Thank you very, very much, and a very warm welcome to all of you. Yes, we appreciate, of course, if you switch on your video.

We're a photo company, Sirka, right? We're living in pictures, and video is part of that.

Thanks, Robert, for doing so. We appreciate it very much.

Welcome to this Q1 earnings call. Sirka, we have a very special earnings call

this morning. Yes, I guess we made our first quarter quite exciting.

Yes, I hope so. This is why, when we look at the agenda, we start with latest news hot off the press, to speak.

You probably have all noticed our communication, which we pushed out yesterday. We had to push out yesterday, actually, because we concluded a deal in the commercial online-print.

Then we go through the results, the corporate development, financial details, and it will be followed, as always, by a Q&A session. Let's start with what we have communicated yesterday.

We are in the process of selling our commercial online-print business segment. We took the decision to to sell it.

We signed the deal yesterday, and we are in the period now to wait for the closing of that deal. What is our commercial online-print business segment?

That is the business segment with the brands Saxoprint, viaprinto, and Laserline. These are brands which help people to print their business cards, their brochures, their flyers, their flag backs, basically promotional material in a wider range.

What we do basically is either large format or paper-based printing business there. Just let me go through a little bit of the of the rationale here.

What does it mean? It means focus.

This is the main message we want to convey here. We want to focus on our core segment, which is photofinishing.

We're the leader of premium photofinishing products. With this deal, we want to focus management attention, but also capital, to grow organically—and non-organically, we come to that one—our photofinishing business.

That is the main rationale for why are we doing that. Also, we are increasing profitability.

On a pro forma basis, looking back at 2025 figures here, we took out the commercial online-print division out of our figures, and it would be roughly one percentage point of margin increase, which we are having here. Also, our return on capital employed will create increase significantly by two percentage points on a pro forma basis in 2025.

This deal gives us focus, but gives better profitability as well. We will have a cash inflow.

We will come to the metrics of the deal in a second. We will have a cash inflow.

We did not sell it for €1. We will have a cash inflow.

How do we use that cash inflow? We want to use it in a value-oriented matter.

The strategic priority, as pointed out in the first point, is the photofinishing business. We want to continue to invest in technology, efficiency, our brands.

We're really the brand leader in photofinishing. As you all know, and you've heard from us, and we are we are confirming that one through selective, value-enhancing acquisitions.

We we're not trying to do acquisitions for the sake of doing acquisitions. We want to do acquisitions that really make sense.

We tend to say deep pockets, short hands. We really will focus there as well.

You can expect from us the continuation of our share buyback program and also the dividend payout. You will come to that in a second, Sirka.

We remain one of the very few leaders of constantly increasing dividends here. This is something you can expect from us as well.

Looking a a little bit deeper into the transaction. Whom are we selling it to?

It's the company called Cimpress. Most of you would know it from the brand Vistaprint.

If you're German-based, you might have heard of wir-machen-druck.de, which is a a website where they basically do the same business like we're doing. For them, it makes a lot of sense.

It really makes a lot of sense, because in Germany they do not own a production yet. They print at third parties mainly.

I can see, I mean at the end of the day you have to ask them in their quarterly call, but at the end of the day it makes a lot of sense for them, because with the acquisition they not only gain revenue, but they also gain the capabilities of a very efficient production, and they can use this production to print their own products there. It makes a lot of sense to them.

This is why they take over all the 544 employees that we have in this business division. It will be taken over.

We have to say they're the global market leader. We have always discussed the topic that this is a consolidating market.

They will be able to produce more efficiently. We can also say, well, we are quite proud that what we have built over the last decade, a little bit more than a decade actually, was so attractive that the world market leader actually had a high interest in in acquiring this business segment.

Looking into the the transaction there. Now this is the Okay, sorry about this one.

First let's talk about the [inaudible?] .

Let's look back a little bit. We have a bit of confusion, but it doesn't really matter here.

Where were we coming from? If you look back in 2009, so that's a long time back, we know that, sorry about this one, but it made sense to think about something like commercial online-print.

What was the situation we were in? We were not able to grow the photofinishing business at that point in time.

We had capacity in in digital print. That was the start in in 2009.

We wanted to leverage also the brand that we had built for the commercial online-print. You all might remember that we tried with ceweprint.de.

These were moves we made there. It seemed appropriate, let's put it that way, to establish commercial online-print as a new business unit.

This has changed a little bit. That what we did in the photofinishing, we really grew that business through acquisition, organically, through regional expansion.

We really grew that business, and we didn't grow the commercial online-print to a, let's say, balancing second leg that you would stand on. What we are in right now is a business with a consumer-oriented photofinishing.

We have double-digit margins in the consumer-oriented photofinishing. It's our growth driver, but it's also our margin driver, very clearly.

The commercial online-print is just clearly a very different business. It's a price-driven segment, it's B2B-oriented.

We cannot leverage our brand. We cannot leverage our B2C capabilities as much as we hoped for, let's put it that way.

We also, were in front of this decision to say, okay, do we invest more into that? Because scale matters really in the commercial online-print, and this is the decision we took.

We said no, we focus on photofinishing. We don't want to dilute this because scaling in commercial online-print would have meant a significant investment, and it would not have it would not had allowed us to to significantly invest into photofinishing.

It was really a, it was like a turning point for us, and we took a really strategic decision here. Now, sorry about this one, coming to the transaction details.

Obviously, we did sign yesterday, but the closing is depending to the typical conditions, mainly antitrust approvals. We expect it to take place during the second half of the year 2026.

You might ask us, okay, how much did you get at the end? We have agreed not to disclose that that price, but we can tell you we managed to sell it for a higher price than our book values.

You see that in the in the last bullet here. We expect to generate a gain from the sale of the of this business segment in the mid double-digit million euro range.

It's a bit complicated there, but it was a, let's put it this way quite frankly, it was a good deal. It was really a good deal.

We managed to really get back a significant portion more than what we had in the in the books. We will receive a cash inflow.

I I referred to that as as well. Just for you to remember, what was the turnover?

It was close to €90 million. We had an EBITDA of €8.9 million, an EBIT of €1.7 million, and EBT of €0.9 million.

That was that's basically what we are going to divest. What can you expect in our figures?

Now, or yesterday, let's put it that way, with the signing, we will separate the commercial online-print from our consolidated income statement. IFRS is telling us to to do so.

We continue to to report the segment with the COP segment and group totals with and without commercial online-print. You can expect us to do so.

We need to do it. We expect closing, as said, in second half of of '26.

Then we will deconsolidate—deconsolidate, it's an interesting word—deconsolidate the commercial online-print, and of course with the recognition of the gain of disposal. We will also adjust our segment reporting accordingly.

This is something you can expect from us. Just for you to to get a sense of what's happening with the group, and and we did this based on, of course, a full year, and the only full year we're having is the year '25.

We did this on a pro forma—it's really pro forma display here—with the consolidated financial statement from '25. Our turnover, obviously because we are selling a whole business segment here, will decrease to 777.0—oh, that's an interesting figure, it's not a Boeing jet here.

It would be the turnover figure from last year. The EBIT would decrease slightly as well.

Profitability, as mentioned, would go up by one percentage point, and our ROCE, as mentioned, would go up by two percentage points without the commercial online-print. Our target ranges, obviously we had to adjust as well for '26.

The revenue that we project now is between €780 and €810 million, and the EBIT between €85 and €91 million. Here you can see it on a long-term range again.

You can see the famous chart. We still call it internally the Olaf chart, just in in accordance with our old CFO who who invented this chart.

We see the long-term growth path to be continued into '26, and the story remains very intact, and very solid, and even more compelling, even more compelling without the commercial online-print segment here. Here you can see what what we have just mentioned.

The group EBIT without commercial online-print, this is the new target range, €85 to €91 million. This is something which we will expect for the year 2026.

Here we you can see our new targets, and which is very important. You can see the commercial online-print had nothing to do with photos, had nothing to do with the CEWE PHOTOBOOK there.

You can you can see the previous year figures on the left-hand side, previous year '25 including commercial online-print, the old target including commercial online-print, then the pro forma figures of the year '25 without the commercial online-print and the new targets. We talked about revenue and EBIT already.

I just stress the the fact that it doesn't change anything in terms of photos, it doesn't change anything in in terms of CEWE PHOTOBOOK. The EBIT effect here you can you can see, this is very important to know, is 85 to to 91.

The EBT here, and this is is without the and the earning of of tax is without the one-time effect, and we will come to this one, which we were expecting from the commercial online-print, right? This is the target without commercial online-print.

We have a nice chart which will illustrate what's happening with the with the earnings after tax and what's happening with the earnings per share. I think this is about to follow, yes.

Here you can see our earnings after tax, the new range which we're going to expect from the business segments to be continued, from 58 to 57 to 62. We will have an earnings after tax resulting from the sale of the discontinued segment of commercial online-print, which is actually quite significant.

We are not going to comment in detail on that, but just by the size of the box we were trying here to illustrate, you can probably deduct a little bit of what to expect here. The same is true for the earnings per share, obviously, right?

Now let's let's come to this one. This is again just confirming the strategic rationale of of this transaction.

The strategic positioning of the CEWE Group is 100% focused on photofinishing. We will really entirely focus the the whole group on photofinishing with clear objectives.

They have not changed by this transaction, not at all, but we will be able to give it more focus. Focus means management attention, but means also capital allocation here.

We want to scale across production, logistics, and IT. Scaling is very important, we discussed that.

We have a premium brand strategy. We're quite successful with the premium brand strategy.

It allows us to generate a lot higher margin than other, let's say, printers, and we would love to call them printers just to make that difference. We will continue to invest in innovation.

We will continue to invest in in technology. We will use this investment to automate more, to standardize more, and to gain more speed.

We think this is a really important USP of our brands here. We will also continue to look at acquisitions like we did before.

Basically all the brands which you see, Pixum, WhiteWall, DeinDesign, Cheerz, have been acquired in the in the past, I would say, 20 or 18 years, in the past 18 years, and we will continue to do so. We will continue to look for for acquisitions which make a lot of sense to us.

That the segment is not too big, we have to be very selective here. Also that we do not have like an M&A department consisting of dozens of people, we need to make very smart choices on whom to acquire and how to acquire and when to acquire.

You can expect that we are on it. This should result everything together in the continuation of our growth momentum, and definitely we will look after our margins.

This being said, these are the news hot off the press from from yesterday. I wanted to elaborate a little bit further on this one.

I I probably would expect the Q&A session rather is circling around this question here. You can imagine it's really important.

It's probably the most important change in strategy since we started that that segment here. Let's come to to Q1.

Q1 is it's the first quarter. Oh, that was a military plane just above us.

I don't know if you heard that. Sorry about this one.

Let's come to the results of the of the first quarter in a nutshell. As always, we want to inform you about a couple of developments which are very important as well.

Group turnover grew by 1.4% or €2.4 million. The group EBIT reached €5.6 million as planned.

There are a couple of reasons behind that, and Sirka will come to it in in more detail. One is a change we made to our DeinDesign division.

We went into slight change of business model. I will explain that on a on a chart later, which is about 300,000k in the first quarter.

Also, we were able to basically swallow, and this will be almost the last quarter where we can see this effect in in this magnitude, our new tariff union contract, because actually we're comparing a, let's say, a new cost level here on our personal cost with a quarter which did not have the same cost level here. This is why we're saying we're quite in line with what we're seeing here.

This is why we're also saying we are confirming our targets for '26 on the revenue as well as on the EBIT. In photofinishing, and as always, we're quite proud.

Innovation is a key driver in this segment. If we want to continue with our premium brands, we need innovation.

We need distinctions to other market player. We need distincts to just the usual photobook.

This is something which we're pursuing. This product already, but what you don't know is that we received an award for it.

That's the memento pocket. We we see we were surprised, I think I commented that already in in one of the calls.

We were surprised actually by the success of that. It's a very simple product.

It's just just a pocket at the end of the day in a CEWE PHOTOBOOK where you can put on remembrance like, I don't know, like a menu card from your wedding, for example, or boarding pass from your travel, or something like this. Very simple, good margin, because it's just something which basically we glue into into the CEWE PHOTOBOOK at the end of the CEWE PHOTOBOOK, but does create a lot of value for our consumers and they love it.

We also did did receive an award. You always think you can't innovate on the calendar segment, but you can.

This is It looks more like a wall art and and it's a size which is astonishing. It's really a wall art if you put that up to your wall.

I would say the calendar kind of goes into the background, the calendar function. It's more the picture there.

It's one of the largest calendars you can order in the in the market. Very interestingly here, you know that we that we are pursuing an omnichannel strategy.

That our retail partners really are at the core of what we're doing. This you see in the background a CEWE Photostation, which is usually placed in drugstores, or grocery stores, and where people go to print.

The question is, how do you transmit your photos, right? There's the cable, very traditional, but it works quite well, right?

Sometimes you have to stand in line. I don't know if you've ever managed to to look just before Christmas into one of these stores.

People really stand in line, then they connect their smartphones, select their pictures, and so on. Some of them, especially when standing in line, have some privacy issues to say, okay, is somebody looking over my shoulders?

What we did here is we we built an app, CEWE Online Direct, we called it 2.0, where you can with a QR code very simply just transmit your photos to the CEWE Photostation. Very easily, you can prepare everything while sitting in the bus or standing somewhere else, and and and so on.

It does allow us, and that's also very important, it does allow us also to get access to the apps of our retail partners. That the dm app, you just, dm is a is a large German drugstore chain, is very, very popular, millions of downloads, used by millions of people because their their customer loyalty program is based on that one.

Even payment functions are built in there. We can basically put a photo function into their app.

Very smart, very nice. Also this seems to be like an IT kind of thing here, like Shopify lab connection, sounds very IT-ish.

It is, but it's in what it does, it's not. We know that marketing of product has changed a lot over time.

You see that in the music industry, for example, where you can see artists that don't use a label anymore. They use platform like YouTube, for example, or just Instagram, or TikTok to become famous.

The same is true for photographers. In in in former times, photographers, if you're a professional photographer and wanted to sell your your photos, you needed a gallery, right?

A gallery really to at the end of the day as an intermediate to to sell your pictures. A lot of photographers don't use a gallery anymore.

They market their pictures via Instagram. They have an web shop in order to sell their pictures.

What do you sell? NFT really did not come through that much, you actually sell printed pictures, right, printed photos.

How do you do that as a photographer? What are you doing?

Are you ordering that at, let's say, WhiteWall or CEWE, and you put it into your garage, and if somebody calls you up, and then you send it out to the US, to Japan, to Europe? How do you handle logistics?

How do you handle customs and all of that? That's something we can do.

What we built is an app that can integrate in Shopify. Shopify, one of the most used technology platform for photographers to build their web shops with.

It just plugs in, and they can define, okay, I have an I have this picture, I have an edition of 10 or 50 or 100, I want to have sell it in this size, I want to sell it with this frame, and we handle the rest. We handle logistics.

We print it on demand, there's no risk for them, and so on. It's branded, it's it's quite neat, and we see a lot of future for for this one in our relationship with our photographers.

I did not mention that we got a TIPA Award for it, but we got a TIPA Award for it, so as we did for all the others. Last but certainly not least, and I commented on that one because it's a little bit the reason for not reaching the previous year EBIT figures here, because we did invest a little bit into into the change of DeinDesign.

DeinDesign is our specialist for smartphone cases, and you see them here. In the past, we concentrated on the value of a photo on a case, right?

Sounds logical to you, right, or a design on a case, or something like this. We saw the market changing quite significantly, and we saw that the value is not only by the case by the picture on the case, but also by the case itself.

This is a little bit different to what you see maybe on paper. Like, if we print something on a paper and we create a CEWE PHOTOBOOK from it, then the paper already gets a totally different value.

This is not so much the case for smartphone cases, because the primarily target is you want a smartphone case to protect your smartphone. We said, well, the quality of what we had in smartphone cases was good, but was not outstanding.

People said, okay, it's nice that I can print a Disney design on it, or that I can print a photo on it, that is quite good. The smartphone case you're using for it, I can actually get for €7 at Amazon, or €5 at Shein, and and so on.

We said we need an own range of cases which are really outstanding, which at the end of the day support our premiumness of our brand strategy here. You can see that range.

We also, in addition to sell that printed with a photo, we also say, okay, this is a good range, we can also sell without pictures. This is an investment we did.

This is why we needed a different name. It's Nivo case by DeinDesign.

I invite you all to go to this website, look at it. Really great product.

We don't have a smartphone here, but I can assure you very, very, very nice and premium product together with the nice picture. This was my elaboration of what had happened in the past months, and I hand over to Sirka to let her tell what that meant in figures.

Thank you very much, Thomas. Let's get back to numbers.

Let's start again with the photofinishing, which is our core of the business. If you look into what happened with our turnover, you can see that there's a moderate growth.

The moderate growth means here we have a turnover increase by 1.7%. If we anticipate what's going on in the different economies, I guess even for a first quarter we can be quite satisfied with it, and especially also because we again followed the trend that we have a volume growth.

This is always good, and we will also later see what products drive these development. If we look into the EBIT, you can see that, and Thomas mentioned it already, that the EBIT mainly contributed from the photofinishing here for the group EBIT.

So €5.1 million coming out of the photofinishing, which is compared to the last year's first quarter half a million less. This is by €300,000 driven by the adjustments into the business model of DeinDesign.

We redeveloped the web shop. We invested, and of course the business, while this transition is happening, we've seen of course less turnover, less results of course, and this is also our investment into the new business model of the DeinDesign, the Nivo case as core product, and we will monitor and watch the developments in the next months quite closely.

Also we have one of our board members acting also as a managing director for that business, we are very close watching the developments here. All in all, we would say a successful start to the year.

We also see a continuous increase of our cost basis, personnel costs plus marketing costs, especially also to support our turnover in the international markets. This is here reflected in the EBIT.

If we would extract the special effect of DeinDesign, we would see a comparable situation compared to last year. If we have a specific view on the turnover development of the quarters, you can see that traditionally the first quarter is the second or nearly the third best of the year, we are still having a bit the flow of the last season.

We can see that we ended up within our expectation for the first quarter. Also in terms of EBIT, we are in the expected range of the quarter.

If we look into the number of prints, I mentioned it earlier, there is a good development of the total prints in millions. A continuing growth, and also the value per photo is growing, and that's ending up in a turnover of the photofinishing, which is positive.

Our core product, the photobook, we can see that the volume continues to grow in the first quarter by 2.2%, and also due to a lot of new features, a lot of new product addings, like the pocket at the back or the other premiumization standards like different paper quality, different covers. This is feeding again also the turnover of our core product.

Please have a look. It's really great also with the new coffee, and then also the new colors of the covers.

It's really great. Commercial online printing, we start repeating a bit what is containing to our commercial online print segment.

It's with a setup with three brands. We have the viaprinto, SAXOPRINT, and Laserline.

It's still on board, of course, so that we are also having a look into the performance, which is not too bad. Especially if you anticipate the market development.

The market is still under pressure, we have a high competitive environment. Also, of course, it's if you have a commodity product, it's following also the trend here that the price is the driver.

This is what you can see here also in the results, slightly shrinking, but turnover-wise not too bad, especially if you see how the market is developing. The retail segment is also, I'm repeating a bit what we also presented last time.

We have 101 stationary photo retail stores, especially in Scandinavia, Central Eastern Europe, e-commerce web shops which sell hardware like cameras and accessories and photo products, like frames and stuff like that, decorating the photos, integrating into the rooms at home. What we can see here is a slightly decrease of the overall turnover by 3.7%, but the EBIT is slightly rising.

It's all in all a low contribution with small amounts, but also we can see that the hardware retail, which is really related to this hardware products, is growing. The trend is obviously not really shrinking.

The other segment is not really adding something to our business, but it's part of the reporting. I have nothing to add on that.

That leads me to the financial details, and it's here in a consolidated P&L statement for the first quarter. We have an addition of 2 and 1/2, nearly €2.5 million more revenues, mainly driven or contributed by the photofinishing.

As I also mentioned, the result is affected by higher marketing expenses, higher shipping and logistic costs, and higher IT license costs. Also what we can see is that the expenses for the materials are rising.

It's a mixture of different effects, so that means that our EBIT is lower than the last quarter in '25. If we look into the balance sheet, you can see, and you probably have noticed, that the balance sheet is growing.

We have now an equity ratio of 70.8%, which is quite high. This is mainly because we invested into two buildings, and we added a renovation of our local facility here.

We invested into a production place of our WhiteWall business in Frechen, but also we bought a new building in the UK, and which are our last two bigger investments into our production facilities. This is of course increasing our asset base.

Also we invested into photo paper, mostly in to the photo paper for the photofinishing business, but also still for the commercial online printing. If you look into our free cash flow, then you can see here of course what happened with our investments.

You can see here especially the cash flow shrinking from the investment activities by €25 million. Also the free cash flow is shrinking.

If you look into the operating activities, this is more driven from an offset of the working capital. The significant change is towards the last quarter of '25 is really the investment activity.

This is really the investment into the production plants. That also means for us that all our production plants are now in our hands.

This is it for the moment. We follow our strategy to be the driver of what we are doing with the properties.

This does not mean that we invest into further property plan or production plans, because we have them now all in our hands. The return on capital employed also here is reflecting the result situation, 17.4%, still strong.

The dilution which was here by the commercial online printing is going away by selling the business segment. The seventh time in a row, we proposed to the Supervisory Board, Board of Trustees, but also for the next step for the shareholders' meeting, we propose €3, which is again 15 euro cents higher than last year, and reflecting a bit the last result situation of the year '25.

We are curious for the shareholders' meeting taking place beginning of June to get an approval. We would like to follow our, I would say, also reputation as being the top dividend increaser at index or stock exchange here with the second place, second.

For us it's not only driving so the numbers, it's what makes us happy, it's our customers. Happy customers is our really core element of managing and driving the company.

Thank you very much.

I'm unmuted. Hello.

Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. Thanks for taking my question, and congratulation on the divestment deal.

I think it's strategically the right decision. Of course, as you already indicated, Mr.

Mehls, all of my questions are circling around the topic. You said you are looking for value-enhancing acquisitions.

I would be interested to get more granularity. Do you have already a short list of potential targets, or are you even already in negotiation?

You said, "We are on it." What does that mean?

Of course, in that context, what criteria for potential target you are looking? What are potential valuation multiples which could be attractive for you?

All in all, what is the financial headroom which you are willing to use for potential acquisition? That is the topic around how to use the proceeds from the divestment.

Second question would be on current trading. We are already now in April have seen April and are in May.

Given the current macro environment, do you fear that consumers will do less long-haul vacations in summer, which means then less photos and, consequently, also less or smaller photo books for you later on? Just your thoughts on the current environment and how to deal with these.

Thanks from us. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Bosse, for your question.

I can fully understand your wish to dig a little bit deeper into our acquisition strategy. Just let me frame that a little bit.

It's a very small market, and our main target is that we get the targets that we want, that we get it at the right price, and we are also maybe a bit concerned that yesterday's news might raise prices or expectations for prices in the market. This is why we are a bit careful on the communication of that one.

You ask a couple of specific questions. We're on it, what does that mean?

Number one, we regularly, for the past years, are looking at the market developments and are talking to many market participants. The industry is quite small.

We did enhance this activity a lot, by far, over the past 12 months. We were a lot more active going out there, talking to people, if you know a couple of our competitors, many of them are in the hand of private equity.

They have investment horizons. We know broadly in which phase of their investments they're in.

You can anticipate a little bit their timing and their horizon. We wanted to make clear that we have this strategy going forward.

The main purpose of that was a little bit to evaluate where are they on their, let's say, investment horizon, what's their expectation, what's their strategy, and in order for us to prioritize. This is the main topic.

We needed to prioritize potential acquisitions. We wanted to get away from, let's say, opportunistic things.

Also, market conditions actually helped us in this respect a lot, because it goes rather to a buyer's market. We came from a seller's market, let's say five years ago, and now it's rather a buyer's market, we feel.

We felt, we kind of put them into a line of what's priority number one, what's priority number two,

and

that one. That brings me to your question of the criteria there.

Number one, and this is maybe even together with your third part of your question, we are rather looking for significant acquisitions, because we knew from the past even smaller ones, let's say less than €10 million of revenue just to phrase here something, made almost the same amount of work in our M&A department, in our PMI, in our IT, in our whatever, than the larger ones. We said, well, if we want to do a step now, we are rather looking into more significant ones and not adjacent small ones, small startups which will cost us a lot of integration work, right?

Let's say magnitude is one of the criteria. If we look at what kind of business are we looking for, definitely we're not looking for printing business, right?

We are looking for a premium brand business, somebody who built a brand and which could give us, this is a very important criteria, geographically more strength. We are the market leader in Europe, but we're not the market leader in every single market.

We have the clear aim, especially now after the divestment, to become the market leader also in every single market in Europe. This is rather a very long-term view, a very long-term strategy here.

Because sometimes we have one dominant market player and we just take our time. We take our time to grow our own brands there.

We did so. If you look at Austria or Switzerland, we came basically from nowhere.

Now after 10 years of really investing into these markets, building the brands there, we are have a significant market position in these countries. We can achieve something by organic ones, but not in every single country.

We are looking really for something which gives us regional strength. We're looking for premium brands.

We're looking for something which gives us hopefully also a technology advantage. These are things that are on our list.

In terms of headroom, you can have a look at the balance sheet. I would say that there's almost no deal which we could not do just because we don't have the financial headroom to do so.

There are a couple, but let's say almost no deal. Number one.

Number two, we want to create value. We want to create value, and we feel prices that are achievable are rather attractive right now.

Does that mean we can create value from day number one, meaning that we can increase our profitability from day one? I'm not so sure.

This depends really a lot on the deal. On the long term, we want to create value.

That means we want to drive our profitability up, we want to scale, we want to increase our return on capital employed. That's the long-term strategy, and we're definitely looking at assets which can contribute to that strategy.

It was a long answer, but I can't go into more details, Mr. Bosse.

I beg you for your understanding. Current trading is good, but it's not overly strong, I have to tell you.

It's good, but it's not overly strong. Yes, we're looking with cautious on that one.

The good thing is that we're not impacted now and immediately by the let's call them discussions which are going on here. We had the discussion in the board about the Germans being overly pessimistic.

There was a friend of a board member of ours who is very active in the airline industry and went around Europe and said, okay, the situation in all the countries is the same, but the most pessimistic ones are the Germans. I think that's a little bit in our heritage.

We're not influenced as of now by these discussions, but still we're cautious. Yes, we're cautious.

We have a couple of higher logistic costs now. Good contracts, but if the diesel price rises, our logistic costs rise.

We're working on giving them to our consumers, which is quite accepted, and so on. We're cautious on expense, number one, and we are still optimistic on sales, number two.

Thank you very much. All the best.

Thank you.

Good morning. This is Ingo from Montega.

Thank you for the presentation. It's impressive to see that you started the year with such a major strategic decision to sharpen the group's profile.

Regarding the divestment, I have just one question on profitability. The group margin increases significantly after this deal.

How much of this new profitability can you keep in the long run? Do you see more potential to increase margins now that you are fully focused on the premium photo business?

Thanks.

Just very, very clearly, of course we are looking at things like how much are the synergies between the two businesses, right? This is basically what you're referring to.

Are we losing synergies? There are a couple, but not many.

The answer is we clearly aim to keep up this margin improvement. Very clearly, that's the clear goal there.

We see very limited downward risk by, let's say, losing synergies. There's a couple of things we buy together, but it's rather minor.

This was at the end of the day one of the strategic rationals of why the divestment made sense. If now by all the sudden, let's say all of our prices for material would go up, then we would say, oh, maybe we shouldn't have divested it, but it's just not the case.

We don't see that this is just a one-time effect, number one. This is the premium brand strategy we are in, we have the clear goal to drive margins up.

We see scale being of importance for us, leveraging the scale of the group better, leveraging potential acquisitions in terms of scale better. This is part of the answer I gave to Mr.

Bosse a couple of seconds ago. We're looking for acquisitions which give us scale, which use technology, and this is why we are aiming for higher margins.

Perfect. Thank you, and all the best for the rest of the year.

Thank you.

Hello. Can you hear me?

Sorry, I did not find the hands up button. Just one question.

First, congratulations on this deal. I think this is really a large step now for you and one that we waited on for a long time.

If I calculate it correctly, you say that you increase your margins by two percentage points, and you can do the calculation how much that reduces return on invested capital. It's probably around 60 million or so, together with a gain of mid double digit.

You must have raised some 100 million in cash from this deal. I think that's certainly a good base for further steps.

Now my question: artificial intelligence, is this a threat for you or rather a benefit? I could see a couple of beneficial impacts, but maybe you can talk about this, how you address this topic and what kind of the timeline of use cases could be for you.

Yes, I can tell you that artificial intelligence is for us really a topic with a lot of different perspectives. I can tell you that this is already there.

We are using it on the one hand for our customers to reaching them by using the assistant to create the photo books, to be more efficient, to have less time to produce your photo book, for example. Also, if you would look into our production plants, also there we have a lot of automation.

We have already in the software helping us with automate the processes. There's also artificial intelligence included.

In addition to that, we have started different initiatives also to use this for creating more efficiency in administrative processes within the group on all the different ends. For us, it's not just one headline.

It's really integrated in a lot of different aspects.

Fully correct. Just let me add, because it's true.

We started with artificial intelligence in our platforms a lot before the large language models came out, because has nothing more a perfect fit for artificial intelligence than pictures, right? Like picture sorting, face recognition, all of these things we did already start before the rise of the large language models.

I fully agree. It's embedded in a lot of things.

I'm not sure if I should be black or white, but I just go for the white now, only as a chance. We don't see a lot of threats here for our business model through artificial intelligence, because the pictures people take is about real memories.

Yes, you can create pictures or images, not photos, but you can create images by artificial intelligence. It's maybe a stupid answer, but if we compare that to the times where we included databases in our platforms where you could, for example, just draw or just take a picture, the perfect picture from the Eiffel Tower, because you have missed it, because it was in the clouds when you travel to Paris, we saw nobody wanted that, because they wanted the imperfect picture of the Eiffel Tower when they were there.

We don't see that let's say in the very start, this artificial intelligence imposes a threat that people are not taking pictures, that people don't want to preserve their memories. Also, looking at the competition of what they have, and of course that is race, we're looking at them, but we feel very confident that we're at least a little bit ahead of that race in what's embedded in our applications.

Big opportunity answer to your question, and not so much a threat answer.

Yes. Thank you very much.

I think they are.

Yes, Zirka, I think we are sitting here quite confident. I think that's important after this news of today.

We've put in a lot of work

to

what we have announced yesterday. We're sitting here quite confident that we took, A, the right decision, B, is that we found the right buyer, and, C, that at the end of the day, the economics of the deal are quite beneficial to us.

Some of you put some questions or some numbers around it, we're not commenting them, but at the end of the day we're quite confident that this was very beneficial. I thank you for your interest.

I thank you also very much for your patience. Some of you have asked for that step to be taken some time ago already.

Us, we're a mid-sized company, we don't put pressure ourselves, but we have a clear focus on how we want to steer that business. Yesterday's news has confirmed this focus.

Thank you very much for your interest.

Thank you very much. I have nothing to add honestly, but I was sitting in front of a lot of investors during the last months and asked all the time for patience.

Thank you for that as well. I'm also very proud on our organization that we did the transaction in that way.