We have completely reorganised the pharmaceutical business over the past five years. As a result, the patent expiry of Xarelto is no longer a patent cliff, but rather a dip in sales. We have six blockbuster candidates at the start. This is unique in Bayer's history. Never before have we launched so many major products at the same time.

As I said, we have launched six new products. At the same time, we are losing exclusivity for our best-selling and highest-margin product, Xarelto. Despite strong generic competition, we expect Xarelto sales to remain at around one billion euros in the future. With the cancer drug Nubeqa and the various areas of application of Kerendia alone, we will largely be able to compensate for the dip in Xarelto sales over the next two years. On top of this comes Acoramidis for heart failure, Elinzanetant, a hormone-free preparation that alleviates menopausal symptoms, and the eye medication Eylea in the new dosage.

That is our ambition. With the new dosage, we have significantly extended the life of the product. We want to stabilise sales of Eylea at a similarly high level over the next few years.

In the case of biological products, it is the treating physicians and not the pharmacists who decide which product a patient receives, even after patent expiry. As long as they are convinced that a particular product is the right treatment option for their patients, it will be prescribed. We have seen this in similar cases of generic competition after a product has gone off-patent but the biosimilar has not found favour with doctors. If we weren't so confident about the new and improved version of Eylea, I would share your concern.

You have to take a more nuanced view. The decline in sales of Xarelto will have a negative impact on the gross margin. At the same time, expenses for the market launches of a large number of new blockbuster products are increasing. This is a normal downturn that we are now experiencing. In order to move back towards 30 % in the long term, we need to generate growth. Until then, we want to keep the margin in the mid-20s. Due to the Xarelto effect, we expect earnings to improve from 2028.

We were faced with the decision of maintaining the margin at the expense of innovation or sacrificing the margin in favour of the future. We have decided in favour of the second option. We are now investing a significantly higher proportion of our turnover in research than ever before. When I started at the end of 2018, it was around 14 %. Most recently, it was 18 % and we want to move towards 20 %. In return, we are spending less on sales as a percentage. In short, we are now much more efficient in marketing and more successful in innovation.

Today we have a quality in the early development pipeline that Bayer has never had in this form before. Unfortunately, you don't get a bonus for this on the stock market because the risk is naturally high at this stage of development. Whether in oncology, gene therapy or cell therapy – we have products with transformational potential everywhere. Let's take Parkinson's disease as an example. Here we now have two products in the later stages of development, a cell therapy and a gene therapy. If the next studies are conclusive, they will qualify for authorisation. Ideally, by the end of the decade we will have one, if not two, products against a disease that has terrible consequences for patients and their families.

One indication of how well we are doing is the stance of the regulatory authorities. So far, we have data from Phase I trials for both products. In these severe disease cases, healthy patients are not included in the first phase of clinical development. However, based on the data available so far, we are now receiving support from the authorities to accelerate research, because this would be a major breakthrough. This doesn't reduce the risk, but it does increase the hope that it could become a major breakthrough.

On the one hand, we expect sales of Xarelto to be around one billion euros. On the other hand, the sales growth of our blockbuster products that have been launched by then will be fully realised.

We invested more than 3 billion euros last year. We are trying to steadily increase R & D investment despite flat sales. But it's not just a question of how much money we spend. In pharmaceutical research, the innovation criteria are also decisive. On the one hand, this concerns focussing on the therapeutic areas of cardiology, oncology, cell and gene therapies and immunology. On the other hand, we have defined as a quality criterion that every active ingredient we develop must change a therapeutic standard.

We are doing research very differently today. For example, we have invested a lot in research activities in the USA in recent years and have grown into the biotech cluster there. As a result, research expenditure also goes more into external collaborations. Today, we are much less inwardly focussed and much more outwardly focussed. This is also reflected in the shifts in personnel.

Let's take our company Vividion as an example. Around 200 researchers work there. They are already working on four products in clinical development. In the old set-up, it would have been unthinkable to build up this level of productivity. We have learnt from the biotech companies we have acquired, such as Vividion, BlueRock and AskBio, that productivity is highest when they continue to drive their innovations forward as grown units and are supported by the teams at Bayer in the right places.

Stefan Oelrich returned to Bayer as Head of the Pharmaceuticals Division in November 2018. His task is to give the division a new perspective for the future. Within five years, the 56-year-old has succeeded in building up a promising early pipeline. Naturally, there is a lot of hope involved. But Oelrich, who worked for Sanofi between 2011 and 2018, has no doubts about the success of his mission.

DSO acts as a catalyst. We set up our research projects in small units. We build the units around the product, with end-to-end responsibility. Previously, we were organised functionally. Now we are pursuing the biotech approach. The acquisitions were a good way to strengthen our own research productivity. Our current research team is better than before and the internal competition for limited R & D funds supports productivity.

We have an above-average share of pharmaceutical production in the EU, but we also have production in the USA. At the same time, we invest a disproportionate amount in the USA. We have to see what comes out of this in the end.

If tariffs come into effect in the long term, we will have to sit down with politicians to discuss this issue. And by that I don't just mean the Americans, but also the Europeans. The question is what this means for the European value chains. In the pharmaceutical industry, production is only part of the value chain. I don't want to speculate here. But of course we – like every other pharmaceutical company that is strong in Europe – are concerned.

Among other things, the unique research environment there is based on two pillars: firstly, a state-funded research system into which a lot of money flows. Europe is keeping a close eye on this and is considering providing incentives itself in order to perhaps attract investment to Europe. The bigger difference, however, is the overall architecture of the American capital market. In America, there is a thriving field of biotech innovation that is fuelled by academia. Academic knowledge is translated into products that become start-ups. These companies then go to the Nasdaq, where the real value creation happens. That hardly happens in Europe. I would therefore be very surprised if the United States were to call this highly productive ecosystem into question.