. So we feel confident that we can also deliver in this environment. We have excitement and we are fired up for more. I think you could get a sense of that with the divisional presentations. We have, I think, really good initiatives that have real traction in the business to accelerate sustainable growth. And we are not building pipe dreams. We have a strong commitment that this makes sense for our shareholders that we have higher return on invested capital and that we provide a good return profile to you as our shareholders. With that, I thank you for your attention, and we have another round of Q&A.

Thanks, and I ask the 3 presenters of the second round. To join us up here together with Melanie. In the meantime, as I said, we got a couple of questions from the outside, offering a good fit to the topics that we covered in round 2. Thank you. But first, let's see whether there are any immediate questions right here from the floor. Maybe over there, Johannes Braun.

Yes, Johannes Braun, Stifel. I have 1 question left on Express still for John, I guess. And then 1 on the postal law. On Express, a couple of years ago, you had a Capital Markets Day on Express. I think it was even prepandemic, where one of the messages was that B2B e-commerce would be the next big thing for Express. Moving forward to today. I haven't seen this moving a lot. So maybe you can comment on whether this has not developed as planned or whether I missed anything on that one. And then on the -- shall I give you the second 1 as well? So on the postal law, you mentioned that the margin that you are allowed to earn now is based on the Euro Stoxx 50 average. I think it's -- at the end, it's 6.5%, if I remember correctly, which is basically half the margin -- the average margin of the Euro Stoxx 50. What has been the rationale of the regulator to cut that margin by 50%? And is there any chance that you can maybe negotiate that way in the future?

John you want to go first.

Yes, first on the question of B2B e-commerce, you're right, on September 7, I think, in the head office before we went out to the Cologne Hub. That was quite a feature within our presentation. We'd already made some progress on that. In fact, we realize it's a big opportunity because of all the multinational companies we talk to, 12% to 15% had a dedicated bespoke portal where people could come in and buy B2B online, sort of shop now buy a Rolls-Royce engine. It really was like that. So there's a huge potential to go to these MNCs and convince them that selling B2B online is a good model. I think the truth of the matter is we got distracted with some elements of traditional e-commerce, more recently, our GT20 program and our SME activity where at about the same time, we received the market sizing study, and I'll just summarize it like this. it pointed to a big opportunity to manage our SME customer base better. So it's a little bit of an all hands on deck in terms of SME, which I profiled briefly. And like the tutorials we did for some of you on B2C online generally, we're very happy to pick up tutorials on SME or on B2B online as well going forward. And Martin might be able to facilitate those to bring you back to speed.

So that's still very much alive. Thank you, John.

So I would take the question on regulation as it relates to the postal law. So what's important to see that the margin that is mentioned there is the regulated margin, which is not identical to the divisional. The regulated margin includes central cost that we have. So you would have to add a notch to the 6.5% to get to the divisional margin of P&P. Now to your question, why is that a discount to the Euro Stoxx? We're not the regulator here or the legislator, but I think the argument is a risk adjustment that the business is more stable in its regulated form. We obviously see that ambition of the legislator positive to provide a relatively risk-free environment. That is the rationale why such a discount would be applied. The -- I think it's clear, and Nikola mentioned this, that this regulation is much better than what was in the old law in 2 ways. The old law also had a price cap that went back to the mail price in 1997. That is de facto gone. And we have a base now that is not anchored in the postal industry with all the problems that our listed peers have.

Okay. Thank you. Oscar, we got 1 question from the external audience actually from Vincent from Zadig. All the introduction of technology, robotics and what's the key lever for you? Is it productivity? Is it better attractiveness on the labor market? How do you measure whether the whole exercise you're going through there is successful and what are the KPIs?

I'll make a short answer out of this. So one is, of course, productivity, but the productivity makes us more attractive more competitive to win your business. And at the same time, it also makes us a more attractive employer because the working environment is far more inspiring and attractive. So it's those 2 elements and being a better employer also helps you to have a longer-term contract with people, and that actually drives productivity up as well. So that comes back to productivity again.

Excellent. I think that's helpful enough. Peter, I'm happy to follow up. We continue with Andy in the meeting.

Andy Chu from Deutsche Bank. Can I just ask a sort of big picture question? If GDP -- if global trade is significantly below 1x real global GDP, and we've had the discussion that maybe really knows. But if that were to be a scenario, which is obviously different from the assumption under Strategy 2030, how will you kind of pivot the business to cope with that sort of maybe a downside scenario?

So I think, Andy, I have seen some of that. First of all, we're shifting the footprint. I think it's -- it will be highly unrealistic to assume that we have a very homogeneous development of trade. China made clear commitments to further opening up. I think there are geopolitical reasons why this is a credible statement. We have seen the trade that Asia has with the rest of the world, excluding the U.S. and to some extent, Europe mushroom. This is really growing very fast. And I think there's no indication, also what you read in the newspaper in the last 72 hours in terms of alignment between countries that on other topics have a rather, let's say, interesting relationship. So I think we will see a very heterogeneous pattern with the U.S.-related trade most likely taking a hit if those measures announced yesterday would stay for longer. So that is also, I think, to be seen, but that's obviously a scenario. And we have -- you've seen this clearly in the 3 divisions of supply chain, e-commerce and P&P, a strong exposure to domestic activities as well. So we see the volatility that is ahead of us. but we're definitely not scared by this scenario.

Okay. Then we continue with Alex in the front row here.

Alex Irving from Bernstein. Two, please for Nikola. First of all, can you please comment on your competitor's profitability in Germany and the implications of this for market pricing dynamics? You talked about being able to price up. Is it more that you've got no choice but to price up, if you want to stay below 50% share and avoid unwanted attention from the competition regulator? Secondly, how is the current relationship with your unions in Germany? Can you talk a lot about efficiency savings pointing to what looks like head count reductions with the A/B deliveries and things like this. Is that running into resistance from your labor partners?

Okay. So let me start with the competitor's profitability. I would say that we own most of the profit pool in Germany, meaning DPD and Hermes, they are not doing financially so well in terms of profitability. And then when I look at the others, I see more a strive to get cheap volume in rather than optimizing the whole business. If I put it like this. So we have pricing power because we have premium quality. And we also see that once we -- once e-commerce continues to grow, there will be undercapacity in the market in terms of sorting capacity. So we don't see competition investing. We still do invest in our parcel growth, and that certainly helps our pricing power then going forward. On a question with the union, given the stage that we are in, in the transformation, I would think we have a reasonable relationship with the union in a sense that over the last few months, they probably get a deeper understanding what this transformation actually means and where it leads if they are not a partner at the table.

Okay. We continue with Sebastian -- Emily.

Emily from Barclays. I just have a couple of questions on the cost savings program. So could you give some color around the cost savings program and how that's allocated within the divisions? And whether that total EUR 1 billion, is this also from the integrations between the divisions? Or are the initiatives quite division separate focus? And just tagging on to that, the P&P stable-ish EBIT to EUR 1 billion in 2026. Could you speak about what assumptions you have for cost savings within 2026 as well?

Maybe I...

I can quickly talk to the cost savings program overall. I think what's important to note is this is not top-down and allocated, but this is rather us summing up what we have been working on since September and giving you transparency around it. So this is how we also came up with a figure. It's not a top down. This is what we need to, but it was just let's really take a close look what we can do on the structural side, deploying technology, changing networks, changing our setup. And this is why it comes out of the current business structure. We keep the divisional setup. We collaborate between the divisions, but there's no element of integration in that sense.

And if I could just add, so I mean, when you look at the different buckets, we have the aviation bucket, which logically applies to forwarding and Express. And then we have the ground operations bucket and the indirect bucket, which applies to everybody. But just the composition with the 3 bucket shows you that there is obviously a significant contribution also from Express and Global Forwarding. And in terms of last but not least, Tobias mentioned it already, of course, there is also a program for corporate center group functions, where we have also adjusted the guidance from the past EUR 450 million to EUR 400 million, so it is really a group-wide program.

And on P&P, because you asked specifically, all the cost measures we have implemented or in the process of implementing will help us achieve the EUR 1 billion. You saw on the operational levers, the rates that we put there in terms of savings is always for a full year when they are running fully, when they are fully deployed. So A/B steering, for example, you probably saw EUR 50 million per annum. That's incremental. Because we have already been doing a lot on the ready to go, that will take longer until that really has an impact because we are only deploying it. But everything we have collected structurally will pay into the EUR 1 billion. And then in addition to that, we also have the constant adjustment of our costs to the actual volume. So we have structural cost savings plus the flexible ones.

Before we come to the further questions here from the floor. One question that we got this morning already and now following your presentation, Nikola, not very surprising question. The whole new group structure after the carving down of P&P, does that mean a spin-off of any division and P&P for many would be a candidate here. Does that mean that this is still on the table, off the table? Tobias give us your view of it.

So it's interesting that, that question is asked remotely. The -- I think we have commented on this. We are going currently through the process of aligning the legal structure with the management structure. This has operational reasons. But obviously, it also gives us certain strategic flexibility. That being said, we think this portfolio makes sense. We -- I think also through these presentations have shown the positive linkages that we see between the businesses, especially our ambition to be a leading European parcel provider is something that we see as an attractive offer. It's a market that is significant in size. And in our view, highly attractive. We need a domestic national last mile capability of density to make this successful for a pan-European e-commerce play, and that's 1 of the linkages that is important to keep in mind. This is why we find this portfolio that we have a very attractive portfolio, but we also obviously understand that it's upon us to deliver what we have laid out in September. And today, that this is an attractive play also for our shareholders.

Thank you. Very clear. And Sebastian, we continue with Cedar and then Alexia, please.

Two questions. Can you talk about your perspective on what's going on with USPS as it relates to your e-commerce business in the U.S. because they're clearly your last mile partner and there's a lot of change with their business and UPS' relationship with them and give us some perspective on how you think that impacts your footprint there and upside risks, downside risks? And then another question on e-commerce. With the move to grow the out-of-home network, how do we think about that from a sort of competition and margins perspective over the medium term? Because I would think that it's probably good for margins, but maybe it lowers cost to serve and maybe that makes it easier for new entrants, but then the new entrant has to actually invest the capital in a big network. So some perspective on what you think that makes -- or what that means for your e-commerce position in Europe?

Sure, you want to make to take the USPS. Yes. So USPS, as it is publicly known, last year, the USPS continued executing on these delivery for America program that was led by the former PMG, Postmaster General, who is no longer in place. That program included a change in their operational network to have partners like ourselves, injecting volume at a higher level within the network, which we fully executed, we fully compliant with. And actually, from a quality perspective and cost perspective, is working really well. And our customers are super happy also with the move towards that operating model. . It's publicly known that the Postmaster General is no longer in place. There is an interim person now who has continued so far with the existing plan, but it's very likely that a new leader will be appointed and to be determined how that will evolve. We have a multiyear agreement with the USPS. We are a significant revenue and volume generator for the USPS. So we have a strong mutual interest in continue working that out. And to be honest with you, we have -- we are confident that regardless of new direction from a partnership perspective, we could add significant value to the USPS and continue adding value. So independent of the details of the operating model and whomever will come, it's very likely that any scenario will lead to continue having partners like ourselves because we have a very strong role to play for them and also for customers. So that's the extent of the situation. And again, long lasting relationship, we are confident that we will continue having such a relation with the USPS. On the out-of-home, yes, it's important to keep in mind that out-of-home definitely is about lockers and parcel shops, but there is much more behind that is not only about having thousands of metal boxes on the street or parcel shops. It's the entire middle mile, its entire selling capacity, it's entire 360 customer experience. And that's why while on the surface, the proliferation of out-of-home points could potentially be perceived as overcapacity in the market from a last mile delivery perspective and utilization of the lockers and parcel shops. The entire profit will be driven by those companies that have the ability to scale the first mile and the middle mile, and that's the game that we are playing. So we definitely need to have that out-of-home capability. Yes, in some pockets, there might be a little bit overcapacity, but the barriers to entry are much higher upstream into the process, and that's where we see that we have the opportunity to differentiate.

Maybe if I may add on the USPS situation. We have a bit of a unique advantage because we have 1 thing in common. We have a universal service provider for a country. And we know how it feels if there's arbitrage against your obligation as a universal service provider. And we have always been very respectful to that with the United States Postal Service to make sure that we don't do what we would also not like others to do to us in Germany. And I think that has strengthened the relationship that we always had an eye out that this business is also beneficial for the United States Postal Service. It provides them, we provide them access to volume that they would otherwise not have in the network.

Okay. Then we continue with Alexia, please.

Alexia Dogani from JPMorgan. Just 2 questions as well. Just firstly, on e-commerce, can you talk a little bit about your strategy in the U.K. and Poland, where you are slightly underweight your less than 50% kind of market share delta? And how much investment are you willing to put in those markets to get you up to the leaderboard? And could you expand a little bit on why you reduced the range of future CapEx investment today and whether kind of the ROIC are something that have come into consideration? And then for Melanie, just looking at kind of returns to 2030, obviously, you've given us the evolution of EBIT over the past 10 years, we can really see that EBIT revenue and returns kind of peaked in 2022. When you will look at the plan now, because of the cost-saving program you're doing and CapEx needs having rebased, should we be looking at a better return kind of ROIC capture, assuming we get back to a similar revenue number in the several years. But are you basically structurally improving the operational efficiency and cost delivery that should get us to structurally better returns from the peak years we saw during COVID?

Do you want to start with this? Yes. So regarding U.K. and Poland questions. U.K., we have a great B2B business, and we are a niche player on last-mile delivery e-commerce. We are growing our cross-border, deferred cross-border also very nicely and our investment phase, I would say that the most of the investment phase has been completed there. We have some delivery depots that we need to upgrade, but in general, the significant investment has already -- or is behind us. And we will continue playing in that niche high-quality next-day delivery segment that we are very good at. And in Poland, we have also a full range of services where we are predominantly investing in the out-of-home locker network because there is demand in the market for another player that will have the capillarity that is required to satisfy the customer needs. But at the same time, we have very strong positions for B2B, which is existing. We have 25% market share on B2B domestic and also similar or more share for cross-border. So we will continue in Poland also with our current strategy plus the out-of-home network investment for lockers.

Yes. And then on the ROIC part to Pablo's numbers, yes, I pointed it out because I think that is a nice first example of how we are now having a dialogue with the divisions where we also really factor on capital efficiency and how much CapEx do you really need in an even more stringent way than before. And we came to the consensual agreement that EUR 300 million to EUR 400 million is actually good enough. And that will, of course, then also help us on improving ROIC for e-comm. In terms of general ROIC aspiration, it's a bit for us like with free cash flow, where in the beginning, we said, yes, we want it to grow, but we didn't give a specific target. So I think for today, the statement is that, yes, we also want to see ROIC now moving forward in the second half of the decade. I think then in terms of maturity level, not at a point where we will say, okay, the target number is x for 2030.

Okay. Well, I think that's pretty much bringing us to the end of the allotted time. I mentioned how much I love to stick to timetables. Those in the room still have now a chance to grab a bite and have a further chat. Thank you very much for your time coming here. Thank you very much for your time and effort to bring the presentation. Thanks to you out there to the whole team putting this together. And last not least, to Bank of America for providing the space here for us. So thank you very much. And I think that would then leave the final words to Tobias.

Well, not much more to be said. I hope you found it informative. I hope we were able to address your questions. Maybe we should have allotted a little bit more time to question still. But we'll see each other in one or the other format, I guess, over the coming quarters, and you know how to find us elsewise. So thank you very much for your attention today, for your interest in our company. And again, I hope you found it helpful. Thank you.

Thank you.