Ascom Holding Aktie

Welcome, everybody, to Ascom's 2025 Full Year Results Conference, and also welcome to the participants that we have on the webcast.

Our plan for today according to the agenda, which maybe is going to show in a minute. Yes, there we go. First, Michael Reitermann, who was our CEO at interim from September of last year to the beginning of February of this year, he's also a delegate of the Board of Directors, will take you through the results and the highlights of 2025. Thereafter, I will go through the financials in more detail. And afterwards, David Hale, our CEO as of February of this year, will show you the outlook and the guidance. Finally, we will present our proposal to the General Assembly regarding the distribution to shareholders.

We will take your questions in the end. We will start first with the people who are present at the conference, and there afterwards, we will take questions from the webcast.

So many thanks. Michael, over to you.

Thanks, Kalina. Yes, a warm welcome also from my side. I'll give you the business update, Ascom 2025. And we start with the key financials. Probably most of you have already looked at them. So 2025 at a glance. And I also want to mention here our improved operational performance in all segments and regions, and I will give a couple of examples later on in the slide how we have achieved that and also some metrics along that.

You know that the net revenue increased to CHF 292 million, which was an increase of about 3.8 percentage points at constant currencies. The incoming orders increased to CHF 311 million, 3.2% in constant currencies. The EBITDA grew to CHF 34 million, a considerable increase versus 2024 of about 60%. And the margin improved from 7.4% to 11.7%. Net profit, also quite an increase from CHF 3.7 million to CHF 15.1 million. And the equity ratio is at 40% and net cash at close to CHF 30 million.

So now after having given you the highlight financials, let's look what drives our markets. The secular growth drivers continue to trend positively for our businesses. And I will just give you a few concrete examples. Demographic change, everybody knows about it. Statista quotes in December 2025, by 2030, all baby boomers in the United States will be 65-plus years old, including myself. That means 1 out of 5 Americans is in retirement age.

When you look at staff shortages, Euronews reported in May of 2025 that across the European Union, health care systems face a shortage of more than 1 million staff. That's physicians, that's nurses, that's caretakers.

The consumerization of the patient. Just one data point, in 2024, so in our time, this is almost a century ago, 70% of the Internet users actually were looking for medical information on the Internet. And that means that our health care providers face more and more educated consumers and that, of course, also they have to adapt to.

When we look at care anywhere, there is a bio space study in the United States, where they said that the U.S. home health care services market was about [ CHF 130 billion ] in 2021, and it's expected to almost double by 2030. And when we talk about health care digitalization, there was a McKinsey article from summer 2024 where they referenced a global survey of 200 health care executives. And 85% said that digital and analytics transformation is either highest priority or one of their top priorities. Unfortunately, in the same study, 75% said that they don't allocate enough resources to those trends.

And last but not least, which we sometimes forget in that environment, are the regulatory demands. Last summer, AHA, the American Hospital Association, published a paper that said that health systems and hospitals must comply with more than 600 discrete regulatory requirements and spent more than $40 billion in trying to fulfill them.

Now on the next 3 slides, I will talk about our 3 core segments: Acute Care, Long-Term Care and Enterprise. And I want to give you a picture how do we view those segments. The first one is, of course, we still have the major market dynamics, the secular growth drivers that I just outlined. But another trend is in Europe, but especially also in the U.S., the consolidation of hospitals, groups getting larger and larger.

And later on, I'll tell you about an example of our customers where they have 40-plus hospitals and clinics. They also move from reactive care to proactive care. If you can prevent the deterioration of somebody in an ICU or somebody in a ward, that is reducing length of stay and it's also reducing the cost for the health care system.

So now what do we do in the Acute Care segment? We are becoming the hospital management system for insights and action. And that, we do with our solutions in alarm management, clinical surveillance and decision systems and our classical nurse call systems. This will allow our hospital customers to have higher efficacy and better efficiency.

And when you go to the right side, the focus here is, of course, on the high acuity areas, so basically emergency department, operating room, intensive care environment. This is where our solutions can really make a difference for our customers, but also in the recovery and general ward area, if you can detect changes in the status of the patient earlier, you can make a difference.

When we talk about Long-Term Care, our second segment in the health care arena, again, you see aging population, caregiver shortage are major drivers. But also people are trying to live longer at their home. And that, of course, is also kind of an opportunity for us, how do we enable and embrace that. Here, we focus on as a company on our solutions where we have the alarm management, activity monitoring and clinical surveillance. Because of the pattern of a resident, we don't call them patient here, of a resident changes, let's assume they spend more time in bed. They spend more time in the restrooms. They take more frequently showers. These are changes in the behavior and the status of the patient. And if you evaluate them cleverly, you can predict and become proactive in treating those situations of the patients.

And when we then look on the right side, it's about home care. This is something which is an opportunity for us. We haven't been strong there. But together with the cheap sensor technologies that you see coming to life, probably some of you have an Oura Ring or a Whoop or a Fitbit, et cetera, et cetera. So they are more sophisticated, more clinically proven sensors, and they will make a difference in that segment.

Our major areas here are home care, independent living. And I don't know. I mean, my mother is in a long-term home care in Germany, and this is not fully utilized because they don't have enough staff. There's a certain ratio of staff to occupants. And if you don't find enough staff, your capacity is only 80% or 75%. And so our technology has had an opportunity to make a difference there as well.

The third, but not the last segment, is our Enterprise segment. Here, the market dynamics are a little bit different from what we see. It's, of course, also staff shortages but a lot more about remote work. Workers get stretched in the facilities. And you probably have heard also, there is safety concerns, security concerns for people who work alone, whether it's in hospitality, whether it's in transportation or in other segments. And our solutions, when we talk about alarming, when we talk about mobile communication, those are efficiency improvements and security improvements that will make a difference in the lives of our customers and their employees.

And when you look on the right side, the different segments, we call them the verticals in the Enterprise, we basically play in different markets, in different verticals because we, of course, analyze where do our solutions have the biggest benefit. And I'll tell you later on in the customer example about the secure establishments, which especially in Switzerland has been a good opportunity for us.

Now how do we address these 3 segments? We do that with 8 core capabilities grounded in one containerized platform. And I'll lead you through the 8 core capabilities. And you have heard them already or quite a few of them in the 3 segments: Acute Care, Long-Term Care and Enterprise.

And we start with alarm management, clear workflow management for nurses, for staff in a long-term care home, patient surveillance or resident surveillance. I brought the example how long are they in bed, where are they in their room, et cetera. Decision systems, communication and collaboration between patient residents and nursing staff or loan workers and their central department and, of course, also amongst nurses.

Analytics and reporting. We talked about the administrative burden. Here, we can alleviate the administrative burden for our customers. Data management and, last but not least, asset tracking with RTLS solutions, et cetera, et cetera, is becoming a bigger, bigger driver for us as well.

And when you can see at the bottom, our elements nurse call, our patient system solutions and, on the right side, mobility, of course, the Myco, our DECT technologies, they are integrated in those solutions. But also third-party sensors becoming more and more important because the more you can measure, you can analyze and drive your customers' benefits.

On this slide, I also want to talk a little bit about the changes in the organization which we have made in April 2025, where we streamlined our organization through consolidation and simplified interfaces, which actually enabled us to achieve closer collaboration between departments, across countries, across headquarters into the countries and allowed for the co-design of efficiency improvement measures, which led actually to quite some of improvements across our customer care and our professional services organizations.

And on the left side, you see the improvements in 2025. Here, the project margins, so when we implement our solutions in our customer environments, they improved by more than 5 percentage points. The billable utilization of our professional services staff increased by more than 10%. And then on the customer care side, the average ticket resolution. When there's a service call, you create a ticket. And the average ticket resolution reduced by more than 15%.

We also launched a couple of initiatives in Q4 of 2025, which are directed towards the top line. The first one, we call commercial intensity. And here, it's about measuring in a consistent framework and managing the performance of our own sales team, but also the performance and the knowledge level of our partners. Because in quite a few countries, we have an indirect go-to-market approach.

And then the second one is the Enterprise growth segment. And Enterprise is an interesting segment for us because the book-to-bill cycle, so basically from order to implementation and revenue recognition, is the shortest of the 3 segments we play in, much shorter than in Acute Care and also shorter in Long-Term Care. So that's why we started focusing at the end of 2024 and have launched an aggressive lead generation campaign for staff safety, alarm management and mobility. And we are looking forward for those activities to yield results in 2026.

Now revenue, we said we grew 4 percentage points in constant currencies from CHF 287 million to CHF 292 million. And as you can see, 66% of our revenue comes from health care. And here, about 1/3 is Long-Term Care. And in 2025, Acute Care grew, Long-Term Care was more flattish. And then 1/3 is about Enterprise.

And on the right side, you see how we think about our business. Of course, number one, winning orders from customers. And you saw the 2 initiatives, commercial intensity and also enterprise initiative. But here, it's also important that we have a technological and solutions differentiation because that allows us to win more orders. You saw in the 2, 3 examples that I gave on the professional services side, on the commercial -- on the customer care side that we also improved our processes, whether it's the design of the solution, the delivery of the solution or then the servicing of the solution.

And the better we do that, the more opportunities and the more understanding and the more financial funds we have also to continue to innovate because we are in segments where innovation is a must. And with innovative solutions, we, of course, then start the wheel at the beginning again, we win. And I truly believe that our solution portfolio differentiates us from individual solution providers. And I think when we talk about now about a couple of examples, you can see that. These are integrated solutions that we brought to our customers and that made us successful.

And we wanted to have an example in the Acute Care segment, in the Long-Term Care segment and in the Enterprise segment. The Acute Care segment is from the U.S. And here, this is one of those examples where I said earlier, consolidation. Ochsner is the largest IDN in the U.S. Gulf Coast. It has about 40 hospital/clinics under management. And what we have done here, we implemented our Telligence nurse call solutions, Unite medical device integration. And those solutions bring the Ochsner team measurable benefits regarding response time, friction, inefficiencies between their medical staff, doctors-nurses, nurses-nurses and allows them to deliver smarter and more connected care.

The second element is from the Long-Term Care and comes from the U.K., our region North. And here, we signed a contract with Nourish Care. And Nourish Care is the U.K.'s leading digital social care provider. Its platform is used daily by more than 400,000 care workers in the United Kingdom. And here, our Ascom's nurse call, monitoring and alarm management, combined with Nourish's digital care planning solution, enables a platform that allows for increased efficiency, increased safety, a better residence experience and, again, a reduction of administrative tasks because we can map them digitally. And in the first step, the joint teams are targeting approximately 90,000 beds that Nourish has under management.

And the last example gets closer to home, in the Canton Zurich. In 2024, we installed our first solution in the secure establishment, Zurich West. We also told you about it in one of the previous conferences. Here, we had now the opportunity to roll out our Ascom solution in 8 secure institutions in the Canton Zurich. Here, we basically use our deck with the Myco 4 technology and multiple software elements containing the integration of technical alarms, staff safety and especially our Prisoner App. And that allows staff in the prisons to actually identify inmates, look at their profiles for identification, improves the risk management and, if necessary, can also support the handling of the prisoners.

And just in the last day, we won now our first project outside the Canton Zurich for secure establishment in Switzerland. And all of these opportunities that you see here are in the million Swiss franc-plus range, and we will continue to look for such opportunities in order to drive the Ascom business.

And now I hand it back to Kalina to give more details about the financials. Thank you.

So let's go through the financials in more detail. Starting with an overview of top line figures and also profitability and cash flow. We see that incoming orders have increased by 1% in Swiss francs and by 3% in constant currency, order backlog at 3% in Swiss franc and 6% in constant currency. And net revenue, we had an increase of 2% in Swiss francs and 4% at constant currencies. This resulted in a very good EBITDA result, where we increased by 61% and from 7.4% EBITDA margin in '24 to 11.4% in 2025.

Capital expenditure, just taking you to the other end of the graph, decreased from 15.5% to 11.1%, a substantial decrease, which is due to lower capitalization that we used to do in the past, but also due to the fact that we completed one furbishment project in 2024 and we don't have this capitalization anymore in '25. And this is the result, what you see in the middle, that the free cash flow improved substantially, on the one hand, from the better profitability; on the other hand, from the lower capital expenditure and also due to better management of net working capital, we achieved free cash flow of CHF 21.8 million.

Now starting from the top of our financials from the top line. Incoming orders, the increase of 3.2% in constant currency, you can see has an uneven split between projects, products and services and maintenance and support. While projects, products and services remained flat, we could see quite a substantial increase in orders for maintenance and support. This has the positive effect that such orders are quite stable and contribute to recurring revenue at Ascom.

When we look towards the regions, we have now introduced the new group of North, South and U.S. and Canada. We could see strong order intake in the North, mostly coming from health care in Norway, where we see big hospital groups that invest heavily in digitalization. But also, we could see strong order intake in Sweden both from the health care and from the Enterprise segment.

South remained flat as a whole, whereby in the individual countries we could see quite some differences. Here, we had a strong development in Germany, but it was compensated by a lower order intake in Switzerland and Australia, most notably. The region USA and Canada remained relatively flat in constant currency and with the development of the U.S. dollar versus the Swiss franc, this resulted in negative 6% development of the order intake. And this is predominantly due to the uncertainties that we have in the U.S. health care system.

The development of the backlog, you can see over year-over-year. So over the past 4 years, we have development of positive 4% in constant currency -- sorry, in Swiss francs and 6% in constant currency. And also in 2025 versus 2024, we have an increase of 5.9% in constant currency and 3% in Swiss francs.

Also an important point that we'd like to mention is that more than 50% of the order backlog, which we have generated or which we have on the books as of 31st of December '25, is scheduled to turn to revenue in 2026.

The net revenue development of 3.8% in constant currencies was then impacted by currency effect in translating to Swiss francs of 1.9% and therefore, resulted in the CHF 292.1 million revenue in Swiss francs. Here, the recurring revenue element, 27%, was similar to prior year and is at a very good level.

Here are some more details towards the split on the one hand versus products, projects and services and maintenance and support as well as the split from half year to half year, half-year-to-half-year comparison. Starting with the first graph, we see the opposite development of what we had in order intake, namely, that we have in maintenance and support a lower increase of 2% in Swiss francs and 4% in constant currency. And in products, projects and services, similar growth rates.

Then we had quite an extraordinary development in 2025 regarding to half 1 versus half 2 development. At Ascom, the second half is stronger than the first half. This is typically the case. And it was also the case in '24. But in 2025, this effect was much more pronounced. As you can see, in half 1 '25, we remained flat to the half 1 of '24. But in the second half, we had a substantial growth compared to prior half 1 of 5%.

Going through the profit and loss statement. Here, I want to draw your attention to the fact that we could increase gross profit from 46% to 48%. And this is due to the optimizations which were put in place starting end of last year but also throughout 2025. These optimizations in our service and support organization, and this resulted due to lower personnel costs in a better gross profit. And this is despite the fact that we had CHF 1 million of write-offs on obsolete components and also CHF 0.5 million of U.S. tariffs that we paid, which were not there in 2024. So I would say we have a very good development on the gross profit level, and this is a level which we aim to maintain.

Going through the other cost items. You see that marketing and sales, we reduced the cost quite substantially. This also had to do with the reorganization and with our new operational setup and also resulted, by largest, through personnel -- through reduction in personnel costs.

Research and development, you can see a small increase in the P&L. This is more due to the fact that less projects were capitalized and therefore, they do not appear in the CapEx on the balance sheet, but rather appear here in the profit and loss statement.

And finally, our administration cost was also reduced, and this is also due to the efforts to maintain strict cost growth. As a result, our EBITDA margin increased from 7.4% to 11.7%. And this is a result that we are quite happy with.

Here a little bit more detail to what I mentioned before regarding the CapEx development. You can see in the dark green area the reduction of investments in tangible assets. And this is what I mentioned, the refurbishment of the only office which Ascom owns, which is our office in Sweden. It was finished in 2024. And therefore, in 2025, we have only a very low level of, I would say, recurring tangible investments. And the area which is light green is intangible CapEx. It consists of approximately 2/3 of capitalized R&D developments and approximately 1/3 of capitalized ERP migration, which we are still continuing.

Here is the view of the cash flow. So as I mentioned, we are very satisfied with the development of the operating cash flow, which is CHF 32.6 million in 2025. There you can see also which parts of this operating cash flow were used for capitalization, for CapEx and also for return to shareholders, which here consists of the share buyback of CHF 6.8 million and the dividends of CHF 3.6 million. So altogether, we returned CHF 10.4 million to shareholders from Ascom's cash flow, and this is compared to the CHF 10.8 million in 2024, which was paid as a dividend.

Finally, a view to our balance sheet. We continue to have a robust balance sheet with a good cash position. We have 40% equity ratio and basically standing very confidently and strongly with a very good financial and financing situation.

Maybe one point here on the net working capital because I mentioned an improvement of the net working capital throughout the year, which indeed we achieved. However, we had a very strong revenue development in the months of November and December, and this increased our accounts receivable at the end of December. So this is something which is not evident when you look at the December balance sheet number. However, also here, we are in a very good situation at the moment.

So this concludes the financial part. And with this, I would like to hand over to David.

Thank you, Kalina. [Foreign Language] Good morning. Very happy to be with you all this morning. Maybe just a couple of points to my background. I've been with Ascom now for the past 5 weeks for the second time because I actually was an intern at Ascom [indiscernible] in Bern, Switzerland almost 35 years ago. So I'm actually -- I can say I'm happy to be back. Totally different activity at the time. And after I left Ascom, I actually went pretty quickly into health care, and that's where I've spent more or less the past 25 years.

I spent quite a bit of time at GE Healthcare here in Europe, a little bit in the United States, half that time, about 15 years, focused on diagnostic imaging, services, capital equipment, MRI, CT scanners. And then the second half of that time really on the health care IT side, so everything that is radiology IT, cardiology IT, perinatal, perioperative IT systems.

And then I left GE Healthcare and joined a pharmaceutical company called Guerbet. It's a French-based pharmaceutical company, family owned but publicly listed. I was the CEO of that company for the past 6 years and had also a Board position with a long-term care chain out of France for a couple of years. And I'm currently on the Board of Ambu, which is a Danish medical device company, also publicly listed, that operates in the area of endoscopy. But very happy to be here at Ascom now.

Just to come back to what Michael had mentioned earlier, I'm not going to go back into the numbers. But I think what's super interesting to recognize here is you have a demographic shift of patients combined with a very big change in how we deliver care. And those 2 changes combined is what's really creating opportunities and consistent growth that you're going to see across the health care for many years to come. Health care has the beauty of being a sector that structurally has grown and will structurally continue to grow, but continue to grow in different areas.

If you just take the U.S. as an example, if you look on the top left, you've got kind of the shift in demographics that Michael was talking about earlier. And if you look at the percentage of the population, birth rates are falling, people are living longer. So I have a shift in the percentage of my population that is elderly. And if you look at the cost that it takes me to deliver health care to an older population, it's kind of, for a health care system, the worst of both worlds.

It's a bad segment mix. I've got my most expensive older population, which is actually growing. And this is creating massive margin pressure for health care systems. And a recent study was done to look at where are the opportunities to improve the margin of health care systems. So in the U.S., we talk about improving the margin. But even outside of the U.S., you can talk a lot about how do I have to do more with less resources because every government around the world is looking to how they decrease health care cost in their system, reimbursement cost, overall health care system costs.

So if you look at the different opportunities, there's actually several areas here where Ascom's portfolio can really add value and bring that value to our customers if you're talking about clinical workforce management, operating room, inpatient operations and also in the emergency department. And if I try to translate that into, okay, how should I think about growth for Ascom, where Ascom plays in the market?

If you take our underlying solutions, starting with mobility, moving into alarm management, medical device connectivity and all of those solutions across the system, we can expect over the coming years anywhere between a 4% to 7% growth in those areas taken at large where Ascom really has an opportunity to bring something to the table.

So if we look at 2026, obviously, objective is to continue to deliver profitable growth, but there's 3 main areas that we're going to be focusing on to do that. The first one is really to continue to exploit the benefits of this new organization that Michael talked about. We have opportunities now that we're structured as a regional organization to better balance resources. If you think about delivery of projects, service of our customers, previously, those were optimized within a country. Now we have the opportunity to better optimize those across the region.

Also focusing on further operational improvements, project implementation efficiency. Michael talked about the improvement in our profitability on the projects. You can do that through standardization of deployments. I can do that linked to the first item, also sharing my resources and optimizing those across the region. You have now many AI tools that I can be using for improving my delivery as well as improving my development.

And finally, accelerating our innovation pipeline, and I would also say, preparing our commercial and marketing teams to be able to deliver that innovation. So those are really the 3 areas that we plan to focus on in 2026 to deliver -- continue to deliver that profitable growth.

You've seen the guidance, so I won't spend a ton of time on that. But what we're saying for 2026, we're going to deliver low to mid-single-digit revenue growth at constant currency and an EBITDA margin of 10% to 12% in 2026.

So with that, I will hand it back over to Michael, who will present the proposals for the Annual General Meeting.

Yes. Thank you, David. Really glad to have you onboard, this time on the same side, because we were battling each other for many, many years, me on the Siemens Healthineers side and he on the GE Healthcare side, both in imaging, et cetera, et cetera. So glad that we are now fighting the same fight.

Yes, proposals for the Annual General Meeting. And I have switched now my head, not ex at interim CEO, now I'm a member of the Board. And I'll talk about the proposals for the Annual General Meeting. And on this slide, I will outline our dividend proposal to the AGM, an update on our share buyback program and what it means for our shareholders.

So the Board is proposing a dividend of CHF 0.20, to the Annual General Meeting. This is based on a group profit of CHF 15.1 million, and CHF 15.1 million corresponds to an earnings per share of CHF 0.43. We also have to see that in the context of our share buyback program. We will continue to complete our share buyback program in 2026. We launched it in May of 2025. And as of the end of December 2025, we bought back 1.8 million shares for about CHF 7 million. And together with the 2025 dividend, we returned about CHF 0.30 per share to our shareholders.

In 2026, we expect to repurchase the remaining 1.2 million shares now at a higher average share price than in 2025, at least we assume that. And that's how we spend probably around CHF 8 million to buy back those 1.2 million shares. And together with the 2026 proposed dividend, we plan to return to shareholder amount up to CHF 14.9 million, representing up to CHF 0.45 per share. That's our proposal to the Annual General Meeting.

The other proposal is about the members of the Board of Directors. As you probably know from the last AGM or afterwards, Valentin Chapero has decided to not stand for reelection to become a member of the Board of Directors or the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The other 5 members have decided to stand for reelection. So we propose to the AGM the reelection of the current Board members: Nicole Burth, Laurent Dubois, Jurg Fedier, Dr. Monika Krusi and myself, Michael Reitermann. We also propose to the AGM the election of Laurent Dubois as the Chairman of the Board.

And I end our presentation today with just a glimpse, who is Laurent, Laurent Dubois. He actually also battled me on the GE Healthcare side for a few years. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Ascom since 2020. He is a Belgian national, lives in Switzerland. He is the CEO and a member of the Board of ADB Safegate, a Belgium-based company, which is airport technologies. When you Google the company, you probably will see that you have interfaced with a lot of their technologies when you are flying. And he has a long background in health care as well. So more than 20 years background in understanding processes on the customer side in the U.S., in Europe, around the globe with McKinsey, GE Healthcare. And so I believe that Laurent has an excellent profile for becoming the next Chairman of Ascom. And that's why we propose him to the AGM.

So thank you very much. I hand it now back to Kalina to lead us through the Q&A.

So thank you, everybody, for your attention. We open the Q&A session.

And first -- yes, there we go, what's the first question.

Yes. I will have 3 questions. The first question is about your midterm goals. Are you going to announce them some time? Is this planned?

Then the second question would be about this big order that you got in December. Maybe if you could talk a bit more about its nature, its size.

And yes, my third question would be about the tariffs. You mentioned that CHF 0.5 million amount of tariffs you have to pay. Are you going to try to reclaim that? And do tariffs still influence you in any way?

Yes. Thank you very much. So regarding the first question, well, we'll probably ask Michael to give an answer, and then I will take questions 2 and 3.

Yes. I mean, basically midterm goals, there are 2 rationales why we don't right now give midterm goals. The one is, of course, the global uncertainty. I think we said that a couple of times. And then, of course, also, David will have the opportunity to now look at the business and also then make decisions where he wants to take that business. And David, I don't know whether you want to add anything to that, but I think that is why, at the moment, we will not plan to issue a midterm guidance fully aligned.

Then on the big order of the U.S., we just disclosed the following situation. It is a big order that we have already received in 2024. And it is not uncommon for Ascom to receive big orders, which are then delivered over multiples of years. So this is nothing unusual. This particular order was actually in the Enterprise segment, but we also have such orders in the health care segment, of course.

What was a little bit unusual is that a big chunk of this order was asked to be delivered in December, right? This is something which is where we don't really have a very, very granular visibility because the customers can decide also on short term to ask us to deliver. So this is the situation that we had. So in this sense, it is not a one-off, per se, right, because we have big frame contracts also in other countries. It is just a little bit unusual in terms of the timing and size.

And the last question regarding the U.S. tariffs. Yes, the impact in '25 of about CHF 0.5 million was, in fact, lower than what we feared in the beginning. So our current setup is such that we are partially impacted but also partially can deliver in the U.S. free from tariff. And the situation, unfortunately, remains dynamic, right? So we have to see how things will develop. Certainly, we will try to claim the tariffs that we have paid. We have already started first steps in this direction. But also here, there is substantial uncertainty whether this will materialize and also when.

What I would expect for this year is that we will continue to be impacted. But in terms of magnitude, I cannot really say it's going to be more or less than what we had in the past, right? Because right now, we are again very low at the 10%, but we do not know how long this is going to last. So all that we try is to optimize our supply chain and the timing of our deliveries in the U.S. in such a way that we can be impacted in a minimal way.

So the production is made in Mexico for the U.S. market?

We import to the U.S. market from various markets. Mexico is one part, but we also import from China, from Thailand and also some -- a little bit from Europe. So we have various countries where we import. And sometimes, we are exempt from tariffs and sometimes not. And again, this situation is indeed very dynamic. So we follow it very closely and we try to optimize as good as we can.

[indiscernible]. I've got a question regarding your guidance for the current year. For the EBITDA margin, you guide for 10% to 12%. You had 11.7% '25. Given the fact that you also guide for rising sales low to middle digit, isn't this a bit defense? Shouldn't the margin grow again with rising sales? Or is there something special we should keep in mind?

I mean maybe I'll give it a first shot and then Kalina can chime in. I mean, we are looking at some -- first statement, the uncertainties in the market. We just talked about tariffs. We don't know. Right now, the new issue is 10% for 180 days, might be 15%, an increase. It's not the mega number. But we also, from an investment perspective, are investing in our solutions portfolio.

We basically have in 2025 made good progress on that. By 2026, when we, for example, say, cloud-based solutions, the Nourish solution, the Nourish care example that I presented, there, we will also make investments in order to integrate into their digital care solutions. So it is an investment case also on the expense side in R&D. And then what you saw on the commercial intensity side, we also want to invest in our go-to-market. And that means education of our own sales force, but especially also the education of our distribution partners.

Because today, in many cases, we have distribution partners who can sell the low end of our solution portfolio. So they sell nurse call, they sell mobility. But we see an opportunity to actually -- in software, you usually talk about land and expand. And so we are investing also in our distribution channels to be more capable to then upsell. But that is in 2026 an expense item. So there are a couple of investments in the future, in 2026, so that we decided to give a wider range and a more cautious range.

And I don't know, Kalina, whether you want to add something.

I don't think there is much to add to this. I think this is pretty much all. I think also from our perspective, when we make our forecast, we see a number of uncertainties. And we just want to remain reasonable but, at the same time, a bit cautious.

Michael Inauen from ZKB. I'm not going back to the EBITDA margin guidance, would have been my question as well. But maybe you can just try to give us a hint on how much this December delivery actually helped your margin. I mean, I'm surely helped on the gross profit margin that you had everything in December. So just to understand if maybe that's the difference that we can look into '26.

Second question is, as far as I remember, you changed your setup or particularly the people in North America, I think, about a year ago. And in order intake, it looks pretty good. So I'm just trying to understand how successful this new team is, how satisfied are you with these people? And can we look at a more stable Ascom environment in North America?

And just an understanding question as the last one. I think you say somewhere in your presentation or in the annual report, 13% of your revenues is software. I'm just trying to understand what exactly that is. Is that usually attached to something that you sell on the hardware side? Or is that generally everything recurring that repeats itself, like on a Software as a Service level? Just to understand, maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like to get it better.

Thank you very much. So I would then answer the first question and the second question regarding the development of the U.S. team. Michael, I suggest that you answer this one. And then the software percent of revenue, I can start and then, of course, you can complement. So on the U.S., we can say that it impacted our EBITDA margin by a bit less than 1 percentage point, just in terms of rough estimate. Then the development of the U.S. team and how we see its progression, I think, maybe, Michael, you can give your assessment.

Yes. How should I say that to be diplomatically correct? I think we have a better team in the U.S. at the top but also on the next layer, so basically the people who work in the regions with our distribution partners, who, what I said, working on educating them so that they basically are not only, let's say, infrastructure facilities people, but they can actually have a clinical discussion. And that was clearly identified by the new leadership probably summer 2025. We are investing now in that and how do we educate them and train them to have this land-and-expand concept, that we basically are in 20% of the U.S. hospitals with our nurse call, but we don't go to the higher-value software solutions. So this is one element that was clearly identified by Tobias Stanelle.

And then the second one, we also, not only on the sales side, but also on the implementation side. We made some, I think, good choices with new people joining us, somebody who worked with us on -- probably some of you know that we have a collaboration with GE in the United States about digital CMU, central monitoring unit, where you integrate out of, let's say, 10 different hospitals the ICU so that you basically can leverage the staff. And you don't have to have an ICU observation site in each hospital. You can centralize that. That's productivity, et cetera. And he worked in that. And he is now responsible for our professional services and customer care.

So the 2 elements I showed earlier where we already made improvement. So I believe we are on a good way in North America. We'll see. And probably all of you know the OBBBA, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So we don't know what that now means for the funding, especially Medicare on the elderly. We saw that more and more of the people will go in this elderly segment and you have to have the funding in order to support that. And we don't know yet what impact it will have on the funding situation in North America. So a little bit hedging our bets, but I definitely think the prerequisites have improved quite a bit in North America.

Yes. Thank you very much. And then the software question, yes, the 13%, which we show is, in fact, consists only of the licenses, which we sell, right? In reality, we usually sell a project. And within this project, we have hardware and we have software and we have also services, which either we deliver ourselves with our technical experts or we have a partner or both, right? And in the end, it is a combination of hardware, software and work. And the part that here we count as software, the 13% is only the licenses. One can, of course, argue that if we had not developed the software, we would not be able to deliver the entire project. So we are still thinking of what would be a correct way to demonstrate the value of our software also in the financials. But at the moment, we think that this is a transparent way to show it. And then, yes, we will consider if there is an alternative to demonstrate how important the software really is for Ascom. I don't know if anybody wants to add.

I would just add that software, thinking about it as the license only is extremely restrictive because even the -- you install a software license with someone, even if they buy it as a perpetual license, you still have upgrade opportunities that are pure, what we would call professional services work that don't necessarily involve additional software license, but which generate new projects and therefore, also new service revenue. So there's -- I think, as Kalina said, we're kind of looking -- there's software and there's software-induced revenue and how do we look at that better as a whole.

Any other questions? This seems not to be the case, then I will go to the question. We have one question in the chat from [ Dominik Maurer ]. He's asking, looking on the explanation for the increase in R&D cost of lower capitalization on Slide 20. The capitalization was reduced by CHF 1 million, but R&D cost went up by CHF 2.5 million. What is the reason for this?

Yes, and this is indeed a good observation. So the place in the annual report where we show our R&D expense in terms of cash view, right? So it is free of capitalization, but also free of amortization of intangibles is on Page 148 of the annual report. And there, you see that we have an increase of CHF 2.4 million in real R&D expense. And from this, CHF 1.4 million, you can see in terms of increase in the P&L and the remainder, CHF 1.1 million is a reduction in the CapEx.

What we also have here is a certain complexity comparing year-on-year and also certain complexity that you have with various FX rates. But basically, this is where you can see the full picture of what -- of the R&D expense and its development year-on-year in terms of entire R&D expense.

Let me see if there are any other questions on the webcast. Yes, we have a second question from [ Mark Possa ]. Could you talk about your visibility and its change? That's question number one. And question number two, about the competitive landscape and its change.

So about the visibility of the results, I can say my personal opinion, then maybe I can hand over to Michael to add something. I do not see any substantial change in the visibility. But again, other than what we see is a macroeconomic impact on Ascom, right? So we have -- as a large part of our revenue, we have projects as well as customer support contracts, right? Customer support contracts are long-term contracts. And there, we have close to 100% visibility.

Regarding projects, these are also typically mid- to long-term projects. So they -- also you can argue that we have a certain visibility on the revenue. And there, of course, it depends on execution on our side, but also it depends on the speed of execution of the customer. So this is in terms of revenue visibility, right? The visibility on the order side is again much more impacted by tender activity at our customer site and the investment appetite of the enterprise customers. So this is a bit from a financial perspective, how I see it. I don't know if you want to add anything.

I mean, I interpret visibility means visibility for project wins, revenue and order entry. That's what I assume.

That's how I interpret it as well, yes.

Yes. Basically, in 2025, and I think at the end of 2024, beginning of 2025, we have a much more stringent, what we call funnel review where we basically go through all the regions and actually say, hey, what are the projects that you have on the horizon that you see, then which ones are you bidding for? What are our success chances there? What do we need to do from a corporate perspective, from a regional perspective in order to be more successful. Then we assign probabilities like you always do when you have a good funnel management. And that gives us then a very good -- a reasonably good visibility in order to see what orders will come in.

So I think that is a change in the organization also with the focus on the 3 regions. So this is now more easily deployed into the regions, this funnel review. And I have been participating now for 5, 6 months. David had 1 month of experience. And I think this is a good way for us to become more predictable internally on what will be the order entry.

From a competitive landscape, I would say, and this is a little bit of my observation. I think some of our competitors that have been acquired by larger companies sometimes are not investing as much as we think they should in R&D. And that's why I believe by being the innovator, having innovative solutions, I think in the next few years, we have a good competitive position because some of them are not as innovative going forward.

Okay. Thank you.

I would just add one thing. The -- if you look at our competitors, we very often have competitors that are smaller niche players. Sometimes they vary from country to country. And Ascom, first of all, provides a total solution across a particular space. And the advantage of that is, in particular, for example, if you're looking at medical device integration, we're sitting or seeing pass a ton of data because we're connecting to each one of those medical devices, whereas a niche player may connect in one area or one particular space.

And one thing Michael talked about earlier, which is when you talk with customers is incredibly powerful and something they're looking for. When you see all that data pass for somebody that's sitting in the ICU or someone even that's sitting in an inpatient environment, you can start to predict with some decent level of accuracy, a deterioration potential for that patient long before a human or human eyes would be able to predict that. We're sitting on top of that data. We're sitting on top of the whole of that data. Some of our competition are sitting on parts of that data. And if we can figure out how to grasp that opportunity, I think that's an absolute opportunity for Ascom to see how we turn those data into real insights that you can do something with.

You have the same thing in Long-Term Care. If you're following your residents around with sensor detection technology, as Michael mentioned, that's 4 nights in a row, your mother stayed in bed half an hour, then an hour longer than 1.5 hours longer, something has changed. And that's not something as a human caregiver, you would naturally pick up on. So there's lots of, in my opinion, pools of opportunity there where someone who's across the platform like Ascom can play where some of our niche competitors who only see a piece of the puzzle will struggle to be able to play.

Thank you. We have one more question from the chat from [ Mark Webb ]. And it is, could you update more on how the Enterprise business is going and break down sales between prisons and other and geography?

Maybe on the second part, I would like to mention that we do not provide breakdowns within Enterprise neither by geography nor by type of customer, but we are happy to give an update on the development of the Enterprise business. Here, maybe I will hand it over to you.

I mean the Enterprise business, as you can tell, we basically use a lot of the technologies that we have in Acute Care and in Long-Term Care and redeploy them. We have a couple of software solutions that then sit on that, for example, the Prisoner App. And it sounds like we have now twice picked secure establishments as we call them, as examples, for the customer examples, but this is definitely not the majority of our business. It's blue light services. So basically, when you have police, when you have fire departments, they want to have secure communication when you basically loan worker is a big one, when you are an oil platform and you suddenly want to know the worker doesn't move anymore or basically the device that he's carrying is in an awkward position that you can send an alarm. These are the solutions across the board that we are providing there. And that is way beyond the secure establishments.

And I think we have a really strong point in the DACH region. And we believe that we have the opportunity to be more successful in other countries, regions with Enterprise. And that's why we started the Enterprise initiative, Enterprise growth initiative, where we want to aggressively, with the lead generation campaign, go after new customers in each country with a different focus on a different vertical/industry, but we believe we have opportunities to grow in that segment, and this will be an emphasis in 2026.

Thank you. There are no more questions from the chat. So final call for the participants in the room. Yes, one more question.

Jorn Iffert, UBS. Maybe one question. The OEM has gained some share in the total revenues. And I was wondering what is behind? Is it this U.S. bigger order? Or yes, a little bit if you can comment what went better than Ascom Group in the OEM part of the business.

Yes, it is true that in '25, we had a somewhat higher share of OEM, but I would not necessarily see this as a trend. One can also argue that '24 was particularly low in terms of OEM. So OEM for us is a relatively stable business, which, of course, we try to satisfy our customers, but it's not one of our main growth drivers to put it like this. So I would say that there is not any trend that can be seen in this. It just happens to be a year where our long-term OEM customers ordered a bit more than in '24.

Also here, we have some visibility, but not really to the last million that they are going to order. So yes, I would say this is what we can say today also in terms of visibility. We have long-term contracts. We know that these contracts will be fulfilled. We are not entirely sure of the exact timing of the orders, but it's certainly a business that we are very happy to keep and to continue.

One more question has come from the chat. If you were to give an educated guess, okay, better than [indiscernible], where will the industry be in 5 years' time in terms of consolidation? I suppose this refers to our industry. Where will the industry be in 5 years' time? Yes, we can guess which industry, but yes...

Maybe 2 answers. One from both perspectives, and then we're sure that we get Mark's question covered. From a -- if you look at the health care segment, already today, you've got roughly 80% of the health care establishments in the U.S. that belong to a system of some sort. And when they belong to a system, there's 2 meanings to that. They can simply belong to a purchasing group. So in the U.S., there's 3 main purchasing groups that centralize buying or it can be a part of a system. As Michael mentioned, you have Ochsner in the South, you have Kaiser Permanente along the West Coast. You have Advent Healthcare across a large part of the U.S. You have Mayo, which has several clinics across the U.S.

And it's 2 steps. One is if you join a purchasing organization, they're doing it for 2 reasons. One is to save money at the end of the day. The second one is also to standardize across who they purchase from because it's easier at the end of the day to do implementations. When they're part of a complete system, you will actually see them standardizing across solutions, like they will choose Ascom nurse call for all of their systems. And the advantage of that is when they've chosen you or when you're on these purchasing groups list, if they've chosen you, you have free rein. If you're on a purchasing group list, you have a license to hunt. So you still have to go sell. But each health system has an advantage if they buy it from you and the purchasing group wants you to buy it from them.

In terms of a competitor, and you'll see the same thing, in my opinion, in long-term care in the U.S., and you already see it, you have chains in Europe already. You have [ Korian ], which is in many European countries. You have Emeis, which is in several countries, very strong in France, but in several countries. Bupa exactly, and more of these are coming.

From a competitor perspective, I think it depends on who you look at as the competitor. If you look at it from a big health care industrial type competitor, I think they will do, like Michael said, continue to buy, but not sure if they're going to keep up with the investments that would be needed to keep going.

If you look at it from the smaller niche players, there will either be consolidation or they will disappear because at the end of the day, the more you move towards software, the more you have to be able to invest. And if you don't have scale to be able to invest, it becomes very complicated. Even if you're looking at specific regions, you need a minimum size of your customer base from a profit perspective for you to be able to go direct in that region. Otherwise, you'll never be able to make the return on investment. So I think you will see a consolidate or disappear strategy in some of these smaller niche players as we go forward.

Regarding AI, could AI be an enabler to reduce the implementation time and, in the end, increase the addressable market for you? Or is it more a threat because some services, software solutions are obsolete going forward?

So if we don't do AI internally, that would be a threat because it can absolutely increase your -- think about a -- we have hundreds-plus projects per year that we have to manage, and you have to schedule the right resources with the right competency. And it's like imagining FedEx sitting in a room with 10 people around the table trying to decide on a human level who's going to go here and where over the day. It's not efficient. If you don't start to use those tools, somebody else will, and they will become much more efficient, much more cost competitive than you. So that's why I mentioned for me, those are areas where we will start to look at and focus on in terms of driving our own internal improvements.

You talked about deployment. You can also think about it from a service perspective. Today, someone does a service call, very often, you're dependent upon an unstructured knowledge base that the field engineer can quickly go look in, did somebody already call with this particular case how to -- or -- and therefore, a certain level of expertise. You have now agents that listen into the call, so AI agents that listen into the call, they start already building a prompt for you and go out and dig into your database and actually doesn't matter if it's structured or not structured anymore and be able to come back with you, okay, dear engineer, try this, try this, try this because this already occurred at certain places. And we're already doing some limited, I would say, pilot testing with that type of thing inside the service.

From an external perspective, same opportunity. We have, for example, with our operation room OR suite, Digistat product in Italy, they are literally running the operating room and the scheduling using Ascom product. And what happens is some of the doctors, the surgeons, they come on Wednesday by noon, and they have to deliver their desired schedule for the following week. And then a human sits down and looks at the 60 -- in this case, they have 60-plus operating rooms in one customer, and they schedule and plan individually each of the operating rooms. And every day, there's an emergency, which means every day something changes.

You could quite -- there exists even on the market, algorithms that will allow you to do OR planning, to do dynamic updating of that OR planning. And that's things that we need to look at how we integrate into our portfolio because that's a real value add for the customer. The operating room is typically the biggest expense, but also a revenue generator for a hospital other than potentially cardiology.

If I can optimize my operating room utilization rate, every point additional that I get out of utilization rate of my operating suite is direct P&L impact on the bottom line. So there are absolutely opportunities. And I don't think Ascom has to necessarily every time be the creator of those. There are some that we may want to -- because it's so high value add for us, we may want to be the creative. There may be others that we want to partner with. And it's the value of having that vendor-agnostic open platform.

Then we have one more question from the chat which is, are there any patent changes or expirations ahead in terms your bundle?

The short answer to this question is no. We don't have anything in the horizon to threaten us in terms of patent expirations or changes.

So I think with this, we are probably going to conclude. No more questions from the room and no more questions from the chat. If you should have any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You have my contact also in the press release. And thank you very much for your participation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your conference call operator. Welcome to the Ascom Half Year Results 2025 Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] The Ascom CEO, Nicolas Van Den Abeele; and the Ascom CFO, Kalina Scott, will answer questions. The conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Kalina Scott, Chief Financial Officer of the Ascom Group.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome also from my side to our half year results conference call. My name is Kalina Scott, I'm the CFO of Ascom and also responsible for Investor Relations. Today, as part of the agenda, first, Nicolas Van den Abeele will give you an overview of the half year results at a glance. Then I will take you through more detail of the financial results. And then I will turn on off again to Nicolas for strategy and business update as well as for information on our guidance. At the end, we will take questions. You can ask questions by phone, or you can post them in the chat. With this, over to you, Nicolas.

Thank you, Kalina. Good morning, and a very warm welcome to all of you as well to our first half year results call. I would like to start my presentation with a couple of points. First of all, the highlights on the financial figures. As you will have seen in the press release this morning, we posted good progress on some of our financials, in particular, on EBITDA and also on cash flow. But this is on the back on a very volatile market environment, which I will come into in the presentation. In the second part of our presentation, which is on the strategy update, I'll come back to where we stand and the progress that we made on our platforms, which, as you know, is a very important milestone and project that we're working on.

So I'll give you an update on that as well as on the tariff situation and the work that we did on lowering our cost base last year and also the first half of this year. But let me first start with first half '25 at a glance. The first point to mention, which is a note at the top of the slide is that going forward, we will report our figures actually according to three regions, which is a change in the organizational setup that we did earlier this year to have a much more leaner and streamlined setup. So going forward, we will announce our results according to these three regions, which is Region North, which is Region South, which is the U.S. & Canada, which comprises the countries that you can see also listed at the top of the slide. Moving to the first half figures at a glance. We posted a flat revenue overall at constant currencies, a slight reduction in actual currencies.

We had a good progress in the region South with a positive development in a number of markets, Region North being flat, but on the back of some headwinds, which we've seen mostly in the U.S. & Canada due to the current market volatility, but also the currency headwinds that we had over the first half of this year. Likewise, in terms of incoming orders, where we posted a negative growth of 4.2% at constant currencies. But on the other hand, actually a positive book-to-bill and a healthy book-to-bill of 1.12, which I will comment on later on. We progressed well on our EBITDA margin, where we can show an increase of 1.2% year-on-year versus first half 2024, thanks to the positive effect and visible effects of the cost measures that we've taken, but also an improved gross margin in the first half of this year, which increased from 47.3% to 48% in H1 '25.

Group profit at CHF 2.2 million, which is below H1 last year, mainly due to unrealized FX losses on intercompany loans, which Kalina will also highlight a bit later today in the presentation. And last but not least, a good and solid cash flow generation with a cash balance at the close of the first half of close to CHF 30 million, which is a good progress that we have made year-on-year, thanks to tight receivable and cash flow management, but also thanks to a lower CapEx expenditure in the first half of this year. So moving into a little bit more detail on our financials, as you can see on this slide. We posted a net revenue of CHF 140 million, as mentioned, which is flat at constant currencies, but mainly driven also by some market uncertainty and headwinds that we've seen in the U.S. & Canada in the first half.

Likewise, in terms of order intake, as mentioned, a decline in constant and actual currency, but an increase sequentially versus the second half of last year of about 10%. But actually, the good point is the positive back-to-bill -- book-to-bill ratio, which is standing at 1.12. As mentioned, EBITDA and gross margin, a good progress, and we're happy to post that in the first half, despite a flattish revenue developments, we posted a good progress in EBITDA and also on our gross margin, which, let's say, is a result of visible cost measures that you can see, thanks to operational efficiency measures taken in the second half of last year, but also first half of this year.

A very good progress in our net cash position, as mentioned, an increase from CHF 16.5 million last year to almost CHF 30 million in the first half, thanks to, I would say, a tight working capital management and receivables management, but also as a result of a lower capital expenditure in the first half. So these are the key financial highlights. I'll give the floor now to Kalina for a much more detailed update. I will come back a bit later after Kalina's presentation on the strategy update, on the business update, on the situation in the U.S. and the tariffs as well as on our guidance. Kalina?

Thank you, Nicolas. On Slide 8, you can see an overview of the key financial figures. Some of them, Nicolas already presented, you see the incoming orders declined by 5.7% from the previous half year. The order backlog declined by 0.6% compared to the situation in the first half of 2024, whereby it is important to mention that this is predominantly due to currency effects. The net revenue declined by 1.5% compared to the first half of 2024 in actual currencies. What you see on the second row, however, of these charts is the result of our efforts that we started in the second half of 2024 to improve profitability at Ascom by reducing the cost base and also to increase the cash generation.

As a result, you see that the EBITDA has increased by 15% or CHF 1.6 million compared to the first half of '24. The net working capital was reduced by CHF 8.5 million, and the capital expenditure was reduced by CHF 3.7 million or 40%. All of this has led to substantially better cash generation and a more stable financial position. On Slide 9, we begin to go through the details of these items. Incoming orders declined by 6% [Audio Gap] products and services. And you can see that the decline is quite more substantial in Swiss francs compared to local currencies. The distribution of the order intake development was quite different among the regions, whereby the region North could post an increase. The region South showed a small decline. And we had substantial headwinds in the U.S. & Canada, just as Nicolas mentioned.

This had to do with the macroeconomic uncertainties, which everybody feels and was further exacerbated by the currency impact of the lower U.S. dollar. On Slide 10, you can see the development of the backlog. In actual currencies or in Swiss francs, this development is negative. But in constant currencies or in local currencies, it would have been an increase of 4%. The split of the backlog remains largely unchanged with about 52% in projects, products and services and about 48% of maintenance and support, which is our long-term core business. On Slide 11, you can see in more detail the split of the revenue between local currencies and the currency effect. While in local currencies, the revenue remained stable compared to the first half of 2024. The currency effect led to CHF 2.4 million revaluation, which in the end brought us to the CHF 140 million net revenue in the first half of 2025.

Maybe I should mention here that most of our revenue we generate in euro as well as in the U.S. dollars. Also, we generate revenue in British pounds, in Norwegian and Danish kroner. And all of these currencies were lower in 2025 compared to 2024. So this negative currency effect comes from all of these currencies. On Slide 12, you can see the development of the net revenue split by maintenance and support, projects, products and services on the one hand, where we see that the development was quite similar and relatively flat in these two areas. Whereas when we look at regions, we see that Region North showed a small decline in Swiss francs or was actually stable in local currencies, whereas Region South showed a small growth. Similar as in order intake, also net revenue in the U.S. & Canada was lower than in prior year.

And this was also partially due to some large orders that we received in 2024, and which could also be turned to revenue in the first half of that year, which we could not repeat in the first half of 2025. Looking at Slide 13, I will mention a few more details about our income statement. Starting with the fact that we could improve our gross profit from 47.3% in the first half of '24 to 48% in the first half of '25. This had to do with the redundancy program that we executed in the second half of 2024. For those of you who participated in the full year conference, you will remember that we mentioned that we did a substantial redundancy program in the second half of 2024, which impacted the results of 2024 negatively in the sense that not only we had severance cost, but also we had to book provisions for some of these redundancies.

Then I also mentioned that we will see an improvement in the profitability of 2025 because this cost base will have already been reduced. And this is, in fact, what you see here across all cost line items of the profit and loss statement, starting with the gross profit. This is also what you see in marketing and sales, where cost was reduced by CHF 2.8 million or 7%. This is also due to the same reason to the lower personnel cost. Research and development increased, but a lot of this is actually due to higher amortization of intangible assets, which is also included in this line and to the fact that less of the R&D expenses have been capitalized in the first half of '25. Also in administration and G&A, we could save costs by the same manner, as I mentioned before. This led to the EBITDA margin increasing from 7.4% to 8.6%.

We had, however, some substantial headwinds in the currency exchange rates. And here, I would like to differentiate between two aspects, the realized and the unrealized portion. It is important to note that the operational center of Ascom is in Sweden. So there are certain realized FX expenses that result from the development of the Swedish krona, which, in fact, is the only currency that appreciated in this period compared to the Swiss franc. But the substantial part of the FX expenses or the financial expenses, which you can see is due to unrealized expenses, and these result from the revaluation of our intercompany loans, which are in foreign currency and which we give to the various countries from the holding in the local currencies and therefore, turned back into Swiss francs leads to these unrealized FX losses.

On Slide 14, you can see the development of our cash position. The biggest positive development came from operating activities, which is the result on the one hand of the higher EBITDA, but also the substantially improved net working capital. Then also we had CapEx that was lower compared to the first half of 2024. And also, you see that for dividends and for share buyback, we have expended approximately CHF 4.5 million, which leads to a cash position of CHF 29.5 million at 30th of June 2025. On Slide 15, looking at the balance sheet, you can see a solid position with reduced net working capital, but also with a solid equity ratio of 37.9%. Our share buyback is ongoing.

You can see a few cornerstones on Slide 16. We announced in March -- on March 12 that we will start the share buyback. We launched it in May. The framework of the share buyback is -- or the aim of the share buyback is to buy 3 million shares to a maximum amount of CHF 15 million, and we expect the share buyback to be finished latest in November of 2026. By the end of July, we have bought approximately 522,000 shares at an average share price of CHF 3.8, and we have paid approximately CHF 2 million for this share buyback. With this, I turn over back to Nicolas.

Thank you, Kalina. So I would like to proceed with an update on our strategy and also business. So first of all, as a recap, I mean, Ascom, our strategy and our ambition are to become the key enabling platform across the two domains in which we're active, which is healthcare, acute care, hospitals and long-term care as well as enterprise. And our revenues are split in these two segments with around 70% that we generate in the health care segment, around 30% in enterprise. The total addressable market, which is quite sizable, is around CHF 4 billion across these three segments. So we have a market share on average globally of around 8%, but depending on the countries, in some countries, much higher than that. So our ambition is to become that key enabling platform, which is the real-time critical platform of communication and collaboration across these different segments.

Now we play into some key trends and some key needs of our customers, be it on the health care side, the shortage that many of our customers are facing, hence, the need for workflow automation and digitalization, be it also the complex integration, what we call medical device integration of multiple medical devices that you see across the different care areas in hospitals, making that, let's say, integrate and tangible is also one of the key things that we do. Likewise, in long-term care, aging population, the need for additional capacity, a need also to stay longer at home with monitoring solution before moving to a care home. These are all key trends that we see in the market and key trends in which Ascom plays into and has also key value propositions to offer. We view it as second to none in critical communication, real-time communication and collaboration.

We're also a platform of reference in the market for alarming and monitoring, making sure that whenever there's an occurrence that the alarms are triggered, that they're also tended to within the seconds or the minutes by the appropriate caregiver with the necessary escalations to the next caregiver. So everything we do across these two segments is making care delivery or work in general, more efficient for the worker, for the caregiver, but also allowing and enabling better patient outcomes. So that is our strategy. Looking at the two key segments in which we're active and the different solutions that we offer, we are one of the key players in the market that offers end-to-end workflow communication and automation solutions.

In health care, we do that across the different care domains, which is the general ward, which is the intensive care unit, the operating room, the emergency department. And we offer a key number of solutions, which you can see on the slide, going from alarm management to medical device integration to clinical surveillance, so really monitoring the state of a patient with early warning scores, OR operating solutions with scheduling, with inventory management and a number of more solutions that we offer across the health care domain. Likewise, in enterprise, with a number of solutions similar to health care like alarm management, like workflow efficiency, like staff assignment and task assignment and workflow and workplace safety. Now the market trends, the underlying market trends are definitely solid.

These are key needs that our customers need, the need for critical communication and collaboration, need for digitalization. But we've seen in the first half of this year, a certain market volatility, which in particular in the U.S. was quite noticeable, which led to a number of delays in investment decisions given the market and political or geopolitical situation basically. This was compounded also by some adverse FX impacts, in particular, the dollar, but a number of other currencies as well, which is visible in the figures that we've posted in the first half. Nevertheless, we believe that these delays, which were noticeable in particular in the U.S. & Canada are of temporary nature. Also in Germany, there were elections. There was also a lot of discussions and certain delays on the new health care bill, which in the meantime has been approved. So we believe this is of transient nature.

The underlying and the midterm growth drivers remain fully intact across the three segments in which we are active. For the second half of this year, we have typically a more seasonal effect in the second half versus the first half with a higher order intake, also higher revenue. And this is supported by the strong backlog that we have for the second half, but also a healthy pipeline of new projects on which we are working. One additional comment that I wanted to make, which is an important one on the tariff situation in the U.S. & Canada. To give you a little bit more insight there, obviously, this was a matter of concern, not just for Ascom, but for all companies in the first half with a lot of volatility and changing market environment.

We anticipated on that with -- I mean, at the end of last year and early this year, building additional inventory in the U.S. to pre-empt any possible tariff move situation. But it's important to mention also that as a Swiss company, actually, we do not produce or export from Switzerland to the U.S. I mean we have our production, but also development activities located in multiple locations, not in Switzerland. So we're not subject to the potential 39% tariff. What is the situation today? We produce for the U.S. market a lot from Mexico, which is our Nurse Call, which today is exempted from tariff. So there's a 0 tariff for Mexico to the U.S. We produce also on our mobility side in China, which are our microphones for 5G phones, but also DECT phones, where we have a tariff situation of 20% to 30% depending on the device itself.

Again, it has an impact. I would say it is important, but it's manageable. We have anticipated to that in the first half of this year with additional inventories. We've also worked on making sure that we can adjust prices, and we've done that over the first half to cater for potential cost increases on some of these products. Maybe a last comment. While there is a tariff situation in the U.S., we -- if you look at Ascom as a whole, invoice around half of our turnover in software and services and about half in hardware across Nurse Call and mobility devices. Now the impact, obviously, is much less than half of the turnover for the U.S. because we import only a part of that. We also source certain things locally.

So moving to the next page. Given that, let's say, overall situation in first half, we posted some important customer wins, which are strong proof points of the value that we bring to our customers. And I just listed a few here on this slide, a very important one in Switzerland here, the Kantonsspital Baden, which is the regional hospital in the region of Baden, where we've actually deployed a fairly large system, Nurse Call system, but also with workflow solutions and alarm management, which really enables that hospital to improve efficiency, to improve care delivery to the patients in a much better, much more ergonomic and a much more efficient way for the caregivers. So it's a very important flagship reference for us. We invited a number of overseas customers also to visit that site and hospital, and we're proud of that reference.

The second one in Germany, which is the Wertachkliniken, where we did a nice project on Medical Device Integration together with Alarm Management, likewise, a very nice reference. Another reference in the U.S., where we have a partnership agreement actually with AvaSure, which is a company also active in the health care domain with hospitals and long-term care homes, where we have a partnership to deploy jointly what we call the virtual nursing type of solutions to make the work of the nurses better, more efficient with also a virtual nursing capability so that they can rely on more specialist nursing support whenever needed.

The fourth reference is closer by in the Nordics, in Sweden with ISG Nordic, which is a company specialized in the enterprise side in basically staff safety workplace safety, staff monitoring across multiple enterprise domains, and we have a strong partnership with them and a lot of projects working on Staff Safety, on Secure Communication, on monitoring and task management basically for the workers across these different verticals. Last but not least, a reference in Finland with the Kokkola Hospital, which is also a project on Alarm Management and Medical Device Integration. And as you can see, some very nice proof points on improvements that we brought to the hospital staff in terms of reduction of non-actionable alarms and making, again, care delivery much more effective and efficient.

So with this, I would like to give you also an update on where we stand in our strategy execution and the progress that we've made in the first half of this year. Two points I would like to highlight on the next couple of slides. One is on our portfolio strategy. Second one later on is on what we've done in terms of having a leaner cost structure and a leaner organization in Ascom. So first of all, an update on our portfolio strategy. As you know, as you will recall from previous conference calls, we've invested over the past 2, 2.5 years on streamlining our portfolio, on moving our portfolio, integrating it, but also moving it to cloud-enabled platforms. And we are very, very advanced in that.

We -- the ambition is that we seamlessly integrate our different platforms into one where we can offer on the same solution and platform basically our alarm management, our workflow management, our surveillance and monitoring across the different domains, but really coming from the same integrated platform, which gives a lot of benefits to our customers in terms of value that we provide, but also simplifies much, much more in terms of complexity of the solutions that we offer. We're pretty advanced in that, and I will highlight that briefly. So in terms of the enterprise platform, I mean, we are fully ready, and the platforms are available.

But also in long-term care, we are now moving in the second half of this year to scaling basically our deployments and our rollouts in terms of these new platforms to our Long Term Care customers. We will complete that journey and that transition early next year with also making these new solutions available for our Acute Care segment. which will be early 2026. Now what does it mean specifically? So it basically means that if you look at the left-hand side of this slide, today, we have already a number of customers on our new platform, close to 20 customers in enterprise and long-term care that we are scaling up in the second half of this year to move many more of our customers to that new platform.

The initial rollout so far has been on the number of applications, which was mostly centered around Staff Safety. We are now ready to scale that up and to offer also next to Staff Safety, also the other solutions in terms of alarm management, SmartSense, which is a monitoring solution, but also task management to these customers. And with our platform, we are also now capable of supporting all customers across long-term care and enterprise, going from very small ones to very large 400, 500, 600 rooms or beds type of customers in the long-term care domain. What does it basically bring? I mean, this is a new platform. This is a cloud-enabled or cloud-native platform, which integrates, as I mentioned, the different solutions in terms of alarm management, clinical surveillance, in terms of monitoring.

It can be deployed in an on-premises or in a fully cloud version. And it definitely brings distinct benefits to our customers in terms of easier scalability, in terms of self-healing capability of the platform, which really increases the quality and the reliability, but also making automated updates so that you don't have to send technicians or you can do it immediate and not have to plan specific service windows to do that. So a lot of additional benefits. As mentioned, we're ready to scale up now, which will be in the second half of this year with our long-term care and enterprise customers, and we will finalize and complete the transition early '26 with also our healthcare hospital customers.

Now next to that platform integrations, there's also a number of important innovations on which we're working on. Just to name one, Ascom is viewed in the market as being second to none in terms of alarming, critical alarming in a health care setting, which is a very regulated and complex domain. But what you see is that basically every alarm has to result in an action. And sometimes you have a number of alarms that actually are nonactionable because it depends really on the physical condition and the contextual information of a given patient. And there's on average around 50%, 60% of alarms and alerts generated by medical equipment in a hospital, which is not really actionable and which results in, let's say, an action by a nurse or a doctor, which could have been prevented.

And so everything that we're doing right now is to develop smart alarm filtering in order to reduce these nonactionable alarms for the caregivers but also moving much more to what we call pre-emptive alarming. So really pre-emptively being able to spot potential deteriorations, potential risks of certain patients with early warning scores and other type of solutions, right? And that's the next thing in terms of alarming. That's where the industry will be going to, and we want to be on the forefront, obviously, of that. The second point I wanted to mention is the effort that we've done, as Kalina highlighted as of the second half of last year and this year in working our cost base. And we've implemented a cost efficiency plan as of the second half of last year.

We've also implemented earlier this year a new organization where we combine the different country structures in bigger regional setups, which are the three regions I referred to, Region North, Region South, the U.S. & Canada, but also underneath that, integrating part of our sales and marketing teams, but foremost our customer delivery and service and operations teams. So this has now been completed. It's an important step that we've done earlier in the year, but with visible impact also in terms of cost as of the first half of 2025, but also second half and run rate 2026 with a net additional saving in '26 versus '24 of around CHF 3 million. So with this, I would like to conclude and give you the key takeaways basically, which is that, I mean, Ascom is really second to none in a number of care areas, a number of key solutions, which bring really value to our customers.

Despite the volatility that we've seen over the past number of months, our markets are healthy, have solid growth trends. And we also expect that over second half, the volatility should normalize or should more stabilize, which is important. Strategically, we have worked a lot, and we are completing the important milestones in terms of our innovation road map, also in terms of our platform conversions. And we've worked our cost base with visible impact in the first half and also on a full year basis 2025. And we're committed to work further on our growth, which we know has been a little bit subdued in the first half, but we expect a better second half of this year, but especially continue to work on EBITDA accretion as well as cash conversion, where I believe in the first half of this year, we've shown some good progress.

With this, I would like to move to the guidance of 2025. And we can reconfirm the guidance that we also have given at the beginning of the year at our full year conference -- full year '24 results conference in March, which is that for the full year 2025, we expect and we target a low single-digit revenue growth at constant currency, but also an EBITDA margin of between 9% to 10%. So an unchanged guidance for the full year, and we're committed, obviously, to delivering that. With this, I would like to conclude the presentation, and I move back to Kalina for questions and answer.

Thank you, Nicolas. So with this, I would like to open the floor for questions. We will take first live questions from the phone and then the questions from the chat. Operator, would you please instruct the participants accordingly?

[Operator Instructions] First question, Reto Huber, Research Partners.

I have about three. The first one is you were saying that your order intake increased sequentially. Maybe you could give us a little bit of color what drove this? Then secondly, there was a lot of optimism at the last conference because you hired a new sales rep in the U.S. coming from GE Healthcare. I'm wondering is the person still there and is he or she making progress? And then thirdly, you explained that you were going to transition customers to your new platform. I was wondering, is this going to be associated with extra costs that should be regarded as one-off in the second half of this year?

Thank you, Reto, for the three questions. Let me take them one by one. So the first one was on order intake. And we gave you the two sets of data indeed sequentially versus second half of last year, where you see a 10% increase. But year-on-year, we're actually down 4.7%, 5.7% versus first half of 2025. Now what are the different drivers? We -- I mean, there's always a seasonality also towards the second half of the year, where we've seen in the past that typically H2 is stronger. Now last year was a bit weaker in the second half. What we do expect basically or what we saw in the first half of this year is that in a number of regions, mainly in Europe, actually, we have seen some growth, mainly in the Nordics or in the North region.

But we have seen a delay in investments, particularly in the U.S., which has been reflected in the numbers that we've shared with you. The main reason is investment delays due to the uncertainty and the volatility in the market as a result of the trade-war. The second reason, as Kalina also highlighted, is that in the first half of last year in the U.S., we had a few larger deals, which were kind of one-off deals, right? Now that being said, we expect also in the second half for the U.S. a better uptake in order intake based on the pipeline and the funnel that we see today. We also expect that in the other regions, I mean, there are some deals that we are working on, which normally should come in.

So we should be able to post also, let's say, a positive evolution over the second half of this year. So that's with respect to the order intake. With respect to the U.S., we've announced in March a change of leadership. So we brought a new person on board coming from GE with a very strong sales profile, sales background and track record, knowing the industry very, very well in the U.S. He came on board towards the end of the -- I mean, the first quarter of this year. So we -- I mean, we're working on a lot of initiatives.

They're not yet visible in the results, but I'm confident that, I mean, step-by-step, we will also see the positive outcome of that with the new leadership in place, not just Tobias Stanelle that we hired, but also some other changes that we did in the team and some of the people that we brought on board. We also expect that the market situation or the uncertainty in the U.S. market should stabilize. Obviously, we cannot predict. But if we look at the discussions which are ongoing with the different countries and if you look also at our supply chain setup, we -- I mean, it should stabilize in the months to come. So it should not have, let's say, a big additional impact in the second half of this year. With respect to the new platforms, we -- I mean, this will be an incremental approach.

I mean we are starting to deploy our solutions in enterprise and long-term care. We will -- and we expect it to scale up in the second half of this year with more customers moving to that new platform, in particular, in enterprise and in Long Term Care. We will only do that as of 2026 in the hospitals in the Acute Care part of our business. So it will be an incremental, let's say, transition because it also depends on the projects that you win and the time line of deployment of these projects by the customer. So don't expect it to happen at once as of the second half of this year.

But I would say, over the next 2 years, we will see a good increase and an incremental increase step-by-step to that new platform. It will bring additional benefits. I mean, first of all, this should help us to scale more and to be able to scale more with a similar cost base. Secondly, it should help us also step-by-step to be more efficient in terms of deploying a more simple solution and maintaining or upgrading a more simpler and a more stable solution as well given the benefits that I was highlighting to. So yes, there are positive benefits, but this will come, let's say, step-by-step incrementally over '25, '26 and probably early '27. Thank you, Reto.

Can I quickly, did I misunderstand this, you're not going to convert existing customers to the new platform, but you're going to sell the new platform to new customers?

No, it's going to be both. So we -- I mean, the existing customers which have new projects, obviously, all new projects will go to the new platform. But we also have an upgrade path, let's say, for the existing rollouts, which will seamlessly migrate to the new platform. But again, this will be a stepwise approach. So it's not from one day to the other that you move everyone immediately to the new platform. This is more of an incremental approach.

So this conversion is mainly going to happen as part of the regular maintenance and service activities that you perform at your customer site?

No, it can be -- I mean, we will sell the upgrades also to the different customers. So it's not part of the normal maintenance. But let's say, it's part of an upgrades with additional features and functionalities that we will offer to the customer. As we also have done in the past when we migrated from one generation of Nurse Call to the next generation, this is what we intend to do here as well. We move from the current platform to the new platform. And this will also provide, let's say, a good business case for us to do that and benefits for our customers to also do that.

Any further questions?

There are no further questions from the call at the moment. So maybe you'd like to take any questions from the webcast for now.

We will take them, there are three questions from the webcast from Marc Bürgi from Finanz Und Wirtschaft. I will read them out loud, and then we'll answer the second question. And I think the other two questions will hand over to Nicolas. So the three questions are, could you please talk about your midterm goals? Are you on track to reach them? The second question is how many people were laid off last year? And the third question, could you clarify the comment about market share? Does it refer to health care?

So on the second question, I would like to refer to Page 12 of our half year report. There in the last line, you see the FTE development at the 30th of June 2024, we had 1,433 FTE. And at 30th of June '25, we had 1,370 FTEs. So basically, that's a reduction of 63 FTE or 4.4% of the workforce. This is in the framework of our reorganization, and it is not purely the FTEs that the FTE reduction that we believe leads to efficiency improvements, but also an improvement in the structure that allows for more effective collaboration and cooperation, which I think hopefully answers the questions. And then I will hand over to Nicolas for the other 2.

Yes. So the first question is on the midterm goals. Yes, we are on track to deliver our midterm goals, which is obviously revenue growth and yearly EBITDA accretion. We are working on that. We -- as also you've seen in the results of the first half, have posted a good progress in our EBITDA. And the plan and the intent are to continue to also work on further EBITDA accretion over 2025 and in the coming years. Now we have not issued yet a midterm guidance. We will come back to that in the full year media conference, which is in March 2026. Reason why is basically the market volatility that we've seen and that we've faced -- have been faced with over the past number of months, which gives a lot of uncertainty on markets, on certain markets, on certain investments of our customers.

So given that current uncertainty or volatility, we will give an update actually at the full year conference, which is in March 2026. So that's on the second question. The third question about market share. I was referring to the overall market share, actually overall, if you look at our markets in which we are across long-term care, across acute care or hospitals and then enterprise, overall, compared to the addressable market for Ascom, that's about 8% overall. But obviously, depending on the country, depending also on the product, we have higher or lower market shares. I mean if you look at Nurse Call, we are the #1, #2 player in Nurse Call globally with actually three main players, which are global Nurse Call players, which is Rauland in the U.S., which is #1.

We are #2 in the U.S., which is Ackermann in Europe. And actually, we are #1 as Ascom in Europe with Ackerman #2. So depending on the products, actually, we have a higher or lower market share. But overall, across the board, against that CHF 4 billion market, we have around 8% market share. Obviously, the intent is to continue to work on that to improve that across the different domains, but mostly, I would say, in software, increasing there much, much more our market share in health care and medical software, but also continuing to increase our share in Nurse Call in some of our key markets where we may be not yet #1 or #2, right? So that's the objective that we have.

Are there any further questions?

No further questions from the queue -- the call queue. Please go ahead.

If there are no further questions, I would like to thank you all for participating in our half year results conference, and I wish you a pleasant day. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.