CMD 2022

Mar 29, 2022

Slides

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Wacker Chemie 2022 Capital Market Day. We're excited to have you all here. Looking forward to a very interactive day. With this, let me hand you over to our CEO, Christian Hartel. Thank you, Jörg. Welcome everybody, ladies and gentlemen, to our Capital Market Day. It's great to see you in person. I think it's a great opportunity for us today to engage with you, and thank you very much for your interest in our company. These are not easy times. They are tough times. We see an unprecedented situation with a war in Europe going on now more than four weeks, till the end of February. We see a lot of suffering in the Ukraine. That fills us with grief, horror and anger. Our hearts are with the people in Ukraine, and we all hope and pray that this war will end soon, very soon. Of course, we do see some political and economic consequences already. Talking about energy prices, for example. That will affect us all here in Europe and probably in the rest of the world. Today is an important day for Wacker. We will present our new targets for this decade, our targets till 2030, and by presenting them, we show you that we listen to our customers, we listen to our investors and the analysts. We listen to you, and we listen, of course, to ourselves, what we can do. In December, we published already our, I will call it our first exclamation mark on sustainability targets. Today, that is the second exclamation mark, if you want. It's about growth and profitability targets. Today we will set course for the next years to come for this decade till 2030. Let's get started. I would like to have in my presentation the aspects of where do we stand, what we achieved, where do we want to go, and of course, how do we get there. Yes, 2021 was an exceptional year. It was a record year. Yes, it is a challenge to build up on a record year, a plan for the future. We did, and we will discuss it today with you. Accelerating proven successes and maintaining resilience, that is our strategy for 2030 going forward, the story of today. I can tell you that every word has been carefully chosen. Accelerating proven successes. Accelerating, we want to have more speed. We want to grow faster than in the past. Proven successes, that stands for, it's not about visual thinking or dreaming, but it's about what we achieved in the past. We want to accelerate in the future, but we have been successful in these stories. Maintaining resilience, that means financial stability and also attractive profitability. Tobias will put more on this part. Creating tomorrow's solutions, that's the slogan we have since years and decades. That's the slogan that inspires us, that drives us forward. I think you see that combination that makes Wacker different. It's that combination of great people we have, of great products and solutions which we offer. It's all and everything for our customers everywhere on this planet, and it's about great assets and offerings, and I truly believe it's that combination that makes us different also to many of our competitors. We are driven by a common purpose. Our solutions make a better world for generations. You know, many people, many companies have a slogan, have a purpose, but I think this one fits extremely well to Wacker. Our solutions make a better world for generations, and I would like to give you an example on this. Our products play a major role in fighting climate change. It's a huge contribution to the renewable power industry. You all know that our annual production of polysilicon could capture 450 million tons of CO2 if you replace conventional electricity production, and that's over the lifetime of a solar cell. We have a big contribution for making this planet a better world. Where would digitalization be without Wacker? Today, it's almost every second computer chip is built with polysilicon from Wacker. Smart construction. You'll hear about this later more from Peter. Smart construction without our products? Almost unthinkable. We have more and more enabling technologies for our customers that are based on renewable raw materials. Of course, last but not least, biopharma, health and wellbeing, the big megatrends where we built our reputation in the last years and the last decade, where we want to grow and contribute. We did our homework, and we do our homework on our own sustainability targets, of course. We talked about them in December. I think what also makes Wacker different is that our products enable our customers really big scale, big time, to become more and more sustainable. Last year, we had our capital market days for the divisions of Biosolutions and Polysilicon. For Biosolutions, you all remember we had a very promising and very ambitious target set out, a billion from bio. For Polysilicon, we are clear number one in the semi and high-end solar market. We will talk about this again, but today is also new on the chemical side for silicones and for polymers, where we have a very strong market position, and we want to accelerate the growth stories we have here. That makes the whole picture for the group complete. Biosolutions, poly, and the chemicals. Coming to the targets, I don't want to wait till the end or wait till the middle of the presentation, but show it right in the beginning of that presentation. What are our targets? We have targets on growth. We want to achieve more than EUR 10 billion sales in 2030, but the very important target is to almost double, 1.5-2 times historic growth on volumes. We have ambitious targets on profitability. This time we also introduced ROSI as a target measure for us, a target measure which also guides us on the topic of investments going forward. You know our target on sustainability. All of these, I think, ambitious, and I think also attractive. Now, let's start with a little wrap-up, if you want, on the part of proven successes. I said it before, proven successes should stand for, this is not only visual thinking, but it's something we achieved in the past, and we want to build on onto this. We started the so-called leverage phase in 2012. Leverage phase, you may recall, it was very much about investing below depreciation. It was about attractive margins, gaining attractive margins, and about cash generation. I think we did our homework on this. If you look at chemicals, the transformation into a truly specialty business, very much so for the silicones but also for polymers, has been achieved in that timeframe. Also, we set the foundation for the growth of our biotech business by acquiring several companies, different sites, and gaining reputation in the market with competence, so we are well respected by our customers. Of course, for polysilicon, with a clear high-end focus on polysilicon, focusing on the high-end markets, but especially focusing on the semi market, and in the last years, doubling our capacities and volumes in that segment. There is more to come. If you dive a little bit deeper into these segments, and let me start with silicones. As we mentioned, the transformation to a specialty supplier, in our view, has been completed. Silicones, I think, are the best material on this planet. They are so versatile, and you can use it for almost every application you can think of. The success from silicones comes from performance. If you talk about performance, what is essential for performance is you need expertise and customer proximity. Otherwise, this performance will never get to the customer and will never be a success in the market. We truly transformed ourselves into the fully integrated player for specialties and silicones. That means that standard products, and you can see that on the slide here, the share of standard products declined over last years very strongly. Standards play no strategic role anymore. Robert will elaborate in the session a little bit more on this, but I can tell you that, yes, we do sell some standard products, but that is mainly for big customers that have a big portfolio of specialty products. It's just an addition. What are standard for us? Standards are typically products which are siloxane plus one, and standards are typical products which you can replace easily. We focus very much on the standards now. In the past, we have a growth factor of 4%-5% in volume, which we will increase. I think what's also amazing about silicones is the sustainability factor. Yes, it is energy intensive to produce silicones, but typically you get 9-10 times the CO2 payback if you use silicones. We grew our business and we grew our margins in silicones. Proven success. Diving a little bit more into the polymer business. Transforming construction industry into smart construction is one of the big topics. The other one is performance-based substitution of other polymer systems. We are the world-class leader in this segment, and there's so much more to do. We are clear number one product-wise, but also capacity-wise. We can show an impressive growth over the last years and also an impressive growth in Asia. We are offering customized solution, customized meaning tailor-made for specific customers, and that is specialty strategy. The growth in the past was about 4%-5% organically in this segment. As you can see, we grew the business strongly and we retained attractive margins. Coming to Biosolutions. Biopharma and bio-ingredients business, as I mentioned, the last year was really the decade of setting the foundation. We acquired several companies. We acquired a site in Spain also for our bio-ingredient business. We built a strong foundation to accelerate our growth. What is even more important, we built up a strong reputation in the market. We jump-started with new technologies like mRNA technology, which we did just more than a year ago. I think also in mRNA, although the CureVac story didn't be that successful because of other reasons, not of us, we are seen as a player in that segment of mRNA. I think that speaks for us and it speaks for our customer proximity to convince our customers that we have the right technology and that we are the right partner going forward. You can see here also the growth and the share of our biotech business in Biosolutions. Coming to polysilicon. In polysilicon, we definitely had tough years behind us, but we always believed in that business, and we worked hard that we can believe in that business. We did everything to make it a success story, and foremost is really a day-to-day hard work on reducing the cost structure. I think that's a very impressive picture, and you all know this picture, what we achieved here, and we will not stand still and work further on our cost. The second real success story, I think, was our very concrete shift to semi applications. In semi, we doubled the capacities in the last years. As I mentioned, we have more than about 50% market share in this segment, making every second computer chip based on our material. The semi shift also reduced the volatility on the business and on the earnings. We will further work on pricing, mix, and portfolio and cost. You see here the development of the last years. Proven successes, leverage phase completed. That was my story just a few minutes ago. Let's talk about this and give it a little bit more evidence and flavor. One of the targets was to gain attractive margins in our chemicals business over the past. Here you can see, I think we did a lot improving our margins for the chemicals business. Yes, 2021 was a record year. Also if you take the years before, 2017 to 2021, as an average, you can see an impressive increase in our margins for the chemicals business. Also you can see, we talk about the ROCE targets, also an impressive development for ROCE for our chemicals business in the last years. The leverage phase also resulted in a strong financial foundation. Again, we don't only want to look at 2021, but also the average years before. You can see a very strong trend if you look at the net cash flow. The same is true for our net cash position, which strongly improved over the last years. I think with that, I would like to conclude this part that we could prove we have success stories, there are proven success stories, and we maintained resilience. We built up resilience, strong foundation to further grow from. Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready for the next step, accelerating our growth going forward, switching gears. We talked a little bit about switching gears. Is that the right picture? Switching gears. Do you have a gear in an electric car? Luckily, I found in very fast electric cars, you do have a gear. Like in the Porsche Taycan, you have at least two gears. Switching gears, I think still is a good picture going forward. We want to accelerate our growth, and we want to do value growth. Where do we want to go, and how do we get there? Now, the key message here is there's a clear customer demand. There's a clear customer pull for this strategy. It's not that we sat together on a green table and said, "What could be a nice growth rate?" It's the growth rate which we deduced, really from the talks with our customers and the demand for products which they need. For chemicals, sustainability is a very strong driver next to innovative and customized solutions. Yes, we do need to invest more, and we will come to that a little later, in order to meet this demand. Chemicals, investing in chemicals will give us a strong financial return, but it will also give a strong CO2 or sustainability return, if you want. For Biosolutions, we set the foundation for further growth, and there's a very strong pull in the market. We see a lot of strong market opportunities. Also here, we want to invest more, and we want to do more on acquisitions going on. For Poly, we want to further strengthen our semi position. We believe there will be strong growth in the semiconductor market, and this will also be accompanied by more investments than in the past, but very much focused on the highly attractive semi market segment. I think if you talk about semi, I think what is really important is the same story for chemicals and for Biosolutions. It's all about customer proximity, which makes the difference. You cannot become the leader in the semi market without having a very strong customer interaction and customer trust. That's the reason why we believe it will be very hard to copy Wacker in the semi field. Sustainability is a key value driver for us. We talked about it, and you all know that at least two-thirds of our portfolio is either directly enabling our customers or supporting our customers with sustainability technologies and helping them to achieve their target. It's about saving water, reducing CO2, using renewable raw material. It's an integral part of our business model, and it's really right back to the roots of this company more than 100 years ago, when we started with hydropower in southeastern Bavaria, with hydropower, green, cheap electricity, making new sustainable products out of that. Last year, we joined also Science Based Targets. We joined the Race to Zero, also to underline, to really show our commitment to sustainability. This year, we also give our clear commitment to the TCFD disclosure program, which we really believe is a good thing to be part of and which we really believe will bring us forward. Now, let's dive a little bit into these segments, and we start with the chemicals division. As I mentioned, silicones are the best man-made material on this planet, I believe. What drives us here is about performance, it's about sustainability and the customer pull. As an example here, you see a picture of a cartridge. Cartridge made with renewable raw materials, which is very much sought after from our customers. A very strong customer pull. By the way, the reason why I give you this example is cartridge business is an excellent example of the shift from standard business to specialty business. In the past, we and other companies sold truckloads of polymer fluids, and somebody else made the cartridge business out of that. Today, we sell very little of these products in tankers. We sell the cartridge. We make the cartridge. It's either Wacker label, where Wacker is on the cartridge, or we do it for customers like Sika or like Würth, which is then a private label business moving from standards to specialties. I think it's impressive example. It's all about performance. Just one example here, hydrophobic cement. Something we invented together with the customer in India, which gives a better performance in humid climate areas. This product helps to save energy in the process. I think another good example of specialty strategy combined with sustainability, combined with customer proximity. Renewable energy. You probably know the example of the windmill. In a windmill, you have about 100 kilogram of fumed silica in it. Fumed silica we call HDK. By the way, HDK is the product we produce ourselves. We are the only player in the market with own HDK technology. We leverage both the divisions from polysilicon and silicones with their waste streams. Out of that, with our own technology, we make HDK. That's something really unique in the market, which gives us benefits on the cost side, which gives us benefits on the ecological side. Then, of course, the trend of e-mobility. Electric vehicles use typically 4 times more silicones than the combustion engines. That's the good news. I think we are well-positioned here. It shows another good thing, the trend we do with our customers. In the past, we have been primarily a Tier 2 and Tier 1 supplier with our silicones. With electromobility, we moved up the ladder and are now a supplier directly to the manufacturing, to the OEMs of car manufacturing. I think, again, that shows you need customer proximity. You need the trust of your customers to be a direct supplier to an OEM. A few examples of where do we want to go to achieve our growth targets. Also here, you have the chance later to discuss more with Robert on these. We want to become the number two in North and Central America. We see there is an opportunity in the market. We see a strong pull from our customers to stronger growth in North America, and therefore we will invest also more in North America. On the top left, you can see our new Ann Arbor R&D center and regional headquarters. We will open it just in a few weeks from now. Below that, you can see our site in Tennessee, where we will invest more on the silicone side to grow the business. We want to become number one in HCR, in heat curing rubber. A big product group, by the way, which consumes 30% HDK of fumed silica, where we have an advantage because we produce it in-house. Also, it's not a coincidence, you see an application here in the medical field. Also from the markets we serve, we believe there's a very strong opportunity. We are number one in India. We want to stay number one in India and want to grow our business strongly in India. We just recently opened a new site on the east coast of India. Also here, a strong focus on HCR, for example. Yes, Asia, we want to strengthen our position in Asia. You all know about our acquisition with SICO, Organofunctional Silanes. I think that's a very convincing step of broadening our technology portfolio, but also broadening our regional presence in the region here, especially in China. Now coming to polymers. Polymers is a lot about customized solutions and proximity to our customers, and that is specialty strategy. It is very much driven by sustainability topics, and we have a lot of global climate policies, like the European Green Deal, where a lot of insulation, for example, in the housing sector, will be addressed. 40% of the CO2 emissions of Europe are coming from the housing sector. We believe with our solutions, we can offer a lot. We see it from our customers, a strong pull, and Peter will give you impressive examples of this in the later session. There are trends like plastic to paper, where we see that our products have advantages. Our products are water-borne, which gives a benefit on the sustainability side, and this trend also helps us. We keep inventing new products, like this aerated mortar, which uses less sand, which uses less cement, which is easier to carry, so less CO2 in the transportation. Where do we want to go for polymers? We want to grow our business. We want to expand our business, the regional presence, more investments in the regions. We want to leverage also on the pricing power, which especially last year, I think was a great success story for us. It was driven by raw material price hikes. I think we established now a very good understanding of how we can better position our products and our pricing in the market. These investments will be very rewarding in our view, based on the performance material we sell. Going forward, we expect, same like silicones, an organic growth of 6%-9% volume-wise, both in silicones and in polymers. Yes, in order to meet these growing demands, we need to do more. We need to invest more. That's a clear statement here. We want to double our CapEx compared to last year's, to more than EUR 400 million in chemicals per year. We believe that's a brave step. Brave, bold, but it's not exaggerated. Always keep in mind, we have a ROSI target which will guide us here. We will have a more resilient and diversified portfolio, and Tobias will talk about it later, and very limited upstream investments. Upstream investments are solely limited to growing our specialty business. Here are the targets for the Chemicals, faster growth, bolder moves, and higher profitability, and the ROSI as a clear investment rule or investment guidance, if you want. Now, coming to Biosolutions. Biosolutions is an extremely fascinating field for us, and I'm excited about it. Susanne is excited about it, and she will also give you more details later. It's a huge potential we believe we can grab in Biosolutions with the basis we've built up in the last years, in the last decade. There are big mega trends, of course, like the advanced medicine, and I mentioned our jumpstart into mRNA technology. Although it's not yet official by the German government, but you might have seen some of these press releases, maybe a little bit too early press releases from the German government, but it's somehow out in the market. Again, it's not yet 100% official. Of course, we've been very excited that we've been picked as a deep player in the mRNA sector for the pandemic preparation plan, by the German government. I think which speaks for the expertise and the competence that we built up in recent years. Yes, there is this big trend of CDMO business of outsourcing in the market where we see ourselves rightly positioned. Yeah, the other big trend and the other big opportunity, not to forget, next to biopharma is bioingredients, where we do interesting projects very much also with partnering. Not so much on our own. Just to mention the artificial meat cooperation we have with Aleph Farms on growth factors for growing these cells. Vitamin B7 with Biosyntia. There are more projects which we cannot disclose today maybe, but we are working on them. The clear target is a billion from bio. That is certainly ambitious, and that also needs strong support from the investment side and also from the M&A side. We talk about EUR 80 million of investment, approximately, per year in this segment. It will be about expanding our sites in León in Spain for the bioingredient business. Fermentation-based materials, ingredients for our customers. It will also be about expansion in Amsterdam for vaccines, proteins, San Diego for plasmid DNA, and Halle in Germany for mRNA. As I mentioned, we rely also on strong collaborations. We have a collaboration on the lipid nanoparticles with CordenPharma, which helps us to broaden our portfolio. I mentioned the vitamin B7 with Biosyntia. Coming to polysilicon. Here, Tobias will also be afterward ready for your questions and ideas. I think we are perfectly positioned in that high-end field of polysilicon. The digitalization drives the chip demand, and we do expect double-digit growth rates also for the next years to come, so it's a fast-growing market. I mentioned the customer interaction is absolutely essential in that segment. You don't get 50% market share by chance. You get it by hard work, by performance, and by convincing your customers. Therefore, it's definitely hard to copy. The solar trend will definitely accelerate and continue because it's the answer for fighting climate change. We positioned ourselves in the very high end of these solar applications. We will see more and more solar coming to the world. By the way, below here you also see some small solar cells. Every spot on that planet is ready for solar. We have a very good sustainability footprint for our products. I think this is something which will definitely also pay out. It's also because, to mention it again, because of our Verbund structure. We have silicones, we have polysilicon, and we have the HDK, the fumed silica. This gives us a benefit cost-wise and sustainability-wise. Where do we want to go with polysilicon? We doubled the volumes in the past on the semi side, and we want to double the volumes again. This doesn't come for free. It comes with an investment, with a higher investment of about EUR 100 million per year for the next years to come. Here again, as a clear guidance for us on margin and on return on capital employed. The group targets for 2030 here. I can click that through. I think it's definitely ambitious. I hope it is clear, and I hope, I believe, we believe it's convincing and attractive targets. This is our commitment for the years to come. The first exclamation mark was our targets on sustainability. On our own footprint, we want to reduce our own CO2 footprint by 50% till the end of the decade. That is definitely ambitious, clear, and I think also convincing. We are working on it, and you can see on the right-hand side a few examples that it's not just text, it is really facts and action that are combined with it. Therefore, Nanjing, Holla or Hilton, just a few examples to mention and this will continue. Again, today, I would like really to send our commitment to the TCFD disclosure project. That brings me to the end of my part. We've set ourselves ambitious and attractive targets, faster growth, bolder moves, and higher profitability. I'm truly convinced that Wacker is a great company with great people for a great future. I would like to thank you for your interest in that company. We will all achieve this while maintaining resilience. Here I hand over to Tobias. Thanks. Welcome, great to see you in person. I'm really excited as Chris is, and perfect handover. He talked about resilience, and I brought you 2 definitions of resilience. Number 1 is the capability of a strained body to recover its shape after deformation. The second is the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. I think we have clearly proven resilient and that through many decades. As you know, Wacker is more than 100 years old. That's the company and the leadership team, as we are present here in London today, we are ambitious and full of energy. Now the ambition is to accelerate proven successes. It is crystal clear that we do have one boundary condition, one commitment that is at maintaining resilience. All this is even more important today than before. We are living in a world of, I would say, unprecedented volatility. As we all know, COVID is not over yet. Might be in London here, but definitely not in China. There's more and more demanding regulation. Supply chains are under severe stress since almost two years now. Raw material and energy markets are at absolutely new highs. What nobody could believe just a couple of weeks ago, there's war in Europe, a terrible war, just very close by. For Wacker, maintaining resilience is about active management. There are four dimensions covering this in our business. This is, number one, our supply. Number two, our sales. Number three, our costs. And number four, our balance sheet. How to manage supply in volatile times, how to mitigate price volatility. First of all, you need to accept the terms. You need to have a toolbox in place for that. You need to have a toolbox in place for that for long-term setups, mitigating volatility. Now our long-term strategies go from LTAs to hedging, but we also backward integrate if required. You need to adjust also with short-term actions for mitigating volatility. Our short-term actions encompass tactical buying or e-auctions, or we also use artificial intelligence, for example, in energy hedging. Going backwards is definitely important. Just look at Silicon Metal as an example. I would say as an excellent example. I think it's a typical bolt-on acquisition of Wacker. We bought it in 2010. I think at a decent price. We made it better, and we made it bigger. We bought it at a decent price. We made it better. We made it bigger. I think it's exactly what we're after in acquiring such an asset. We wanted to have supply stability, and we wanted to have value creation. If I look at our benchmark costs in Europe for Silicon Metal production, I could tell you that we are contributing about a three-digit million EUR performance in 2022. It's about value creation. Looking ahead, that's a great site that we will continue to expand. There's room for expansion, and it's a great site that we will eventually make CO2 neutral, which is an important pillar in our path forward towards neutrality. Now look to sales. Pricing power is crucial. Pricing power is crucial to protect financial performance. I would love to draw your attention to two proven successes here. They're different, but they show the same conviction and ambition that we have. First, polymers. We were faced with unforeseen hikes in raw material prices at the end of first quarter, at beginning of second quarter last year, and that was in the midst of the contracting season. We reacted immediately with the surcharges. We talked about that, we adapted those, and that was so effective that our EBITDA last year was almost flat. Almost flat in absolute terms, despite the key raw material doubling in price. That is polymers. Silicones also was faced with unprecedented raws. That was at the end of the third quarter, beginning of fourth quarter, silicon metal, and energy. That's the difference ahead of a contracting season. We, again, reacted immediately, and we announced a strategic price increase of about 30%. That was so effective that the first quarter, where we still enjoy also trading effects from raw material and energy prices bought in last year, we will see an excellent performance in the first quarter, even overcompensating that headwind. I think in both divisions, it's clear we are price leaders and we do this for stable financial performance, and we want to have stable financial performance because we want to continue investing to serve our customers' needs. A bit on specialty pricing. True specialty pricing goes hand in hand with customer relationships and the customer relationship, the longstanding customer relationships, are the basis for value add pricing. Specialty pricing gives you the desired effects you would love to see in financial performance, get a higher stability and a higher predictability of your sales. In more volatile times, you also need to adjust the specialty pricing. We do this. We go for shorter contract durations. We even have specific raw material and energy clauses or temporary surcharges as we discussed. We do something what is not entirely typical for specialty pricing, we even go formula-based if required. We do this for the resilience of the business. We do this because adjusting our pricing models flexibly is to compensate inflation. Now to cost management. Cost control is key at Wacker and we are continuously focusing on cost management. First, look at the overall cost structure of the organization. Here I would point out the Shape the Future program. That is our efficiency program that we launched at the end of 2019 and in the midst of the first lockdown of the pandemic in 2020, we developed the actions to come up with the savings. This program focuses on indirect spend and on lower headcount. We have achieved EUR 160 million in savings last year. There's EUR 200 million ahead of us and the target is around EUR 250 million in next year. I can tell you that we are on track in this program. This program focuses on all non-operative functions. We also have a longstanding focus on operational efficiency. We talked so often about the rigorous cost roadmap in polysilicon, and I think you should not forget that this is under the umbrella of what we call the Wacker Operating System, WOS, which also encompasses chemicals and Biosolutions. We have this program established now for more than 15 years. 15 years of proven success in delivering savings year-over-year in a very consistent way. Putting all together, supply, sales, and cost results in our balance sheet. The status at the end of last year, at the end of the leverage phase is, I want to point out three items. During the leverage phase, we reduced our capital intensity by investing below depreciation level. You can see. Point number two is we have rigorously managed our working capital, as you can see from the KPI. Just recently, we made great progress also on the DPOs. Third, all this resulted in a position of about EUR 2 billion liquidity at the end of last year and more than EUR 3 billion in equity. All in all, we have a strong balance sheet, and this strong balance sheet is first proving our financial resilience, but it's also a great starting point. It is the foundation for pursuing our growth ambitions. That's where we want to go. Going forward, we want to focus on two items, highly profitable growth, not just growth, highly profitable growth, and shareholder returns. I don't need to repeat what Chris just presented. You have seen the new targets for 2030 for EBITDA margins and ROCE. You will wonder, how do we operationalize this for the next five years? How do we get there? What will be our key actions and interim ambitions? First, on chemicals. We have seen that both silicones and polymers are full specialty suppliers. They have proven resilience, and now we see a strong market pull, both from our innovation and from the sustainability trend. We want to focus on further regionalizing our supply chain. We want to do earning accretive bolt-on acquisitions. The target is to grow, to grow stronger, and that growth should come from volume and mix. That growth should accelerate, as Chris presented. We are targeting at a speed factor of 1.5 to up to 2 times our historical growth rate. For sure, this needs to be nourished by a higher CapEx. We are going for a CapEx doubling in chemicals to historic numbers to more than EUR 400 million per year. We are investing and watching out for our ROCE, which should continue at more than 2 times cost of capital. Our target and our governing ambition for chemicals is highly attractive growth for the next years. Biosolutions is at a different stage of development. As you know, it's still the smallest segment, but we also have a foundation here to be an established partner with proprietary technology. We can focus on investment in innovation with CapEx of more than EUR 80 million per year. We will focus on our established sites. For M&A, the clear message is we will remain disciplined. We will watch out for early-stage bolt-on acquisitions. If you put everything together, organic growth should be about two-thirds of our growth trajectory and inorganic, about one-third. ROCE in this phase will still be below cost of capital as we are investing, and we are just forming a resilient business with highly attractive growth prospects. Polysilicon, we are leveraging our strengths. We are just focusing on investments in semi and cost efficiency. Different to the other segments, we don't have a volume target per se, but we have a target to rather increase the semi share. The key is the portfolio shift to semi. That's where we are investing about EUR 100 million for the next years. For solar, and any opportunity that arises from the shift to renewables and the massive investments and also the discussion about potential regionalization opportunities. We are the biggest player outside China. We are uniquely positioned. We are here already. In any case, if there's a value chain reestablished for solar in the Western Hemisphere, we are one strong pillar of supply. The target is ROCE above cost of capital, and a clear strategy going forward is under the premise, just focus on value. With respect to financial leverage, you all know that we had a stringent target in the leverage phase, which was in the corridor of 0.5-1 times EBITDA. I think this was all in line with the rationale of the leverage phase, which was about deleveraging and improving our financial resilience. Now, after the pandemic year 2020, where we had a strong focus on liquidity and a very strong cash flow, 2021, with a new record set, we are even in a net financial asset position, and we definitely have a strong balance sheet as I showed, and we have a strong starting point. Going forward, we have flexibility. We could go up to 1 times EBITDA, and we would have sufficient headroom to pursue our growth ambitions. Again, the boundary condition of maintaining our financial resilience. Going forward, what are the priorities for capital allocations? In fact, we have two. Number 1 is growth, and number 2 is shareholder returns. Then there's another one, I would call it a priority. It's more a necessity. It's our pensions, which I will also cover briefly. Our investment portfolio is geared towards growth. We are in a strong position, and I think we have a good challenge to have the demand pull from our customers. That's why you can see that the majority of our CapEx will be geared towards high-return growth. There will also be a component for cost and efficiency just to ensure our competitiveness, and we will have a portion as maintenance of business, increased by the focus on sustainability. The clear focus is on high return CapEx, high return growth CapEx, and that means four things to us. Number one is we are accelerating the chemical capacities, in particular, in all regions. There again, that's the idea of resiliency. We want to invest close to our customers, and we want to shorten our supply chains. Number two is we want to, and we will manage a diversified portfolio of downstream projects. Number three is, as Chris said, we are talking about upstream CapEx only for specialty growth. Number four, we are not talking about one thing. There's no major greenfield investment. I assume that you might need some illustration of our investment portfolio to get a better feel for it. We're talking about roughly 40 major projects for the next 5 years, and they are the size of double-digit million to low triple-digit million, and there's only one which is larger, but none is larger than EUR 400 million. If you look at that portfolio, it's obvious that as our investment is strongest in chemicals, that we are talking here about 30 projects and then another 10 in both together, Biosolutions and polysilicon. We are talking about 40 projects. 40 projects means 40 decisions to be taken. I think that's enough to juggle. That's enough to steer flexibly, depending on the return, depending on the urgency, also of the customer pool, and depending also, to be frank, on the resources available to manage such a portfolio as engineer resources are also not greatly available. In other words, it's a great portfolio of opportunities. We have the ability to choose and prioritize, and we will do this in managing our hurdle rates in the sense that the chemicals continue to earn more than 2x cost of capital, which I think is an unmatched performance in the industry. We are really, as a management team here as present today, we are really looking forward to this exercise. Second priority for growing the business is M&A. I think it's easy because it's simple. It's similar to the past. Look at the successful track record of our acquisitions in biopharma, bioingredients, also in specialty silicones. Going forward, the only difference is we want to do more in number and in size, but the approach will remain the same. For Biosolutions, we will focus on early-stage assets. We don't want to spend too much for big sales, for too expensive targets. We want to remain disciplined, and we will remain disciplined. We want to create our own synergies with the acquisitions. That means if you look at top line and earnings, we will see lagging effects of those acquisitions on sales and earnings. For chemicals, it's a bit different. Here, we want to strengthen our market position with focus both on M&As, or we want to extend the value chain. Fit is important to us. Not any chemical. It needs to fit to what we are doing today. Here we rather look at more established businesses and profitable businesses. Ideally, as you can see from the SICO specialty silane transaction that we are going to close in the second quarter this year, it should be immediately earnings accretive. So much for growth as priority. Now to shareholder returns, the second priority. We are here for growing the company, but at the same time, we are here for shareholder returns. In 2016, we defined a new dividend policy. For the past year, we have proposed a dividend of EUR 8 a share. It was a record year, which is a record dividend. It's simply based on our dividend policy of around 50% payout of net income. It's based on our strong liquidity at the end of the year of EUR 2 billion, and it's based on the confidence in the future. The very simple message going forward is we will continue with our dividend policy. Last but not least, in this case, last and least, if that works in English, a short update on pensions, because we've talked often about it, and now we have reduced some of the risks. We paid EUR 250 million in a newly established CTA at the end of last year for so far unfunded pension obligations. That was deducted from our net cash flow, which was still a record cash flow with EUR 760 million. These EUR 250 million create a new plan asset, and this shortens the provisions 1-to-1. In addition, we achieved, end of last year, an agreement with the Workers' Council in Germany. We will modernize our system to a fully funded defined contribution system, and this will be relevant for all new employees and everybody willing to switch over to it. For all who are still in the legacy system, we will introduce new options for capital payouts. When this all gets implemented in the second half, this will further reduce pension liability. Our pension deficit, as you can see, has reduced from EUR 2.6 billion to EUR 1.8 billion. Allow me some modeling hint, pension, as this is a complex topic. Obviously, pensions are debt. IFRS discount rates are or were around 1 percentage point, so much lower than cost of capital. If you do your modeling, deducting financial debt one to one, I think from the enterprise value, it's pretty clear and straightforward. Deducting pension debt, I think you need to take into account that the equity effect of the pension deficit is reduced by deferred tax asset, which is calculated again at a different discount rate. We provide the details for the deferred tax asset, because not what you see in the balance sheet is deducted from equity, but the pension obligation minus the deferred tax asset is deducted from the equity. We provide those numbers, and the net pension deficit is just EUR 1.5 billion, as you can see on the chart. All accounting and modeling aside, pension liability will reduce further and there's moving factors to this. First, with the increase or potential increase in interest rate, there's a sensitivity of each 0.5 percentage point increase would reduce the pension deficit by EUR 0.4 billion. In addition to that, with the modernization of the pension system I discussed, we will expect another EUR 0.2 billion reduction at the end of this year. Over time, pensions should become a smaller burden. We might still need to fund some of the legacy systems, obligations with top-ups, but it's clearly manageable and it's not a priority. Putting all together, while accelerating our proven successes, our focus is on maintaining resilience. We have a clear focus on capital allocation. Number one is to grow the company profitably, and number two is shareholder returns. I think this is the targets that we have run through before, and this is our motto, creating tomorrow's solutions, that has been established for years. Our purpose is our solutions make a better world for generations. That's why we are working here for this company, why it is so exciting, and we are looking forward to your questions. Thank you. Just a quick housekeeping item before we start with the Q&A. There's microphones on every table. Please, when you ask a question, we would appreciate it if you could get up, if you could state your name and affiliation. If you could stick to one question at a time, that would be nice, because then everybody gets to have a turn. Let's start the Q&A. Christian, please. Is there a person? Marcus? Maybe I start, Markus Mayer at Baader Bank. On your ambitious targets, of course, it might be hard to give a phasing, but nevertheless, it would be interesting for model reasons, of course, how this phasing might look like. If, I guess it will be not a linear trend as we have to invest first to get the growth, then more back-end loaded, but nevertheless, would be interested to hear some thoughts from your side. Yeah, I could give you my comment and then maybe some more modeling hints from Tobias. Already this year, our investment budget will be around EUR 550 million-EUR 600 million. That's what we published. It's stepping up already. From the investment portfolio, you could rather call it linear, I would go. As Tobias mentioned, in Biosolutions, there is also what we've shown on the slide, a little delay on that, but I think for the chemicals, it's fair to assume it's a kind of linear thing. Yeah. Sebastian. Hello, Sebastian Bray of Berenberg Bank. Could I ask one on the polysilicon CapEx, please? The EUR 100 million referenced in the slides was said to refer to semi. The press release today indicated it potentially referred to the polysilicon segment as a whole. Can I just double-check? Could you remind me of the maintenance CapEx of the polysilicon segment, and is the EUR 100 million guided for the next four or five years in addition to this, or does it refer to the total CapEx for this segment? Thank you. I mean, the better details. An overview is the EUR 100 million is very much focused on the semi side. There will be some also, of course, on the maintenance of business, but that is much lower. Yeah, EUR 30 million-EUR 40 million. Yeah. Could you use the reference here compared to the past years for me? Just to double-check, if I say EUR 140 million for the next few years for that segment, is that reasonable? Am I warm or? Okay. Thank you. The key message is really the investment. The higher investment amount for the years to come will be focused very much on the semi side. I mean, that's the key message, and that's the EUR 100 million. Capital allocation would be impacted by proceeds from Siltronic. If that's built into the- No, I mean, as Tobias pointed out, we have a very strong liquidity. We have a strong balance sheet. We are in a position to finance all these investments. There's no correlation with the Siltronic proceeds. We will still continue this and follow this strategic decision to get out of Siltronic. There's no rush in doing so, as we have a very strong financial foundation. Sorry, any proceeds would be continued with a capital allocation plan of M&A and growth followed by returns. Wouldn't change it. Yeah. Wouldn't change it. Charlie Webb, Morgan Stanley. Maybe just one on silicones. You kind of pointed out in the slides earlier, 2012 to 2021, obviously a meaningful step up in profitability. That very much coincides, obviously, with your increase in specialization, but also with the underlying market also improved a lot in silicones. Just trying to disaggregate how much of that improvement to where we are today in silicones profitability would you put down to the specialty push versus the improvement in the market dynamics as a whole? Because it'd be good to get a sense on how you see that's going to evolve from here, because obviously a lot of questions out there. Are we at peak profitability in silicones as a whole, downstream benefiting from tied upstream versus, strategically, you pushing down the specialty route? Well, I can't give you an exact calculation on the business, the Excel sheet you probably want to have on that. What I can tell you is the growth we've seen, both the growth and the rise in profitability in our side, was extremely much driven on the specialty side. The year 2018 had a, you can call it maybe special effect because of very high prices for silicones. It's also on the standard side. Showing with our slide, I mean, with the 85% now of being specialties, the exposure to the standard market is not really that relevant anymore. It's really driven by specialties and the underlying market. Maybe just to kind of follow up. I mean, how would you say there's a tangible benefit from the merger of DowDuPont and what happened there in terms of splitting up the business? Have you, as Wacker, benefited in terms of taking market share? Has that improved your market position? I think in a situation where companies merge or dismantle themselves to some extent, you always have a chance in the market being the resilient, strong, and customer-focused player. Thank you. Hi, Chetan from JPMorgan. I mean, I was curious. I've seen these slides, market growth presentations in the past from Wacker, and it was always thought to be more opportunities for the future. I'm curious, what is driving this 1.5-2 times growth uplift target today? Because some of these opportunities were discussed maybe even three years back, five years back. I'm just thinking, is it the current momentum that you see in your numbers, in your demand that is driving that uplift? Or you see tangible signs for the first time in five years that this 1.5-2 times is more reliable today than it was in the past? I'm asking this question because today Q1 last year was strong across the board for the whole chemical industry. When you speak to any company today, they are all bullish. I'm just trying to understand what is different here. As we said, Chetan, there is a very strong demand we see from our customers. I think what changed substantially in the last years is the drive from the sustainability aspect. It's the performance that has always been there. I think also in that respect, performance is getting more and more important and silicones have an advantage to many other product groups in the world. The topic of sustainability is really something which grew much stronger in recent years. That's the feedback we really get from our customers, both on the silicone side and on the polymer side. That's the reason why we definitely believe there is a higher growth rate to expect in the future. You can discuss it also then with the division heads to get a first-hand impression of that. Andreas Heine from Stifel. I would like to know, understand a little bit more these upstream and downstream investments. Most of the investment you highlighted will be downstream, but if you grow these 6%-10% in silicones- Mm-hmm. At one point, you will reach your siloxane capacity. Mm-hmm. What's the strategy in that? It's, I think, kind of no-brainer in these markets to invest in Silicon Metal, in Holla, which obviously is also upstream. Maybe you can highlight what your target is in being backward integrated into Silicon Metal. Lastly, also on this upstream, downstream in polysilicon, the EUR 100 million is quite an investment. My understanding is if you go to semi, then you can still use the same reactors, but you have to do some more purification or after treatment or whatever it is. Also there, you probably have at one point then to invest in reactors or is that enough, this EUR 100 million to just have the aftertreatment? Okay. Andreas, maybe I start with the third question on the polysilicon. Again, you can also use the opportunity later to get more into details with Tobias on that. Yes, we do have enough capacity on the reactor side. Almost all of these are capable of producing semi material, but the semi material needs also purification on the outside of the material. We can tweak the process to get poly material out of the reactor, unlike many of our competitors. Then we have a second step of further purification, and that is mainly where that investment of EUR 100 million will go into that. For semi, we don't need to invest into new reactors, to be a clear answer on that. First part was on the siloxane expansion. Yes, there will be a point in time where we do need more, I will rather call it specialty precursors, and big part of that is siloxane. I'm not afraid to use the word siloxane. Unlike in the past, the strategy for many companies, also for Wacker more than a decade ago, was focus on the siloxane and then see what you can do with it. Whereas now our clear strategy is, what is our specialty portfolio and how much siloxane and other silanes and other byproducts which you also need. It's not just about buying siloxane. That wouldn't help. You need a bunch of chemicals, and siloxane is the biggest part of it. But you also need to produce these others. Our calculation then is really when is the point? When do we need them? Then we are also in a position that we don't need to make a big greenfield investment for that, but we are in the position that our existing sites, we can debottleneck or call it a bigger debottlenecking, whatever you want to call it, but it's not a greenfield investment in order to get sufficient and stepwise volumes of these specialty precursors. Third part of the question was on Holla, on silicon metal, and as Tobias pointed out, I think very attractive for us in the past, a very attractive acquisition, and then we expanded it. It gives us now about 25%-30% of backward integration. Yes, we are planning on expanding further, both on the aspect of cost performance, which we see now, but also on the aspect of sustainability performance. Target? How much percentage you would like to be backward? A third is good. We could do more, and I'm coming back to the portfolio of the investment opportunities that we need to manage this flexibly, so we can't do everything at the same time. For our target, maintaining financial resilience, prudent in that sense, but we would definitely love to keep a share of 30% or a third of our supply need. Hi, Ranulf Orr from Citigroup. If we take your low end of your chemicals target of, I think, 6%-10%, and the EUR 1 billion Biosolutions by 2030, I think that implies a top-line growth in polysilicon of about 2%. Is this a reasonable assumption? Presumably, if you're not building any more reactors, this is all going to be price mix driven. Is that reasonable? It definitely is more than EUR 10 billion for the group. The more is the open-end. It depends on the polysilicon division's performance. We are highly confident on that mix shift towards semi, and the financial performance is more or less also derived from that stability of financial value. That's why we are investing in that. The question is, what will be the earnings of the remaining piece? Could be much higher as it was in last year, as it is in this year. Don't get too much into the modeling of what does it mean for polysilicon if you come from the group number. That would be my recommendation. Okay. I might follow up just very quickly on the remaining technology in solar. What's your view of the technology? Are you stepping away from it, and why might that be? Is it that Chinese competitors might be catching up on N-type technology? No, we are not stepping away from it. We have a very strong position in the high-end market of solar. We are seeing a strong demand. We are fully sold out. We are getting a price premium. That's something Tobias could also talk about later at the tables. We are here. As we have experienced in the past, this market These fluctuations, we see a continued trend towards more installations. This year should be more than 200 gigawatts, and the trend towards the high-end spectrum will continue. It will be N-type, and N-type is closer to semiconductor, and that's why we always say, at the end of the day, solar, if you think it through, could also become sort of a design rule race, and the purity of the starter material of polysilicon could be of vital importance. It's difficult to model, I would say. Thank you. Sebastian Satz from Barclays. Similar question, actually, also on the 30% polysilicon margin. Even in 2030, you're likely to still have a very high share of solar. If I look at the margin target versus your past few years, it looks quite ambitious, bearing in mind where you are on the cost curve relative to some of your Chinese competitors. Could you give us just a little bit more detail on the mix by 2030, solar versus semi, and just the assumptions that you're making to get to such a high margin? I think we would still sell the majority to solar, just because of the limitations of the size of the semi market. As we have described, our ambition is to double semi volumes again, what we achieved over the last 5 years, over the next, I think, up to 2030, to double it, and then you get close to, I think, a good 1/3 of the capacity or almost 1/2. Almost half? Almost half. Yeah. On the margin in solar and your position on the cost curve, how do you think about that? I think we are absolute efficiency leader. For that reason, it depends on the factor costs, and I think we will continue as we did. We focus on cost reduction. Also in a year, as last year and this year, when profitability is high, we rigorously reduce our costs and improve our efficiencies. There's more to go. We have the target to reduce by another 30%. Mm-hmm. Thomas Swoboda from Société Générale. Slightly different question. Cash flow. You haven't mentioned it in your prepared remarks. You obviously have enough money to finance all what you have mentioned, but what is the general idea? Do you want to finance your CapEx and the divvy from the recurring cash flow, or is the plan to tap into your reserves from the beginning on? If you do the equation on the financial leverage, we are right now in net financial asset position, and if you would move up and use that flexibility to go to 1 times EBITDA, it's obvious that it would also increase our debt. We are committed to a strong cash flow. We have an ambitious CapEx program ahead of us, but we are also committed. As I said, the second pillar of our capital allocation is to pay a dividend in line with our dividend policy of 50% payout. Yeah. Yeah. Michael Schäfer, ODDO BHF. Question on your chemicals margin outlook. You presented this on a combined basis for both chemicals segments, basically. Is there also a structural element to the polymers, where you see basically an upward trend in margins? It has been rather volatile over the past, too, as a mechanical dilution effect. We all know about this one. Is there something which we should think about until 2030 in this segment? We are also looking for improving our portfolio. What should drive us have chemicals in total at a margin of more than 20%. We see the opportunities in polymers, as Tobias said, especially on the poly side, and Peter can talk more on this, especially if you talk about dispersible powders. I think we are in a very unique position here, and create value for our customers, and that will have an impact also on the pricing structure. Obviously, the value chain is a bit shorter, and that's why it's more ambitious for polymers than for silicones. Mm-hmm. On the other hand, the return on capital employed is. Mm-hmm ... highly attractive for everything. If you put it together, we have shown that we earn more than 2x cost of capital for that business. Hi, it's Jaip from On Field. I guess the first question is really, the German government did not give you the green light on Siltronic, which means they think it is strategic. On the flip side, you're not getting any love on electricity prices compared to China. Do you think that your bargaining power with the authorities has somewhat changed and, at EUR 0.25, even there, you ought to get some support from the government if EU is at all serious about not creating a second Russia situation on solar. Mm-hmm. That's my first question. Okay, that's a difficult question, Jaip. I mean, the question is essentially what kind of leverage do we have against the German government? I don't know. But what I can tell you is that, of course, we do a lot, not only on ourselves, but much more together with the Association of the Chemical Industry in Germany on promoting globally competitive power pricing, because I think this is absolutely essential for the chemical industry, but also for other industry where Germany today has a very strong position, and this position is absolutely in danger if nothing happens. There have been clear statements before the elections and during the elections on the German government, they want to do something. They talk about the so-called Easter Package, which should be disclosed soon, because Easter is coming. They talk about a summer package. I think with this horrible Ukraine conflict, the whole thing speeds up. I cannot, because I don't know any details today. I think my impression is at least that the German government understood the necessity to act here in order to really protect the biggest asset of the country of Germany, which is the industry. Just on semi-grade plans. Mm-hmm which obviously at least I'm very happy about. We are also. Yeah. We are also. Could you just say, when do you expect Sumco to completely destock? And are you calculating your market share ex Sumco or including Sumco? No, I bet that we will do that later at the tables. Yeah. I think you hit a point. The market was smaller because Sumco had so much on stock. But we are happy to serve all customers. I think that is the simple answer. Any growth opportunities that are out, we are trying to follow with our investments. The next question is from Rikin Patel from BNP. Thanks. Just a question on Biosolutions. You've spoken about the CapEx and M&A opportunities. If we look at R&D, it's been fairly low versus other peers in CDMO over the last couple of years. Should we be expecting a big step up over the next, say, 5-10 years in R&D? For Biosolutions, yes, definitely. That's what we're doing. Also we are building a new research lab in Munich at the consortium, the Munich Biotech Cluster, which is a clear commitment to investing more into R&D in that field, Biosolutions. More to come. As we are about to move into the second stage of today's CMD. The last question from Geoff. Geoff. Yep. No? We got to go. All right. Geoff Haire from UBS. Obviously, in the last 6-9 months, you've benefited greatly from the pricing power that you've had, particularly as raw material prices go up, and some of that has been surcharges. Mm-hmm ... in silicones and polymers. When we get, hopefully, a normalization of energy prices and raw material prices, whenever that may be, how much of that do you expect to keep? Because I'm assuming with the targets you're putting out of 6%-10% top line growth, you expect to keep quite a bit of it. Well, the 6%-9% growth factor, that is based on volume. Actually, that is not including- Volume and mix Hmm? Volume and mix. Volume and mix. That's not based on the pricing side. To answer your question, we want to keep as much as we can and as much as we can convince our customers. Something probably good also to talk to our colleagues from the division. Keep in mind, typically our products are just a minor part of the investments or the costs our customers have in promoting their products. We will definitely focus on selling that performance aspect of it and, therefore, try to keep prices high. Last question from Sean. Thank you. Sean McLoughlin, HSBC. Coming back to electricity pricing, I noticed there was a slide where you talked about more renewable PPAs. What is your strategy looking at your power procurement in Germany over the next 6 months, 12 months and out to 2030? As I discussed in one of the slides on maintaining resilience, we have a clear hedging strategy for energy. That has been established for years. We have a rolling hedging approach, which goes three years out. Obviously, the first year is hedged the highest level, then second lower, and third lowest. For the current year, we hedged more than two-thirds. To all our guests on the webcast, thank you very much for the interest. This concludes today's presentation.