Daimler Truck Holding AG (ETR:DTG)
Germany flag Germany · Delayed Price · Currency is EUR
44.31
+0.53 (1.21%)
Sep 11, 2026, 5:35 PM CET
← View all transcripts

Strategy Day 2021

May 20, 2021

Ola Källenius
Chairman of the Board of Management, Daimler AG

Hello, everyone, welcome to our Daimler Truck Strategy Day. This is an exciting day and an exciting year for Daimler and for Daimler Truck. As you know, we are in transformation, and we are pulling off some historic changes for our company. There's a fundamental technology shift going on in this industry, and we intend to lead it, especially in terms of electrification and software. For us, this comes with a definition and execution of a new strategy. To accelerate all of this, we're also revamping our structure. Taken together, these steps will significantly improve our company's performance. That's why we're looking forward to tell you more about the roadmap for Daimler Truck today. What we intend to do is clear. We are building two independent pure-play companies. Mercedes-Benz will be the world's pre-eminent luxury car business, committed to leading in electric drive and car software.

Daimler Truck will accelerate its path towards zero emissions as the world's largest truck and bus producer and technology leader. Going forward, there is so much opportunity. We're all well aware that greater independence also comes with great responsibility to raise our financial performance, to accelerate on our strategic course, and to create sustainable value. I have full confidence in the financial and operational strength of our two vehicle divisions. With regard to Daimler Truck, I'm convinced that independent management and governance will allow them to operate even faster, invest more ambitiously, target growth and cooperation, and be significantly more competitive. How are we moving forward? Short answer, we are on track. We're making significant progress on all major cornerstones of this project. I want to mention just a few. The independent governance for trucks is well underway.

The carve-out of central functions is moving along, and we're on time for the planned majority listing by the end of the year. The same goes for the EGM this fall. I can't wait to see what the team is going to make out of it. With this, I'll hand it over to the CEO of Daimler Truck, Martin Daum. Before that, let's have a look at a short video.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Ola, for the introductory remarks. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this first Daimler Truck Strategy Day. The film you have just seen tries to sum up what Daimler Truck stands for as a company and what we want to become as we make our way towards an equity market listing and towards public life. I want to start by explaining that leading Daimler Truck towards an independent future as a publicly listed company has long been a personal mission for me. I believe it can operate most efficiently as an independent company, and I believe the scrutiny, the intensity, and the discipline that the capital markets will apply to us will be a profoundly good thing. We are committed to confront our weaknesses. We are very serious about making hard decisions. It will bring rigor to our capital allocation.

It will raise our financial performance. It will make us a better company for our customers. It will make us a better place to work for our employees. I'm looking forward to this journey. I'm grateful for you all tuning in and joining us here today. I'm looking forward to telling you more about this company and the great new management team that we have assembled. I'm looking forward to your questions. In the months and years ahead, I'm looking forward to meeting with you, discussing with you, welcoming some of you as shareholders, and learning from you about what you expect of us as a listed company. Let me turn to my first slide, which tries to summarize our strengths, our weaknesses, and our opportunities as an independent company. Our strengths are very easy to describe.

We are a true global number one in terms of size, reach, and scale. In a normal year, we sell over 500,000 million trucks globally. We have powerful brands that customers value for what they stand for, successful across all major continents. We are a technology leader in combustion engine, a technology leader in safety technology, and increasingly in zero-emission powertrains. We are absolutely a powerhouse in North America with a 40% share and a leader in profitability terms with strong double-digit margins. So far so good. We also need to acknowledge our challenges. In fact, we have decided today to spend a lot of time talking about our challenges. We want to acknowledge them. We want to explain them to you, and then we want to show you how we are going to fix them. Our challenges are substantial.

Chief amongst them is our failure to turn scale, the scale that I just talked about, into enduring and financial success in all regions. We've had some successes in this regard. We have leveraged technology across continents and business units, for instance, using powertrain technology developed in Europe in our North American products. We are deploying our electric solution for safety, sensors, and connectivity across our global product portfolio. Overall, our regional financial results tell a story. With weakness in Europe, Asia, and Brazil, we have inconsistent regional profitability, and we must address this. That leads me to our opportunities. We have an opportunity to fundamentally raise the game of this company. How are we going to do this? In a recently announced move, we decided to change our organizational structure.

As we get ready for public life and as we get ready to raise performance, we needed a new approach. We have decided to give each region more independence and more entrepreneurial freedom and greater product development responsibility. We will focus each region on targeting its local profit benchmark. In North America, we are already the benchmark. In other regions, we are far from it, and this needs to change. You are all industry experts, so you know what this means. In Europe, the benchmark is double-digit margins. In Asia, it is high single-digit margins. In Brazil, we have competitors who are profitable, but we are not. Every region must target its benchmark. This is non-negotiable, and every region must deliver. How will we combine this with our technology strengths and scale? Simple.

We will focus on pulling synergy from our technology portfolio, not pushing them into regions. We will use the scale we'll soon have in battery electric and later fuel cell and deploy that scale globally. We will also use technology to grow our services. We are aiming for the best of both worlds, maximum customer proximity and entrepreneurship in our region and focused engineering power for future technologies. I will say it again, as part of this strategy, every region must deliver. Our mission as an independent company is clear. It's very simple. First, we need to reset profitability. Using a targeting regional approach, we will raise our financial performance. Second, at a time of immense industry change and by leveraging our scale, we intend to lead the way to zero emissions.

We are going to talk a lot about that today. I hope we are going to surprise you with the extent of our ambition and the precision and detail of our plan. That's it. It's that simple. We are going to reset profitability. We lead the way to zero in pursuit of profit and technology leadership. Let me tell you a little bit more about those two pillars before I introduce you to our great new team and hand over to my fantastic colleagues. This is critical. This is essential to our future as an independent company. This is our responsibility. Here you can see our strategic financial goals. They are self-explanatory. We will target regional benchmark profits, focus on the highest return segments.

This means a further pivot towards heavy trucks, systematically lower our fixed and variable costs, lowering our break-even point and grow service revenues to reduce our vulnerability to industry cycles. Are the goals. We must deliver on them. Turning now to the second pillar, leading the way to zero emissions. As well as resetting profitability, we are also aiming to lead the way to zero. As my American friends like to say, we are going all in on zero-emission trucks. I've said that we are committed to raise profitability. We owe that to our shareholders, but it is also our responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint and lead this industry to zero emissions. We owe that to society and to the planet, and we will deliver on that promise in a way that is profitable and creates value for our shareholders.

With the right technology strategy, with bold decision, and with focused execution, we can lead the way to zero and improve profitability. That is our goal. I briefly want to tell you about the key decision we have made as a company when it comes to zero emission, and that is that we need to pursue a dual-track strategy with both battery electric and fuel cell trucks. The customer needs both, the industry needs both, the world needs both. We are going to develop and deliver both. Let me explain. Battery electric trucks are real. Battery electric trucks are convincing, and the energy density and cost of batteries has developed so fast that long-range electric trucks are viable.

We are already selling electric trucks today, and our electric trucks and buses have driven more than a million miles in customer hands, already providing us with invaluable information to improve them further. We have some great new heavy-duty electric trucks about to be delivered into customer hands. We have additional long-range heavy trucks in advanced development, and we have ambitious technology plans for the ultimate next-generation battery electric truck that our CTO Andreas Gorbach will tell you about later. What's great with all electric trucks is that they are great and easy to drive. What's especially great with battery electric trucks is that you can deploy them in small quantities fast. An infrastructure for those trucks can be built up fast, and we are kickstarting such an infrastructure ourselves with high-power chargers.

We also need hydrogen trucks because the electricity grid can support the charging of electric trucks only up to a certain share of the fleet. We do not believe that the electricity grid can support a pure 100% electric truck fleet. The transportation industry will need a second energy source, and this is where hydrogen comes in. We believe hydrogen will be part of the future energy mix. We believe in the hydrogen economy, and we know hydrogen trucks work. Fuel cell trucks have an energy density that is superior to lithium-ion batteries and so are better for long haul. We have confidence in a rapid reduction in cost. In fuel cell technology, our engineers are targeting a dramatic reduction in cost that can make a hydrogen truck cheaper than a battery truck.

We can get the product cost down, and thanks to our cellcentric joint venture with Volvo, we can also limit the development cost by adding scale with the volumes of another major OEM. The challenge with hydrogen is starting this infrastructure. There are massive investments necessary by the energy companies, just like today in our carbon-based economy. Once they are done, they will scale easily, supporting hundred thousands of trucks and ultimately millions of trucks out on our roads. We intend to help kickstart this infrastructure. We will tell you more about that later in this event with some exciting news. We have heard others questioning hydrogen trucks and put all the emphasis on electric trucks. We believe this is shortsighted. Both technologies will be needed, and we intend to lead the industry in both technologies. I have explained our strengths and our weaknesses.

I have explained our opportunities in our new regional-focused organization. I have promised that we will unlock the potential of Daimler Truck for you, our shareholders. Now I want to introduce to you the management team that I'm counting on to deliver and unlock that value. Let's turn to the next slide. Here, you see our top management team. This is a team that has seen very significant change in recent months. We have assembled a new board for Daimler Trucks that I believe have the skills and the perspective and the energy to deliver a step change in performance. In the rest of the event, key members of the team are going to explain Daimler Trucks regions and technologies to you. Jochen, John, Karin, Hartmut, and Andreas are all going to talk to you today. You are going to witness their passion, their expertise, and their commitment.

I'm honored and blessed to lead such a great team. I would like the team to spend as much time as possible with investors and analysts, getting your input, learning from your perspectives, and bringing that capital market message back into the organization. With that, I'm going to hand over to Jochen Goetz, our CFO, to talk in more detail about our financial ambitions. I will see you again later. Thank you.

Jochen Goetz
CFO, Daimler Truck

Hello, everybody. Welcome also from my side. I am Jochen Goetz, CFO of Daimler Trucks. Just like Martin stated in his opening comments, while we are excited about our independent future and listing, we are not underestimating the demands and challenges of life as a public company. There is much hard work ahead, but we are ready for this work. We are ready for the scrutinies we will face, ready to provide transparency that you require, and we are ready to lift the financial performance of this company. Let's be clear, we absolutely do need to raise our financial performance. We know that our financial results in the last years were not where they should be. You will see that on my first slide. This is our starting point. Our EBIT margin is simply not competitive with the benchmark.

Our volatility of performance is excessive due to a too high breakeven point and too low share of service revenues. While we are the profit leader in North America, our other regions are not strong enough. We need to fix this. The good news is we have the blueprint for how to do that. Daimler Truck North America: strong market position, excellent customer relationship, and benchmark in profitability. On the other side, to be candid, in Europe, Asia, and Fuso, we have our challenges. Given the size, Europe is the most important region and has the highest upside potential. We are focused on fixing it with new leadership from Karin Rådström and a comprehensive turnaround plan underway. We recognize and acknowledge our problems, and we realize that our shareholders will demand much stronger performance. How do we tackle the challenges?

First, our most important challenge is to streamline our fixed cost base. We aim to reduce our fixed cost by 15% by no later than 2025. We have already achieved a lot in this regard in 2020. Yes, you can debate the reason for that is the pandemic and the corresponding one-time measures everyone has taken. Some of that is true, but on top, we actively installed some very strong strategic initiatives to lower our overall fixed cost level. At the Capital Markets Day, back in 2019, we already announced our personnel cost reduction target in Europe, and we are well on the way, money and time-wise. Besides personnel cost, we are also engaged in systematic efforts across the businesses to reduce complexity in our product, in our structure, and in our organization.

Another major step for that is the recently announced organizational change to give more entrepreneurial freedom to each region while reorganizing our resources on the truck technology side. We will be able to leverage technology globally and be more efficient in product management and R&D. For sure, we learned quite a lot during the pandemic. This cost-focused spirit we will keep also in the years to come. Based on what we have achieved so far and based on the initiative which will be effective in the near future, we are very confident that we will achieve this target. Now let's focus on CapEx and on R&D. Same as on the fixed cost side, we will see a normalization effect in 2021. However, we will remain significantly below the level of 2019, and we will further reduce spending going forward. What is necessary to achieve this 15% reduction target?

First, we will even more focus on heavy duty, since this is known as the by far largest market segment with structurally higher profitability. It is our intention as a business to grow our revenue per unit by richer mix, high-quality product, and services. Second, as another very strong initiative, we implemented active portfolio management. We will use that to identify the profit pools of the future and ensure smarter allocation of our capital. The overall reduction of CapEx and R&D is one ambition, but within the given budget, there will be also a significant shift from ICE towards zero emission and autonomous. The last point on this slide is really key. We are committed to absolute budget for CapEx and R&D in the future, independent from the market environment we are operating in.

As I just said, we want to increase our revenue per unit via mix and product and grow the quality of our revenue via services. This is really important. We don't want to grow the top line by fighting by market share, but rather by delivering compelling products and intensifying our relationship with our customers. We want to increase our recurrent revenues and find long-term, enduring customer relationship. Now let's talk about services as one of our most promising growth paths. When I talk about services, I first mean the traditional ones, like spare parts and maintenance, but I also mean financial services like leasing and customer-specific insurances. I mean the very fast-growing new services in the field of digitalization, electric, and autonomous. Based on our new global connectivity backbone, we are developing tailor-made services for every region and for every customer going forward.

For me, the most exciting area are the services regarding zero emission trucks. Starting with battery management and ending with the question: What do we do with the battery after the first life? Overall, the growth potential we see on services is significant, and with that, we aim to increase our revenues on our service portfolio from roundabout 30% today up to roughly 50% in 2030. Now, let's talk more in detail about the financial performance of our regions. I know there have been questions from analysts and investors about how Daimler Truck will disclose financials going forward. Right now, I can give you the answer on that. In future, we will report five segments. First, Trucks North America, including the very strong brands Freightliner, Western Star, and Thomas Built Buses. Second, the Mercedes-Benz truck brand in Europe and in Latin America.

Third, Trucks Asia, including our operations in China, in Japan, in Indonesia, and in India. The Mercedes-Benz branded bus with the main operations in Europe and in Brazil. Finally, Daimler Truck Financial Services. My overarching message here is clear. We must improve the financial performance of many of the segments. We will have a no excuses policy. Every region must deliver. Let me explain in detail. Obviously, there are two very decisive segments. That's Trucks North America, and that's Mercedes-Benz Trucks. In North America, our main job is to reinforce our very strong position and to sustain discipline. Even if it looks like we already have achieved the maximum here, we still see an upside potential, especially with our latest launch product, the tailor-made vocational truck. Our challenge is more the Mercedes-Benz Trucks. Here, we have to improve dramatically.

We must lower the break-even point profoundly and increase our revenue share on traditional and digital services. In Brazil, we must reverse our losses in a rather weak market environment, finalize the renewal of our product portfolio, and significantly lower the overall cost. Asia, we see as the region with the greatest growth opportunity midterm. First of all, in China with our Mercedes-Benz branded heavy-duty truck made in China for China. Second, with the light duty business, where we see opportunities, especially in Southeast Asia. Now, let's briefly talk about the bus. Despite the currently very difficult situation, well, the coach market in Europe has basically stopped due to the pandemic. The business itself is in a good shape. Then we will welcome our latest member in the Daimler Trucks and Buses family.

After the separation, we will have our own financial services business where we want to build up a high return on equity business. I know you are all very curious about the regional profitability, but please bear with me. I cannot disclose them today. We are still in the process of preparing all the financial numbers for our new segments after the spin. I promise that at your second Capital Markets Day in Q4, where we will focus on financial performance, we will give you detailed segment specific financials. To sum that up, what does it mean for our overall financial ambition? You all are experts on this industry, so you know that the truck business is a very cyclical one. Having that in mind, we decided not to shoot for one single point, but rather focus on three different scenarios.

The rainy scenario is very much in line with what we have seen last year. The so-called fair weather scenario in the midfield reflects a kind of an average. All the way to the right, there is a sunny scenario. This scenario is based on rather strong market conditions. Important here, regardless of the weather scenario or market conditions, we will stick to our 15% reduction targets in regard of fixed cost as well as of CapEx and R&D. What does it mean in terms of profitability? We are working to prepare a floor where we can achieve at least 6% return on sales, even in the rainy scenario. In average, we shoot for 8%-9%. In sunny conditions, which we have seen already several times in the last decade, we aim to deliver more than 10%.

That is our target. We will work relentlessly to make it happen. What's needed to do so? We must focus on bringing our fixed costs down and on improving our aftermarket performance. On top of that, we will address even more levers to improve our profitability. Material cost efficiency in operations, product quality, and also very important, establishing our new business model in China. Regarding cash, one of our strengths in the past was always to convert our EBIT into strong cash flow. We will continue to aim for a cash conversion rate between 80% and 100% in all scenarios. This is our answer on the overall financial ambition and how we will create value for our shareholders.

As I said before, we will give you more detailed financial guidance in Q4, also including regional profitabilities and regional targets. In addition, ahead of the spin, we will give full details of our dividend and shareholder return philosophy, which is going to be a priority for us. Before I hand over to John, I would like to repeat once again, we want to achieve benchmark and profitability, and for that, each and every region, and I mean each and every region, must deliver.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

John O'Leary
CEO, Daimler Truck North America

Hi, I'm John O'Leary. We have been joined tremendous success in the last decade. But our goal is to now go strong to even stronger.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

John O'Leary
CEO, Daimler Truck North America

Hello, I'm John O'Leary, CEO of Daimler Trucks North America. Thanks for your interest today. After spending Q4 of 2020 and part of Q1 of 2021 in Germany, launching the Mercedes-Benz Trucks transformation, and as interim CEO, I recently returned to assume the leadership of DTNA. I have a long history serving in various senior leadership positions here in North America, CEO of Thomas Built Buses, Head of Aftermarket, and more recently, as Chief Financial Officer. This is a business I know intimately.

In this time, we have grown our business to become the undisputed leader with 40% market share, and most importantly, number one in both absolute profit and return on sales. I'm excited to speak to you today about how we leverage our great strength to grow even stronger in the years ahead. My plan for the future is to expand both our market position and our profitability at Daimler Truck North America. We will do so in an efficient, smart, but most importantly, effective way. We will further grow our top line, while at the same time improving efficiencies to keep our industry benchmark cost position. As you saw in the video you just watched, we operate a large enterprise in North America, offering everything from electric school buses to the industry-leading Class eight truck, the Freightliner Cascadia.

Among the nation's largest fleets, you can see our unrivaled strength reflected in our 58% market share. As you can also see, we still have plenty of room for growth in the profitable small fleet and vocational segments. Despite the normal fluctuations of industry cycles, we continue to dominate in Class six to eight. Second place is 25%-26%. We've shown this remarkable resilience and strength thanks to several key factors. One, by offering industry-leading technology to enhance safety, fuel efficiency, and productivity. We leverage in-house global solutions where we can and improve our margins as a result. Take, for example, our proprietary Detroit engines, which are spec'd in 94% of all vehicles we sell. Second, our flexible manufacturing network incorporates nine locations in the U.S. and Mexico, allowing us to scale up or down as the market demands in a very cost-efficient manner.

Third, we have the largest dealership network in North America, serving three vehicle brands, all equally dedicated to satisfying our customers by keeping their productive assets up and running. Leading me to the final point here about our strength. It is derived from an absolute unwavering commitment to customer centricity. Their vehicles are assets, expensive assets, purchased from us to generate revenue for them. Most of the time, the cargo that rides on those trucks is worth more than the truck itself. The driver shortage is well-documented, and it isn't unusual for drivers to just walk away from a broken-down truck the second or third time it interferes with earning a living. Customers know and even accept that occasionally trucks break down in the severe duty cycles to which they're exposed.

What becomes critical and a competitive advantage is how quickly we can get that valuable driver and their valuable cargo back in operation again. We bring an unwavering commitment to supporting every customer, every truck, every time. Looking forward, what are the key items we'll be focusing on? In short, improved profitability driven by cost control and increased revenue growth. This includes furthering our technology leadership. Being part of the global Daimler Truck organization, we have access to a wealth of technologies. Whether by in-house innovation or buying from suppliers at scale, we can put more purposeful innovation into our trucks than our competitors, allowing us to command a premium for our vehicles. Next, we will continue managing costs and leveraging our flexible manufacturing footprint. We are great operators.

The truck business is cyclical, and we will account for fluctuations by remaining steadfast in our cost control measures in both fixed overhead and variable costs. As the pandemic has taught us, our discipline here, especially navigating recent supply chain disruptions, serves us well in good times and even more so in times of uncertainty. Moreover, we can maintain positive cash flow and profitability even down to a 165,000-unit market, which hasn't happened in our professional lifetimes. Lastly, we will continue to improve on our unparalleled market position. Our business strength has been cultivated over many years. However, this is not a given. We are humble and still very hungry. We've forged many strong partnerships with the most sophisticated and demanding customer base of large fleet customers. They challenge us every day to be better.

We will continue our uncompromising customer focus for those customers while doing the same for new ones in the vocational segment. Let me provide some specific examples of what this continuing use of our strengths looks like in practice. You heard me reference it earlier, and you saw my colleague David Carson mention it in the intro video. Our vocational focus is coming at a perfect time. Leveraging the global technology toolkit of Daimler Trucks to realize synergies and cost savings while tailoring for the unique DTNA markets, we recently introduced the all-new Western Star 49X. These trucks were built for the most demanding work imaginable: accessing oil derricks and logging camps, pouring concrete, and tackling all types of construction work. I've been around this industry long enough to know that sometimes you're good, sometimes you're lucky, and every once in a while, you get to be both.

That is exactly where we stand now, as we have our sights set on achieving 45% share of the vocational market, which means incrementally growing our share by 15% in a 130,000-unit market. While the 49X is arriving now as the result of a $350 million investment we made four years ago, it's just the beginning of a series of products aimed at this segment, just as infrastructure spending is likely to increase in the U.S. Although we can't take credit for this amazing timing, we do plan to take full advantage of it. On the subject of our aftermarket business, we are wholly committed to further advancing our KPI of getting customer trucks back on the road in 24 hours or less when repairs are required. We'll continue to leverage our subscription-based connectivity services to keep increasing our customers' productivity.

While you'll hear more later on the subject of electrification, let me briefly touch on the fact that we have already started delivering battery-electric Thomas Built Buses to school districts across North America, and those numbers will only continue to grow. In the Class six to eight segments, our Freightliner eCascadia and eM2 are slated to begin start-of-series production in late 2022. We already have 40 fully operational development units in customer hands, from which we obtain operational data, customer input, and afford our customers an opportunity to gain experience with the new technology. Just last month, we opened the order books on these important products, and we're already off to a strong start in filling our backlog.

Lastly, while the sight of electric semis and school buses captures a lot of imagination and attention, I'd be remiss not to mention our battery-electric walk-in van chassis from Freightliner's custom chassis division. This is the right vehicle to capitalize on the surge in e-commerce spending and subsequent last-mile delivery. They are quiet, they are efficient, and they are capable. We will begin deliveries late this year. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is our relentless dedication to developing industry-leading safety technology. While you'll hear more on this from Martin shortly, I'll mention that this is a non-negotiable here at Daimler Truck North America and something we take great pride in delivering to our customers. In conclusion, these are just a few examples of how we continue to leverage our industry leadership position to drive future growth, fantastic profit, and unmatched customer satisfaction. We are strong and getting stronger.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Karin Rådström
Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks, Daimler Truck

I'm Karin Rådström. I just joined Daimler as the Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks. I've been now 100 days in my new role, and I've had a chance to get to know the company, the products, and most importantly, the people. I really feel that we have the basics in place to manage this turnaround. We're going to continue to build on our strengths, the people, the brand, the products, and at the same time, we're addressing our weaknesses. I feel confident that we're on the right track.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Dominik Böpple
Managing Director, Böpple Automotive GmbH

My name is Dominik Böpple . [Non-English content] Böpple Automotive GmbH.

[Non-English content]

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Karin Rådström
Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks, Daimler Truck

Thank you, John. Hi, nice to meet you. As mentioned in the video, I am Karin Rådström, I'm the new head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks. During my first 100 days, I've had the chance to study the business, meet people, understand our strengths and weaknesses, I've started to come to some preliminary conclusions about what we need to do. I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you my 100-day observations. Before coming here, I spent 17 years in the industry working at one of the competitors, I've obviously had the chance to study Mercedes-Benz as an outsider. I've always looked up to Mercedes as a tough competitor. Mercedes is known in the market for its low total cost of ownership and as a leader in safety and in technology.

Even as an outsider, I've seen the company lose position in the last couple of years, and I could even identify some of the likely issues behind that. I chose to join this company anyway because I believe in the potential of Mercedes-Benz Trucks and because I think we have everything in place to do a powerful turnaround. Now, when I've been here for a while, I definitely haven't changed my mind. I honestly feel even more confident after my first 100 days, and I'll explain why. Let's start with the big pictures. Here, you see the facts about the European business. When we go back to the early parts of the last decades, we were really at benchmark profitability and had double-digit margins. In the last years, we haven't delivered good performance.

Our market share has declined, and our financial figures have been going in the wrong direction, and also customer satisfaction. On the right side of the slide here, you'll see the results of a benchmark study, which was done by a consultant company. They interviewed a very large number of truck buyers of all brands about their perception of us and of our competitors. The results show that amongst the major seven brands in Europe, we're number four on product, number five on sales, and number six on service. It's obviously not a positioning we're proud of. I think our performance decline can be boiled down into basically two fundamental problems. To some extent, we lost touch with our customers, and secondly, our cost base increased, but we weren't able to increase our revenues at the same pace. Let me tell you how we're tackling these challenges.

We're taking action to become more customer-driven. On the product side, we need to connect our engineers with our customers. I've lived in many different parts of the world, and I met many engineers, and I can assure you that at Mercedes-Benz, we have great engineers, so that's not our problem. We have been developing our trucks with a little bit too much focus on technical perfection and sometimes not understanding our customers' needs or what they're actually willing to pay for. A little bit too much from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. We're shifting our processes around to involve our customers much more in the early stages of development and to test things early before everything is finished and it's too late to make changes. I think the electric Actros, or as we call it, the eActros, is a really good example.

We've had a fleet of vehicles in the market for over two years in four different countries, trialed by many different customers. The feedback they've been giving us has been used to develop our series product, which is coming soon. On the sales side, some of our customers are telling us that it's a little bit complicated to deal with Mercedes-Benz. They tell us that we have a big organization with sometimes too many people involved, and that it takes us too long even just to make an offer. We have to simplify this, and we're doing it through improvements in processes, better IT, better and quicker back office support, and by making sure our salespeople are well-trained and up to date with our product portfolio. We're also far from the benchmark when it comes to services.

Obviously every day that a truck stands in our workshop instead of working is time wasted for our customer. Here and now, we are increasing our focus on retail. We are investing in retail, and we are improving our network locations, both on our own and together with our partners. It is our retail colleagues who meet our customers every day. The rest of us sitting here in Stuttgart, in the head office or wherever, have to view ourselves as one big support team to our guys and girls in the front line. We need to make sure that we are giving them the prerequisites to do their job by improving spare parts availability, making IT systems easier to work in, improving service methods, having reliable delivery dates, just to give a couple of examples.

Another very concrete example of a shift is that we have changed our metrics around from being very market share based, which doesn't always drive the right behaviors, to focusing on customer satisfaction and on how we can continuously make our customers more successful. We're also running an intense and systematic performance plan aimed at reducing cost across the board in almost every category. We have excessive fixed overhead costs. Within Daimler Truck, we can obviously benchmark with the other regions in the group, we can also compare ourselves, since we know the levels of our competitors, to them. While I don't want to share the precise figures with you, I can tell you that we're not the benchmark. Actually, we're a long way off. If we want benchmark EBIT margins, which we do, then we need to lower the fixed costs to benchmark levels as well.

The cost reduction plans were already progressing before I joined. Now that I'm on board, I intend to accelerate them. We need to go faster, and we need to be more systematic. I brought in fresh expertise to advise on the restructuring, and we brought everything into one program. We're now beginning to reconsider and revisit every aspect of the business cost structure. In manufacturing, in logistics, in product costs, in non-personnel overhead, in sales, in admin, in distribution. All of these areas are under review, and we're working on a plan that will drive costs down item by item, directly linked to the P&L and to our cash flow performance to ensure that we have benchmark costs and therefore benchmark profitability. We'll give you more details on this in our next Capital Markets Day towards the end of the year.

By the way, in terms of cost reduction and spending where we need to spend, I think the split of the truck and car companies will be helpful because we will be a much more focused business. I'm absolutely confident that this will help us raise our performance because from my own experience, I can tell you what a focused high-performance truck business looks like, and I know what it's capable of. Now, over to Brazil, another key market. We've been present in Brazil since the 1950s, and I truly believe in Brazil for the long term. Also here, we've had incredible success some years ago, but with declining performance for the last couple of years. While we managed to regain market share, we have not been able to grow profitability at the same rate.

Our decline, I would say, is related both to our own performance and also to external factors like currency depreciation and political instability. We obviously cannot change the external volatilities, but we can build a more robust and a more resilient business model. Now we have a comprehensive and holistic restructuring being implemented also there. We've phased out underperforming models such as the Atron and Orion, and we're introducing new products that are really fitting the needs of our Brazilian customers. We're also reviewing our dealer network performance and focusing on improving our revenues from services like Fleetboard, like extended warranty, Mercedes-Benz Uptime.

We're also focusing on margin improvement, reduction of fixed costs. We're reviewing vertical integration and changing our value chain so that we will be less sensitive to currency fluctuations. We're confident that this will take us back to success also in this important region. To summarize, after 100 days, I feel excited and I feel confident. Mercedes-Benz Trucks is under new management. We're setting a new strategy. We're focused on strict cost management, and we will be relentless about customer focus. Step by step, we're taking the action that's required to take Mercedes-Benz back on top where it belongs as a benchmark within Europe and in the world. With that, I'll pass on to my colleague, Hartmut Schick. Over to you, Hartmut, after a short video.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Hartmut Schick
Head of Daimler Trucks Asia, Daimler Truck

Our engineers represent ingenuity, perfection, and dynamics by combining the best of German, Japanese, and Indian cultures. Fuso is a leader in electrification technologies with our successful all-electric eCanter.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Hartmut Schick
Head of Daimler Trucks Asia, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Karin, and welcome from Asia. My name is Hartmut Schick, and I'm the Head of Daimler Trucks Asia. I'm truly excited to share more about our story in this part of the world. Our aim in Asia is to grow profitability, access the opportunities that the region provides, and maximize our cash and earnings contribution to the group. We have operations in Japan, in Indonesia, and the rest of Southeast Asia, in China and in India. This diversity is a strength, and we are working hard to optimize our financial performance across the region. We have made progress in recent years, but there's still a distance to go. We are more profitable than some of the competitors, but we are not yet on the regional benchmark level. That's our target because within Daimler Truck, every region must deliver. Let's start with our business with Mitsubishi Fuso.

Mitsubishi Fuso is our commercial vehicle business, centered up in Japan, but with extensive success across the Southeast Asian region. Customers know that the Fuso brand stands for Japanese quality. Thanks to our brand, localized production, and a very strong dealerships, we can provide tailored solutions to demanding markets. Our home market for Mitsubishi Fuso is Japan, the third biggest economy in the world. Last year in Japan, we enjoyed a market share of 20.4% and are confident in growing this number further in the mid and short term. We are very well-established in the stable Japanese market in all segments, including heavy duty, where our Super Great is the clear fuel efficiency and automated driving leader. This is due to the global DNA of Daimler Truck. It is important to note that in Japan, a very substantial amount of our contribution is generated in the service and parts business.

With modernized own retail branches, by adding new working bays and reducing our structural cost, we will further grow our downstream business, aggressively aiming to service the four million trucks and buses in operation.

Indonesia, with a population of 273 million, is our second most important market for Fuso. We hold a very strong position here and currently enjoy a market share of about 50%. With our strong partners, we have a very capital efficient and profitable joint venture structure. 220 dealers across the country with deep knowledge of local needs and culture, as well as very high rate of localized parts, are the basis for our ongoing success. Asia is our home turf, and we have a strong footprint in demanding markets where the cumulated share of non-Asian brands is well below 5%. Here, we are well positioned as a Japanese brand. Overall, we are serving 170 markets worldwide with Fuso vehicles. Our Fuso Canter is one of the few true world trucks in operations all around the world. The ideal vehicle for the last mile logistics.

Fuso is also a leader in electrification. Today, the Fuso eCanter is already offered on four continents and has covered more than 3 million kilometers with customers across the globe. We are one of the most experienced producers of all-electric trucks, and we will not rest being a pioneer. In 2022, we will launch the third generation of our battery electric world truck with a significant improvement of its profitability. We already transformed our business model for combustion models. Most Canter models are only available with third-party ICE engines. Let's turn to India, where we are technology leader in the heavy-duty segment, where we successfully established our made in India for India brand BharatBenz. We are the first manufacturer to meet the new Indian six emission norms last year and grew our market share to 9.1% under severe market conditions.

We are positive that the Indian markets will continue the upswing we already saw this year and are confident in further growing our position in India and doing it in a profitable and cash generative way, adding value to Daimler Truck overall. Also in this region, we will deliver. Speaking about Daimler India Commercial Vehicles, it can add value beyond just serving the Indian market. We have also set up an export hub, delivering parts and vehicles for all brands within the Daimler Truck networks. This leverages the full Daimler Truck potential for the best local customer fit. In particular, by serving the so-called Next 30 markets, here, we expect double-digit growth in the next decade. In addition, we established a low cost, high quality R&D and IT hub in Chennai and Bangalore. Let's turn to China, the world's biggest truck market.

In theory, a source of great opportunity, but let's be honest, a market where international truck makers have struggled to find success. For Daimler, we have a strong local partnership with Foton. Profitability is not where we would like to be, but we are working hard to improve pricing and optimize our cost structure. At Daimler Truck, every region must deliver. What's our plan for China? What excites us going forward in China is the potential for the Mercedes-Benz brand. We are moving fast to localize the Mercedes-Benz Actros. We will be the first international truck producer to localize its top-level product, and we are confident we will have a clearly better cost position than for imported vehicles. We will be able to price competitively and to offer our customers a tremendous vehicle.

We are convinced that the Chinese market is going to get more sophisticated in its demands, and the share of market taken by advanced trucks is going to accelerate fast. We want to capture this with our new strategy and capture it profitably. In summary, Daimler Trucks Asia is well positioned, and we are ready to take it to the next level. Profitability for Fuso in Japan is stable, with a large service revenue element. Many of our important markets are expected to see tremendous growth. For example, GDP increase of 62% for Indonesia and 82% for India is predicted by 2030. In China, our localization strategy will mark a new chapter. Additionally, we will leverage our footprint for low cost exports and further reduce our fixed and variable costs. Asia has many opportunities. We intend to maximize the potential of our business and target regional benchmark profitability.

Let us move on to the next chapter presented by my colleague, Andreas Gorbach.

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

Thank you very much, Hartmut, and welcome also from my side. My name is Andreas Gorbach, Head of Truck Technology. Today I'm here to talk about technology, and even more so, its transformation. What does technology mean for me? Technology for me is always an enabler. If we talk about technology in a truck, what it first and foremost enables is a benefit for the customer. Asset utilization, asset efficiency. Now, the technologies that enable this benefit for the customer the most are two. On the one side, the propulsion system, the power to drive, and on the other side, the operating system, the intelligence to drive. Now let's double-click on propulsion system. The strategy as for the propulsion system is based on three core beliefs, on three convictions. The first one is about speed, fast ramp down of ICE, diligent but fast.

The second one is about duality of technologies, battery electric and fuel cell electric. The third one is again about speed, zero emission speed, as for the penetration into the portfolio and as for the rapid evolution of the technology itself. Let's talk about the first conviction, ICE ramp down. Speed is the imperative. 20 years anyhow, a hard fact. If we want to comply with the Paris deal, if we want to comply with our own ambition, 20 years is set. We are convinced that the transition will happen faster, 10 to 15 years. Why that range? Why five years corridor? Well, three reasons. First of all, very broad applications, very different use cases at our customer. Second, we still see a very heterogeneous legislative landscape. Third, the infrastructure is in its infancy and developing at different speeds around the globe. How to deal with that?

How to manage the speed? How to manage the uncertainty? How to avoid the Clayton Christensen situation? The answer is threefold, partnering, transitioning. Partnering stage one, you are well aware, we are completely exiting our captive medium-duty technology during this decade together with Cummins. Partnering stage two, also on the heavy-duty side, we are actively seeking for partners in order to share the inevitable invest into the next legislative hurdle, which is already knocking on the door, Euro VII. This is a joint challenge of the industry, and we have to solve it together, and we will solve it together. Then transitioning, basically, as a result, this enables us to significantly reduce our spending in conventional powertrain. Already in 2025, we will spend the vast majority of our R&D spending into zero-emission technologies. How does the transition look like?

You see the illustrative picture here, and you could add now the uncertainty in the year 2030. Some talk about 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. We even talk about 60% zero-emission technologies in the year 2030. The only question is, what is the catalyst that makes the reaction go fast? The chemical reaction, if you will, to bring the blue line up fast and the gray line down fast. The answer is total cost of ownership. TCO is the catalyst. In that very moment, when the customer starts benefiting more from a zero-emission truck than from a diesel truck, well, there's no reason to buy the diesel truck anymore. This is the tipping point. With the assumptions you see here, we are convinced that this starts happening in 2025 for battery electric, and it starts happening in 2027 for fuel cell electric trucks. It's the tipping point.

To win there, you need two things, benchmark technology, as for the performance, and the ability to scale fast to bring down variable cost. We are doing both. Second conviction, duality of technologies. How to propel a zero-emission truck? That's the question. There's no debate about battery electric. There is debate about fuel cell electric. The debates are usually around assumptions as for energy price and powertrain cost. Consciously not on this slide. On this slide, we did not put the assumptions. We put the facts. There are three of them. First one, these lines must cross. It's variable cost over range, installed cost over range. For sure, at a low range, battery wins. Take the 40 ton 300 kW truck. I need the 300 kW fuel cell for the low range, battery wins. Now, what happens if we increase range?

On the battery truck, we keep on adding battery cells. Battery volume correlates with cost, and volume goes to the power of three. Let's park the three. Go to the fuel cell truck. We have the 300 kW installed. We increase range. We just increased the size of the tank. The cost of the tank correlates with the surface, and that's to the power of two. We have to the power of three and to the power of two. You understand that this, from a mathematical standpoint, means that these lines must cross. You can debate assumptions again and move gray and blue line up and down. The wildest battery dream gives you 700 km, and the wildest fuel cell dream gives you 300 km. The crucial point is, for us, it doesn't matter.

We have important customers to the left and to the right of the intersection. Second hard fact, this is energy density over charging speed. Isn't it impressive how the energy density has developed over the last years? In a way, we would have not anticipated it, and it will further develop. There's limitations, right? There's limitations, for example, with the elements that are available on this planet from the periodic system. Even if we go to the extreme, we will still see a factor of 50 to 100 compared to hydrogen. A similar situation as for charging speed, even with 2 MW charging on the electric side, we still have a factor of three. Here again, customers with high range will benefit, as for payload, as for flexibility, as for charging.

Third fact, independent of trucking, independent of the mobility sector as a whole, we will see green hydrogen and green energy. Why is that the case? Today, the countries are trading with energy, right? We do this because the self-sufficiency of energy is not given. Some countries have too much energy, other countries have too less energy. We're trading with energy and today mainly with oil, coal, and gas. If we fast-forward in the year 2050, and we are hopefully in a CO2 neutral society, we will still trade with energy because the self-sufficiency of the states as for green energy is also not given. Sun, air, water. Or at least not competitive on a global scale. Will this be electricity? Will we deal with energy in electrical form over the planet? No.

We need a chemical bond, CO2 neutral energy carrier, and hydrogen is just the best form. To sum it up, we will see customers benefiting more from battery electric. We will see customers benefiting more from fuel cell electric. Both energy carriers will be available in green and competitive price, and this is why we push both. Third conviction, speed as for zero emission. Isn't this a great starting point, the portfolio you see here? Since years, we have electric trucks in customer hands, eCanter, eCitaro, eM2, eCascadia, eActros, and so on and so forth. We keep on adding one truck after the other year by year. We even kickstarted the projects for the second half of the decade already. Still, this is not enough for us. To put a little bit more color on it, let's have a look at this clip.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

As you can see, it is not just about speed as for the penetration into the portfolio. It is also about technology evolution. What we are launching the next years is already benchmark as for the characteristics in range, in efficiency, in variable cost, and in charging. We are already working on pushing this to the next level, and we're talking about 60% more range. We talk about 25% improvement in efficiency, 40% reduced variable cost, and up to 2 MW charging. The question here is, what are the ingredients that we need to do this? What are the accelerators behind that story? Three of them are really important. It's people, it's technology, and infrastructure. On the people side, we have well understood that we need to ramp up competencies and capabilities and capacities as for e-propulsion. Catalog engineering is not enough here.

We need to understand, we need to specify, we need to engineer the key electric components on our own. People. Technology, we have well understood that just upscaling passenger car technology is not sufficient. We need truck dedication. We need truck genes. I'm super happy to announce a partnership here as for the battery cell with CATL, and I talk about it in a minute. Technology. Infrastructure, we have well understood that just offering a truck in the future will not be sufficient, and this is why we are partnering as for the infrastructure as well. I'm super excited here to announce a couple of partnerships here in a minute as well. Then certainly the truck. We are already working on the next gen e-truck as well. This truck will certainly be able to incorporate all the new benchmark technologies.

It will certainly be able to cope with the next level of infrastructure, and it will bring its own next-level genes as for powertrain integration and aerodynamics. Now let's have a look what we are doing with CATL. Well, first step, and this is the baseline, we secure supply. With the technology we launch in 2024, which already has some truck genes incepted, with this technology, we already secured the supply beyond 2030. Check mark, baseline. At the same time, the teams are already jointly working on the next level of truck dedication battery cell. Besides cost, focus very much on durability and fast charging ability. This is the baseline for the truck genes. Even beyond this, we are already jointly exploring opportunities to localize production in North America and in Europe. Lower logistic costs, lower CO2 footprint, higher local content.

I'm super happy now that we have a statement today from Robin Zeng, CEO of CATL.

Robin Zeng
CEO, CATL

Daimler Truck AG has built an outstanding reputation for its high-quality vehicles and reliable service, which have been well recognized in the whole commercial vehicle industry. We are very happy to strengthen the existing partnership based on our shared vision in e-mobility. With CATL's innovative technology in EV batteries and Daimler Truck's strong expertise in the heavy truck industry, we will jointly on the development and the design of advanced battery cells and packs for truck-specific applications. We believe the partnership will enable Daimler Truck AG to further enhance its market position on the e-mobility stage and lead the way to the realization of carbon neutrality.

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

What are we doing on the infrastructure side? On the infrastructure side, we partner with Power Electronics in North America, Siemens and ENGIE in Europe. Jointly, we develop chargers such that we not only can sell the customer a truck, but also part of the ecosystem, including the charging intelligence and including installation support. We start with 350 kW. We are already working on the dimension of mega chargers at the same time. Now we are shifting from battery electric to fuel cell electric, and let's do this with a short film.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

As you can see, also on the hydrogen side, on the fuel cell electric side, we have extremely high ambitions. 1,200 km range, 24 tons payload, only 15 minutes charging, and maybe more important, nothing less than 90% reduction of variable cost. Again, the question, what are the ingredients here? What are the accelerators behind this story? The answer is the same. It's people, it's technology, it's infrastructure. People and technology are cellcentric here. I could talk an hour about it, very emotional, as I had just the privilege to set up and lead this company. I can tell you, the technology roadmap, the cost roadmap is super convincing. 25 years experience in fuel cell, now 100% dedicated for trucking in a joint venture with Volvo. Cellcentric, people, technology. On the infrastructure side, we partner with Linde for the right technology for liquid refueling.

We partner in a consortium with many partners to jointly push the infrastructure and standards. That's new, and I'm happy to announce this today as well, we partner with Shell in a partnership where we showcase how we jointly remove the chicken and egg problem. What are we doing with Shell? A concrete route, 1,200 km, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Cologne. Shell providing the stations, us providing the trucks. Ready in 2025. Already we are thinking beyond 2025. We are thinking 2030. We are thinking 150 stations and 5,000 trucks, and we open this partnership for everybody else. Let's hear what Ben van Beurden has to say, CEO of Shell.

Ben van Beurden
CEO, Shell

In February, Shell set out its strategy, Powering Progress, to accelerate the transition of our business to net zero emissions. To get there, we will work with customers and companies across sectors and industries.

Sectors such as heavy-duty trucking remain one of the hardest to decarbonize. With hydrogen, there is hope, and I'm delighted that Shell and Daimler Trucks have committed to a substantial rollout of hydrogen trucks and infrastructure across Europe. This is a partnership of two industry titans. It builds on the work Shell's already doing to develop hydrogen, both as a fuel for transport and industry. Hydrogen, along with electrification, can help to decarbonize the economy and advance Europe's own goal to be carbon neutral by 2050. This requires projects and policies and partnerships, today's announcement is another big step in that direction.

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

Let's talk about the second key technology, the operating system. What are we doing here? Step by step, we move the electronic architecture of the truck into a software-defined architecture. What does that mean?

It means we reduce the amount of computing units in a truck, less computing units, but more powerful computing units, thereby de-linking hardware and software cycles, and thereby pulling in the relevant software know-how that we need. What's the benefit for the customer? Well, certainly more uptime, less workshop visits as we flash over the air, and more efficient workshop visits as the workshop is already knowing that the customer is coming and what to do. Certainly also, in addition, more tailored digital services and maybe the most important thing, it enables the seamless integration of the asset called truck into its ERP system. What's in for us? Certainly additional revenue streams and customer loyalty, certainly more speed as we decouple hard and software, and then the big data thing. Why is this so important?

We today already understand very well what the customer is doing with the truck.

With all the data that we get here, we understand even better in every second the customer uses the truck, what is he doing and how can we further improve the product to the benefit of the customer. Already in 2023, we launched the first evolution here. From the beginning, 100% connected, 100% ready for over-the-air, ready for the next generation of HMI, ready for the next generation of safety systems, ready for the next generation of predictive intelligence, ready for the next generation of electric and fuel cell electric trucks. Maybe this is the most exciting thing, also ready for autonomous driving. This topic is so important that I give it back to Martin.

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Andreas. The operating system Andreas Gorbach just talked about serves as a basis for our next generation trucks and is a key enabler for our autonomous technology.

Autonomous is one of the holy grails out there. To win in autonomous, we are following a dual-track strategy. We are focusing on developing a redundant chassis, the hardware basis for any autonomous driverless driving. Here we are working together with Waymo as a key strategic partner. Secondly, we are developing our own virtual driver, the software package for hub-to-hub operations on North American highways. Together with Torc, pioneer in the heavy-duty autonomous industry, independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck, we had invested in already two years ago. Our dual-track strategy will not only accelerate the deployment of autonomous technology but also provide our customers with a choice as to what solution best fits their business. We are convinced that with this dual-track strategic approach, we will win the revolution in transportation.

Let's take a look together to understand our dual-track strategy with our partners more in detail and also hear from the CEOs of our partners, Tekedra Mawakana from Waymo and Michael Fleming from Torc.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Tekedra Mawakana
CEO, Waymo

When we were looking for a vehicle partner for our trucking unit, Daimler Truck was at the top of our list as we have the deepest respect for their strong global presence and leadership in both technology and the trucking industry. We are thrilled to collaborate with the team to develop a unique version of the Freightliner Cascadia specifically for the Waymo Driver and make that fleet available to customers in the coming years. Together, we will be able to scale the Waymo Driver to achieve our common goal of improving road safety and logistics efficiency on the world's roadways. We're very excited and look forward to making this partnership a tremendous success.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Michael Fleming
CEO, Torc

Bringing fully autonomous trucks to the North American market at scale requires commitment and experience. Torc's pure play in trucking positions us to establish the industry standard in self-driving trucks. A Level four truck built from the factory with seamless hardware and software integration. Our next generation trucks are on the road right now, running daily routes in New Mexico and expanding into Texas. Customers can be assured there's a solid path forward to commercialization.

Speaker 2

[Presentation]

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

Now it is time to sum up this event and bring proceedings to a close before we turn to the Q&A. This slide reiterates the message that we communicated at the beginning today, our mission as an independent company. Our mission is clear, based on two guiding principles. First, we are absolutely committed to resetting profitability. We have to deliver on this as a public company. I am laser focused on it, personally, as is Jochen, as is the whole management team. How we will do that? It is start first and foremost with fixing Europe. Europe is our biggest challenge, and as you've heard from Karin today, we are accelerating our efforts to turn Europe around and restore margins to the level that we know we are capable of and that do justice to our technology and our brand.

Beyond Europe, we will also be highly focused. We will target the profit benchmark in each region. There's work to do in a number of areas, but this is no excuse commitment. Every region must deliver. We will also grow our profitability and our relationship with customers with a big emphasis on services. We already have a strong service portfolio, but those recurrent revenues will be an increasingly important profit driver for us going forward. This needs to all come together to deliver strong shareholder returns with a management philosophy that makes sure we deliver value and strong dividends for our owners. In addition to the intense focus on resetting profitability, we are also committed to leading the way to zero emissions. This is our responsibility as a company and as the industry leader.

As Andreas Gorbach just described in detail, we are going to refocus our R&D activities on zero emission technology. The majority of our R&D spending will be focused to zero emission trucks by 2025. Related to this, we are going to sundown our ICE activities with partnering strategies. We've done that already in medium-duty engines with Cummins, and we are working on more solutions that will allow us to manage our exit from legacy activities. As we move fast to deliver best-in-class zero emission trucks, we will follow a dual track BEV and fuel cell strategy because we are convinced our customers will need both technologies. We will make sure that we are highly cost competitive, thanks to ambitious targets and by leveraging our scale and our partnerships. Finally, we'll kickstart infrastructure in both charging and hydrogen, as we have highlighted today. That's it. That's our mission.

We are pursuing profit and technology leadership. We will be tireless in our efforts to deliver on these promises. We are excited about becoming an independent company, excited to be listing later this year, and excited to welcome investors and analysts on this journey. In fact, I'm personally looking forward to meeting many of you in the months and years ahead. Thank you for joining us today. Now let's turn to the Q&A, where I'm sure you will have some great questions for the team.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Ladies and gentlemen, also from my side, I'm Steffen Hoffmann, heading Investor Relations. I'm very happy to have the Daimler Truck management team here on stage for today's Q&A session. That was a lot of interesting and valuable content today. You will be able to deep dive into all single aspects of the presentations.

They will be made available after the event in the Investor Relations section on daimlertruck.com. In our Q&A session, you will have the chance to raise questions concerning the topics we just presented. Please focus on those fields. Before we start, a few practical points. First, in case you want to ask a question to our management team, you will have to dial in individually by telephone and register. The dial-in numbers have been shared within our final invite that we sent out on Monday last week. Second, we will identify the questioner by name, but please also introduce yourself with your name and the name of the organization that you are representing before asking your question. As a matter of fairness, please just limit yourself to two questions.

Last but not least, please be aware to mute the live stream while raising your question and listening to the regarding answers. Before we start, the operator will explain the procedure for dialing in.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin our question -and -answer session. At our customer's request, this Q&A session will be recorded. If you want to raise a question, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you want to withdraw your question, please dial zero and two on your telephone keypad. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. And if you are using speaker equipment, please lift the handset before making your selections. One moment, please, for the first question.

Steffen Hoffmann
Investor Relations Representative, Daimler Truck

Thanks for the explanation. I see already lots of callers have queued up for the Q&A. We do start with Horst Schneider from Bank of America.

Horst Schneider
Analyst, Bank of America

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. It is Horst Schneider from Bank of America. I have got two, please. The first one is a little bit more short-term related. I understand you talked today mainly about the mid-term perspective, which is, of course, very important. Nevertheless, of course, you understand we could also a little bit more short-term focus. I would not say only short-term focus, but a little bit as well. As we know, you guide for the 6%-7% adjusted EBIT margin for 2021. Can you maybe explain again why you are not more optimistic? What keeps you away from getting more bullish? How close this guide is, finally? Also related to the short-term picture, I remember to the 2019 CMD where you guided for the more than 7% adjusted EBIT margin in 2022.

Referring to your weather guidance, I think, and looking at the order book, I think it looks as sunny as in the Sahara for next year. I just want to understand how quickly you can achieve these mid-term margins. Can that maybe be achieved already in 2022? A more medium-term question relates to the U.S. truck business, where I like basically your vocational strategy, but on the other hand, of course, we need to take into account that also competition is heating up because one of your competitors, here, especially Navistar, is getting much stronger by the takeover of Traton, and they will have a better product, the lower TCO as well, and there's with that, of course, the risk that you lose market share, and with that also you lose profitability. How can you prevent that?

Maybe not in the end, maybe a better European profitability is compensated by a weaker U.S. profitability. Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

First one for Jochen, second one for John afterwards.

Jochen Goetz
CFO, Daimler Truck

Okay. Horst, thanks for your question regarding the guidance. First of all, it's great to see the demand for our products, especially in the most important markets in Europe and after is strong in absolute terms, but also in relative terms. We are very pleased what we see in the order intake on the market share at the beginning of the year. However, as you all know, we are in a very cyclical business, and we see that also short term. What we see at the moment is really a stretch on the semiconductor side. We see a significant impact on Q2, and it's not clear, and still it's very volatile. What does it mean from a full year perspective? That's the reason why we stick with our guidance at the moment. There is clear demand beyond that.

If the supply chain is able to fulfill the demand, there's upside potential, for now, we stick with our guidance and as we also said, as part of the Q1, at the upper end of this guidance. Second question regarding midterm. Horst, as you know, we don't guide the next year right now. I could say, we see also good demand in the year to come.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

John, we would go over to you.

John O'Leary
CEO, Daimler Truck North America

Thank you, Steffen. Horst. For sure, we're not here to talk about our competitors. I respect them deeply. We are in a really strong position right now. We're not playing defense. We're on the offense. We're not going to just stand pat. As we heard earlier in the presentation, we're all about increasing to drive even harder, to become more profitable, to even get more share. Again, it's all about profit for us. Will there be some pressure on us? Undoubtedly. We have great products. We have amazing relationships with customers. We have a dealer network that's second to none. I really like the position that we're in, to be chased rather than being the chaser.

Horst Schneider
Analyst, Bank of America

All right. Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thanks a lot, John. The next one in the queue is José Asumendi from JP Morgan.

José Asumendi
Analyst, JPMorgan

Thanks very much. José, JP Morgan. A couple of questions, please. Karin, please could you talk a little bit about the opportunity to improve the share service in Europe and reduce the fixed cost base, especially in the light of your extensive career, probably one of the most profitable truck makers, in Europe. When you landed at Daimler, what was specifically for you, what surprised you the most in terms of that fixed cost base, the vertical integration, and also the levers to improve the service share? Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Karin , first one was on the importance of service in Europe and then, what surprised you most?

Karin Rådström
Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks, Daimler Truck

Yeah. Well, thank you for the question. I think what I see is that we have a huge potential with services. I think historically, Daimler or especially Mercedes-Benz Trucks, has been maybe a little bit more transaction focused, so more really focused on the selling of the vehicles. That has started to change, and we will continue to drive the focus more on the service business. There's a lot of things we can do. Obviously, one important one is the kind of questions that I'm asking. I'm very diligently following up our KPIs on service. When we start digging into our service KPIs, we see that there is potential more or less in all markets. We also see that we have a big variance in markets, on how we perform on service.

What we've started doing is taking learnings between the markets to see how we can carry over good practices. We also see that we have a relatively low penetration on the traditional services, repair and maintenance. We're doing a lot of initiatives related to that. I think also the work that we're doing related to retail in Europe, where first of all, we're splitting from the car side, where until today we still have a lot of locations where we mix cars and trucks, which is generally not optimal because they need to be in different places. A car dealership should be maybe in the center of the city, and the truck workshop should be close to the highway. A lot of work going on to improve that. We're also investing in retail, as I mentioned before, both on our own and together with partners.

About what surprised me, it's a good question. I think I knew what I was getting into, so not so many surprises. Maybe a positive surprise is that I feel very welcomed. I know it's not so common for Daimler to take in outsiders, but I feel, from day one, I've been very welcomed by the Truck Board and also by my own management team, and that there is a big interest and a surge to understand my experiences and how I look at the challenges that we're facing. That's a positive one.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Karin.

José Asumendi
Analyst, JPMorgan

Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

We would continue with Arndt Ellinghorst from Bernstein.

Arndt Ellinghorst
Analyst, Bernstein

Yes. Hi everyone, thanks for the really passionate presentation today. Two questions please. The first one on delivering value to shareholders. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about excess liquidity, how you think about the dividend policy?

I'm sure you're aware that other industrial goods companies have a fairly flexible dividend policy to reflect the nature of the business. Some pay special dividends. Do you think about something similar, or will you stick to the more conventional payout ratios that you're used to from the Daimler world? Second one is on management incentivization. I'm sure you understand that that's a very important topic for investors. You've been around for a long time, running Daimler. We've discussed these fundamental issues for a long time. We discussed them again today. Can you share a couple of ideas how you will make sure that the management team is truly accountable? Thank you very much.

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

Arndt, thank you for your question. Very good questions. First of all, dividend policy, I would say it's too early to talk about the dividend. We will have a clear policy. We are focused on high net income. We are focused on a good cash conversion rate, what we had since years. There will be the liquidity. We are determined to create value for our shareholders. That in a volatile business, you have to adjust to the market is clear. We'll find a very good way to have the shareholders participate in our value creation. For me, fundamental is that management has a stake in the company. Nothing is better to let the people focus on the share price than that they have a lot of shares. I like the share program at the moment at Daimler.

We'll certainly take it over, make it available, or make everyone participate in such a program. I love the idea that senior management have to hold a certain amount of stocks. We are really long-time vested in the company, and benefit and suffer in the same way our shareholders do.

Arndt Ellinghorst
Analyst, Bernstein

Thanks, Martin.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you very much, Martin and Arndt, and the next one in the queue is Nicolai Kempf from Deutsche Bank.

Nicolai Kempf
Analyst, Deutsche Bank

Yeah, thank you for taking my questions. Nicolai Kempf from Deutsche Bank. My first question would be for Ms. Rådström. I believe you analyzed that the Actros can in some parts be described as over-engineered. How do you make sure that the electric truck will not be over-engineered, especially keeping in mind that a famous competitor from California likes to brag with its range? The second question, how flexible is your platform, and can you build electric, fuel cell, and diesel trucks in the same platform?

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Karin, I suggest you take the first one, and then I suggest that Andreas takes the second one on the e-truck.

Karin Rådström
Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks, Daimler Truck

Yeah, thanks for the question. Well, I think I mentioned it earlier in my speech a little bit. The work that we've done with the eActros is a little bit different approach than what we've had in the earlier generations. We really had it out testing it early together with customers, I think four different markets, around 20 different customers. We really used that insight to make sure that we are actually developing a truck which is not over-engineered, but which is exactly what our customers are asking for. I feel confident that we will bring a really good truck to the market that will be just rightly engineered.

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

As for the flexibility versus commonality, I'm very optimistic, especially with the new setup, that we will find the right balance of engineering key technologies centrally for all our brands and regions, and at the same time, have the right customer differentiation with the regional brands. All the key technologies we're going to engineer fit in the trucks of all regions, and at the same time, we translate what the customer needs regionally, which might differ, into the truck differentiation at the same time.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you very much, Karin.

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

My pleasure.

Steffen Hoffmann
Investor Relations Representative, Daimler Truck

And Andreas. The next one in the queue is Philippe Houchois from Jefferies.

Philippe Houchois
Analyst, Jefferies

Yes, good afternoon. Thank you very much. First of all, thank you very much for that presentation. I thought it was very interesting, also very punchy. I have a couple of questions. One is, the pace of transition to zero-emissions vehicle in corporate thinking seems to be accelerating in trucks at the same pace as cars. My question is, going forward, when you think about allocation of capital towards ICE developments versus pulling capital away, how does that conflict with still ongoing regulation pressure, including discussion around Euro VII? I'm trying to understand this, is if the industry, led by actors like you, accelerate transition to zero-emission, what is the possibility of pushing back on some of the additional costs that will be coming to your P&Ls as we fade out the ICE technology?

Also trying to understand how much of that opportunity maybe drives your reduction in CapEx and fixed costs that you're talking about in your targets. The second question is, I appreciate very much the divisional disclosure that you're going to give us, and you were very honest about the failures of the past, and I appreciate that as well. There's obviously a very strong ambition to succeed, and the body language on the stage shows that. You're going to succeed everywhere, that's the plan. What if you don't? Are you going to be in a situation where, oh, we didn't quite get the margin we want, so we'll keep the business anyway because we justify it to scale?

Are you ready to actually make more difficult decisions regarding the portfolio to make sure that the financial performance lives up to your market position and your brand? Thank you very much.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Philippe. I suggest, Martin, you take both questions.

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

Yeah, Philippe. First of all, the transition from ICE to zero emission will be, at the end, a creation of three factors. A, our offering, and that will be great and comprehensive. Secondly, about the infrastructure, and that is when you talk more than 10,000 trucks on the road, pretty difficult and will take its time. That might limit a fast ramp-up. The third one is TCO, and that depends on how the prices for energy develop over time and what we base our toll system in Europe on, whether on CO2 or NOx. We can see various scenarios. We will be prepared for every scenario, even a much faster ramp-up than shown here. On the other side, if it goes slower because of infrastructural delays, no problem for us as well. Euro VII, indeed, is a pain.

There are some changes which will help the environment and where we can comply, which is possible and doable to do. There are other issues in which we, and not we as Daimler, we as an industry, are in intense discussion with politicians as well in Berlin, as in Brussels, as in Washington, D.C., to figure out a way where it makes a sense for transition. When we see you have 60% of the trucks converting over to zero emission, why to regulate the remaining diesel even further, and therefore, potentially even have a bigger pull-forward impact? Pretty difficult question these days. One reaction of us was clear. On those engines where we have small scale, like on the medium-duty side, we teamed up with Cummins, who have a far much broader base and larger base, so we can scale our investments.

I could see a similar thing on heavy-duty here, potentially we offer our services to other manufacturers because we have a huge scale on the heavy-duty platform. We have to see in the next years, will be an interesting question. The second question, the divisional disclosures and what is if we don't succeed. First of all, we have very comprehensive plans. We analyze the situation, we know our weaknesses, and we shared some of you with you today, and we work diligently with it. There is between we keep it as today, which we don't, because otherwise we wouldn't change the results, to complete closure. There is a full host of possibilities we have. We won't be shy, because failure is not an option.

We want to raise our profitability, we have to raise our profitability for you, the shareholders, as well as for our capability to have all the investments necessary for our core products where we make the money. Therefore, I am very confident that we find the right answers. With our transparency that we are going to offer to you, we will be very accountable for what we are doing. I am sure this question might be asked more specifically at a date in the future, and we'll get a more specific answer then.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you very much, Martin. The next one in our queue is Kai Mueller from Barclays.

Kai Mueller
Analyst, Barclays

Thank you very much for taking my question. The first one is really when we look at the cycle and you have your targets for 2025. Is it fair to assume that the current environment we are in right now would be one of those sunny days environments, the year 2021? If so, can you give us also a little bit of a sense on how you would look at North America versus Europe in the different scenarios? Is it fair to say that North America will always stand out compared to Europe and Asia, or is there a pathway to get them aligned? Then the second question I had is really around the technology side again. When we look at the powertrain spending, I understand now medium-duty, you are pushing to Cummins. For heavy-duty, you talk about cooperation.

Is it fair to say that you can then do that transition to BEVs and fuel cell technology while keeping the current R&D spending similar and just reallocating it to the new technologies? Or should we expect some rising R&D in the medium term in order to overcome those challenges?

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

First one, Jochen, you would take on the weather charts, and then the second one is probably between Andreas and Jochen, so probably Andreas starts and Jochen might fill in.

Jochen Goetz
CFO, Daimler Truck

Okay. Thanks for the question. Regarding where we are in the cycle, as I said before, when we talked about the guidance, the demand this year is strong. I would say more on the sunny side. I want to repeat what I said before, we have a lot of uncertainty at the moment regarding the availability of chips or semiconductors. Overall, from today's perspective, we would call it more the fair weather scenario for 2021 than really the strong sunny one. To your question regarding North America and Europe. First of all, in North America, we are already strong. I think John showed a lot of good examples why we are there and also showed that with our tailor-made vocational truck, we have even the potential to get stronger going forward.

If you look, and it's fair to say for in the longer history of Europe, you also might remember that Europe was even stronger in the years between 2005 and 2008. The potential from the market is the same. There is no reason why Europe should be not as strong as North America. That's what we are working on. That's our plan. As Martin said, there are very concrete measures ahead which bring us on a similar level than we see in North America today.

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

Yeah, Kai, I think you're to the point, right? This is certainly a huge challenge, what you described, for us and for the overall industry. Really, the most important thing is focus and partnering. Focus on heavy duty in this example, partnering on medium duty. We're partnering on the battery side and fuel cell side as well. These are the key ingredients, focus and partnering. What I'd like to add is that people tend to underestimate the advantage also that we have with conventional powertrain and e-mobility in one organization, because the competencies that you need to successfully integrate the powertrain into a truck, they do not differ too much. There's always, in the combination of zero emission conventional powertrain, especially on the R&D side, also optimism from my end that we will see synergies there from the competence standpoint.

Jochen, I don't know whether you want to add something to this.

Jochen Goetz
CFO, Daimler Truck

Maybe just a short addition. If you look on the R&D as a starting point, 2019, also keep in mind that we had a lot of major projects in 2019. We talked about China briefly today. We talked about the vocational truck in the U.S. We talked about a renewal in Brazil. There are a lot of big projects included in 2019. They will go away because they're finally done now. That helps to lower the overall R&D. The second one, I also mentioned it in my speech, is the so-called active portfolio approach, where we really think about where are the biggest profit pools of the future, and we will spend our money where we believe we get the best return going forward.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Jochen and Andreas. We continue with George Galliers from Goldman Sachs.

George Galliers
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Thank you, and thank you for taking my question. I know you didn't give the split between fuel cell and battery electric vehicles, but I was wondering if it would be possible to give us some idea of how you see the two different markets shaping up and whether you expect significant regional differences. The reason I ask is obviously you talked about the desire to reduce complexity and take cost out of the business through that. With that in mind, I just wonder, the pursuit of two different powertrain technologies, is the size of the fuel cell market large enough to warrant the investments that you plan to make there? Thank you.

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

George, I might start with this and then I hand over to Andreas, because this is one of the key questions for the future of trucking. When you look on a macro perspective, I see the short-term way from now to 2025 will be definitely electric. Why? Because it is only a few trucks, and for a few trucks, electric infrastructure is fairly easy. Between 2025 and 2035, the next 10-year period, where we ramp up massively, and we is not Daimler, we is the entire industry. The strain on the infrastructure, always understanding that parallel, the passenger car world is ramping up as well. The strain on the infrastructure, especially on the electric grid, will be so enormous that in my opinion, there is no way that we can do it with just one energy source. We need two.

Beyond 2035, it depends where do we get our renewable energy in the world. If we have to store the energy over time, meaning producing it today and using it tomorrow, or over distance, meaning producing it in a hot country with endless sunshine and using it in a gray, foggy, windless northern Europe. If you have to then transport that energy, the only way to transport it will be H2. Once you have energy in H2, the easiest way to get it out, in a fuel cell. With all that is, I would say, only electric until 2025, other than a couple of test trucks on fuel cell. Between 2025 and 2035 and after that, the decision is how will the clean energy of the future economy will work.

On the cost side, Andreas, potentially over to you, and the synergies between the two, or whether it is stupid to have two completely different techniques, technologies in an engineering department.

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

Yeah, the scale question is extra relevant. Yes. What we see during this decade in cellcentric is around a 10 GW per year scale, and this is possible as we partner with Volvo and as we have Mercedes power system also as an important customer. This is about the scale it takes to bring down the cost level to the sufficient level that also enables a TCO break-even during this decade. This is one of the reasons why we partner here besides sharing the invest. On the infrastructure side, I'm also very optimistic, like you are, Martin. As I said earlier, it is anyhow inevitable to decarbonize all the other industry sectors. In a CO2 neutral society, we anyhow are going to see competitive green hydrogen, independent of the trucking industry. I would turn it around.

Imagine this comes true and you have not invested in a fuel cell truck, and then the competition shows up with a fuel cell truck, which gives more benefit to the customer. I see the risk of the double invest lower than the risk not to invest.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Martin.

George Galliers
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Andreas. Thanks, George. We continue with Patrick Hummel from UBS.

Patrick Hummel
Analyst, UBS

Thanks, Steffen. Patrick here from UBS. Two questions from my side. Actually, two follow-ups. One on the R&D. When you gave the R&D and CapEx outlook, I was wondering how you account for the activities that you have in partnerships or joint ventures in there. I guess that is where a lot of investment is required. These joint ventures won't be self-funding because, they're early stage, such as the fuel cell joint venture. It wasn't quite clear to me to which extent you have to put your own money into the partnership with CATL. If you can just give us a feel how much of an investment will be required in the next few years in these partnerships, in these JVs that might not be included in that CapEx and R&D guidance that you gave. My second question is a follow-up on the incentives.

You said every region, every division has to deliver. If you're incentivized with stock, it's relatively easy to sail with the fantastic performance of the North American business, which is the profit driver number one. How will you bring this element into the compensation of the regional units? Also, when it comes to the determination of the variable compensation, how does that environment play into this? Who determines whether a performance was achieved in a stormy weather condition or a fair weather condition? If you can just give a bit more color how that variable compensation scheme is going to work, please.

Jochen Goetz
CFO, Daimler Truck

I start with the first one regarding R&D. First of all, it's an all-in number. Whatever we need in the joint ventures we have today is included in these numbers. There is not a day off, it's really all in, number one. Number two, well, we do not disclose, obviously, the capital injections we've planned for each and every joint venture. It depends on how fast we can grow that. Be assured that it's in our plan for 2025. It might be not known today that we have additional joint ventures going forward. That might change that, but it also means we step into new business areas then going forward. What we know today, what we see today, it's baked into the plan for 2025.

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

When it comes to the incentive, I would say regional incentivization is always difficult because it's not just difficult to determine what type of weather situation it's in. It's at the end to determine who was responsible for that. First of all, we here as a board have a common responsibility. Every region has to deliver. Does not mean John has to deliver, and if not, bad luck, we're still seven great guys. John, I used you deliberately. It was just as an example. We are all responsible for that. We have to stand in for each other. That is not just the guys like Andreas or Jochen or myself who are responsible for all the region. We have Stephan Unger with financial services who supports all. It's, again, John working together with Karin to make a transfer of best knowledge.

Karin working together with John, supplying technology potentially, which is already used in Europe and then introduced to North America. There's so many interdependencies between each region. I would say that the board at least has to only can be incentivized of the entire company. Local management, if we have local targets, like a fixed cost reduction program in Europe, like get the vocational truck out of the door in high quality and high customer satisfaction in North America, or have the electrification of Japan going forward at a record pace, that you have with such kind of local task, special local incentive, I could see that, and we will be very creative on that and motivate our people. Its importance is that you motivate your people and give the results that the shareholder needs at the end of the day.

Patrick Hummel
Analyst, UBS

Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you very much. The next one in the queue is Stephen Reitman from Societe Generale.

Stephen Reitman
Analyst, Societe Generale

Yes, good afternoon. Stephen Reitman, Societe Generale, London. An observation and a question. First of all, I'd like to congratulate you. I don't think I've ever heard this degree of honesty on presentations about the performance of the European operations, and I'm not sure whether the contents of the poll you gave about the relative positioning of Mercedes would have ever been talked about before by management. That's a very good thing. My question is about electrification. For all the arguments that have been in the past about keeping Daimler as an entire group has been elements of scale. My question is, especially with the separation, you talk about you will bring your scale to bear in electrification, but would there be benefits of having even greater scale if combined purchasing might have been with cars and trucks together?

Are the truck batteries so fundamentally different from those used in the passenger cars and vans? Do you see potentially maybe the joint purchasing still, some JV, with Mercedes cars and vans in the future for securing sales? Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you. Andreas, would you take over?

Andreas Gorbach
Head of Truck Technology, Daimler Truck

Yeah. Very good question, Stephen. Obviously, what we do see as for the early adopters at the moment is usually upscaling Pascal technology as for the availability of it. However, and as said earlier, if you look into the next five to 10 years.

The truck dedication of the technology is really crucial, and then we start really differentiating from Pascal technology. It's similar to a combustion engine. It's both a diesel engine, but you don't find too many synergies between a passenger car diesel and a truck diesel engine. We need different optimization criteria. For us, reliability, durability, fast charging ability are way more important than other characteristics, and this indeed leads to a different cell chemistry. Moving forward, for us, it's rather crucial to partner with other truck players than it is to partner with passenger car players. The same holds then true on the purchasing side.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you, Andreas. We have time for one more set of questions. I'd like to ask Tom Narayan from RBC.

Tom Narayan
Analyst, RBC

Yes. Hi, Tom Narayan, RBC. Thanks for taking the questions. Karin, I understand the challenge you have for you is quite daunting, and you're coming from one of the best truck makers in Europe. Curious what return on sales level you would consider in Europe as benchmark. Maybe you can distinguish between sunny and rainy scenarios. Martin, would you be open to opening up the fuel cell joint venture to other truck makers? The investment you guys have before you is significant. There are suppliers out there also making fuel cell stacks and presumably with advantage since they can sell those fuel cells to anybody. Just wondering if you could open them up perhaps to a competitor that Karin used to work at. Thanks.

Karin Rådström
Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks, Daimler Truck

Yeah, I can start. Well, I think it was mentioned in one of the earlier questions. I think for sure that double-digit margins are possible in Europe. Of course, that's not where we are today. Though with the programs we're running right now, both on the top line and related to cost, I think we will start moving in that direction. Of course, this customer satisfaction level that we had and that I also showed earlier on in my presentation, that's not something you turn around in six months because it takes time to rebuild a strong trust and a strong relation with all of our customers. I think for sure we go for double-digit margins on a medium-term outlook.

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

For the fuel cell question. Let me say, first of all, if you have too many cooks in the kitchen, it takes longer to get the dinner ready than if you have really focused and expert cooks in the kitchen. At the moment, Volvo and us are two great cooks working together, and it's going really amazingly well. We have also a third partner, not as an equity partner, but as a partner who will take sizable chunks of our fuel cell and helps us to reach the necessary scale position, which is Rolls-Royce Power Systems. I won't exclude that once this fuel cell is up and running and can be touched and felt and built into vehicles, that we are open for other manufacturers, that we deliver them fuel cell. Ultimately, we can think of even selling some stakes in it.

I would say this is long-term and speculations here. Therefore, let's summarize like this. We are open to sell these fuel cells to others once Daimler and Volvo have their full supply covered. I would say we have high plans, at the moment, no need for another partner.

Tom Narayan
Analyst, RBC

Okay. Thank you.

Steffen Hoffmann
Head of Investor Relations, Daimler Truck

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for virtually being with us today, and thank you for your questions. We hope you enjoyed the Daimler Truck Strategy Day. Also, a big thank you to the Daimler Truck management team for their presentations and for answering all of these questions. Now, Investor Relations remains at your disposal to answer any further questions you might have. We look forward to talking to you soon. Martin, do you want to have some final remarks?

Martin Daum
CEO, Daimler Truck

Yes, I would. A big thank you from my side to the Daimler Truck management team for being with us today. Thank you for everyone here helping us prepare this exciting event. For my team and myself, I can say it very clearly, we are very excited about what lies ahead of Daimler Truck, we are looking forward to shape this journey as a management team, as we are fully dedicated to the strategy we showed you today. More detailed information will be provided in the course of the next months and at our Capital Markets Day in Q4. Looking forward to seeing you again soon. Take care, and bye-bye.