ERGO CEO Markus Rieß erläutert die Fortschritte der Restrukturierung

I can also service it here. I don't want to repeat the numbers already mentioned by my colleagues. By and large, we are now in the last year of the five-year ERGO strategic program. In 2020, as reported, it was the penultimate year, and this can be considered a really good milestone. Look at the numbers: we are ahead in premium income, net income increased again and is higher than the outlook. Regarding investments, we have processed the first year where we invested more than originally planned. Overall, we are now at 770 million euros. But it can now be seen that we will not fully use the billion planned for the entire ESP period; we will probably end up at around 900 million, 920 million is the current estimate. The cost savings and positive GPS are manifesting even with lower investments, and we have now achieved cumulative cost savings of 234 million euros. Very pleasing is the loss ratio of 92.3%, where we are already at a level originally targeted for 2020. Let me go a bit deeper into the content. We have three focus areas: German business structures, the digital area, and the international area. Let me highlight them briefly. In Germany, the success of optimizing the product portfolio continues. We are significantly simplifying, streamlining, and renovating our products. We have now reached a phase where, since the beginning of the ERGO strategic program, we have redefined all major products with very few exceptions. This is highly appreciated by both customers and intermediaries. You can see it in impressively high intermediary productivity, and I am pleased that our distribution partners are selling with such verve and accepting these new products so well. In the fiscal year 2019/10, we increased productivity by another 18% and are now at a per-head productivity higher than any time in the last twelve years. In Germany, we pursue a hybrid customer business model, essentially seamless online and offline integration under the brand name ERGO. That's why, with the exception of DKV, we have transferred all other brand names to ERGO and are now presenting them on the integrated website ergo.de. This also leads to good results, for example in lead forwarding to our exclusive organization. We have more than tripled the number of leads to 32,000 per year. This number will increase again in 2020, and we now have over one million customers using our further developed customer portal. In the digital area, we essentially have three segments in 2019/10. First, the business around Nexible, our bio-digital player. Growth continued nicely, almost 25% above the previous year, and the focus is now on achieving full automation of all processes so that we can reach the real advantage phase of a digital player: scalability through automation. We are on a good path, and I assume that by the end of this year we will be largely done, but we have made such significant progress that scaling to another order of magnitude is possible. Our mobile unit has successfully built its cooperation strategy. Our own software developed for this, based on an SAP platform, is now up and running and will serve as the future platform for cooperation partners in the automotive sector. Mr. Wenigen has already addressed robotics. We essentially pursue three technology trends: robotics, artificial intelligence, and voice. In robotics, we now have 36 applications in Germany alone, processing nearly 160,000 cases last year and substituting the work of approximately 45 employee capacities, making it faster, more reliable, and more cost-effective. Employees appreciate this because these are extremely repetitive tasks. In the international area, we have completed consolidation. All 18 companies are salted? Not yet all resolved, but we expect that this year. Conceptually and managerially, it's done. We now have a very stable portfolio, with top 5 positions in core markets: Poland, the Baltic countries, Austria, Greece, Belgium, and Spain, and increasing presence in emerging and growth markets. We advanced regional expansion in China with a joint venture with Great Wall Motors. This year 2020, we will merge our two companies in India: health insurance and property and casualty insurance, with the same partner HDFC, where we hold 49%. This will create the second largest non-life insurer in private hands in India, with large market shares and a great basis for growth. Our small Thai unit is also developing well. All of this is based on technological progress. We have created an IT landscape that supports our hybrid customer and modern retail market appearance. We have our own digital unit from Poland and Berlin with 200 employee capacities for cost-effective time-to-market, now in production. And we are working on a cross-brand IT architecture, which will take a bit longer, but we are making good progress.