MAN Truck & Bus CEO Alexander Vlaskamp @ historic MAN Lion's E bus handover

Thank you very much, Young, and the distinguished guests, your customers' representatives. It's a pleasure to be here, and it's a real pleasure to be here in South Africa as representing a company. I am MAN Truck & Bus, the inventor of the diesel engine. I've been recently in Augsburg where we have where our founder of the company actually invented the diesel engine, and that was back in 1897. And how fantastic it is to stand here right now where we see the success of this diesel engine, which is also nowadays a very environmentally friendly, but being replaced by an even more environmentally friendly means of transport: electrified transport. And where we start with the most important thing to transport, and that is our fellow people around the world and around the globe. And it's great to actually then also announce here today the launch of our Lion's City Explorer to the South African market. It's great to be here with you in this wonderful location, and it's a beautiful scenery, but of course beautiful people will be transported with beautiful buses. It's great to hand over these buses, and really fantastic that we have you here, Mr. Buyer, Mr. Niedling. It's a pleasure, our colleagues from Golden Arrow Bus Services. It's really a pleasure to have you here, and thank you very much for stepping jointly in this very important step to drive together the road to zero emission transport. And MAN is part of the TRATON Truck and Bus Group, part of the Volkswagen Group. We are a group of 40 billion Euro turnover, unfortunately, where totally we are in all continents on the globe with four brands: MAN, Scania, Volkswagen Truck and Bus, and International in North America. We are definitely as a group leading the global sustainability movement when it comes to commercial vehicles, when it comes to transporting people, and when it comes to transporting goods all around the world. When it comes to MAN, we are talking about a company where this year we will do approximately 14 billion turnovers, so we are a large part of this group, and we do this together with our dedicated 33,000 employees on the globe, including also here colleagues in the various locations in South Africa. Nevertheless, we also do this of course with our fantastic service operations and dealerships, so they will talk about another 30,000 people working every day in the locations to make sure that 24/7 transport for people and transport for goods is in operation. We have production sites in operations in Germany, our home base, in Austria, in Poland, in Slovakia, in South Africa, and in Turkey. Our product portfolio includes from the smallest vans for three and a half to up to five and a half tons, to commercial vehicles from seven and a half to even special heavy haulage vehicles to bring actually the wind farms alive, so to say, to actually produce the electric power, the green electric power for the transportation of this world and for any other purposes. So vehicles up to 250 tons. But of course that is trucks. At the same time, we also have a very vast bus range from city to intercity buses to coaches, coach chassis, and where we have both our MAN brand and we have our Neoplan brand for various operations in various custom use cases in many places around the world. We are doing this by diesel engines, where within the diesel you can use bio resources or you can use blends of biodiesel and fossil diesel, but where you can also use HVO. And at the same time, we are providing our city and intercity buses also with gas engines, so you can operate with biogas but also of course with fossil gas. And we are electrifying right now. We are practically second in the market when it comes to electrifying Europe when it comes to city buses, and actually now we make the step to also do this step to Africa and to South Africa as the first market to place this. Along only not only delivering the products, we're also delivering the services as I mentioned before with our vast network of service locations and dedicated staff to make sure that it's not only nice products but also you can operate this 24/7. And as we have been speaking before with our person here, the expectation is to use these vehicles 18 years in the lifetime. And as we also know that very often our vehicles find the way in the markets. When it comes to number of vehicles, we have an operation. MAN group has been reserved nowadays close to 6 million trucks around the globe and 700,000 buses in all the years we have introduced them, and many of them are still in operation as you know, transporting freight and people. Just to give you some figures, if you just look to the European statistic, 13.7 billion tons of freight are moved and transported. And when it comes to buses and coaches around the world, there's a yearly transportation need for 11.8 billion passengers. And we see actually these markets around the globe further growing, and we want to be part of that. But we want to be part of that along to the climate change, and that means that we also have to make sure that our product portfolio as you can see here is also mitigating the Paris Agreement. We want to be CO2 emissions neutral to make sure that we all live up to the Paris Agreement. And this we also committed within our MAN group by committing up to the so-called science-based targets, where a special dedicated team of the United Nations is scientifically basically following up the emission standards and that companies both in our upstream and downstream are cutting emissions. That means for us that we both in our production but also in our products as we produce for our customers we have to cut our emissions. And that means that for Europe for instance we have to cut down by our regulators to meet design to meet the science-based targets but also the Paris Agreement that we have to reduce up to 30% greenhouse gas emissions versus the fleet we delivered in 2019. And to do this we believe very strongly that electrification is the way to go here, and to deliver this electrification is the prime path to go. Yes, we also will explore hydrogen. We will have hydrogen trucks in our portfolio, but we see that this is very for small use cases and small niches around the planet in use because first of all you need green hydrogen, and green hydrogen you are producing from green electrification. And throughout the whole conversion process back into actually a hydrogen-powered vehicle, we see that you have quite some energy losses. And therefore we believe that both economically as well as by the use of the energy power plants it makes more sense to electrify the majority of the vehicles we have on our planet. When it comes to our roadmap, next to electrification of bus where Barber will rock time will introduce you in detail, we also electrify transportation of goods. And that we do by starting up a pre-series of e-truck production by 2024, which will go to 200 customers, 200 units. And we from next month start due to start of sales for actually our electric generation of trucks. Already by now we have 500 pre-orders in our order book for this truck which we start to produce during the course of next year. And the ramp up will be pretty fast. By 2025 we are expecting to ramp up by 1500 e-trucks because to live up to the legislation and live up also to the commitments of various customers we speak and also their customers which want to actually drive sustainable transports. We see and expect that by 2030 between 40 and 50 percent of all the vehicles trucks we will produce for Europe will be electrified. We also see that many other markets around the globe also are calling for this, and they actually I can even expect and see that some markets might lean front. And what do I mean with that? Actually that you go from Euro three, Euro five even very quickly to electrified transportation. And that is definitely the case when we speak about the operations on buses and on city and suburban operation. So on trucks we are ready to go accordingly from next year and forward. When it comes to our bus portfolio as mentioned before, we are setting pace here now where the MAN bus portfolio has been growing. We have laid a very firm foundation with the modular approach where we can make sure to customize the use case of buses for the particular cities, for suburban areas. We have been also pioneering here of course in the last eight years also with for instance our trucks with our eTGM and also definitely with our e-bus. Since 2012 we had already a vast majority of hybrid buses in the market since then. So right now the market for electric buses in Europe is growing. When we speak about city buses it has been going up by 45% in 2023, and by 2025 most likely half of the market in Europe bus market in Europe will go electric. And our expectation is that by 2030 it will be 90 or even close to 100 percent. Right now we are also gaining traction there. When it comes to our market position as mentioned before, we are now at number second. And that is mainly because we have been customizing our setup and we can approach our customers with our MAN bus range as we did before. But today, today we do the next step. Today we do a step to hand over our Lion's City Explorer. And that's a milestone to see free mobility here in Africa. So we are proud to say that jointly with our customers we are electrifying Africa. MAN is proud also, and I'm proud on the team of MAN here as well to once more on the line that we are market leader in the bus business in South Africa with humbly just over 45 percent of the market share in bus sales by the end of 2022. We are proud that many of our customers are actually choosing for our quality, our service dedication, and our concepts. We are operating with our own bus body plant here in Olifantsfontein, and we are proud that we by that also can contribute to the African economy. As mentioned before, we have been part in Europe now with the most experienced operators, Golden Arrow Bus Service, to make sure that we are electrifying also Africa in the right way. And that you can only do by partnering up very closely to your customers. So the aim here is to start the journey to convert diesel buses into electrified. And we are very proud that we can do this together. Thank you very much, and I hand over to all the details to Bubbles.