Werner Lanthaler
Management
Good afternoon. This is Werner speaking from Evotec. We are here to report on our first-half of 2018. I welcome here together with me, my management team, Enno Spillner, Mario Polywka, and Cord Dohrmann, who are executing on excellent first-half together with me here as a collective management team. We have uploaded a presentation for this event, and we would like to invite you to follow this presentation for the beginning of this call, and then of course, we go into question-and-answers later. When you go to Page 4 of this presentation, you should see that the business performance across all areas is strong. Our growth is not happening by chance. It's the result of all forces working together as one, within one company. With this, Mario will tell you more about the excellent progress within Evotec Execute. Cord will tell you more about the excellent progress of Evotec Innovate. And then, I will then update you on corporate events that has been happening. To go to Page 5 and highlight a few numbers first, you should see that we are fully on track for increased growth, increased profits, and this with even higher value-generation through higher investments into R&D that we are guiding as of today. We are very happy that by increasing our R&D expenses, we will also translate this into higher values going forward. The numbers should speak for themselves, Enno will guide you through that, but you see a strong financial performance through all business lines at this stage. When you go to Page 6 of this presentation, you should be reminded of our hybrid business model. Both segments are performing nicely at this stage. And as an overall picture you should see that in the last 5 years we have come to critical size which…