E.ON SE (EOAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and a warm welcome to our half year 2024 results call. I am here with Leo and Nadia, who will present our H1 results. Special welcome to you, Nadia, your first call in your new role as our CFO. Happy to be here with you. As with every occasion, we will leave enough room at the end for your questions. And this time, we will also aim to finish 2 to 3 minutes earlier because we know that you probably want to jump on the next call with RWE. So we will cater for that. With that, I hand over to you, Leo.

Thank you, Iris. Good morning, everybody, also from my side. Happy to be here again with you. A warm welcome. I'm happy to talk to you about another successful 6 months for E.ON. And once again, we show that we are the playmakers of the energy transition. And I have today only 3 very simple messages for you. Let me just kick it off with them. First, during H1, we have not only delivered financially, we have also further scaled our investments. With that, we continue to be fully on track to meet our group '24 guidance. Second, we target to be the efficiency leader in all our businesses. And today, we will share with you some significant achievement that we have made in this regard. And third, our growth story really has just begun considering the massive investment requirements for distribution grids in the next decades all over Europe. To my first message, our group financials are in line with our expectations. Our reported performance is dampened by well-known positive timing effects and one-off effects, which occurred in 2023, but do not reoccur this year, and Nadia will give some more details on all of that later. The underlying earnings development is predominantly driven by the successful execution of our investment plan. We increased our investments by more than 20% or in absolute numbers by around EUR 500 million in the first 6 months of this year in comparison to the same period of last year. And to make it a little bit more interesting and tangible what we are talking about, I brought to you some of our CapEx. What you see here is one phase of -- 1 out of 3 phases of 110 kV cable. So 3 of those are 110 kV line. So we're building all of that like h***. It's actually quite impressive if I put it like this here. So it stands between the 2 of us. This, we don't want. So we are making progress in terms of CapEx delivery. And with all of that financially and operationally, we are fully on track to achieve our group guidance for 2024. And again, Nadia will give more details later. Now on my second message for today, E.ON's efficiency leadership. We are leading pack in terms of efficiency, and this is also clearly our aspiration. We received an average individual efficiency score for our German power networks of around 100%, which is significantly above the average. And in addition, two of the DSOs, which we have, have received a super-efficiency bonus from the regulator which brings them to an efficiency even above 100%. We also continue to proactively address potential operational bottlenecks. We have increased our workforce in the first half of this year by more than 2,000 employees on a net basis. We have actually hired more. But on a net basis, we have increased them by 2,000, actually slightly north of 2,000 employees. And the vast majority of those have been added into the German network business. We are with that fully on track to achieve also the planned additions in force, which we are guiding for the -- which we're aiming for, for the full year. We have also made significant progress in the standardization of key components. The reduction of the number of variants that we use is a clear example of this. For example, on high-voltage pylons where we then put those decent cables below. So we have reduced the -- from 130 different types to 20. And in the substation transformer variance from around 90 to around 20. And this simplification of variance actually helps us to also future proof our supply chain because it's obviously easier with a standardized approach to actually achieve the volumes which we have. And furthermore, on the supply chain, we have diversified our supplier base and optimize the ways in which we forecast materials. And this allows for a more reliable long-term planning with our key suppliers. And consequently, we have been able to plan and secure quantities with certain suppliers for critical classes of materials up until 2033. Let me now elaborate a little bit on the strong operational performance across our different business segments, which, obviously, this performance is the base for our future growth. What is clear for us is that future power networks need to be digital. This is why a large proportion of our investments into networks and solutions are metaphorically speaking, not just copper and aluminum like here, but also in silicon. A core part of our strategy is to standardize, digitize and automate all processes across the company. And we apply them along our value chain, from the connection request from our customer who wants to feed in renewables to the billing process. And for example, we have already halved the processing time for approving new connections. We have mentioned to you in the past that we are progressing well towards full digitization of connection request handling. And let me now shed some light on the meter to cash process where we reached an extremely important milestone just this June. We went live with the new meter-to-cash system in the first half of 2024 for around half of our German grid customer base. The system which we have installed to that regard provides standardized processing for things like meter reading, device management, billing. And to make clear what the migration effort we are talking about, this implied that we had -- which we did successfully, we had to migrate half of our German customer base together with 12 billion datasets over 1 weekend and then go live from Friday to Monday. It's actually a huge achievement, and it shows how much progress we have made in becoming a digital utility for the future energy world. Now that we have validated the system, we will, in the second half of the year, also migrate the remainder of our customer base. Within our Energy Infrastructure Solutions segment, EIS, we are progressing in decarbonizing our customer and society whilst securing financial growth for E.ON in the future. And here are just some examples. In the U.K., we have announced a long-term partnership with Peel Ports Group, the U.K.'s second largest port operator. This partnership includes plans to install the U.K.'s largest roof-mounted solar energy system on the port of Liverpool. We also signed an agreement to build our pioneering low carbon energy network, Ectogrid for more than 6,000 new homes and business properties at Silvertown in East London. These achievements demonstrate that the demand for decarbonization solutions remains strong, and this strength is also reflected in the EIS sales portfolio pipeline for the second half of this year. On the Energy Retail side, customer numbers were stable despite the increase in market activity in some markets. Additionally, we continue to roll out digital customer handling and can now report that 2/3 of our contract volumes are being handled digitally, which is significantly market increase versus around half, what we had last time. The strong operational competence of our Energy Retail segment is also highlighted by our new partnership with, in this case, MAN Truck & Bus where we will lead the build-out of a public charging infrastructure for electric trucks, which will also be able -- available, however, to the public, for example, to cars. We will install a total of 400 public charging stations at 170 locations across Europe. And that brings me then to my third and last message for today, unchanged. It's an unchanged message. We continue to see significant upside potential for investments. And I want to put that into numbers, and let me just quote a recent Eurelectric study, Europe will need to almost double investments to around EUR 55 billion to EUR 67 billion, depending on the assumptions which we make, which is roughly twice the EUR 33 billion, which we are in distribution networks spending today. And this huge demand for network investment is being driven by the addition of renewables as well as for changing customer behavior by e-mobility and all the well-known effects. For our German DSOs, this translates into an increase of relevant connections by 4x from around 1.7 million in 2023 to around 7 million connections in total by 2030. Considering the constantly progressing and challenging macro environment, I would like to highlight in this context, a very important point that our growth story is actually very sustainable and very robust. The new EU Commission is expected to develop a proposal for new climate targets towards 2040 and its first climate policy projects -- as its first climate policy project. Actually, the 90%, which have been announced have zero impact on our growth trajectories going forward. We are pretty independent also on the political target when it comes to our growth stories in the next 10 years. A continuous reevaluation of the set target is important, but the -- is of greater importance to focus on implementation and affordability rather than actually discussing additional adjusted targets. So what we would really need is to find a way to provide adequate returns to allow for a faster build out. And here, we still require substantial improvements, especially in the German regulatory framework, in particular, the return on equity must improve to attain the required return for our investments beyond the level which we have already in our plans. If this were to improve to international market standard, it could justify further investments beyond what we have in our plans so far. In addition, a focus on flexible energy system and more efficient build-out requirements with regards to where the build-out of renewables should happen to ensure that sufficient grid capacity is available would be very helpful. And the last 2 aspects that I mentioned would both reduce significantly in the system cost which would also be positive in terms of affordability. So much also from my side, 3 simple messages. Let me just repeat them again: Continued financial delivery, including growth; continued operational excellence, including digitization; and a sustainable and robust growth outlook. And with that, over to you, Nadia.

Thank you, Leo, and a warm welcome to all of you from my side. I'm delighted to present to you our financial results for the first time today. As your new CFO, I fully stand behind E.ON's capital market story and my focus is to deliver on the financial promises that we have made. The execution of our growth plan is of high importance to me, and I will ensure that we create value for our investors in everything that we do. With that, let me walk you through our solid results of the past 6 months. Here are my 3 key messages today. First, with EUR 4.9 billion EBITDA and EUR 1.8 billion adjusted net income, our H1 key earnings metrics are in line with our expectations. Our underlying EBITDA is actually growing in the order of a low triple-digit million euro amount, putting us in line with the full year underlying growth assumptions that are baked into our guidance. As you well know, our reported growth is dampened by nonrecurring positive and one-off effects from 2023, which arose mainly in the first half. Overall, we fully confirm our group guidance for 2024 and the targets for 2028. Second, investment backed earnings growth and strong operational execution remain significant growth drivers across all our segments. We are progressing substantially with our planned investment ramp-up and increased our H1 CapEx spending by more than 20% year-over-year to EUR 2.9 billion. Third, H1 economic net debt came in as expected and continues to provide a solid foundation, not only for our current investment growth plans, but also for potential increases in the future if return are adequate, like Leo mentioned. Let's move on to the details of our H1 EBITDA development. Our adjusted EBITDA was down by EUR 800 million year-over-year, due to the nonrecurrence of positive impacts from timing and one-off effects seen in H1 2023. As mentioned before, adjusting for these, we would have seen a solid low triple-digit million euro increase. Looking at the drivers in our different segments, let me start with Energy Networks. The small decline in H1 was driven by the unwind of prior year positive timing impacts from lower re-dispatch costs, as well as slightly higher-than-expected cost from upstream networks in the first quarter of 2024 and slightly lower wheeling volumes in Germany due to warmer temperatures during the second quarter in 2024. As a reminder, all those effects are economically neutral given the regulated nature of the segment. Additionally, the accounting change for our Slovakian business toward equity was driven -- has driven a technical reduction in EBITDA in our Central European business. Regarding the underlying operational performance, we continue to be very excited about the growth path of our Networks business. Underlying EBITDA shows significant RAB-driven earnings growth in all regions, the positive uplift from regulatory parameters in Sweden and positive inflation protection in Germany. Additionally, we are realizing the remaining network loss recoveries in Southeastern Europe. In Energy Infrastructure Solutions, investment-driven growth is progressing well as expected. Underlying EBITDA growth is currently overcompensated by effects we had already mentioned in Q1, namely the nonrecurrence of positive 2023 one-off effects, the accelerated maintenance schedule and temporarily lower volumes in our district heating and cooling business driven by warmer temperatures with a latter effect also extending into Q2. Fundamentally, we are fully committed to the exciting growth path that lies ahead of us for the Energy Infrastructure Solutions business. In Energy Retail, the year-over-year EBITDA decline, we see is fully in line with what we expected. Let me explain the various drivers behind it. The largest impact came from the well-known unwind of 2023 one-off effects from procurement optimization and the U.K. tariff deficit recovery. B2B performance in the U.K. continues to be strong, slightly overcompensating for the well-managed impact from lower volumes due to warmer temperatures. Another key effect, which drove the EBITDA year-over-year variance was the increase of market activity, which we already had anticipated. Let me point out, the continuously reliable performance of our Energy Retail business not only during the energy crisis, but also in the ongoing phase of normalization of market conditions is in line with our guidance and confirms strong conviction to this highly cash generative segment. The H1 2024 adjusted net income development shown on Page 9, follows EBITDA with all earnings elements below EBITDA, in line with our expectations. This puts us on track for our full year guidance. The development of our economic net debt, as shown on Page 10, shows our typical Q2 seasonality. We have seen strong operating cash inflow broadly covering our Q2 investment spending. The economic net debt uplift is largely driven by the dividend payment in May. When it comes to our CapEx ramp-up, it continues to progress well. Across the group, our CapEx fill rate in H1 stands at roughly 40%, which is around 2 percentage points ahead of H1 2023. Our ramp-up remains frictionless with respect to the management of our operations and supply chains, and we remain confident on the future development of our investment spending. Finally, following the rating upgrade by S&P and Moody's rating confirmation in March, we have also received Fitch's confirmation of our strong balance sheet position. Fitch kept our BBB+ rating unchanged. With this, all 3 rating agencies continue to positively assess our funding and financing outlook after the significant CapEx increase that we announced in March. This also confirms our view that in line with our commitment to a strong BBB, BAA rating, we have additional balance sheet capacity to fund further energy transition investments if regulatory conditions are adequate. I would like to close today's presentation by fully confirming our guidance. Our solid H1 results support our 2024 earnings expectations, particularly in the Energy Networks and Energy Retail segments. We have seen some temporary effects in our Energy Infrastructure Solutions segment. These stem from warmer temperatures, resulting in lower volumes in the district heating and cooling part of the business. Therefore, we now expect the segment's earnings to be in the lower half of our EUR 550 million to EUR 650 million guidance range. That being said, we fully confirm our 2024 guidance both for our segments and for the group. We see the midpoint of our group guidance range still as the best estimate for our full year result, meaning, that we expect the up segments to compensate for the temporary effects in Energy Infrastructure Solutions. We also confirm all our 2028 targets, both for all our segments and for the group. Finally, let me say that our balance sheet remains sound. This enables us to continue to pursue value creation in organic growth opportunities while rewarding our shareholders with a growing dividend. With that, back to you, Iris, for the Q&A.

Thank you very much, Nadia. And with that, we open the Q&A session for today. [Operator Instructions] And we will open today the Q&A session with you, Wanda from UBS.

Two questions from me. The first one is on retail. You mentioned increased market activity. What is E.ON doing to prevent its earnings? Which markets are affected? And are you able to quantify the weather impact for H1, ideally for both retail and EIS? And the second question is for you, Nadia. Congratulations on the new job. I know it's still early days as a CFO of E.ON, but what do you see as the biggest challenges for the group from a CFO point of view?

You want to start with that?

Yes, I can start. Yes. What does excite me most about my new job, I think we have pointed out, we have got a huge and massive organic [indiscernible] program ahead of us and that's where I will put my focus on. So my focus will be, firstly, delivering on all our financial promises, both short term and long term. Secondly, enabling value creation within this big growth plan. So that's basically it.

And I can assure you that she's already doing it on a daily basis, which is good. On the retail, we have seen an increase in activity, not so much in the U.K., but more actually in Germany. Some -- and that is -- basically, these are the most relevant markets. We do not quantify individual effects like warmer weather, but we have been able to compensate for that. I think that is the message that we want. So we don't want to compensate because then the question would be what has been exactly the compensating factor. So the moment we see warm weather, we see -- we look to compensate for that in other fields and areas. So no, I don't want to quantify it, but we have been able to compensate for that. But we had no supporting wind as in the last year this year. This year, we had to fight to actually get where we are. And it's actually simple -- or it's maybe an outcome of good performance in operations that we are where we are.

And as a follow-up, what E.ON is doing to prevent the earnings in retail in Germany, if you see the activity increasing?

Product development, good pricing, communications, branding activities, all the levers that you have, you need to provide also then some creative new products to show good value for money. You need to think about the timing and the level of price adjustments, when and where to make them. And we are pulling all these levers. Now I'm struggling a little bit to point out now one specific measure in one tariff because as you well know, we have multiple customer groups in multiple different contracts. So customer group by customer group, we are thinking what is the best way to actually protect the margin from that customer group. So I would say, that's maybe the way to think about it. It's a never starting -- never-ending journey. The second point that I would, however, say is we are continuing on the path that we actually had started before the markup in addition -- in market activity, for example, in digitizing all our processes. So the increase that I mentioned also briefly in electronic resolution of customer contacts is actually mainly driven by an increase in Germany where traditionally we have a lower electronically-driven response rate. So all these measures together have been part of protecting our margin so far and will be part of going forward.

And maybe to add to that, market activity doesn't -- for us, is a big leader in the markets doesn't mean that it is negative for us because we -- as you can see from our customer numbers, we also actually -- we kept them stable or actually increased in some parts. So market activity means also something positive for us that we can actually go into the market and acquire additional customers and we are able to fascinate more customers to become our -- more non-customers to become our customers.

The next question comes from Alberto.

And Nadia, welcome as well, and congratulations. First question is on regulation in Germany. Now can you give us an update on the accelerated depreciation in gas? How -- has this been approved? How does this impact your cash flow generation and your ability to invest? Is this upside? Or is it part of the plan? And while you talk about regulation, can you give us an update on the domestic allowed returns on timing? What's your case given the current interest rates for higher returns? The second question is to all investors that say that returns are not good enough in Germany, what would you reply? And how much incremental CapEx could you do in the current plan if your allowed ROE were to go up, say, 100, 200 basis points? I estimate EUR 5 billion to EUR 7 billion. I was just wondering if you have a number in mind?

These are more than 2 questions, Alberto.

That's the usual trick. Two questions with sub questions, but this is good. So on question one, regulation with sub-questions, A, B. You asked on, what we call, [indiscernible] regulation, which is the accelerated depreciation of gas infrastructure. Two things. The first thing is, for us, this means a significant reduction of risks of having stranded assets in the future. And so this is -- so the main impact first is, this has been basically now approved. This means that we see a significant reduction of risk going forward, not to end up with stranded assets. We have not factored that into our plans so far because what it basically does, it allows us to depreciate our assets faster starting at the earliest in 2025. So we are now putting this into the planning cycle for the next midterm period, and we have to decide when do we start with that? How do we depreciate because there are different ways of depreciation possible? And then we'll know the impact. But it's clear, so it's less of an additional earning, but more of a risk reduction, what they're talking about. And no, it's not quantified yet and not included yet in the budgets.

Yes. No, it's not included. Just to sort of go -- so Leo's absolutely right, we are currently not expecting a big net income uptake, but there is an uptake in EBITDA. So you can see if you sort of have a higher regulatory depreciation that actually increases our revenue line. And it means that EBITDA will increase from this, which is not included, but then we are, of course, also a faster depreciation of accounting P&L. So the higher regulated D&A will match the higher accounting P&L. And of course, there might be a bit of differences between the 2, but we expect net income to be in overall same ballpark. But of course, there is an additional financing effect from this which we haven't baked into our current guidance yet. And what we will do with this additional financial means, we will then decide at a future point in time, and I think the same applies what Leo has said earlier that first, the regulatory conditions need to improve before we decide how to spend this additional internal financing that we get via this regulation.

Yes. That brings me to the second part of your first question, update on German regulation is unchanged. We're still in discussion. And no, I don't want to speculate about any numbers now, and potential outcomes. And so this we do with the regulator.

With that, we move to the next question, which comes from Harry from Exane.

Two from me, and I'll try to keep them relatively short given the time constraints. So first one, we've talked a bit on some of the previous conference calls about what might happen with CapEx in the parts of the distribution good in Germany, which you don't own. And you mentioned that you would be very capital light in how you would approach that. There could be some scope to be involved operationally in the CapEx that's not on your balance sheet. I wondered if there's been any development of your thoughts on that? And how we should think about it? Is this something where you could potentially earn a material margin if you got involved in CapEx of your partners or other asset owners? And is this something that you think could be relevant in your next strategic plan? And then second one, I apologize because, obviously, it's not a fundamental question on E. ON, but it's something that's clearly been moving your shares a little recently. Can you say anything on your shareholder agreement? Or can you give any insights on the RWE stake? Is there anything that would prevent them selling down the stake in E.ON from your perspective or anything that you think you can add to that question?

I'll take the second question first. It's well public knowledge that we have an agreement, but the terms and conditions of that agreement are confidential, I'm afraid. And so no, we don't say anything on that. On the first question, DSO as a service. What I mentioned, I think that was in the context of could we see -- would we be interested in taking over other distribution assets. And I mentioned that we have so much organic growth opportunities that our interest to actually do M&A and buy other networks in a CapEx-heavy way and then integrate and restructure them is limited. So we would be opportunistic on that. But that it would be of much more interest for us to provide services to third parties for that. We are making progress on that, but I think it's too early now to highlight that. In the context of the planning period, we are looking at that in more detail, and we might, in the future, give a more specific update, but I would not like to speculate about numbers now. I think there is an opportunity there. It's not material yet in 2024. So it doesn't really matter for the 2024 numbers that we are currently discussing today.

Next question comes from Ahmed from Jefferies.

Can I just start by asking about the EIS. Could you help us understand a little bit in more granularity, the organic growth trend for the first half? If I look at the stand-alone 1Q or 2Q results, obviously, there's quite a sort of step down year-on-year, but you highlighted there's a lot going on in that division. So it would be very helpful to just get some perspective on the underlying organic growth that you're seeing? My second question is on the net debt. Could you help us a little bit and give us some granularity and an outlook for the full year? And is there anything within that, that we should think about around pensions and AROs given interest rates have started to move around now?

Yes. Thank you, Ahmed. Let me start with the second question. So on economic net debt, we expect that the year-end will be approximately in the ballpark that we have been now seeing in our first half. So we expect our cash conversion rate. So the best guess is still the same that Marc has given in the Q1 earnings call, which is around 90%. We see then, of course, the future normalization of the cash conversion rate to 100% in the years thereafter. There is not a -- I cannot -- I think I would just confirm that the typical sensitivities we have given for pensions and AROs would be kept unchanged. So I would still say that's the best guidance we can give to the economic net debt. Then the second -- the first questions that you had, when you look at the EIS development year-on-year, you first need to consider that there were one-offs in Q1 2023 -- noncash effective one-offs in Q1 2023. Then the second thing, what we have also highlighted in the speech is that we have seen extraordinarily warm Q1 and Q2. And of course, we consider climate change in our estimates, but this was something which was really impacting year-over-year. And the third element is that we have been bringing forward some of our maintenance schedules when we had some planned and unplanned outages, which mainly affected our H1. So when it comes -- so that's sort of the one-off effects and things that have nothing to do with the fundamental growth plan. When you then look into the underlying growth, we see growth from the metering business. And we then also will see continuous growth because we have just put into place some new projects, some [indiscernible]. We will see further CODs from other projects in the second half, which will then also actually show some more operational growth in the second half of this year.

So with that, we move on. Next question comes from Louis Boujard from ODDO.

Maybe 2 quick ones on my side. The first one, I was just wondering if you could provide some granularity on your comments, notably regarding the ban and acquisition and the tariff in the U.K. Specifically, you seem to be quite happy with the decision to extend it to at least 31st of March 2025. I was wondering if there is any chance that it could be extended forever since it might not be necessarily the best way to have a competitive market in the long term. So do you have any view on this? And what would you favor regarding this specific element? And also maybe since you don't go into the details, division by division on the H1 release, if you could provide a rough idea of what could be the consolidated figures of the one-off that you have already recognized and taken in consideration into 1H '24 compared to H1 '23? So what is the base effect? You mentioned EUR 1.3 billion for the full year in 2023 that needs to be reversed this year. At what level are we at the half of the year?

I'll take the first. On the ban of acquisition tariffs, I think that is a consistent approach by the regulator to make sure that we have in the market players that are around not speculating on wholesale prices, which you could easily do actually otherwise, if you were allowed to come in now with acquisition tariffs. So we see this positively, and this is why we have been also publicly positive about it because we think this is a consistent policy approach and it's actually good to see that this has a stability. Whether this has eternal stability, actually, I don't want to speculate on. I would only say we have no problem if it's competitive markets. So I'm not sure what you meant with your comments that maybe necessarily competitive markets are not the best one going forward. Obviously, we would say, competitive markets are the best for our customers, and we need to deliver against them. But competitive markets in which all the players actually compete on the same basis and not like we had it before the crisis that we have some players that actually pick up the shambles of others actually not doing their job. So in that sense, I would just answer your first question. And the second, I think, Nadia, is yours.

Yes. Thanks for the question. So for our -- to come to the underlying performance you would take out EUR 1 billion approximately in the ballpark of EUR 1 billion out of our H1 results. And that means by what you said that we don't see that -- not a pro rata approach of the full year one-offs of EUR 1.3 billion, but only lower amount in the second half.

So next question comes from Deepa.

And welcome, Nadia. Sorry to throw the first question at you. One of your larger network peers in the U.K. surprised the market with a huge rights issue. And so this, of course, has been a common question for E.ON. Could you reiterate what your stance is on equity as a source of funding versus the headroom in the balance sheet divestments? And if I'm not mistaken, you don't even have any hybrids. So where does equity come in the pecking order, if ever? And secondly, Leo, thanks for your comments on reiterating that you will only invest more if the returns in Germany would go up. Do you have an idea of what you want the number from [indiscernible] to be in order to open the purse strings a bit more?

I'll take the first one first. I think I said it already to Alberto, we don't want to speculate about numbers that we have to actually then discuss in private discussions with the regulator. So no, I would not give you an answer on that one. Actually, I can also take the first one. There's no...

I can also do it because Leo has already confirmed it together with mark of full year 2023, and you will get exactly the same message from me, our EUR 42 billion investment program is fully financed by internal and external financing. We don't see any need for additional equity. We will have and we can confirm that we have to wait confirming this EUR 5 billion to EUR 10 billion headroom that we have. And you're also seeing it from the rating agencies, they have been even uplifting us to BBB, knowing all about our investment program. So we confirm -- reiterate what we said at the full year guidance. Please bear in mind that we've also got the discretionary EUR 2 billion of disposal program that we could utilize to spend more into the energy transition and into the German grid if and when the regulatory environment fits to our requirements -- to our return requirements.

And with that, I think we come already to our last question from Piotr from Citi.

Can you hear me? Hello?

Yes, we can hear you.

So I will have to ask you a question about this return debate and possibly increasing your returns. Assuming you are successful in convincing German regulator to give you a higher return, could that trigger a bigger portfolio rotation because on the risk-adjusted basis, this return would be superior to some of the Eastern Europe and you could rather deploy a lot of this capital instantly organically investing in Germany that would be a better return for you? And second question, I wanted to ask you about the renewable asset curtailments within your network or more broadly in Germany. At what level we are now? There are some articles talking about 12% of production -- total production being curtailed. How do you see this now and developing in the next couple of years?

Yes. Piotr, I'll start with the second one. I give you an example, which I also gave this morning in the press call, suggest that you understand magnitude of what is going on. In North of Berlin, basically, we have a supply which is called E.DIS. And there, we have a peak load. It's a rural area, up to the Baltic sea of 2 gigawatts. We have an installed base of 14 gigawatts. We are seeing massive additions, especially of PV. And we're seeing now connection requests in the same area for 190 gigawatts of renewables, which would be -- I mean, it's insane, yes. So we couldn't build enough of these lines, which I have here standing next to me. And obviously, not all of the 190 will be materials. But even if only 10% would be materialized, we would be talking about an area in which we would have then something like 20x peak demand as an installed base. That makes no sense. And obviously, what it really tells you is that we are currently adding massively renewables in areas where we have objectively no need for that on the demand side and actually limited capabilities to integrate them on the distribution side, which means this is counterproductive, and in terms of affordability, we actually shouldn't be doing that. So I've been quite explicit on the record for a while now that I say we need to make sure that the addition of renewables is better synchronized with the expansion of the infrastructure. The real bottleneck is the infrastructure. And what matters is how fast we can add infrastructure, these lines, and not how fast we can add PV -- further PV and wind. What this will really mean in terms of curtailment or so, I don't really know because that depends highly on power prices, kind of like how expensive this becomes. But over the last 10 years, we have -- 3 years, we have spent EUR 10 billion on that and only on the curtailment of renewable. And despite prices going down, actually, we don't see a collapse of the cost for curtailment in the same order of magnitude as in the reduction of prices, which shows you that the problem is actually increasing. We urgently need to address that. I think that is actually known to the policymakers. The same is true for PV across Europe. Across Europe, also in other European markets, we are observing that the addition -- especially the successful addition of PV, which is not controllable, adds a feed in, which is very stochastic and volatile and which really massively increases the stress on the system and in the end, the cost on the system. So it's a real issue. We need to absolutely make our systems more flexible. Currently, the addition of renewables happens faster than our systems become able to cope with it technically and the speed at which we are adding flexibility into the system. So I think there is an urgent need to act on that side. That is what I would like to say. So let me call it this way, for engineers, exciting times. But we don't want -- in networks, we don't want excitement. We just want constant delivery and stability. So this is something we need to get under control. On the first question, I would just say, I would not like to discuss now -- to start now a portfolio discussion. What really matters is we want to invest more if there's a higher need for infrastructure, which there is. So let's make sure we get the higher returns, and then we will cope with it and figure out what it really means for all our portfolio.

And be of sure that, of course, when we do capital allocation, we look where we get the highest value spread. That is, of course, surely taken into consideration.

It can work also against Germany, by the way.

And I understand, Alberto, that you have one additional question, so we might make one exemption to let you ask a third one.

Third one or fifth according to some interpretation. There were no extra questions. I took the opportunity. One quick one. This is probably for Leo. I didn't hear much about data centers. And I've recently heard that you've actually sold land to Microsoft on the lignite side being the big one. Do you have any feel for what gigawatt pipeline from data centers we currently have in Germany? Have you been contacted about connection requests? Can you give us maybe a quick update on where we stand?

Yes. So first, we have -- in our current plans, we are planning the connections of around 6 gigawatts in German networks by 2030. Most of that actually in the Frankfurt area, which is Avacon on the one side, and Seawork on the other side. So two of our distributors, which really cover the circle around Frankfurt. They have massive additional requests. In terms of annual power consumption, 6 gigawatts, is actually quite a lot. 6 gigawatts of data center connection capacity is the same connection capacity as if you were to add Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and probably Cologne together. So it's a lot. So this is included in our plan. We have further requests for a number of, let me call it, mid-single-digit gigawatts. Those probably, we will not be able to build before 2030 because they will require significant extensions on the TSO side, because when we're talking several hundred megawatts, we are talking usually about a TSO connection as well at that point in time -- at that place. So yes, data centers are one significant driver that is adding on top of the renewables addition, the truck charging networks, the e-mobility additions, the heating transition, et cetera. So in that sense, not fully factored in. The bottleneck in the end is not the demand from customers. The bottleneck is our ability to deliver, especially in combination with the TSO.

Thank you, Leo. And with that, we have no more raised hands. We would come to the end of our Q&A session. Thank you very much, Leo and Nadia. And as always, if there are any other open topics or topics you would like to discuss, please reach out to the IR team here to talk to you. With that, I close the call. Thank you very much, and have a good day.