The submission of financial statements and most of the other documents regarding the follow-up obligations to Deutsche Boerse AG must take place mandatorily via ERS (Exchange Reporting System).

The Exchange Reporting System (ERS®) is the interface for issuers for the fulfillment of their follow-up obligations. The data forwarded through ERS is swiftly published on the Deutsche Börse investor portal (boerse-frankfurt.de).

For example the following documents need to be transmitted through the Exchange Reporting System:

• Audited Annual Financial Statements and the Management Reports/Annual Financial Reports
• Half-yearly Financial Statements and Interim Management Reports/Half-yearly Financial Reports
• Quarterly Statements
• Company or bond ratings
• Company profiles
• Corporate calendars

The usage of means of transmission other than ERS (e.g. e-mail) is not sufficient in those cases.

For the transmission via ERS, the issuer may either employ a provider connected to the ERS or the issuer may establish their own connection to the system, so they may independently provide transmissions via the interface afterwards.

Generally the Reports transmitted via the interface are published subsequently on the website of the Deutsche Börse AG. Thus, the interested investor is provided with any information required by the AGB DBAG in a concentrated and easily traceable manner under “Search” > specification of the issuer’s name > “Company details”)

Currently, documents must generally be submitted in .PDF format. Deviating from this, the annual financial report of an issuer whose shares or certificates representing shares are admitted to the Prime Standard and whose annual financial report must be prepared in accordance with the requirements of the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) must be submitted as a .ZIP file. Specific information on the file composition for the submission of an ESEF-compliant annual financial report can be found in the section "Annual Financial Report" of the IPO Line Being Public under the bullet point " Way of electronic transmission". Further technical details, for example on the file formats that can be submitted and the possible file size, can be found in the applicable interface description.

In case your company is an issuer of several different securities at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (e.g. an issuer of several different bonds or a stock issuer who, at the same time, is an issuer of bonds, in the same or different transparency segments), each follow-up obligation still needs to be fulfilled for every security separately. This results in multiple ERS transmissions of the same follow-up documents and data (e.g. of Annual Reports).