So, now I want to talk to all of you 
about what’s most on our minds right now.
 
I don’t know about you –
I don’t know what the question is you hear the most these days. 
I can tell you mine. 
In recent months, it’s always been:
“So tell me ...”
Not always officially – a lot of times it’s after the event is over. 
“So tell me, you at Cargo, 
you’re always the first ...
...leading indicator,” they whisper.
“So tell me, how’s business going to be in the future?”
That’s the question I hear most right now.
Sometimes I get the feeling that people
think we have a crystal ball in the attic. 
I have to tell you that, contrary to the rumors, we don’t have one.
And I know of course
from talking to you, our customers, 
that you don’t have one in your attics either.
But maybe that’s a bit of an indicator, or a big one, of where we stand right now. 
This question gets asked a lot,
and it shows that right now
there’s a high degree of uncertainty.
Take a look at where we’re coming from.
We’ve been through an extremely 
successful growth phase,
especially in the past two years.
And this growth phase, to be honest,
wasn’t quite forecast to turn out this way,
at least not in every market sector.
On the contrary:
In 2015, we were hearing that globalization
is slowing down,
it’s ending,
we don’t know what’s next,
more nearshoring,
3D printing.
All of you know that’s not how it happened.
That’s not how it happened at all.
Had we not been willing to accept this challenge,
then we wouldn’t all have been so successful. 
That’s the truth.
But after such a long sunny spell,
everyone is afraid of the rain, of course.
I want to show you an example of the kind of news
that is influencing this climate and these questions.
By the way,
I’m a lot jumpier today
because we’re constantly playing with these little electronic things
that we always have with us.
We receive news updates practically all the time,
and news is a lot more present than it used to be. 
It’s just that the information content hasn’t improved, of course.
Instead, everything gets boiled down to Twitter size.
You hear a certain word,
and in some cases it all just takes off on its own.
Take a look here, a forecast from JP Morgan –
not the smallest bank, but rather the biggest bank in the world.
A forecast about how the trade dispute is going to end. 
See. There’s still a majority
who expect to see an agreement this year.
But you can also see how much uncertainty there is.
Cease-fire ... well, you know that’s not good for business.
And there’s even 10 percent who expect it to escalate further.
And the first people are already feeling the effects, especially in the U.S.
It’s not as if the protective tariff policy
hat’s coming up right now is going to benefit everyone.
Of course it’s one of the American president’s campaign promises.
But it’s also clear that if you go through with it,
someone’s always going to have to pay.
There are products where it doesn’t play that big of a role.
But when you look at the price of a washing machine in the U.S.,
you can see that it has an impact, of course.
It’s still small right now,
but it’s going to be an entirely different story if we go another round.
And I think
that’s also an important perspective
that shows us where our current news situation,
where this feeling of uncertainty, comes from.
It’s true that if you look at the indicators
from the various models,
you’ll see that the vast majority of financial indicators, especially in the U.S.,
point to a downturn, a recession, 
whereas a look at the economy in general does not.
This contradiction that we have
is helping fuel uncertainty, of course,
especially since it’s important to remember
that the financial sector and the financial markets
are louder than the real economy.
So it’s worth taking a second look
at where this uncertainty that we’re seeing might be coming from.
And you’ll also see that this feeling which exists –
it isn’t more than that right now.
Nothing truly real has happened yet.
There are some indicators.
There’s just this feeling that since things have been going up for so long,
maybe they’ll come back down a bit.
The first thing that leads to when there’s uncertainty 
is a cooling investment climate. 
You all know that from your companies.
When you’re deciding to make major investments –
investments you aren’t so sure about sometimes –
and when the uncertainty about the future feels bigger,
then the tendency to postpone that kind of investment decision
is much higher at any rate than in a market that is optimistic.
That doesn’t mean you cancel your plans.
But you know how it is in many cases:
“Well, let’s wait a while; let’s just push it back a little more.”
And I think that’s what’s going on a lot at the moment, 
what you also see here:
There’s just a wait-and-see attitude.
But when you look at what things are really like,
there isn’t any justification for it from an economic perspective. 
For example, take a look at the level of investment by the German government.
You can see that despite a rise in investment in recent years,
we’re still living off our savings.
That means we actually need to invest more.
In Germany, the delta that we’ve calculated is around 6 billion euros.
We need to invest more to at least
maintain the infrastructure for which the government is responsible.
And believe me, we’re talking about Germany,
and all of you know a thing or two about construction sites right now.
Compared to other countries, we’re doing a whole lot.
In the U.S., in other parts of the U.K., 
it’s a different picture.
This means that generally speaking,
there’s actually a greater need for investment.
And on the other side of the coin ...
... You’re all familiar with this,
especially this past year
during the boom, but even now:
Many industries are facing an extreme shortage of labor.
That means we don’t have enough skilled labor to go around.
And that’s reflected in longer and longer lead times.
So that means that when you look at these indicators,
you should be saying: 
“No! 
Actually, there’s no indication  
that a reasonable amount of economic
growth shouldn’t be able to continue.” 
It’s actually more the uncertainty at the moment.
And if we turn away from this short-term perspective
back to the factors that are shaping our industry in the long term,
which tends to be strategic,
I think you’ll have to arrive – 
at least for the time being –
at a different conclusion.
Global economic growth remains intact.
t may be true that Ms. Lagat
has downgraded the growth forecast once again,
but even this less optimistic growth forecast
currently assumes global economic growth of 3.5 percent.
Yes, we may have been at 3.9 percent, 
which is incredibly high,
but 3.5 percent isn’t exactly peanuts.
 Secondly,
it is quite clear
that technological progress is showing no signs of slowing down.
In fact, it is speeding up.
Why is that?
Technological progress is of course very closely linked
to scientific exchange around the world.
And since global communication
in real time is practically free and possible for everyone,
the pace has picked up once more.
You can see this in the number of patent applications
that is rising sharply,
which means that the product life cycle
is getting shorter and shorter. 
Innovation is more and more important for business.
And it is clear that when this happens,
the time to market will be shorter and shorter.
And if this is happening all the time,
it is perfectly clear that the fastest means of transport will benefit from this.
And in relation to the world population,
it is not true 
what we sometimes want to think
here in Western Europe or in North America –
which have been living in prosperity for a very long time –
namely that the world is increasingly becoming a worse place.
That people are more and more worse off.
The opposite is in fact the case.
You might be familiar with the UN definition of absolute poverty:
“People living on an income or basic income of less than 2 dollars a day.”
An unfathomably small amount for all of us, of course.
But it is also the case that when they have considerably more than 4, 8, 16 dollars a day,
they are in a position to invest in their children’s education,
in health care and also in consumption.
And the reality today is
that 400 thousand people break out of absolute poverty every day.
People who have more at their disposal. 
And it really is the case.
Despite the growing global population,
the number of extremely poor people
has decreased massively in the last 30 years.
That is the true humanitarian success of globalization.
That is why it is also fair to say
that more and more consumers
are taking part in global economic growth in this world.
Because these people who break out of absolute poverty
like to shop in exactly the same way we all do,
or our parents and grandparents did.
They buy themselves a toothbrush for the first time,
of course, and some other things they obtain locally.
After that, they want exactly the same products that we all want.
And of course these products are then bought in the same way as we buy them:
 online, as most of us have been doing for some time now.
Where the product comes from is completely irrelevant here.
It is ordered,
and it’s the same when I, as a consumer, order something,
I do not want to receive it in three months.
It needs to arrive much faster than that,
and that simply means expanding the global supply chain.
And if you stop and look at the whole picture,
it is always the second part of the answer
I give to the question I mentioned at the start.
I have no idea how business will be in 6 months. 
How should I?
I can think ahead over the next 4-6 weeks, like most of you can.
That’s what makes our business so exciting sometimes,
but also very challenging,
that we are doing the best we can.
I do have a clear idea, at least for the time being.
What will happen in the longer term, say, in 5 years?
Of course, I cannot say whether or not there will be a dip in the short term.
Of course, none of us knows whether any one 
of the many crises we see around the world today,
which contribute to our insecurity,
whether one of these crises will mushroom into something bigger.
We have seen it many times over the last two decades.
September 11, 
the Lehman Brothers crisis, 
the Iraq War.
Anything like that could happen,
but you also know that for each of these events, industry
and globalization were able to recover and provide for corresponding growth.
Looking at it like that,
as long as we do not observe any other trends here,
any other megatrends,
I would, personally, at least assume
that the robust growth will continue,
because these indicators haven’t suddenly made a U-turn or changed,
so that certain financial indicators may now turn negative.
I think this is something that we always need to keep in mind.
This is precisely and exactly the challenge we are facing.
At the moment, we can sense a high level of
uncertainty and that is fully understandable given our current news situation.
And this uncertainty can easily lead to us
not taking the actions we believe to be right 
in relation to the long-term approach.
Or that we put them off and that this delay,
which easily happens to all participants around the world,
will naturally have a knock-on effect on all sides
and accumulate so that we,
out of uncertainty and through a lack of decisions,
actually take an active role in instigating the reality
that we were afraid might happen.
You might say that is psychology,
but yet in most cases,
downturns and crises are indeed triggered in such a way.
And we are not able to disconnect ourselves from this either.
Of course, we can’t
and that is why we always get this question in this situation:
“What is our answer?” as a company.
“What is Lufthansa Cargo doing with this starting position?”
And we try to give a two-part answer.
The first part is, which you can see on the left,
that of course this is not possible without utmost flexibility 
and without strict cost controls.
Since we don’t even know what will happen in 3 months.
Yes, if it gets worse, if it cools off,
we need to be ready to act immediately.
We have many examples in the past to show that we are capable of this.
We must then – as you know this is our greatest problem,
capacity costs –
we must be ready to adapt capacity as quickly as possible
without affecting our customers,
without leaving any negative traces on our balance sheet.
Yes, we need to keep working on our costs,
if possible much more decisively than before,
to prevent the delta from becoming too large
in the event that a downturn happens.
We need to continue firmly focusing on quality because,
especially in tough times,
quality is particularly important for you as customers.
But there is also another side.
The right-hand side.
If we believe in growth in the overall analysis,
then we must do something about it.
We cannot believe in growth,
carry out this analysis and then not want to grow. 
That cannot be the right answer;
that would be a strategic mistake.
We must try to stay the leaders of innovation
as only leaders of innovation could maybe have the crucial argument
to be selected by their customers, even in difficult times.
Of course, digitalization is the latest buzzword,
yet it applies to us all as it is the technical trend of the time.
 And that is why, ladies and gentlemen,
we are investing at the moment.
We are being very cautious, controlling all costs,
being fully flexible
as we invest for our customers,
because we believe in the business and in the market.
That is why we will receive four brand new 777F in 2019
alone in order to better meet your needs.
In terms of the modernization of our Lufthansa Cargo Center,
we are entering a crucial stage this year,
meaning we will complete the planning stage and start building this year.
And, of course,
we are extremely busy in the digitalization of our core business as you know.
Of course, not all of it has worked.
Not everything works on first try, of course,
but you can see examples here of huge projects we are currently working on.
Yes, our booking portal has become outdated.
That is the next big IT project that we have currently undertaken and for which we,
Dorothea and her team,
would like to find a replacement in the next two years.
Yes, we are hoping to steer spot pricing into a new era.
We are going to automate it.
I assume we will get to see the results this year
and that they will change the industry for us and maybe for you in one way or another.
Naturally, we will also further intensify the interface to you,
our customers, via APIs.
This is already quite developed with individual participants,
individual customers, but not so with others,
yet this is clearly the way of the future,
especially for simple transactions.
For things that really don’t need human input these days,
it will help to improve quality levels for our customers and minimize costs.
And we will of course see 
much more digitalization in our own processes as well as in handling. 
But that is not an end in itself.
It is quite clear that the purpose of it is to increase quality.
It will improve our services to you, to our customers,
and of course the aim is to improve our cost items, too.
However, and this is particularly important to me,
especially in unsettling times,
we need to lead the way in such areas,
because if we simply sit around and wait,
the competitive position will definitely worsen,
and we believe that fear or downheartedness is not our friend in these situations.
Yes, if we go too far, then afterward, if it goes really badly,
we need to make decisive corrections, but for the most part, this is not the case.
I believe that in most cases it is precisely in such phases
that having the boldness and determination to move things forward,
to invest, pays off.
We do hope that you, our customers, also see it like this
and get to appreciate it, too.
That is why I will close here with these two terms again. 
Boldness – it takes courage to do it.
Yes, we are convinced that our business will grow rapidly in the future,
and when we give these two answers,
the only way is investment and innovation.
That is why we are delighted to have you all here today
because our day is dedicated to precisely these topics.
We want to take you all on a journey to show you,
to showcase, that the world is much too big to see it all in one short day.
But to show you everything that is going on.
Not just in your and our industry, but also what is going on around us.
What do we have to look forward to;
what are the challenges;
and what can we achieve
if we tackle it together and with the necessary confidence.
On that note, I will conclude here.
With this view: That we, together, with boldness and determination
can continue to drive this world forward,
as we are among those who see globalization positively.
The people who make these developments possible.
Together, we are also doing our part
to make this world a better place.
Thank you for listening!
