00:00 It's very clear that for passenger cars the main road are battery electric vehicles on that path towards zero emission.
00:08 But hydrogen will play a role in the general energy transformation.
00:13 So as we move away from fossils and we seek new storage mediums for energy, it's obvious that hydrogen will be one of them.
00:21 So it's going to be used in industry.
00:23 For instance, for steelmaking, we are now sourcing CO2-reduced or even CO2-free steel in the future, where hydrogen plays a role.
00:31 And also our friends at the Daimler Truck Division, which is a separate company now, they are working on hydrogen drive for heavy trucks,
00:41 where maybe that is the crossover where this technology makes more sense at this stage.
00:46 How critical is it for Mercedes to hang on to the high-end part of the Chinese market when it comes to selling luxury vehicles in China,
00:58 when it comes to weathering the particularly tricky financial seas that we are seeing in Germany at the moment?
01:05 China alone is almost as big as if you put Europe and the United States together.
01:10 So it's not a surprise that also for our vehicles also at the upper end, China will have a dominant position.
01:18 If you look at wealth growth in China over the last decade, couple of decades, it has been significant.
01:24 And more and more people are coming into the group, the buying group, where maybe they're looking at the Mercedes-Benz brand.
01:31 So in spite of maybe some short-term, a little bit slower growth, in the long term, with the denominator being as big as it is,
01:40 even at slower growth rates, China in absolute economic terms remains a dominating force that is important for us.
01:48 I'm going to stick with that theme. Plans for future investment in that Chinese market?
01:53 What are you looking at for Mercedes? What are the plans for the future?
01:56 We have, particularly in the last 12 months, doubled down on research and development.
02:02 Only a couple of years ago, we opened a brand new research center in our home city of Beijing.
02:09 But we added another digital hub in Shanghai a little over 12 months ago and hired several hundred talented engineers,
02:17 software engineers, digital engineers, to really push innovation forward.
02:22 And China is such a dynamic innovation environment at the moment.
02:27 And we want to tap into that. And in terms of our production investments, there we will follow the market.
02:32 I think we're very well positioned together with our joint venture partner.
02:36 [END]
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