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Welcome to our today's earnings call. My name is Dennis Müller and I'm responsible for product marketing and communication at ADS-TEC Energy and will guide you through the event. Within the next 20 minutes to 30 minutes, Thomas Speidel, CEO of ADS-TEC Energy; and Stefan Berndt Bülow, CFO of ADS-TEC Energy, will announce the company's audited financial results for the full year 2024. Following the presentation, we will hold a Q&A session of approximately 10 minutes. You could submit questions via this Q4 platform during the event. The presentation includes forward looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and you'll find a detailed disclaimer within the presentation that will be available on the company's website after this event. And with that, I will hand over to Thomas Speidel.

Yeah, thank you, Dennis. Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear investors, thank you for joining today. Let me just go to the agenda. We have prepared today to present a review of the full year 2024 about how we want to strengthen the partnership with our existing and new customers and what we believe can be done in further and accelerating revenues, especially recurring revenues. And we want to present our strategy for Europe and North America. And after that, I will hand it over to my colleague, Stefan, the CFO, who will take you through the financials. And then we will sum it up and be open for Q&A. Let's go to the review for the full year 2024. First of all, I'm really pleased and happy to say that first time ever we can announce a positive cross-profit and also a positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year, and that is what we said. And so, we are happy that we have been able to deliver that. Also, a prediction of what we always said is that service and recurring services will get more and more important. And so, we can see that last year the service revenues almost tripled to EUR5.6 million. It might be not the very highest number, but it's growing and it's significantly growing. And so, we always explain that we start with hardware, with the eco-platform, and then with the hardware and the operations services will come in. We have last year increased our customer base by more than 200%, so more than doubled to 55 customers across Europe, U.S., and Canada. Customer, in this case, means that they have ordered, from ADS-TEC and at least got the first units, from ADS-TEC. We are focusing on a long-term resilient business model, and we explained that several times. We are not a charging company. We are convinced that flexibility, especially digital managed flexibility, will play a big, big role in the future. And that is what we are driving forward. And charging is one of the things we are doing. And so, we mentioned that multi-revenue streams based on proven technology is important, and that turned out, and is more and more turning out to be true. Here we see some pictures from the U.S. with the charge box, which is well-known. But also, here, you see that big storage systems are playing a role, and I will come to that later. And also, the awards we got, which shows that we are on the right way, also from the technology and from the strategy side. Important for us is to strengthen the partnership with our, first of all, existing, but also new clients. That is key for us. And we do everything to help and support our customers and partners because, based on our ecosystem, based on our technology, they can operate their own business. We always said that we have a platform, and our customers, our clients, our partners can run their own business models on our ecosystem, and we are serving with services, which are physical or digital. But we have announced that by the end of the year, we will also accelerate the business by recurring revenues. And that is what we want to explain again here. Based on 2024, we all know that the market has been volatile. Everybody knows the news about charging, then EVs went down. We had the election in the U.S., and it was unclear what to come. But nevertheless, we said, okay, it's a long-term focus, and we have to concentrate also on the margin improvements. And that is what led us to the results, which I showed at the beginning. So, profitability growth was important for us in the last year and also that we want to focus on continuing with the partnerships with the current customers, but also with new ones and the new business model. Realizing new opportunities, as mentioned, we do that with existing but also new customers. And we will act now as a full-service provider to realize complete infrastructure projects. So, besides our partners and customers who are running and operating the system themselves, customers came and said, we can provide you sites, and please operate and own the sites and do it for us. And that is what we have started by end of last year and which we have communicated already. One thing which is also coming back, if you know ADS-TEC from the beginning, so CNI commercial, industrial, and also utility scale battery projects have been very important for us and at the beginning. So, we are getting back on track here. We mentioned already over the last years. First, with the big projects such as Porsche and the battery-based superchargers, we concentrated on that, but now we are getting back also on the big storage projects. So, in 2025, we will develop large-scale best projects. We also have improved momentum in North America. For example, that's also public already. We want new customers such as the Corporation Parkland, which is a big customer not only in Canada, but also with potential in the U.S. The strategy, still, we believe that ability to act is key. Only if you can control the whole stack, the full stack, then you play a role and you can adjust your business model or the business model to the latest regulations and to the specified markets. This is based on the 10-plus years of experience we had and also continuous focus on innovation, which is still a key in ADS-TEC. We see that here, the 360 degrees, we call it, on the left side. That is what is well-known. So, we want to control and we control the hardware, the software, and also the services, including all the digital services. And now, on the right side, we started on a project-based, the own-and-operate business. So, we will finance the sites. We do the operation, the installation, commissioning, and then get the whole revenue stream into the company, which is then the multi-revenue case, which means charging, energy trading, and, of course, advertisement. Here are some screens, some examples where we can see the charge post. The charge post is the first unit where we can combine ultra-fast charging without expending the grid. So, we save the expansion fees. We avoid demand charges and high-power rates. But in addition, we get revenues from energy trading and also from advertisement. I just mentioned the renewed focus on CNI. So, CNI stands for commercial industrial, but here also utility scale. Large-scale systems are more and more getting popular. We can, or you can see that also in the news. That's an international thing, and we have developed a pipeline, and one is one of the largest, best projects in Europe. We have currently being planned, and we have applied for the grid access. You see the number. It's more than 500 megawatt and 1 gigawatt hours. So, the request or the required land has already been secured exclusively for us, for ADS-TEC Energy, and we have already applied for the grid connection to the TSO. So, we expect that the project can start already during 2025, and also further best projects are coming in and are under development right now with our team. With that short survey, I want to hand it over to Stefan, who gives you more insights into the financials. Thank you.

Thank you, Thomas. So, taking a closer look to the financials 2024. So, the company achieved a revenue of EUR110 million for the full year 2024 compared to EUR107.4 million in 2023. It missed market uncertainties. ADS TEC Energy was able to exceed its previous year revenue roughly 2.5%, while growing the customer base more than 200% to 55 customers across Europe, U.S.A. and Canada. In late 2024, the company effectively mitigate and resolve risk from a major customer business difficulty by acquiring nearly all the affected end customers directly, which was a significant success for the company. Worthwhile to mention, Thomas already mentioned that we were able to almost triple our service revenue from $2 million in 2023 to $5.6 million in '24 due to the growing base of installed fast charging solution units. As also already mentioned by Thomas, it's the first time ever that the company can report a positive gross profit and positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2024. This was mainly possible because we were able to reduce the cost of sales by 80%. So, to minus $90.6 million. These results, as already mentioned, in the first time positive full year gross margin of $90.4 million, which is 70.7% for the full year. This is a significant improvement to minus $9.2 million or 2.7% in 2023. The improved gross margin could be mainly realized due to the reduced material cost and also to higher margin. So, the focus in 2024 for ADS-TEC was really on a cost reduction base. This also then results in an operating result of minus $8.6 million, which was a significant improvement by $35.9 million, compared to minus $44.5 million to the previous year. Similar, the adjusted EBITDA could also significantly increase from minus $38.1 million to positive $2.2 million. It's really important to mention here that the adjusted EBITDA only includes share-based payment and not, as in the previous year, reported share-based payment plus write-down on inventories. So, inventory write-downs are not included anymore in the adjusted EBITDA. The cash and cash equivalent ended by $22.9 million in the end of December. The operating cash flow was significant improved from minus $20.7 million to $16.3 million this year. This is an improvement of $4.4 million. Taking into account that in 2023, it was not included in the operating cash flow, the capitalized R&D of $7.6 million, which was shown under investment, due to IFRS rules. The year-to-year real comparison would be an improvement of $12 million on the operating cash flow. To sum this up, we have a proven and highly recognized technology. We won several awards in 2024, starting with the German Innovation Award, the Green Product Award, German Environmental Award and the Red Dot Award. ChargeBox and ChargePost have been proven by real operational data from clients. Exceeding customer experience due to the very high utilization rates, which is a result of the proven and performing technology. This technology was developed for more than one decade. As a CFO, I'm basically super proud of the strong financial basis of the company. First of all, as already mentioned, we achieved the first time ever positive cross profit and positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year. In addition, the company was able to secure a convertible note in the aggregate principal amount of EUR50 million in the beginning of May, to be exact, on the first May. In addition, we extended our existing shareholder loans for one third of the year until August 31st. And we can use this as a credit line, which gives us additional EUR25.6 million, sorry. In total, the company then has enough financial resources and ability to extend its business and invest in operating own units and changing or extending the business to this own operation. The further growth strategy, as Thomas already mentioned, we will strengthen our partnership with existing and new customers. We want to invest and accelerate in recurring revenues. We grow our customer base for more than 200% to 55 customers across Europe, USA and Canada. We will remain focusing on resilient business model backed by long-term multi-revenue and proven technology. And also, as already mentioned, we were able to triple our service business and driven by the growing install base. And this will not stop in 2024, with the increased install base, the service revenue is expected to further grow. With that, I close it and go to the Q&A session.

Thank you very much, Thomas. Thank you very much, Stefan. Now again, from my side, you will have the possibility to send us your questions via this Q4 platform. Let's start with the first question. I think that's one for you, Thomas. What are some challenges and opportunities for companies like ADS-TEC?

Thank you for the question. So, the opportunities, I think they are still the same. So, we see the transformation is ongoing, and it will not stop. We see that worldwide, even if we are concentrating now on Europe, North America. So, the opportunities are the same. And even what we see now is that EVs are coming back. We saw that last year it was a little bit going down. Now, we see that it comes back. So, we don't have any hints that the transformation can be stopped. That's a very important thing. And so, flexibility will be key. Not only the renewables with photovoltaic and also wind and others, but also on the consumer side, on the demand side, we see more and more need for flexibility. And that is why also the large-scale battery storage comes in more and more. We see that flexibility gets prices, and it's a highly regulated market. So, and that is maybe something about the challenges. So, we are facing a very diverse situation. So, not even Europe, but even Germany, is just one region. It's split up in many, and it's split up in many different regulated zones. And now, ADS-TEC comes into place. Ability to act, I'm mentioning all the time. That is why it's so important because we can adjust the system, the operation, the software to the local needs. And it's not just having one component in a container and ship it from wherever to Germany or to Europe or to the U.S. It's about the whole scope. And it's an end-to-end business, and it's not for three years. It's for 10 years or even more. And so, the opportunities are still the same. And the challenges, I would say, they are opportunity for us because we can manage the challenges by following the demand and by having the ability to act. Nevertheless, we saw also some difficulties in the press, in the news. So, charging in some segments was under pressure, and we see that as well. And we see that some customers having delays in installation, that the market is, I would say, paused a little bit in some regions. But the overall red line is still the same.

Thank you very much. There's another question, not the same, but it's, could be one addition to that. How do we see the competition with regard to the large corporations in the same business?

Well, what are the large corporations in the same business? We are not a utility. We never want to be a utility. We are serving utilities in the big companies. So, we see ourselves rather in the second row by being a very strong partner. And now, with the expansion of our business in owning and operating the units and taking care about a very complex operation model, that is our business. And we are not trying to be the Google for the next energy system because we believe that it's more decentralized. It's more, a case-by-case. I always said it's like a fingerprint. So, we are not seeing corporations, where we could say, the winner takes it all, but rather see, who can enable others to participate in the business. And therefore, you need the technology. That's what we do. It could take a little bit longer because that's very complex. And please, realize that also regulation and politics are playing a big role. We see that now last year, we lost our government in Germany before the regular election time ended, and we have a new government in the U.S. And with these changes, you always get impact on the regulation. This is also an opportunity for us, but it did slow down also some of the integrations. And to answer the question, we don't see that there is one big player; rather, the big ones are looking for companies like us, who are able to help them and to support them on the long run.

Great. Thanks a lot. There is another question regarding the large-scale BESS project. Can you provide some view on the financials for the large 500-megawatt project? Who has this been signed with?

It's not signed. As I said, it's under development. So, what we did now and that is how you do the business. So, we want to, the, we do not want to sell just batteries to somebody who is taking the role as an EPC and operating the units. In this case, we are developing the project ourselves. And the first step of doing that is that you have to secure the sites. And there is no project without sites, and the sites have to be close to a grid access, which is strong enough. And so that took some months now to get that done. And this first step, we have closed now. So, we have access to the sites. And the next steps will be that the application for the grid access can be fulfilled. And if you are in this business, then you know that can take some months. So, we expect that during 2025, we would get that second very important step being closed. And then the next step will be then talking about the financials. And of course, we will then communicate the details also with potential investors. Because, as you can imagine, these kinds of projects have a high demand for CapEx, and they are running for more than 10 years now. And so that's a long-term business. And so, we believe that it's very important for ADS TEC to be in that market. We have been there. Remember 2015, we have been the first commercial -- we got the first commercial frequency regulation power plant as an EPC. ADS TEC provided that to Starcraft, which is a Norwegian utility, a huge one. And that's up and running until today. And we have some 100-megawatt hours installed base in different applications. And we want to continue also in this business, which is also flexibility. And flexibility is not just charging. Flexibility is everything also in the big scale.

Then there's another question coming in. Maybe for you, Stefan. Could you expand on how the EUR50 million financing will only result in the number of new shares? It would seem that the conversation price is a lot higher than the current share price.

So, not going too much into detail, but roughly it's a convertible node, which then will be -- let's call it exchange against share. So, the price will be determined in the next month. So, there is a first portion of EUR15 million and then the following portion, about EUR35 million, which is being redeemed over 36 months. And I think that's the most important highlights. What is especially important that we could secure the EUR50 million for the company where we want to invest in the new extended business to operate the units our own, which then gives us long-term recurring revenue over multiple years, 10 years or even longer, because in some cases, we have rights to extend the contract to further five years. And that's the most important about the financing.

Great. Then there's another question regarding the, let's say, change in the strategy or the additional strategy with extension of the business. Could you give some guidance? And given the change in strategy, will impact the numbers short-term? So, should we expect weaker short-term financials?

First of all, for me -- for us, it's very important. It's not a change. So, we still stay with our business, and we are an eco-platform provider, and we support the platform for our customers. And that is why I mentioned, it is so important for us to continue in the partnership for our existing and also new customers. And they are using the platform running their own application. They have their own software business model, and they use us like, I always say, like an iPhone, and you write your own software, and you buy from Apple to phone and the operating system and the services and the data protection and the over the air updates, but you write your own app. And this business will continue, and it's really a very important business for ADS-TEC. What we are doing now is that we extend the business because and that is because the market has developed in a direction that site owners are now coming. It's also due to regulation because now you are forced. You are motivated to have charges on your side. And not everybody can do that by themselves. So, they asked us and said, you are the platform company, and can you also do the operation? And we allow you to do not just the charging where we are interested, but we allow you to take benefit of the advertisement and of the trading. And we take very much care that we are not that, that is all on arm's length also compared to our other partners and customers. So, ADS-TEC will not sell the systems or the services cheaper into the own projects, compared to how we support our partners. That is very important for us because we don't want to lose our partners. It's still for a very, very long time, but it's different. And if you look at, for example, bigger utility, it takes a long time to get them into the business and to adapt their software and their infrastructure, their processes on our platform. This will stay over years, and they don't care whether we, in other cases, provide the full service to, let's say, a small company or a network of companies, which want to use the chart on their premises. That is not a conflict. And so, it's not a new business. It's not a change, and that is very, very important for us. Could it lead to changes in the market because, in terms of revenue, development, if we are investing ourselves, then it's a question of production capacity we do have. So, it's a question how fast we get access to the sites and how fast can we build up the system. That's basically where the restriction comes from in our own business. And maybe one benefit we have also, we can adjust the business model without asking or discussing that with the partner because that's under our own control. So, we are getting faster here. And the other thing, the complete market where we are also depending on the rollout and on the operation from our partners, there, of course, we see, and that is what I mentioned, the overall market charging has come down with the EV development. We expect that it comes back. But that's here we are going with the cocaine market with all the charging market. This is different. But again, please do not think that we are changing the business model. We have just an addition. And so, we are not changing now to CNI. We always did CNI, but we have not been able to do everything at the same time. And now I think that's the positive news. We can come back and also expand the business in these areas.

Then I would say last question regarding the time, very interesting. It's a question regarding this extension of the business model. Could you share how many operational charges you acquire and the deal where you acquired your customers, and related to that, could you say something about how many charges or sites to be run by yourself planning to develop in 2025?

Yeah, we cannot talk about the details which are under NDA with our customers and partners who gave us the details about their sites. So, the first sites we will get is three-digit numbers so it's above 100 and below 500, let's say that way, as for now and then the installation will go as fast as we can do it and thanks to the investment and to the funding we got, we are not limited here. And we also see that if this really gets into the market, then there is also a lot of potential to scale that up. Because if we can show and that is also a big opportunity for us that multi-revenue really has an impact on the whole business model. And so far, we only sold the ecosystem and the services, and the services came in as we just saw, but the trading business is not established right now in the market with our partners. And also, the advertisement businesses at the very beginning, so we are really keen and we are looking forward to make improve with the overall business model, what we say multi-revenue. And we are supporting our existing partners here as well, so it's not that we keep that just for us. So, we are offering the services also to our existing partners; if they want to, they can participate as well. So, in total, we want to have the biggest impact for all of us, for the existing partners and customers as well as for the owned and operated sites by us.

Then I would propose one last question because that's targeting the multi-revenue streams. In a year or two, how much of the revenues do you see coming from power or energy trading?

That's a very smart and good question. And I would say today, we can say, and you can look because it's public, go to the BVES website, which is our storage association. You can see what can be achieved today with energy trading, for example. So, I would say take these numbers for today, but what we also see the market is really changing and developing and region by region, it's different. We started our first bi-directional charger, has been installed in Austria by end of last year, so we got the certification. And now we are collecting data, and the first tests and the first results are coming, and now we do the next step here in Germany. So, this is a step-by-step approach. But to answer the question, where do we see flexibility in the future? It's hard to predict, I don't see that it comes down significantly because as we have seen it with frequency regulation at the beginning, it came from EUR3,000 a week, and of course, it went down after a lot of storage system come into the market, but now it's back on a higher level. Why? Because we have more and more demand in the market. And there will be no energy transformation; that is exactly why we are here, without flexibility. So, flexibility is, and that's our slogan, is the twin brother of renewables and of the new way how we do heating’s and heating systems and also the mobility sector. So, I don't see that flexibility will go down to zero. It's rather the other way that we see a bigger and bigger market for flexibility. And of course, there will be also price for flexibility. And that is, again, where we can adapt our business model to where you can make the most money out of, whether it's frequency, regulation or whether it's trading, whether it's peak shaving or maybe also other grid services.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Jacob. Thank you, Stefan. Thank you to all of you for your time and attention. Ben, I would say we close the session.

Thank you very much for your time. Thank you and for your support.

Hello and welcome everybody to this event. [technical difficulty] financial highlights and results of the first half of this year, 2024. This period ended at the 30th of June, 2024. May I have your attention to the forward-looking statements. This slide deck will contain forward-looking statements. You can read them in detail on slide number two. You will able to download the presentation afterwards on the Company's website. Before I hand over to our speakers, I will guide you through the agenda. We will start with a short summarization of the half year one. Then we will talk about market trends and challenges. After that, we will talk about our strategy and USPs. After that we will show you the financial highlights, and we will end up with a Q&A session where you will be able to send us your questions, we will answer them. You can send these questions during this event via the web portal, the webcast you are logged in. With that, I will hand over now to our CEO, Mr. Thomas Speidel.

Thank you, Dennis. Welcome dear ladies and gentlemen, investors. Thank you for taking your time, and I'm pleased to walk you through the first part before I will hand over to my colleague, the CFO, Wolfgang Breme. A few bullet points at the beginning, the review of the first half of 2024. We have been able to increase our revenues by 107% compared to last year, same period in 2023, so about 107% more, but the numbers will be explained by Wolfgang later. The adjusted EBITDA is positive in the first half year 2024. We have, and that is important, a significant amount of more customers, I will come to that later. And it turns out that our platform strategy and the concept of a multi-revenue business model is the right way, and I will give a little bit more input on that later on. We have meanwhile more than 2,500 high power charging points produced and delivered. Let me say a few words please about the market trends and challenges. I think we all are aware of the news and everything what's going through the channels, e-mobility, renewables, and I want to give a little bit an overview about the challenge and the volatile energy system. Who knows? ADS-TEC knows that we are dedicated to the transition of, let's say, the existing energy system to a decentralized sector crossing energy system, including also the mobility sector and transportation. We come from a decentralized, let's call it the old world centralized power supply, and we are heading, or we are already in the middle of that transformation to, we call it the new world. So decentralized, intelligent, renewable world. And that is exactly where ADS-TEC is dedicated to. So, we are not a charging company, we are not a utility company, we are providing intelligent, decentralized flexibility platforms which also can be used for supercharging, for energy trading and many things more, which we will see later on during this presentation as our strategy and the business model of our customers and future customers. Let me just explain a little bit about the volatile generation and consumption, which is the heart of the transformation. So we know that the wind and also solar on all the renewables, that the energy is produced on a location and time base which is not exactly adjusted or aligned with the consumption. And if we deduct from the generation the consumption, then there is a difference between these two parameters. And we see that on the consumption side, yes, we have new participants, such as the e-mobility, electric vehicles, and they want to be slow or fast charged. We see the sector's heating are coming in, which is also part of the generation of new peaks and new consumption patterns. And we see even more in the future, such as electrolyzer, the sector coupling to gas, and many others On the left side, the generation side is basically driven by volatility. And of course, we generate a higher amount of wind and energy on an offshore wind park than on an onshore smaller park. And also solar is on our rooftops or solar parks, and it's generated over the daytime and not at night. So, the difference, we know that, that's the flexibility. And the best case, generation minus consumption is zero, that's not the case. And we call that the flexibility. And ADS-TEC wants to provide flexibility platforms, intelligent ones, and we see the flexibility is the twin brother of the regenerative generation. There is no generative world, which is our plan, without flexibility. Of course, we need grid expansion, we never said that grid expansion is not a big part of that transformation, but grid expansion alone will not be able to solve the issue of a very volatile and growing, it's a huge growing market. So, we have over generation in times where it's not needed, and we have a lack of supply in times where electricity or energy is needed. And that's exactly the point where ADS-TEC and our solutions platforms and services are kicking in. We also see, and that's just a snapshot, we see that the grid expansion and the upgrade, which is of course necessary, but it's also very expensive. We see that €300 billion is planned for the transmission grids only over the next years, and another €150 billion for the regional distribution grids, and the same or similar numbers we see in other countries and regions. It's a massive demand of investment. And so, there will be a priority, there must be a priority where to spend the money into the grid expansion, take the resources and upgrade the grid, and where we can do that better, by optimization of using the existing grid capacity. And that can be done by flexibility, any kind of flexibility, not just batteries. There are more, but we are -- in ADS-TEC, we are concentrating on battery-buffered systems. If we look at the grid fees, which is also a driver, then we see over the last years, let's say 2010, up to 2019, in average, we saw on households, consumer base, and also commercial or industrial, in average, between 3% and let's say 5%, almost 6% annual growth of the price. And now the last years, and this is due to the higher expenses for the grid upgrades, this investment must be distributed to all of us, to the end users, to the customers, to our electricity prices. And we see that grid expansion at the end will lead to higher costs. Power prices are going up, in the U.S. we are talking about demand charge, in Europe or Germany we see that on our grid expenses. And so power prices are going up as well, because somebody has to pay for it. And we think, we believe, we are convinced that with our flexibility and the digital way of using it, we can avoid the peaks. If you can avoid the peaks and the grid upgrade, then you can save a lot of money. Not only the grid upgrade itself, but also the total cost of ownership, because the OpEx will go down. We will not see these additional costs in our own electricity bill if we can avoid the upgrade. Challenge number two is, we call it the investors' or the Innovators' dilemma, and where we are right now in the segment of e-mobility, and when we open the news every day, we see e-mobility is going up, it's going down, with combustion engines, come back again. And I just want to explain a little bit how we see it as ADS-TEC. And first of all, let's have a look at innovation cycles, and they usually are happening. So, we see at the beginning we have a starter time, any new technology has a startup, then we have the early adopters, then we talk about the ramp-up phase, more and more people are taking the technology, and then we have a very strong period of growth, we see the saturation and then the decline. Let's say, you know, if we look at the records in the past, then the records have been taken over by the CD, the CD has been taken over by MP3, and today we are on the streaming level. So these are the different technologies and they are replacing each other. And if we look now here on the current business, which is our mobility sector, then we see the ICE, the Internal Combustion Engine, the blue curve, and the green one which is the pure EV technology, and it's the more efficient way of driving. So, from our perspective, there is no other opportunity than, on the long run, the EVs, because no gearbox, no exhausting system and so on, no -- the efficiency is much higher. We have 90%-plus on the electric motor compared to the combustion engine. And now we see on this curve, the blue one, we are, of course, for a very long growth period now we are in the saturation and the new curve has already started. We tried to point out where we think we are, that's the black spot here, and this area is kind of a dilemma. So -- and so, a lot of companies are making their money from the blue curve. And at the same time, you have to invest in the green one. In this dilemma zone this is what we see right now, and any politicians would have a good advice if this will be transferred or we make the transition to the new technology as soon as possible, and we are not hesitating by doing both, because that will lose a lot of money. And we expect that now, after a little bit of a hesitation time, we will see that the green curve really gets up very strongly. And if we look at the development of the [EV] market, and we compare Q1 2023 with Q1 2024, then we see in almost, or in the majority of the markets, like such as China, even USA or Europe, except of Germany and Italy, we see a growth in the EV development. So Germany went down 14%, but that's also due to the reduction of the subsidies. Last year, you got around 6k if you -- if you have bought an EV. And then out of a sudden, by end of the year, it was cancelled, which then led to a reduction in the EV population. And what we see is now that new drivers are coming in. So, these are the latest news, some of them, at least here from Germany. So we will see tax write-offs. We can -- we see that subsidies are kicking in again. And we also see that people realize that the total cost of the ownership from EVs is cheaper than running a combustion engine. And over the next years, we will also see that CO2 emission cost will be another driver to invest in electric vehicles. And one part which is important that also the fleets, if we look now, most of the new cars in Germany or also in Europe are bought by companies. And so, now if you can save a lot of tax, and even people who are having a company car and they can save tax and have more net income than -- compared to a combustion engine, then they will go for that. And now it's upgraded, so we can go up to -- the latest number was €95,000 for -- so the sticker price of a car can go up to €95,000, and it has been so far, €60,000. So there is now room of development, and we expect that this is a driver of the EV segment as well. And, we also see that the range anxiety is mostly gone. Now people who are driving an EV, they know that, that's not the big point anymore. We just had one example, last week, we had to drive from Venice here to Stuttgart, and with one charge, 25 minutes, that was done. And we had even 18% remaining capacity. So, I think this is all done. And more and more people will see that it's more efficient, cheaper, and the way into the future. Based on that, now I cannot move to the next page, what has happened? Now it works. So, this will drive with an enormous speed the population of EVs. Here we are referring to a development estimation from P3, and we see in Europe the growth and the growth which is expected in the U.S. And if we look at the numbers here on the timeline, then we are at the very beginning. And according to the installation of the -- or the population of the cars, we will also see the demand for charging will grow. And as we all know, it's very convenient to charge nearby or where you are, that will be also a driver for installations on our offices, factories, in the cities, in residential areas. Because for people it's always more convenient to charge where you are, and it might be even cheaper because you can use your own generation from solar, for example. Some few words about the strategy and our USPs. We always talk about intelligent platform solution, where we manage flexibility, but it's not us, it's always done in the combination with our customers and partners. And we just want to point that out again, yes, of course we have the hardware and we have to own the hardware, we have to have full control over the hardware, that's the only way how we can provide services over many, many years. The reason that ADS-TEC has its own battery modules, own BMS in various technologies, security stacks, backend integration, digital twins and all that is that we are able to act over long-term period. And based on that, we also have the full software stack, whether it's the charge controller, the inverter technology, the battery control system, and also the back-end, we want to have full control over the software as well. That makes us in total to the one partner, one stop customer for our customers and long-term partners. And based on that, we can offer services; services which is availability services, remote monitoring, data acquisition, and also spare parts for a long-term, and keeping the system up and running for not just five years or eight years, maybe for ten years or 15 years. And this saves the investment of our customers. So we take care about the total cost of ownership to maximize the outcome, the revenue streams out of your investment. And, in addition to that, and that is now the last part, we are adding software-based services, which may be, you know, digital payment, DC metering, but also apps, we call it also apps or features. Trading electricity back to the grid or to the store, peak shavers in -- real time peak shavers or quarter hour peak shavers. Solar integration, yes, of course, charging, but also others such as advertisement on the charge post. So, that is now the whole stream. It's not just a component, we are not competing on a component level, it's a platform, it's an ecosystem. And on this ecosystem, we will provide all the basic services and features and apps and data-driven services. And our customers then are able to use not only the data and the apps, they can use the platforms for example to make a swarm out of many, and then operate them as a virtual power plant or as a park. So even if no car is showing up for a charge, the investment can be used by other revenues. Here are some examples. We know that from the standard battery systems and then the two combined systems, including supercharging ChargeBox and ChargePost. Just to visualize the idea, we see -- and I always combine it with the Swiss army knife, a normal charger might be a knife, it can be used to cut something, but you have only one single business case. A charger can take an electron from the AC grid and can transfer the electron to a DC, very highly specified and standardized DC charging inlet of any of these cars. That's the only business model. And the only way to make revenue is that cars are showing up and utilization is high enough, and there is no competitor nearby who is selling the electron cheaper. And what we are offering with the flexibility and the platform on the right side is charging is only one tool out of that Swiss army knife. Yes, of course you can supercharge, you can supercharge even on the power limited grid. So, you don't even have to have a grid expansion and pay for higher price for the higher power rates in the future. You have even more revenue streams out of your investment, which may be energy trading, peak shaving, grid services, advertising. It's depending also on the local regulation. We see that, you know, just in Germany we have 850 grid operators, in Europe we have many, many different regulations, whether it's in Austria, Switzerland, in U.K., and also in the U.S., North America. So, we will follow all of these changing regulations and we are the one -- so one-stop shopping partner who is able to adjust all these different things to optimize the business models of our customers and partners. So, this is what we call the ability to act. And it's important that you, our customers, and the investors have to know that as well, that there is a secure partnership where we can turn any of the screws which might be necessary. So, if there is a new regulation in payment or in DC metering or in grid code or in whatever else, then we are not depending on any third-party. And I think that's a very important message because we have seen in many cases then that investments got stuck because dependencies from others led to the event that then the product was not able to be maintained, furthermore, or that certification was lost and the company was not able to solve the problem because of the dependency from third-parties. One of my most important slides is here how our business develops and here you see the last years. And maybe this gives also a very good insight into the business development. Let's start with the year 2020, and everybody knows that Porsche has been our first big customer. So, it was one customer with a very high revenue in numbers. Then in 2021, we basically got another six customers and partners into the business. And then in 2022, it went up to 10, then 18, and meanwhile we are 53. And the base, the customer base has completely changed, and I want to say something about the sales channel and how long it takes. So, if we onboard or if we come together with, let's say a startup, then that might be much faster than with a blue chip customer, because a blue chip customer, they take the time to do all the evaluation. We know that in the market, many people over the last years have been disappointed because systems were not running up, times have been not as they have been expected. So, they want to test it. And we see now what we have done over the last years. We brought more and more of these blue chip customers into our customer base. And on the right side, we see the business cycle, as we call it. So, the first order is, we have more than 15 customers now coming in from automotive, OEMs, gas station, retail destination, charge-point operators, fleets and depots, even the e-boat business. And then, they start with the rollout, most of them with the small numbers from one, five, ten, maybe 15, and they are now here we have our second business cycle where they ramp up their installation, and then we are getting to the recurring services because we can sell also the services such as availability services or data-driven services. And then in the last part, which is number four, and I just explained it, in the future, we will offer also the digital subscriptions based on data and additional apps which can be operated on our systems by our customers and partners. And I think the most important thing is here that we grew exponentially from the amount of customers. So, and that was a really hard work because the sales cycle, and this is something I want just to point out with this slide to onboard or to get onboarded also the other way around from a blue chip corporation, one of the well-known companies, that takes between nine months and 12 months. So, from the first touch point that the customer gets interested in our technology or platforms until they really buy the first systems, and we have seen that last year, very big corporations they decided to buy one system, then they put it six months into a lab, do all the testing and whether it's according to the specification or to the expectation, and then even then it takes up to six months until the first sites beside the testing labs then are installed. And so, it's a step-by-step and also the onboarding on the commercial side to discuss and to negotiate frame orders if you want to spread the business over many countries, then it takes time to get all the legal stuff in the financial contractual work done. The same with -- we see in North America or in Canada. And so, we need to see that the timeline to get onboarded into these bigger structures is not days or weeks, but then it ramps up. And we just want to point out that we now have more than 50 of these partners and customers onboarded over the last three years. And that is also the basis of the growth in the future. And for us, it's important that now the risk also is much more spread to many customers. So, it's much more risky if we have one or two or three customers with a high number, compared to a significant amount of customers, taking maybe at the beginning a lower number, but then growing with us together into that market. And we are very happy that more and more people understand that there is a differentiation between just buying a charger as a component or having the opportunity to run a flexible digital platform and to optimize your own revenue streams on your side in the infrastructure. And we see that more and more people understand that they have a new opportunity to make revenue, because due to the fact that the electricity in the sector coupling now is coming to us on our location, on our promises, on the factory side, on the office building sites, that they can also make money, and that they are not depending on a utility anymore, where they just have to accept what they are offering. So you can use now your own photovoltaic, you can optimize the charge of your fleet, your customers, your visitors, and also then the sector coupling, including heating and the normal consumption of electricity. So, with that, a few words about the proven track record and we see that we have expanded the business over the last year and also the last half year in further segments. We see that electric trucks are getting more and more important. ADS-TEC is not focusing on the megawatt charging, we believe that the battery, and that's always our case, so the flexibility must be part of the platform, the ecosystem. But we see that even big trucks that they can use it. Here we have an example from the Netherlands, it's a garbage truck, and they run the garbage trucks the whole day and along the route we have then installed charge boxes which are able to charge the trucks with 300k. And we want over the next years we can expand that up to maybe 600k or 640k. But we are not addressing the multimegawatt charging infrastructure or product, because we believe that here, the direct trade connection will be the right solution. We also see that new segments such as boating are getting interested more and more, and of course, we have expanded the business, the ChargePost, to much more customers. And also the ChargeBox is now in more OEM solutions integrated. And we see that the business and the demand for ChargePost and ChargeBox will be more. And just to give you one example, so why should not, for example, the police use EVs? So, how many thousand tons of CO2 can be saved every year if just the police of here, our state, Baden-Wurttemberg or Bavaria or whoever would replace a part of the combustion cars by pure EVs and they are just driving in average 100 kilometers a day. So, that's nothing for a EV, and if we would equip the infrastructure on all the distributed police stations with for example, a ChargeBox or a ChargePost, that would be a very easy but a high significance. It will have a high impact on the CO2 emission and that can be all done right now. And so we see that many of these discussions are coming up. One last example, one customer, they have invested in an infrastructure for taxi, we call it a taxi platform. So the investors are providing the taxis themselves, pure EVs, including the charging infrastructure, which is fully equipped with ADS-TEC ChargePosts, and they started in one European city, and the taxi driver, they just pay a flat rate per month, and they get charging for free without -- unlimited charging, charge as much as you can, and they charge -- they pay just one fixed amount per month to the investors. And so they can use the car and the charging infrastructure. And, I think these new models and that shall be spread now to other countries in Europe as well. We think we are at the very beginning of also new business models, which will change the complete setup as well. Here we see, just to give you some more ideas about where it could be used, on the left here we see the exhibition in Munich, where ion has shown our charger. And also here on Esso gas stations, which, by the way, we have now more brands from the gas stations taking chargers. Why? Because it's kind of a self-obligation that the gas station said, at least here in Germany, that they want to equip their sites with at least one or two superchargers. So here in many locations, it is cheaper to not upgrade the grid, and then they just rip out the vacuum cleaner and put a ChargeBox in, and then you have a 300k charger on that site. We also see distributed areas here where you see the Taycan. So yes, I would say it's almost in the middle of nowhere, but even there, people want to charge and they want to quick charge their car. So this is also a new segment. And we see on the left an example where, for example, retail, retail -- rental car, sorry, rental cars are now using more and more EVs to quick charge the return cars. It's also impossible to equip all the return locations from the rental cars with grid upgrade or superchargers. So, these are just some ideas. On the right side we see a retail store, and here we have another example for a gas station, which is in Berlin. So with that overview, I would like to hand it over to you, Wolfgang. Please take over and tell us something about the financial highlights.

Of course. Thank you, Thomas, and good day, everyone. Before giving you more insights into the state of our business from a financial perspective, I'm also, as Thomas, excited to report that ADS-TEC Energy continued its strong financial and operational performance in the first half of 2024, achieving key milestones that underscore the company's ongoing growth trajectory. We are delighted to report that first half of 2024 revenue was €79.3 million. For Q2, revenue reached €42.4 million. This reaffirms our confidence in the strength of our business model, robust customer demand, and the overall market opportunity. We remain committed to driving sustainable growth and long-term shareholder value. We are excited about the ongoing growth of our business, the progress we have made in the last years, and the opportunities that lie ahead. Before giving you an outlook for fiscal year 2024, let me go back to our H1 2024 numbers in more detail. You will find all the details in the appendix to this presentation where you'll find P&L balance sheet cash flow statement in detail. We are very excited to report strong performance year-to-date. Our revenue grew more than 107% compared to last year's period, which was €38.3 million. From a product perspective, most of our sales, like in previous reporting periods was generated by charging products which you have seen before, ChargeBox and ChargePost which accounted for the majority of total revenues. Commercial and industrial products, service and others were also contributing. From a geographic perspective, most of the revenue originates from Europe. This underlines that Europe is ahead of the United States in terms of EV adoption at this stage. ADS-TEC Energy, with a strong European footprint in service and production is well-positioned to cope with the expected strong growth in that geographical market. Important to mention is that European markets outside Germany and also the United States markets are growing and prove our growing international footprint. From a customer perspective, we saw a significant broadening of our customer base as Thomas explained, with significant players entering the market, but also increasing investments from financial institutions in the charging business. This accelerates our growth potential as we go forward. Turning to gross profit, we saw improvements quarter-on-quarter. Q2 of 2024 was the third quarter in a row with positive gross margins. For H1, gross profit came in at €15.7 million and gross margin of 19.8% compared to a breakeven gross profit in the first half of 2023. Improving purchasing environments, optimized production processes, and finally, economies of scale and volume impacts turned the gross margin into the black numbers we saw for the first half. Coming to operational expenses below gross margin which amounted to €20 million, this means sales, general and admin expenses as well as research and development expenses, the increase compared to H1 of 2023 is only 11.7%, which indicates better efficiency in our sales and administrative functions. The levels we have reached here allow to support the business going forward, but both geographical expansion and an increasing service component may require more investments. Needless to say that listing expenses, including insurance costs contributed here also as well as increased general warranty provisions because of the growing topline. R&D expenses grew significantly because of increased costs in that area and also lower capitalization of development expenses as our product lines offer and offerings mature. Other income and expenses in the first half of 2024 and previous year are driven by operational currency exchange gains and losses which are not substantial to the business. Our operating result came in at €5 million-negative in H1 2024 compared to minus €20 million in H1 2023, so a strong improvement here. Our EBITDA came in at minus €1.4 million for H1 2024 compared to minus €17.6 million in the period last year. Adjusted EBITDA, adjusted for share-based payments and inventory adjustments for the first six months is positive €3.6 million compared to minus €14.3 million in the previous period last year. More importantly, Q2 2024 marks the third profitable quarter on an EBITDA adjusted base since the IPO de-SPAC process, as I said on an adjusted EBITDA basis. Looking at the balance sheets, we further reduced our inventory. Trade receivables were up in comparison to last year because of the increase in revenues. We ended the second quarter with a solid cash position of €23.7 million. The proceeds of the exercise of warrants arising from the December capital raise were used to repay portions of our shareholder loan facilities we entered into in 2023. Now, let me come back to the outlook for full year 2024. We anticipate continued positive momentum in the second half of the year with expectations for increased sales revenues compared to the first half of the year. The company remains on track to be adjusted EBITDA positive for the full year, reinforcing its position as a leader in the ultra-fast charging market, on those revenue levels, which will be the highest in the company's history, we are expecting again positive EBITDA for the year. For 2024 and beyond, with at least doubling our revenues, we anticipate substantial growth driven by a very strong customer dynamics and market trends. Let me summarize the key takeaways from our presentation. First, ADS-TEC Energy technology best-in-class. We have installed more than 2,500 battery-based DCFC charging points, and charging points shipped and delivered. ChargeBox and ChargePost have been proven by real operating data from our clients, exceeding customer expectations at very high utilization levels at the sites where we have our installed base. And our technology, not to forget, has been developed for more than a decade. Secondly, fulfillment and growth. We have achieved a target of more than €100 million in 2023 in terms of revenues. Our revenues in the first half of this year are exceeding €79 million, reflecting a growth of €107 million compared to last year, and we see a significant increasing number of blue chip clients. Thirdly, margin improvements, adjusted EBITDA positive in H1 of this year, we expect to be EBITDA positive for the whole of this fiscal year 2024. We see incremental margin improvements by adding high added value for our clients. Service revenue growth started in following our platform strategy. With that, thank you very much, and I'll return to Dennis.

Yes, thank you Thomas, thank you Wolfgang. Now it's time for our Q&A sessions. Currently, there are no incoming questions in the chat. I would say we are waiting some seconds, if you will have furthermore questions sending please via the web chat. But one question maybe for Thomas, what will be the biggest challenge for ADS-TEC and the competition, I would say in the next one or two days -- two years?

As I tried to point out, we are in the middle of this huge transformation and that is something which is, I would say it's once in a century. We will see this hesitating period for maybe some more months or years, but then it will be very, very clear that the future will be based on decentralized energy. Also on the renewable side as well as on the consumption side, and so we need flexibility. I also want to emphasize again that the e-mobility will come, there is no doubt. And then I expect that the politics will be more clearer, because if it's without any doubt that this is the future, we may take down the hurdles and the investments in many things in parallel, and that will be an acceleration for our business and also the business of all our competitors and everybody who is in that market. But politics and regulations, and -- to answer your question, will play a big role.

Thank you very much. Now, there are coming questions in, a lot of questions. Thank you for that. Next question. What percentage of revenue in the first half of the year came from Germany, and how will that change in the second half? Maybe Wolfgang.

So, as I said in my presentation, the majority of our revenue comes [technical difficulty] strong customer base here accounted approximately of three quarters of our revenue in the first half of the year.

Thank you. Next question, could you describe your capacity to fulfill demand growth in next two to three years?

I guess we have pointed out that last time maybe we should have implemented in this presentation again. So, first of all, the production capacity in our factory in Dresden is high. We can produce 5,000 systems, 10,000 dispensers a year. This is not the amount we can sell today, unfortunately. So, we have spare capacity here, I would say, for the next one or two years, which has been the question at least. And we are prepared in North America to [technical difficulty] logistics within, let's say, one year or 1.5 year. We pointed that out during the last presentations, and that's still, I would say we are fully set for what we can expect over the next years.

Thank you very much, Thomas. Next question. How does ADS-TEC expect to finance growth?

I think that's maybe for me. First of all, you have seen that also if you take our cash flow statement that [technical difficulty] as a public company [technical difficulty] we use the capital markets to -- with a private placement to [technical difficulty] the Norwegian investment [technical difficulty] were exercised, which gave us additional flexibility in financing to pay back the shareholder loans. And for those of you who follow the company, we've also entered into new shareholder loan facilities again a few days and weeks ago, which is also a public information, so you can see that out. We see continuous support of our shareholders and of course we are looking forward to making the company bankable because we, as a startup scale-up business right now we have to work on our bank rating, which we actively do so that we then can also leverage not only equity finance our business. So going forward, the first step as a startup scale-up will be going with existing shareholder support. Secondly, going to the capital markets, and then number three, as the company matures, setting up the credit side of the balance sheet with the equity and debt of course.

Yes. Thank you very much. Maybe another question for Thomas. Can we get an update on your business development efforts in the U.S. market or maybe what will be there, the next steps?

We still are convinced that North America will be a huge market. So, even as Wolfgang said so far, it might be a little bit Europe ahead, but the U.S. and also North America totally such a huge, huge area that we believe it will be a strong EV market. We have started in the U.S., and you have seen our projects in Marina Palms, which is private charging, but also now other OEMs. We have deployed the first units to another OEM, which is Ford. We have started the direct sales, but we also do it on a very solid and careful way. We have seen others who from our perspective have invested very early also in Build in America and Made in America, which we are prepared to do. But we need to see the market to really catch up and ramp up. We are working on some specific projects also with numbers which would allow us to do so. And so, it's kind of being there, working on all of the opportunities, preparing the Made in America structure, but stepping into that and also doing the final -- or investments, which are pretty high, this will be done, and we explained that several times. If the business is according to then the production we will set up. And so it's a step-by-step approach, which we have always said, and that's still the same strategy.

Thank you very much, Thomas. Another question for Wolfgang, I guess. Finance expense was very high in H1 half year one, were there some one-items in that? How should we think about interest expense on a normalized basis?

Yes, very good question. So, this is why I also tend to work more for communication purposes with operating expense, operating income or EBITDA. The finance expense which you see in the first half of the year are driven by the fair value, valuation of the warrants we have issued to our warrant holders. And when the stock price does what it thankfully did in the last six months is when the stock price increases, the fair value of the warrants increases as well. And the counter entry in accounting logically is finance expense, which we have to show there. So, it's not an interest expense, it's a non-cash item, if you go to our cash flow statement, it's simply driven by the fair valuation of the warrants, which we have outstanding, which are in the range, public warrants of around 11 million and another 5 million of private warrants.

Thank you very much, Wolfgang. Next question, I think that's for Thomas. How do you intend to mitigate against an increasingly volatile EV market, in particular in Germany, impacting ADS-TEC business? And how do you intend to ensure the outline further close for ADS-TEC?

Yes. I guess that exactly comes to the core of our business strategy. So, as I said, we are not selling chargers, and so it's not a charging component, you can also charge. And if you look at the big picture then, it is the flexibility. And as I tried to explain, even if no car will show up, we will integrate and implement more and more business cases, such as trading, such as peak shavings, such as solar integration. And that gives a little bit of independency from the charging business, but nevertheless, I guess all of us, we expect that the EV fleets are going up. But I always said, and I did that over the last three years, that just relying on charging and the utilization of charging and selling electrons on a level which finances the whole infrastructure and business may not be the only opportunity. And this is I guess something we have to consider and see if there are more revenue streams paying into one investment, this is interesting, and that's something where our customers can mitigate the risks. So it's not about us, it's more that we are helping investors and infrastructure operators to mitigate their risk just coming from utilization of EV charging rather than adding other revenue streams.

Thank you very much, Thomas. Wolfgang, I guess that's for you, could you expand on the decrease in SG&A year-over-year and your expectations for that going forward?

When I say -- frankly, we haven't decreased, we have relatively decreased the -- decreased SG&A. And what I said before, for the current setup the company is well equipped and the efficiency in those areas which is Selling, General and Admin is improving. But we talked about expansion in the U.S., we talked about expansion in service, we talk about expansion especially in our sales force, both in North America and in Europe, in the European countries as well. So we can expect an increase, but the increase will be significantly under the growth trajectory of our revenue growth. So, it's definitely growing. But as I said, broadly said, we doubled our revenues, more than doubled the revenues in H1 and the SG&A increase was around 11%, 12%, and this is something I would also model into going forward.

Thank you very much, Wolfgang. Another question I guess for Thomas. Can you give some more outlook and guidance concerning your energy storage business, that means the C&I business, I guess. What are the updates on the expansion towards the residential segment?

Yes. I guess we already talked about that beginning of the year, but I want to say that again and explain. So, the -- first of all, the residential area, the residential market has basically been taken over by products coming from far east, we see that. So the deployment, we have now more than 1 million battery buffered systems in the residential area. We know that from the battery storage association these numbers are public. And we have decided that it makes no sense for us to go into that residential market. We rather want to keep the flexibility strategy as explained, and therefore we see now over the last years the size has changed. So, it's from the investment and also from the physical impact, much better to have higher power and higher capacities. And so, we have the fully combined Swiss army knife with the chargers, which is ChargePost, ChargeBox. And then, we stick to the C&I business. Yes, we have been over the last years more focused on charging because that was the biggest project in our company. And now we are also increasing the efforts in C&I, which means flexibility, which does not integrate the charging in one product, but it will be a battery buffered system within the inverter. But all the software and the services, again, comes from ADS-TEC. If you look at our references, you see over the last more than ten years now, we have many hundred megawatt hours of C&I chargers, battery systems out in the field, up and running, and we plan to increase that now in the next level. And we are working here as well on new battery technology so that we can also be on the competitive side of the business, because we all know that this is under a great pressure also in the market. So, we must be careful that we are not dropping into the naked component business, which, as I said, is always a difficult place to be and that's not our target.

Thank you, Thomas. And then, with respect to the timing, I would propose the last question for Wolfgang. How about your cash needs in the next two years? Will you need further investments/capital? Do you expect the need for a capital increase?

This is a very good question. We discussed about the expansion in the United States, which is very clear. If we want to, would go into the United States with our own production to cope with the Buy America, Build America. We definitely need to look for further financing because that's, of course, something which we cannot finance out of our operational cash flow. On the other side, if we take just the ongoing business, so the charging business as it stands today, if you take a look into our cash flow statement, you will see that we're approaching the breakeven cash flow line and operating cash flows. So, this is something which we finance out of our operating cash flow. But, the expansion of the business would need further financing measures. And as I said before, currently we are supported by existing shareholders, and we will not exclude that we will also look for additional funding in the future, whether it's equity or whether it's also credits.

Thank you very much, Wolfgang. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you to the audience for your time and attention. As I mentioned in the beginning, you will be able to download the presentation on the company's website after this event. And, yes, that's it from my side.

Thank you very much for attending and listening.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to ADS-TEC Energy’s Full Year 2023 Earnings Call. A recording of today’s call and a presentation can be accessed shortly after it concludes from the Investors section of our website. Joining me on today’s call are Thomas Speidel, Founder and CEO of ADS-TEC Energy and Wolfgang Breme, CFO of ADS-TEC Energy. Today, we will be discussing ADS-TEC’s latest financial results for the full-year 2023, guidance for the 2024 year and conclude with a Q&A session. During the call, management will be making forward-looking statements regarding full-year 2024 and onwards and the outlook for expected growth in investment initiatives. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control and could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations, including among other risks and uncertainties, economic turmoil and political instability, the ongoing military action in Ukraine, conflict between Israel and Hamas and other geopolitical challenges. These forward-looking statements apply as of today, and we undertake no obligations to update these statements after the call. For a more detailed description of factors that could cause actual results to differ, please refer to the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F previously filed with the SEC and posted to the Investors section of our website. Also, please note that financial measures presented on this call adhere to IFRS and non-IFRS. We use non IFRS measures because we believe they provide useful information about our operating performance that should be considered by investors in conjunction with the IFRS measures that we provide. A reconciliation of these non-IFRS measures to comparable IFRS measures is included in the earnings release and investor presentation. With that, I will turn the call over to Thomas Speidel, ADS-TEC’s Founder and CEO. Thomas?

Yes. Can you hear me? Okay. So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, dear investors. Thank you for taking your time and joining our earnings call 30th of April, 2024. So, please move to the slide with the agenda. We want to go through the year. So, it’s a review of the full-year 2023 and an outlook to 2024. Let me say something about the current market trends and also the challenges we see. Then again, about the ADS-TEC strategy and our USPs. And, important for the call here also the financial highlights and then with that, I will hand it over to our CFO, Wolfgang. Next slide please. So, let’s start with a review of the full-year 2023 and the outlook 2024. Next slide, please. Let’s look at the review for the full-year 2023. So, as said last year, even in a not very easy environment, we made or we met our projection of more than a EUR 100 million revenue in 2023. So, we achieved our targets being communicated to the market last year. We also achieved that the adjusted EBITDA was positive in the last quarter of 2023. We also confirm that for this year 2024, we have our target and confirm the target revenue wise of EUR 200 million and above. We are very proud that we reached these targets with our team and we see that the increasing number of clients and blue-chip partners and clients will lead to the growth and to the targets we have communicated and we are working for. Some numbers, we have over 1500 battery-buffered charging points installed. We don’t know any other company having similar or even close the amount of battery-buffered charging points installed. In total, we have shipped and produced more than 2,500 charging points so far. And, a very important point is that the operation, the field experience is even better than expected. So, we hear from customer that expectations are met or even we have beyond the expectations in terms of utilization. We have sites providing more than a megawatt hour of electricity a day, and we saw more than seven megawatt hour a week, delivered by one ChargeBox to EV drivers on a power-limited grid with no grid expansion. So, that is almost or that’s close to the performance of a charge park because utilization then is more than 20 sites a day. We keep focusing on our core competences and we also want and work for the growth with many partners in different segments and markets. Next page please. Let’s dig a little bit deeper into the market trends and the challenges we see or we’re facing right now. Next slide, please. So, you should see now the assessing current market trends and challenges. A topic which is on the news every day is the grid expansion, whether we are in the U.S., whether we are in Europe, I would say, everywhere grid expansion is one of the hottest topics, because the transition to that more or less all electric world needs more power, more transportation capacity or and that’s the point where we are trumping in flexibilities. We first compile here some messages from some recent news. You can pick whatever news you want. We see that grid expansion is an issue, whether it’s on the highest level or going down to the mid-voltage or low-voltage level. And, that gives us the confidence that flexibility and especially intelligent management of flexibility such as it is necessary for the peak shaving, for example, when we supercharge a car in minutes instead of hours. So, we can see here some numbers and these numbers are important to understand, because all the costs will over the next years, somehow they must be distributed to us as the end customer, because somebody has to pay for it. So, power from our point of view will be more expensive in the future, because the investments they must be repaid. And, we see here some numbers EUR 300 billion for transmission grids and power lines and also EUR 150 billion for regional distribution grids. So, these are very high numbers and we also know that the time to get it done in many cases is delayed. So, you have to apply for it, all the plan is have to be done. People don’t want to have a grid expansion close to the places they live. And, so there are many restrictions and also hurdles, which must be taken even if we would want to expand the grid. There are obstacles, not only the money we need, it’s also the amount of copper, the amount of resources of people, of the time for application and all the other things. Last but not least, also the acceptance of people living close to the transmission line. Next slide, please. Despite the challenges and the dynamic market development and we see that on the news every day right now, so that some journalists are writing that EVs are going down. The others say it will come back. So, we all know that it’s a temporary transitory view. But on the long run, EVs will be more efficient. And, what we see here is also that the management of these flexibilities and of the restrictions in the grid regarding the power will lead to bottlenecks in the grid expansion. But also on the other side, we will see that the driving factors for more power in the grid is not only coming from the chargers, it’s also coming from heat pumps and from photovoltaic. So, in both direction, we have a need to expand the grid and we see here the EV forecast, whether it’s in the E.U. or in the U.S., is an exponential curve. So, this is on top of all and here down right in the corner, you see that our solution with the battery-buffered supercharger is very welcome here and helps to solve these issues. Next slide please. These numbers, we got them from P3 Group, again, gives us an estimation about what’s coming, what’s in front of us. We have here the two geographical areas, European Union and also North America. And, what we can see in many locations, the EV acceptance is really rapidly growing, because people who drive an EV and they have the charging capacity then it’s convenient and it’s cheaper regarding the total cost of ownership. In the Nordics, we have already adoption rate beyond 90%, which is the highest one. But, we also see here that fleets and company cars are going to be electric, because it’s just cheaper and not only for people driving it, it’s also a tax issue, it’s about the energy cost, about the total cost of ownership, the OpEx and last but not least also the opportunity to generate your own electricity, which is in many cases even subsidized by the government, so you can generate your electricity beyond EUR 0.10 while you’re buying it [EUR 0.30] (ph) or even above from the grid. What we see here is that the increasing number of charging points is in front of us. The reason is that if we have higher population, people just expect that they can charge everywhere. And, this is what we also hear from companies, if they move their fleet to EVs, then they cannot spend the time driving over the autobahn or highway, and then it takes you one hour to get off the highway, to make the break to reach out the car to get back on the highway. And, it’s very inconvenient and it takes time to do that whenever you travel. So, charging is also going into the infrastructure. People expect even supercharging where they are close to the office as part of the infrastructure in their office buildings, in condominiums, in residential areas. It is okay to charge your car over hours, overnight, if it’s possible, but just in case mobility is always freedom to go wherever you want and whenever you want. And, that means nobody will accept that you have to wait to recharge your car and nobody would see that’s a convenient solution, which that it takes me 10 minutes to 20 minutes to get to a charge park and then another 40 minutes to get recharged and all the way back. Another thing are the CO2 reduction plans. We just heard from our Commissioner from the European Union, Ms. Von der Leyen, last week when she opened the Hannover Fair that the Green Deal and the CO2 reduction plan will be one leading component over the next years. And, so that is also important for companies, because to reduce your CO2 emission and your footprint and to get credits and ratings with the right results, people have to reduce their CO2 emissions and fleet are one of the driving factors here. Next page, please. As I just said, many people now saying, well, we are going back to combustion engines and the sales of the cars are going back and look at Tesla even their last quarter was going down. But, I think we don’t have to worry about that because that’s normal. You cannot go up all the time and that we will face some pushback that was very clear in this huge transformation and transition. Nevertheless, they can reduce the prices of their cars and we also see that from Korean cars, Chinese cars and others. They can reduce the price and still produce profitable. So, Tesla now is down to 10% profit they came from 17%, which is very high. So, they can still make money with just producing EVs. And, so it will be the way that the car will be a computer on wheels and powered by electric motor. And, what we can see here on this page, the EV registrations, it’s not as we might see it on the news. We see here China, Europe and the U.S. And, if you look at the numbers, then you can see the new EV registrations and the market shares. In China, it went up and if we only, now let’s look here at the best of the battery EVs, the pure batteries not the plug-in hybrid. The pure batteries went up from 39% to 36.6% in China, which is really a significant growth. And, we see in Europe, it’s close, it’s not really a strong growth, if we only look at the best, the battery-based EVs. And in U.S., it’s in a very low level. It’s almost stable so far. But on the other side, we see the registrations and that’s on the right side, the developments in Germany and in the other countries. And we see United Kingdom last year from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024, they raised it about 18%, the EV rate and Germany went down 5%, which is not as dramatic as people say. It’s 5%, but the growth before and also the subsidies we got were heavily pushing the EV adoption rate. Now, it’s coming down a little bit, but we will see that the growth will turn back to a positive growth. So, we are convinced that that’s going to happen soon. And, we see in France that there have been a 17% growth from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024. So in total, there is a growing population of electric vehicles and they all need infrastructure and they all need power. Next page, please. If we now translate that to the need of charging capacity, then we see here a slide which is also the data provided by P3 Group. And, we see what is expected and that is why I’d say it’s in front of us, so best things still to come. We are here 2023, moving to 2024, and we see E.U. and U.S. again and the forecast for high-power chargers, we talk about high-power chargers when we provide more than 150k charging capacity. That’s the definition, and you see here the numbers in thousands of charging points. So, if we look just the period 2024 to 2027, 2028, then this is almost a tripling of the amount of charges planned or expected in 2024. We see in parallel and this is something we also have to consider extremely volatile market conditions. So, as we all know, the infrastructure is called a critical infrastructure. It is regulated, it’s highly regulated even within countries, but even more over the boundaries of countries. And in Europe, we have completely different regulations and grid codes. And, in the U.S., it’s also depending on the states. So, this is also something we have to follow, but on the other side, that’s a positive momentum for ADS-TEC. Why? And, we will see that later. It’s not as easy to just build one component and roll it out over all Europe or the U.S. or worldwide, because to comply with all the specific needs and regulations and changes in regulations, which we have seen over the last years many, many times when we have started to develop ChargeBox, the applying regulations have been 24 pages and now it’s about 300 something. So, you see how also the regulation is changing and who can follow all these changes and who can provide the services and the compliance over years, if you don’t have the ability to change every software, every piece and follow exactly these developments. And, that is for us on one side, it is a breaking momentum, because the rollout can be slowed down. So, it takes some time to get all the regulation stuff done to, when we have to, when our customers have to apply for installation, then that could take some time, but we can do it. And, the positive thing on the other side is, with ADS-TEC, you have the partner who can support you not only at the beginning when you buy and install the unit, we are there also over time supporting with services and also availability services and all the digital things behind that. So, to fulfill the demand, which we see in the upcoming years, now we have the two curves. I just mentioned the demand for the grid expansion residing not only from the EV business, but also from, as we say, the all-electric world. So, it is coming from photovoltaic, from renewables, but also now hydrogen electrolyzers. The whole system is in the transformation and you might have seen that the ZVEI, which is one of the biggest association in Germany of our industry, their new slogan is All Electric Society. And, so it is a clear view on the market that electrons in the future will be the currency of energy, because we can transform electrons very easily, electrons-to-electrons with batteries, but also electrons-to-mobility, EVs, electrons-to-gas, electrolyzer or electrons-to-heat, which could be a heat pump or other technical solutions. So, that’s the currency and we can manage it on a digital basis wherever it is installed and that will be a decentralized installation and that’s exactly what we are supporting here. Next slide, please. A few words about the strategy and the USP ADS-TEC can offer in this environment or in this market segment. Next page, please. We want to still focus on our core competencies, which means when we started, when we had the first slide presentations, we already said we want to be very clear. We are not an operator, we are providing technology and services to the future power companies who are serving their customers, are offering charging services, they integrate the solutions into the infrastructure, that’s still what we do. So, we are very clear in the position in the market, which is helpful for our partners and customers, because they don’t have to be afraid that we are in competition with them. And, you will see later that this strategy led to a broad base of new customers and partners, because it’s their job to be the next utility company or the next power company offering all the services following the local regulations, optimizing the energy flow or the payment services and everything that’s their business, that’s what they do, but we give them the opportunity over a long time. As I always said, it’s like your phone. Apple is not providing the app, but they are providing the platform that companies, thousands of companies can run their own applications on the platform. And, we are the one who support you with updates over the year, security patches and so on. So, when we look here at Europe and North America still, the two geographical targets we are supporting. So, ADS-TEC here in Europe, we will expand our role and we want to have the leadership in battery-buffered charger. And this is, I think the role we currently have. And, we see strong momentum on onboarding new also blue-chip clients and customers. And, this is important to understand also the growth plan, which we will see later. Why can we grow in a way that we have seen last year and what we expect this year and beyond that is, that many partners will or have just been starting with us. And, we have over the last three years started with one customer, one partner and then meanwhile there are many. And based on these customers and they all are facing a network or not just one installation, so together with them, we see the growth in the market and in the future of battery-buffered charges. And, also in the business models, because very often they start with one business model and then the other ones will be added. So, for example, you start with charging, because you just want to avoid a grid expansion and then later you may add bidirectional use of the battery, you may add using arbitrage against the stock, because therefore you need also the back-end and all the technical environment to do so. So, it’s a step-by-step case and not every customer from ADS-TEC is using the full package from day one. For the geographical expansion, we are now active in 15-plus countries. So, from Great Britain over Europe, the Nordics down to Spain, and recently also have installed or partners has installed some systems down in Australia, even if that’s not our target country. We see on the right North America, we have set our location in Auburn, which is already or has already been communicated by us. We have with Robert Vogt, a new Manager in the U.S., very experienced manager. And, now in the U.S., many changes has happened. We know that NACS came up last year. We will follow the NACS demand for ChargeBox as well as for ChargePost. Why that has been decided, nobody knows, but it is now the new standard and we will follow that. We have besides Renato, who is managing the U.S., we have Michael Spurr. He was the last year here in Germany and he is now also in the U.S., and he is responsible for the role and for the government affairs. So, we are closely also in discussion with the authorities because we know that there are lots of regulation funding subsidies, demand charges where we have to talk also to the official sites. That is what Michael does and supports Renato in that regard. We have also new partnerships in the U.S. So, these stores like Nouria, we have first sales to Alabama Power and also to some for dealerships. And, so in the United States, we are now getting step-by-step into the especially into the decentralized locations. And, as you have seen the press release, I hope we started one installment at Marina Palms in Florida. Why did we do that? Because, we are convinced that supercharging will be part of your infrastructure asset. And in this case, it’s a luxury condominium. People already enjoy elevator, air condition, valet parking, security, gardening, everything is coming out of one service package. The garage is sufficient for 400 cars, passenger cars. And, if you walk through the garage, you’d see really nice cars. So, also the not only combustion, but meanwhile lots of EVs. So the manager from Marina Palms told us that last year it went up to 50 EVs and it was from a Tesla Cybertruck to Tesla Model Plaid, Audi e-tron, Porsche Taycan and the Korean cars. And, what we have seen is that the installment of a Level 2 charger is expensive. It was about 15K to get that installed and all the wiring going through the concrete ceiling and then the charging capacity is only 11K. What we did is now we installed a ChargeBox in front of the garage and now the valet parking and also the residents of the condominium, they are now able to quick charge their EV and that is very convenient and the feedback we got so far is absolutely positive and we see a market there for all these condominiums, residential areas and also office buildings that they will install a supercharger on their premises, because it will be as normal as an elevator or HVAC. It’s part of a modern infrastructure that you can charge your car and even fast charge. And that’s in front of us. So, we see that maybe there is much more supply or there will be much more supercharging capability than we expect, because if you can do it everywhere and maybe even for low price, because electricity is generated locally or it’s subsidized by your employer or by the city or whoever then that will be also a hotspot for people driving an EV. Also here, to come back to the companies, 100% ability to act is key for us. And, now we are also the recommended partner. We all know that Porsche has been our first big contract, and more and more we are also providing the services for the Porsche dealers, which now and I mentioned that last year will help us to expand our service business. We are convinced and that is what we already see that the services are kind of a tail you pull after the OpEx, after the CapEx. After installation, people need different services. Sometimes you start with a low level and then you take a higher service level and this is where we are right now. So, we see it’s coming step-by-step. Next page, please. And this is what we, I guess, mentioned very often. So, just the basic footprint of ADS-TEC, we need to have the hardware, because only if you control the hardware you are able to add all the other things on top of it. So, hardware is the key. We are still only buying the battery cells from different cell suppliers and all the rest is developed internally. Based on the hardware, the software also must be in house. Meanwhile, we have also the software for the chart controller in-house. We have the software for the inverter in-house, for the battery, for the battery management system. That’s all internal software, which helps us to modify the systems whenever it’s needed or to provide security patches or upgrades. Then the services are kicking in. Services, it’s a broad range of services. In general, it’s all about optimizing the TCO, whether it’s providing APIs for a new business model, which could be frequency regulation, it could be an interface to interconnect many of our chargers to one virtual power plant. It could be availability service, which is very common that customers say, please, ADS-TEC you take care for the availability. So, we want to have 97%, 98% whatever, depends on the location, availability. It’s your turn and ADS-TEC is doing it. So, we have remote access, we are monitoring the systems, we can do the software updates and then we also can do the services, which means spare parts over very long periods, because it’s all developed in-house and also if needed software updates. Last but not least, and that will be the next step and partly it’s already starting. We call it features. And again, if you compare it with your Apple iPhone, the platform Apple is providing own apps, such as AirDrop and others, which are highly welcome if you use your Apple system. But, there are others, which can be programmed by you as a customer. And, the same strategy is ADS-TEC offering. So, we are offering more and more integrated software components where, for example, a real-time frequency regulation or real-time peak shaver, which might be dedicated to a local requirement from a grid operator that could be an internal function. External function could be that you are using our battery and integrated in your SCADA system, which is very interesting for utility companies, because they are trading electricity 24 hours, 365 days a year. They make money out of energy trades and then they can integrate the battery as a source or a drain. And, that allows them to distribute electrons and not only on a virtual base and therefore they need interface. And, these kind of interfaces you see here, third-party apps, we can offer a standard interface, but also can customize these kind of additional functions to the needs of our customers and partners. Next page, please. Here we see again that it is kind of a toolbox. We have own in most cases the same battery module which allows us to provide spare parts over a long time. So, even different battery cells are in the same form factor. Our battery module can support 2,700 cylindrical as well as prismatic cells. And, you see here some of the application whether it’s industrial storage or the ChargeBox or the ChargePost. ChargeBox and ChargePost are using identical battery modules which allows us to have one spare part for long-term. And, on the other side, because the module is less than 30 kilograms, it’s very easy to replace in a service case, because you only need one person to handle a module and no forklift to replace our 400 kilogram battery pack. Next page, please. Let’s go to some of the advantages when we talk about battery-based charger. On the left side, we have a standard charger, so a grid connected charger without a battery. And, on the right side, we have the DC fast charger, the battery-buffered. And, just walk through these items here. So, the CapEx, the CapEx for a non-battery-buffered charger is cheaper when there is enough grid capacity available. That’s for sure. That’s not new. But, as soon as grid expansion is necessary, then it shifts in because you have to apply for it or the cost for the grid expansion. Then every year, the price for power has increased over the last years and I will show you another slide where you can see that later. Even if you expand the grid, then you must consider that it only makes sense the year has 8,600 hours. If we expand the grid only for 5% utilization, that makes no sense. And in nowadays, when grid expansion is very expensive and in general is needed, then why should you expand the grid for 300K to charge your car if you only needed 5% over the year? That makes no sense. So, the spare capacity will be too high and some utilities are charging you a penalty, because they want if you expand the grid, they want you to use at least, for example, 70% of the capacity over the year. You also would not build a highway with 12 lanes, where the 12 lanes are only used in 5% of the time over the year. And, that is why we will see additional cost coming up, it’s not only the transformer, it’s not only the initial cost for the CapEx. And, we see here the OpEx, total cost of ownership over 10 years, yes, we have to consider also increasing price for the electricity, not from the generation, we even see now that the electricity price went down again. Even people say, now the Ukraine war has led to a shortage and that is now why the electricity price is up three times. But meanwhile, it came back. And, we all know that based on the very low cost of, for example, for the world hike generated electricity, you can generate electricity beyond EUR 0.10 on your own premises. So, over time, if we talk about a 10-year or even more operation, then with your photovoltaic, you look at the carport, a carport roughly can have five megawatt hours solar generator on the rooftop, five megawatt hours a year, that is already what a Tesla Model S takes if you run-in 25,000 kilometers a year. So, here we see that there are potential savings and it’s also paying into your CO2 reduction account. And, if you buy it from the grid then you are addicted to the cost and not only the electricity cost from the stock price, but also from the grid price and the grid cost and they have been increased over the last years, especially last two ones significantly. Then grid services, we just mentioned it with the battery you can use it for bidirectional use and we also can offer peak shaving or frequency regulation, arbitrage, I think I don’t have to mention that and with the ChargePost, in addition, advertising. But also here, advertising has a very regulated market in some location, it’s easy to get an application through, in some areas it’s a longer thing to get a loan to install an advertising pole. But, these are the opportunities where people can add revenue streams on top of the investment and which are not only related to charging. Next page, please. But, even in the pure naked charging application, we enable the operator to have an optimized business case. And, let me just point out it here, the standard DC fast charger to the battery-buffered fast charger on the right side, we see on the left side. If we buy the electricity from the market, then we have a stacked electricity price. It differs from region-to-region, but basically the electricity price is composed out of the electricity price, which is basically defined by the stock. In Leipzig, in Germany, for example, and then all the grid fees, expenses, taxes and so are they added up. And, so we have different prices here in Austria or in Germany or wherever in Europe or in the U.S. And, what we can see here, if you have a charger, a normal charger then your margin can only be made out of the top of all the costs. So, you have to follow the costs, which are provided by the grid and the grid operator and the electricity pricing you have to add a margin. And, you are in the competition with all the others providing exactly the same electrons. And, there is no difference, which makes it very hard to compete. And, I think that’s part of the reality we see right now in the charging business. Where is the big difference if you only have the same electron and you have to pay the price for the electron, which is not in your hand. You have to pay whatever is given by others. And, if the grid fees are increasing, then you are forced to increase your price. If the grid fees are going down, they are going down as well for your neighbor, and the same system. On the right side, we are offering then more opportunities to optimize your margin. Just one example I mentioned before is, if you compare, when I pull an electron out of the grid today, it could be here around EUR 0.25, EUR 0.28 up to EUR 0.30 maybe. If I generated on my own premises with my own photovoltaic it’s EUR 0.07, let’s say it’s EUR 0.10. So, it’s about EUR 0.20 difference from using your own electricity or the compared to the electron you buy from the grid. In that case, your margin will be tripled, I guess. And, you can control part of the cost by yourself. And, the same is, if you use it for arbitrage for peak shaving, you use the battery for peak shaver, you make and avoid demand charges. In the U.S, we have compiled a database where you can type in your zip code and then you will see what can be avoided regarding demand charges and we see locations where it’s between $40,000 almost $100,000 a year only to avoid demand charges. So, the payback time of a battery-buffered charger in these cases is very short. Why? Because you don’t have to apply, you don’t have to expand the grid and you don’t have to pay for the demand charge. Next page, please. Let’s come back to our business and the development of our business. And, I think one very important slide here shows the development of our customer base. We started with, as you know, one blue-chip customer and some less others. So, but that was our main customer with Porsche when we had the opportunity to equip all the Porsche dealers. But, then new customers came in and you see here how it developed over the last year. 2021 was when we have launched the Porsche ChargeBoxes by end of 2021. They were all shipped out and now we see 2022 already and this is what we also communicated. We won new customers, partners and they followed our, they are sharing the same vision of the future in terms of a decentralized intelligent energy system, and they followed with their business models and our platform strategy. And, you see then how that almost exponentially grew over the years 2022, 2023, and you see here end of year 2023, 2024. So, that is already what we have achieved with new customers. Of course, they are starting on a low level, but every customer and we are not talking about end customers where we sell one unit to one, let’s say, office owner. These are partners who want to scale into the market. And, now you see the distribution all over Europe or the U.S., there will be 100s of them, because it’s so distributed and there is not one Google serving all of the installations. There will be many and we want to be the company supporting them and we see here that it worked. And, just a few words about the sales cycle, we can say that it takes almost like a pregnancy about nine months to get a new customer on-board because they need to understand the technology. We talk a lot about the potential. We have to talk about software interfaces about the business models or they are asking us how we can support them and then they do a first installation. They may the bigger ones have the request to put the units in the test lab first and so it’s about nine months until we get the first orders. Then, they do the testing, they check the utilization and then we see that the numbers are going up. And, don’t forget that these companies that they have the sites, so they have to do the planning, they have to do all the preparation to get the units out. So, it’s not only that they say, wow, this is the solution we want to have and now we buy I know how many 100s. And, it’s only a question of logistics and installation, no, it’s more because you have to plan it, it must be part of the business model and that is why it takes some time to get new customers and partners on board. And, we are proud and this is what this curve shall show that we did that in the past and this is not a plan now into the future. And, we only want to share here and today that it’s already achieved and that we have reached a significant amount of new customers and partners and not just relying on the initial ones, they are important of course and we will serve them as good as we can. But, we also want to go into the broader market and that is what we see here. And, don’t forget that all of our partners; Number 1, we are not competing with them. So, everybody is served as good as we can and in a fair way, so they can rely on us. And Number 2, they all want to scale their business, so it’s a partnership. And, that is why we believe it’s a long-term partnership and it will be for both, very positive that we can follow in the combination what we will expect new business model flexibility could be a market. We are talking about bidirectional use of EVs as a buffer. Whatever is now coming up together with our partners, we are the one who can help them and it’s not a standard investment, because they have a partner who has the ability to act 100%. Next slide please. That’s the summary of I think what I already have mentioned. We see here that the ability to act helps us to optimize the total cost of ownership to provide multi-revenue opportunities to our customers to make them strong. The stronger they get, the better it is for us, for all of us. And, we need resilient energy system, we need a resilient infrastructure. And, that is what will be more and more topic. We see that the geopolitical issues are not solved and maybe will not be solved over the next year. So, it will be more and more important that networks are coming together supporting here in the best way. The broad scope of services I already mentioned, and also that we can follow the market specifics and that we can offer them individual IT interfaces or APIs, which allows then our customers to adopt the physical opportunities of the platform from ADS-TEC into their own business models, whether it’s trading or whether it’s arbitrage, whether it’s flexibility management or whatever, or like we have seen it in Marina Palms serving the local customer. Next page, before I hand over to Wolfgang to talk about the numbers, I want to thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for all your support also in very volatile times. I’m proud what our team has reached over the last years and especially that we have been able to close 2023 on a level what we have communicated to you as an investor, to the market, to the analysts. And with that, I want to hand it over to, Wolfgang.

Yes. Next slide, please. So, that shows the development of the revenues. I will be relatively short to open the line for questions as soon as possible. So, what we see on this slide is and as you know, we already published our rough financials in February. So you can see, we achieved what we announced to deliver, so EUR 107.4 million in revenues. And, our guidance for this year, we reiterate our guidance, which we gave out earlier in the year. So, this year we are approximately doubling our revenues to EUR 200 million that’s the target and guidance for this year. For last year, the adjusted EBITDA was around minus EUR 16.6 million as announced in February. More interesting is that the EBITDA for Q4, where we had EUR 50 million in revenues, the pro forma adjusted EBITDA in Q4 amounted to positive EUR 4.6 million which shows that the company, first time after the de-SPAC and IPO, was able to deliver a positive result on a pro forma EBITDA basis. So next slide, please. Let me summarize the highlights of the presentation. So, best-in-class, what Thomas mentioned, more than 1,500 charging points installed, we delivered in total, so this means delivered, installed and not yet installed 2,500 battery-buffered DCFC charging points. Our major selling products last year were ChargeBox and ChargePost, who have been proven by real operating data from customers. So, those products are very high-performing, high-usage products in the market and exceed customer expectations. So, currently we are basically benefiting from the fact that more than 10 years of product development are now coming to success and entering the market with bigger numbers. The revenue target, as said, we achieved EUR 107.4 million. We confirm the revenue target EUR 200 million for this year. We increased our number of customers, which is quite important. So, we see blue-chip, very well-known names going into the market and also some of our smaller start-up customers getting funded, as we also mentioned before, so that we can see traction from two sides, new blue-chip clients, but also our established customer base. And, we are now working in North America with a new management expertise, and are expanding as well. You can see that we more than at 5x grew our revenues in the United States. Margins, we are positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4. We are targeting to be positive on an adjusted EBITDA basis for this fiscal year, and the incremental margin improvements are driven by high-value add for our clients, as Thomas pointed out. Service revenue growth, also important that our products are now going into the market and within our model. We are also selling service and contracts to our customers, which has proven to be very successful, and there is a high demand, because we also can support the customers for a very high uptime of our system. And of course, this year we will see another volume impact when we expand the revenues and the number of products shipped. So with this, I have a very short finance presentation, and I give back to the operator, please.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from Matt Summerville with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Hi there. You have Canyon Hayes on for Matt Summerville. I just wanted to check-in on the 2024 guidance with respect to the first half and second half revenue and EBITDA cadence. Similarly, I was curious on your unit volume assumptions baked into that guide and similarly geography.

Hi, Matt. Good morning to you. So, first of all, as mentioned in the press release, we expect a stronger second half of the year, so a back-end loaded fiscal year in terms of revenue. Of course, we do not want to disclose exact number of products, which are shipped into the market, given our, if we just say EUR 200 million in revenues, but it’s not wrong to assume, if you look at the numbers, which are published that we will bring an equivalent numbers times maybe two, if it comes to the EUR 200 million compared to last year into the market, if you look into our presentation. As this said, also, we are not expecting, for instance, to have margin decreases. We are expanding with the market, we are not expanding the market by for instance reducing prices or anything there. We simply sit in a good spot in the growing market and expect to also double the output in terms of numbers of our system, if it comes to charging products.

Great, thank you. And, do you have any early feedback or any read on the ChargePost demand in the U.S.? Similarly, are there any existing supply chain or manufacturing challenges as of late?

Yes, we already have spoken about the ChargePost, and we said that we will introduce the ChargePost 2025. Now, we have the development changes of NACS. We will do that right away and certification UL, everything is right now ongoing and we expect the ChargePost to be announced in the U.S. On the exhibition which is Q1 2025.

Any further questions, Matt?

Thank you.

The next question comes from Pavel Molchanov with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the question. Let me start with a similar question to the previous analyst. When we think about EBITDA positive for the year as a whole, should we assume negative EBITDA in the first half, positive in the second half? Is that a fair generalization?

It’s a generalization. Of course, it’s driven by types of customers, products sold into the market. In general terms, Pavel, it’s such that, of course, the second half if, like if you see for instance the Q4 numbers, in the second half, if we have higher revenues, we will have a stronger result. But in general, we are not expecting to be negative as in the previous years and quarters.

Okay. As you look to build a significant U.S. business, will that include establishing a manufacturing operation in the United States?

Pavel, we are still online what we have planned in the U.S. So, as you know, in Auburn, we have started with the battery assembly. Meanwhile, we had two major events in the United States. Number 1, the market has changed and now request NACS at least as a replacement. That’s the reason why we will postpone the introduction of the ChargePost in the U.S. a little bit, because the certified cables from our suppliers will be available to the market in Q1 next year, and we cannot ship the units without the cable. So, that is one reason why it’s a little bit slow or why is it delayed in the U.S. and the second, the Inflation Reduction Act and the NEVI fundings, they that all has changed many times and we have seen that in the sentiment of EV charging to follow these rules and regulations. There was uncertainty also on the customer side. We had many, many talks with potential customers and they said, okay, I would like to buy unit, but I don’t really know how to apply for the subsidies funding. How do I get it, what is requested from ADS-TEC to get as confirmation from us. And, so we had last year a lot of discussions here, but still the target is that we in the United States, ADS-TEC will have over time our own, let’s say, out of the U.S. for the U.S. That’s the way we have said it. So, we have already started to work with local suppliers to be prepared to then get the supply chain also moved over to the United States. So, this plan has not changed, it only has been postponed for several reasons and in total, there is no change and you see our investments now in Auburn, whether it’s Renato Gross, who is really experienced guy and he knows how to build a business or now we have sent over people, we are hiring new people, we are expanding our sales, but we go step-by-step and with a clear plan from the low hanging fruits, what’s coming next and we don’t want to go and now for example, take a lot of money into the company and build a factory, which is completely focused on an IRA or funding or tax credit basis, and then the market may change or might be delayed and then we could get in trouble because the sales and the production capacity is not aligned and then we got stuck. And, we have seen some of these cases in the U.S. also, by the way, the battery business, I have started very early to look for partners in the United States, where we could get batteries, cells. It is not as easy as we might think, and that is ongoing. I’m 100% convinced that we will see a lot of supply out of North America, including Canada. And, we know that that’s going to happen, but it’s ongoing. And, so the answer is, yes, we will stay with our decision in Auburn. We will go step-by-step. And yes, we plan to have a local-for-local strategy in the United States or North America.

Last question from my end. What was the percentage of revenue from Germany in 2023? And how will that change this year?

So, the German content went down slightly. If you look later, if you look into our revenue breakdowns in the filings, so Germany is around, Europe is around 80%, remarkable is so Germany, Europe 80%. U.S. grew by 5x, not significantly, it’s 5% U.S. and then other countries. So, there is, of course, Germany being very strong as a big country in Europe. The other countries like Nordics, like Benelux are growing. The DACH countries, the DACH countries are growing. France came in. Of course, Germany is by population very big, but the others, as Thomas pointed out, have higher adoption rates. So, not only the customer portfolio is diversifying, but also the countries are diversifying now. So, and going forward, what you saw in the graph is, we still expect Europe being faster in EV adoption and faster in extending the charging grids and network. So, for the next maybe foreseeable shorter term view on years, it’s stronger Europe and then the U.S. will kick-off at the end of the day. If you remember the graph, which Thomas, showed. So, and then it will shift to the U.S. and this is why we are preparing, let’s say, with hindsight, we are preparing building, if the demand is there, assembly facility in the U.S. to serve our U.S. customer base.

Got it.

And, we see for example Kia, they are close to us in Auburn or close to Auburn and we have now installed a ChargeBox close to our factory or site in Auburn. And, they are coming and charge the EVs and you can see how positive it is received and very welcome that you can really even in these decentralized areas you can supercharge your cars. And, so that’s at the very beginning. It’s such a huge country. It is impossible to expand the grid in all the different countries and corners. Well, we are positive with the U.S. it might be a little bit delayed, but it will come.

Thank you very much.

You’re welcome.

The next question comes from Craig Irwin with Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions or I should say good afternoon.

Good morning, hi.

Hi. I was hoping that you might be able to talk a little bit more about your backlog and your business pipeline. Do you maybe have an updated number for us on the backlog today, the committed backlog at April 30? And, can you maybe characterize for us, you saw five-fold growth in the United States, those were very early units and many of those customers who are taking their first units last year. Are you likely to see similar strong growth in the U.S. based on what you have in backlog? And, then is the NEVI funding starting to support an accelerating outlook for you in the United States and business pipeline, anything quantitative that you could share would be really useful? Thank you.

Yes. So hi, Craig, how are you? So, let me start with the backlog. So, we will disclose the April backlog with our quarter one numbers. We will change, because I very shortened my presentation. We will change to quarterly reporting this year. So, it’s not a full like U.S. reporting, but we will give you a trading update on the basis of Q1 within the next four weeks. So, then we will disclose the backlog. If you take the backlog as of December 31, it’s EUR 80 million, eight zero million, the backlog for the year. So, you can see that already end of December, and this backlog turns around this year, the backlog is sufficient to cover more or less the whole of last year. So, we start with a quite solid backlog into the year. The pipeline is larger than the backlog. If you take our filings, it’s around at the end of the year, we had a pipeline with, let’s say, a certain high-probability as we define it internally of around EUR 100 million. So, having said this, we have a good start into the year, but what I said before, maybe it’s back-end loaded, so the same what we saw in last year. So, then I think NEVI, I’ll give to Thomas, what do you expect from NEVI?

Yes, NEVI, the question is, who will benefit from the NEVI funding. And, if you look in details what’s happening here is the companies who benefit from NEVI funding are the ones who will do the installation or operation or the utilities themselves. And, so for us as a partner, as a platform partner, it is important to have additional values in USPs, which gives our customer and partner the need or the wish to go with us and not just for pricing, because if you take away all the fundings and subsidies and everybody is naked, then at the end of the day, you have to have additional values to survive and to be on the right place. And, just building a business on funding with subsidies and tax credits, that’s never good. So, it might be an accelerator. We would take the accelerator, but we would not invest only hoping that this accelerator will bring us up as a company, because if you take it away then everything is gone. That means, yes, and I cannot disclose the company’s names, but we know that customers from us, they were filing or they were applying for NEVI funding and they got it with ADS-TEC technology. And, then we are in very close discussion what is really needed and that is it’s not one serves all for the whole U.S. There are different waivers, locations, you can talk to the utility companies, to the grid operators and say, okay, is that needed, is necessary? We have different regulations in California, which are the stronger ones compared to others. And, that is what we do and we want that our customer partner picks ADS-TEC for the additional services and not just because of the cheapest price. And so, NEVI finding is okay and fine, yes, but at the end of the day, it’s neutral. It’s the same for anybody. So, it’s good. It’s a warm rain. It’s a warm shower if it comes. And, then we take it, but it can never be the basis of the business we want to develop, because if you take it away then everything is gone.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over for any closing remarks.

Yes. Again, thank you for supporting ADS-TEC for your interest in what we do. Thank you for all support. And, we are looking forward to getting 2024 as successful as 2023 has been and we are very confident. And with that, I wish you a very nice and pleasant day. Thanks again.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.