Ascom Holding Aktie

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Ascom's 2026 Half Year Results Conference. My name is Kalina Scott, Chief Financial Officer of Ascom. On behalf of David Hale, our Chief Executive Officer, and myself, thank you for joining us today.

Before we begin, let me briefly cover a few housekeeping items. First of all, this conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

With that, I'm pleased to hand over to David Hale, CEO of Ascom. David, over to you.

Good morning, everyone. And as Kalina mentioned, today, very happy to welcome you to the conference this morning. I'm going to go ahead and put the slides up on the screen. Thank you.

So we have quite a good agenda lined up this morning. We're going to talk to you about the results of the first half of 2026, and I'm going to go through some first highlights. I will hand it over then to Kalina, who will go into details behind the financials. Then, I will come back for a bit of a strategic update. We'll give -- confirming the outlook and the guidance for the year. And then we will open it up, as Kalina mentioned, for questions and answers.

So let's go ahead and jump right into the highlights for 2026 first half. I know you've already seen the press release. So let's get right into the details. We continue to see really the structural demand drivers, I would say, pulling the market in every market we're in because in these markets, governments are really trying to rein in the cost on health care, in particular, to drive productivity, but also to offset staff shortages. And really, as a result, what they're doing is, they're taking their investments and they're really focusing them on digitization, which is our sweet spot. And I'll go through this region by region in a moment. But that market pull is what's driving for us what you're going to see, a solid growth on orders and growth on revenue as well, constant currency, in every region that we are in. And our focus is really, how do we capture that -- our unfair share of that growth and doing that without needing to scale our cost at the same rate as the growth. And so, you see that also in the improved EBITDA and the EBITDA margin, if you compare that to 2025. So, as a result, we are confirming our guidance for full year for 2026, and I'll come back to that specifically in a moment.

If you look at really the -- where -- if I go into the financials a little bit deeper, incoming orders, very solid, 15% up at constant currency over half 1 2025; an increased order backlog, and that includes some frame agreements or some multiyear contracts because what we see is a lot of our customers are -- as they drive some of the consolidation in their markets, they're trying to really standardize on certain solutions and then roll those out across their systems. So from a revenue perspective, I know we said at the full year 2025 results conference that we would likely be flattish first half. We're actually up 3% at constant currency, and again, positive revenue growth in each of the 3 regions. And as mentioned before, in part, thanks to the synergies that we're starting to see now from this regional model that was deployed last year, and of course, a real drive and focus on cost discipline, what we're seeing is, we can scale that revenue faster than the cost, and that's what's contributing also to the improved EBITDA and EBITDA margin.

From a market perspective, as already mentioned, the demand is really there, and that demand represents different opportunities for Ascom in 3 of our markets, and we'll talk about that in a moment. But our strategy of really leading with workflow orchestration and integration into different existing systems, Ascom or other, is really resonating both with customers, as well as with our partners, who we continue to build out. So for 2026, we confirm that guidance of low-to-mid single-digit revenue growth at constant currency with an EBITDA margin of between 10% and 12%.

I mentioned some of the drivers are different for the demand in each of the region. And so, I want to go just a moment into that because it's a little bit different, depending on which region that you're looking at, even if the demand drivers behind it are quite similar. If you -- if I start with the U.S.A., for us, it's really a share capture play because what we see is, as that health care consolidation continues, it's really driving our customers to look for scalable platforms because what they're trying to do is reduce their cost. But to do that, they know they need to digitize. They know they need to move into smart hospitals, enabled by this digitization. And so, they're really channeling the investments in that area. Something in the U.S. called concept of virtual nursing is gaining significant traction, and we are serving as a communications platform in many instances for that.

But if you look at the overall market, that pull is really in the area where Ascom plays. And given the size of Ascom in the U.S. today versus the size of the market, that's really for us an opportunity to take share and take the market demand pull there. Even on the enterprise side also, the critical infrastructure organizations, we see they're also really prioritizing these kind of platform investments that they can scale across their systems as well, and they're really looking for kind of this resilience. And our arguments, our selling point in this area is really around lone worker safety, and that really resonates with them.

If you go to Region North and the European part of Region South, it's really more about, from an Ascom perspective, leveraging the installed base, the customer base that we have to upgrade and expand their relationships. Pretty much across the region, you have hospital modernization projects going on. You have government-funded digitization projects, health care programs being pulled out, and the customers are really pushing also for that platform approach to be able to decomplexify their own IT landscape. So they're looking for someone who can provide them that complete solution, which Ascom does. We really have an offering in each of the areas that they're looking for in terms of clinical workflow around the patient bedside. And when we can bring that to them in one solution that we can integrate into their platform, that also helps them decomplexify their own IT landscape. And both in Region North and in the European part of Region South, we have a pretty strong customer base in most of the markets on which we can play. So it's a lot about upselling our potential. We've already landed. How do we take that land and expand now out into other categories?

If I look at the Middle East, Asia part of Region South, it's really more around capturing a lot of that investment that's going in. So they're doing actually quite a bit of hospital builds, modernization of the infrastructure, expansion of their infrastructure. And so, we tend to partner up there, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. And together, we can bring in a real solution that resonates with them across the breadth of the Ascom offering. And so, I would just -- again, different dynamics in each of the regions. But from an Ascom perspective, the demand, and that's what I find quite -- the structural demand is really pulling the Ascom solutions, and we're able to play a lot in that space.

So I'm going to hand it over to Kalina, and she is going to walk you through the financial results in a little bit more detail in the first half. And then, I'll come back and talk a little bit more about the strategy. Kalina?

Many thanks, David. I will take you through the financials, starting with the highlights that we had in the first half of 2026. Most importantly, our incoming orders have increased by 14.6% at constant currencies. This brings our order backlog to CHF 345 million, which is a very healthy book-to-bill ratio of 1.25x. Revenue increased by 2.6% versus H1 of 2025 at constant currencies. And after translation to the Swiss franc, it has remained flat.

We have continued our focus on cost discipline and also on efficiency. And this has led to the fact that we have yet again increased EBITDA margin and also EBITDA in terms of Swiss francs. We had good cash conversion, and we returned CHF 13.3 million to shareholders in the first half of 2026, which is substantially more than what we did in the past, and this through a combination of dividend and the share buyback. Despite this, we have a strong cash position, which is making us resilient towards some supply chain bottlenecks that we observe at the moment.

Let's start with a review of the incoming orders. These increased by 14.6% at constant currencies. And as you can see, they increased predominantly in projects, products and services, which is good news because this means that these projects in the future are also going to pull more maintenance and support contracts. So this is a very good development that we saw in the first half. In terms of regions, we see that all regions grew order intake. Most strongly, the orders grew in Region North, especially in the Nordic countries, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. In Region South, the orders grew by 11% -- sorry, by 22% in Region South; in Region North, by 11%. In Region South, we saw the strongest growth in Germany, Switzerland, as well as in Asia. In U.S. and Canada, we saw growth at constant currency of 3%. But given the substantial devaluation of the dollar to Swiss franc, this converted to a negative number in Swiss franc.

Going over to the backlog. We see that the backlog increased by 11.8% at constant currencies. And we also see that approximately 67% is converting to revenue beyond 2026. This is normal for Ascom. We have quite a lot of multiyear contracts. But nevertheless, it gives us also good visibility for the second half of 2026, as well as a good backing for the coming years. In terms of split, we see that the backlog has grown both in products, projects and services, as well as in maintenance and support contracts.

Net revenue increased at constant currencies by 2.6%, as you can see on the graph. Unfortunately, as you are well aware, we had quite some headwinds, especially from the U.S. dollar devaluating almost 9% compared to the Swiss franc, as well as the euro. So in the end, this resulted in actual currency in a flat revenue development.

When we look at the net revenue split, we see that it increased in constant currency, both in maintenance and support, as well as in project, products and services. So here, we see a balanced development. And similarly, when we look at the regional split, we see that every region grew in constant currency. In Region North, it was predominantly driven by Sweden and Denmark; in Region South, by Germany and also Middle East and also Central and Eastern Europe. The U.S.A. delivered revenue growth of 4% in U.S. dollar. And after conversion, it resulted in minus 5%. Maybe just a side comment on this is that sometimes, we comment on the development of software. Software grew half year-on-half year from 13.1% in the previous half year to 14.4% and is actually -- you can see it in all regions and also as part of maintenance and support and as part of projects, products and services.

Going towards the product and loss -- profit and loss statement. We already commented on net revenue. Then, going over to gross profit, here, you see a small decline in terms of gross margin compared to the first half year of 2025, which is due to a product mix with less mobility and more project work. So for us, this is not a matter of concern.

Then, going down towards the cost items, what is reflected in the profit and loss statement is really our cost discipline. You see that the marketing and sales costs have reduced substantially, as well as the general and administration costs have reduced also. And this is also substantially due to the reorganization, which we did in 2025 in order to become more efficient in these areas. On the other hand, the costs for research and development have grown as we see the necessity to invest in product and in innovation. As a result, our EBITDA increased by 11.6% or 1.1 percentage points, and also our net profit demonstrated a very positive development.

Looking towards the cash flow. Our operating cash flow was quite good with CHF 14 million. This represents 104% cash conversion. So I think this is a healthy level for Ascom. And we see that this year, the result of the dividend and the share buyback is CHF 13.3 million, which was returned to shareholders. This led to a slightly lower cash position at the 30th of June, but I think this is still a very strong net cash position and gives us good confidence in the financial stability of the company.

A few other comments on the balance sheet. In terms of net working capital, the net working capital has reduced to -- from December, which is typical. We have this kind of seasonality in our business. It has increased slightly compared to June 2025. This is due to 2 reasons. On the one hand, we had higher trade receivables. And this is, in fact, just a reason because we had quite a lot more revenue in the months of May and June. It is -- we had CHF 5 million more revenue in these 2 months. So this development in the trade receivables is not a reason for concern. And we also have approximately CHF 2 million more inventory. This is something that we do deliberately in order to secure the material that we need for sales because we do observe some supply chain bottlenecks, especially for semiconductors.

The other topic I need to mention is the equity. You see a reduction in equity, and this is due to the fact that we have bought back 3 million shares as part of the share buyback program. And moving over directly to this point, the 3 million shares have been repurchased at an average share price of CHF 4.47. Over the entire period of the share buyback, which started in May 2025, we have paid CHF 13.4 million for these shares. And the intention is to cancel these shares through a capital reduction by using Ascom's capital band.

Finally, just an overview of the main key metrics that we follow for 2026 compared to 2025. You see the very strong development of incoming orders, 15% in constant currencies, 11% in Swiss francs. A very good situation with the backlog, 12% higher in constant currencies and 11% in Swiss francs. Net revenue with 2.6% increase in constant currency. EBITDA, 12% higher than the prior year period. Net working capital has increased, just as I mentioned before, but not an area of concern. And capital expenditure is, at the moment, lower than it was in the first half of 2025. However, for the full year, we expect to be on a similar level compared to 2025.

With this, I hand over back to David.

Thank you, Kalina. I wanted to come back and give a brief update on the strategy from Ascom perspective. I think the -- first of all, a couple of key messages before we dive in. One, as Kalina already mentioned, software is -- as a proportion of the revenue, is continuing to grow, and that is a key part of the drive that we have ongoing right now, really to move from a software-enabled services provider, more to a services-enabled software provider. Vendor-neutral integration and really our open app platform is proving to be a real differentiator that is resonating with our customers.

And sometimes, I get the question, is vendor-neutrality really a differentiator? Is that really important? It is because customers do not want to be locked into closed systems. And our open platform connects alarms, devices, sensors, workflows across different ecosystems, be them Ascom or not Ascom. And that gives customers flexibility, and it really supports our partner collaboration effort. And if you think about nurse call in particular, you remember, these systems run for 10 to 15 years. And so, when a hospital decides to implement a modern clinical workflow solution, they can't just change out all of their nurse call systems overnight. So the fact that we integrate both with ours but also with the competitors, for them, is a huge advantage from a transition perspective, gives them control over the timing and the deployment cycle.

And on the medical device side, where we do the integration of all the clinical data, you will rarely come across a customer that has chosen one supplier for their bedside medical devices. They typically have quite a few of those. And so, they're always wanting somebody who can integrate with each one of those. And that's something that Ascom does very well and is recognized by the customers, and it makes a differentiation in our offering.

And finally, mobility. Mobility remains strategic in that because it's part of our way of being able to enable and deliver some of these clinical workflows to our -- to the clinicians or to the caregivers or to the workers in our enterprise segment, so very important from a part of the total portfolio purview. So if you look at that, again, what our solutions are really addressing today is that productivity and workflow efficiency that customers are trying to drive, be that health care or enterprise. In health care, it happens to be one of the areas that is the most strained, and then you compound that by workforce shortages.

I'm in Asia this week traveling with customers, and they're all talking about how do we move from, in the ICU, a ratio of 1:1 -- 1 nurse, 1 patient -- to 1:2 or 1:3, not just from a productivity perspective, but from a workforce shortage perspective. And that really gives us a play in this, what we call, mission-critical communication needs. This vendor-neutral platform in an environment that is highly regulated gives the opportunity to that customer to have that real workflow drive, as well as a road map for where they're going to go.

So we talked earlier about the importance of the health care consolidation. When they're doing that, they're not buying a product that they can just install and forget. They're buying a solution that they want to be able to then roll out across their system. And that rolling out takes time, and they want a company that's going to come with them on that journey that has a vision and a view of how their platform and solutions will develop and has the capabilities from a regulatory perspective also to follow. And a company the size of Ascom with our global footprint, that brings credibility to that offering.

We also sit at the crossroads of quite a bit of data. And again, tied back to the vendor neutrality, that's quite important for the customers that we can leverage that data that we see all of that data that's coming in and, together with the customer, can turn that data into actual insights that they can use to drive better outcomes. And that open platform approach is really what is helping drive that. That -- we have an open API. We have integration of third-party algorithms and solutions. So we reduce, for the customer, their risk of being locked into a closed system, which they're really counting on.

So if you -- our strategy, I would say, hasn't really changed. It's really about how do we help these organizations respond, respond faster and consistently and improve their outcomes really when every second counts. And we kind of break that into 4 categories: integrate, whether it's acute care, long-term care, enterprise, how do we integrate all that data, take the data that's coming in, orchestrate the workflow, communicate it back out to the proper person so that they can then be enabled to make the right decision. And that communicate is really a key part of that offering, and that's where that mobility platform plays a key role for us.

On the integration side, if you think about it, we're connecting and integrating alarms, medical devices, sensors across a variety of IT systems and even IT ecosystems. And that vendor-neutral platform, the fact that we can integrate across different systems based on standards is something that gives the customer an opportunity to decomplexify their own IT infrastructure, which is what they're looking to do.

From an orchestration perspective, you take that data and you can unify the operational and the clinical workflow layer with alert management, with workflow orchestration. I can prioritize. I can define an escalation logic. So from a customer perspective, they have this one shared data model, and a hospital in country 1 is not the same as a hospital in country 2, is not the same as a hospital in country 3. So we can provide them a standardized solution, but that then they can configure to their own workflows. And then, on top of that, they can build with us an analytics foundation, AI-ready. That architecture is actually ready for them to start building out some of the AI capabilities.

And then, from a communication perspective, communicating that to the right caregivers, be that actually directly the alert, dashboards, control panels that they can use then to be able to choose where they interact and when, and that allows them, really from a decision support perspective, to provide the right outcome to the right person at the right time. And that's really the objective we're trying to enable our customers to be able to do.

As you know, we're in 3 areas, and we've really started to get more focused and disciplined around what we want to do in each of those 3 areas. And in acute care, it's really about how do we strengthen our development and our go-to-market partners. We work very closely with many of the key medical device manufacturers, thus the vendor-neutral platform, and also with health care infrastructure, large project partners because in many of our markets, in particular, in the growth markets, Middle East and Asia, we have a lot of large system integrators or infrastructure builders where we're able to provide a complete solution that they can then bring to the customer as a part of that overall build proposal. In the more mature markets, the electronic medical record integration is absolutely key. Epic is one of the leading players in that area. We have seamless integration with Epic, certified by Epic and back for our customers is a big plus.

In long-term care, we've really kind of narrowed down and said where our play is going to be is when we can provide Software-as-a-Service kind of cloud-based solution. It's easier, it's less complex deployment for the customers and for Ascom. This is a market that is not necessarily used to investing in IT and IT infrastructure. And so, when you can bring to them something that optimizes their workflow that doesn't require a large amount of complexity on their side from an IT perspective, that's really what they're willing to value and pay for. And when we work with partners, then we either bring that to SaaS providers that are already providing a bunch of solutions to these customers or we'll work with principally large private chains that have a real clinical IT focus.

And then, on the enterprise side, we've narrowed it down to 3 areas that we're going to be focusing on going forward. One is secure establishments. One is critical infrastructure. And then, the third one is manufacturing. And that's where really our value proposition of lone worker safety, mission-critical communication that really resonates. I know historically, we've tried and dabbled and played around a couple of other areas. But if you look at the Ascom value proposition and the problem that the customer is trying to solve, it is really those 3 areas that fit best with what we bring to the table.

Underpinning each of those 3 areas, there are some kind of core business fundamentals that we're going to be reinforcing: our marketing muscle; our project manage -- project cost management and project deployment; and then, as we move towards this platform and platform deployment, making sure that also on our side, we're able to support a customer from cloud operations and readiness perspective.

Just on the note of the marketing muscle, if you will, I'm happy to announce that we will have a new person joining the Executive Committee of Ascom starting September 1. Her name is Lisa Reck, and she is going to be head of our marketing. She will be based in our Gothenburg office and comes with quite an extensive background in marketing across a couple of health care sectors with quite a bit of experience both in the European and the U.S. markets, which for us is extremely important in looking for that. So moving in the right direction on the marketing side.

And then, finally, I just wanted to share a couple of -- to come back to this -- the importance of partners in building out these partners, some wins that we've been able to drive over the first half that really exemplify what we're looking for as we go forward. One has been HSO, which is the Southeastern Health Authority in Norway. It's actually one of the largest health care organizations in the Nordics. They have about 40 hospitals across 70 sites with a patient and catchment area of about -- a little bit more than 3 million people. And this is exactly what I was mentioning before.

They want to standardize and roll out, across their health systems, one framework. So we were able to win a multimillion framework agreement. It's a 7-year agreement. It covers the existing facilities, as well as 2 new hospital projects that they're going to build. It's the integrated health care platform from our side, so nurse call, critical alarms, staff safety. And what really pulled that over the finish line and convinced them was our ability to really deliver that on a fully integrated health care communication and safety platform. And that is exactly what they were looking for because they want to decomplexify their own -- decomplexify and standardize what they're rolling out. And we did that in partnership with an IT partner in this case, so Sykehuspartner, which is the partner of HSO for all of their IT solutions.

A second example would be the Eastern General Hospital in Singapore. This is one of Singapore's leading health care institutions. It's about 1,400 beds. This includes, again, a large part of the Ascom solutions. So we have our nurse call system, Telligence. We have our Unite platform, our mobility solutions. And here, we work together with the prime contractor, Honeywell. So this is where I was talking to you before about a contractor that gets the entire build, they also want to simplify their life. So when they have one provider that could provide a substantial part of the clinical information system that they're looking for, in this case, that was Ascom, that is -- that gives us a chance to win there as well.

Third one is again on the health care side, and again, in our growing markets, so in Saudi this time. And this is in the ICU space, so back to this medical device integration. It also includes, in this case, tele-ICU remote patient monitoring. And the first phase is covering around 300 ICU beds, around about 60 of their hospitals. And this is going to serve them as a blueprint, as the foundation for what they want to roll out across the Kingdom of a tele-ICU program. And again, partnership here is critical. So we've been partnering with GE HealthCare, all the way back to 2013. And so, our medical device integration platform, Digistat, complements the GE HealthCare portfolio. And together, that gives us really a differentiated offering that we were able to propose together to the Saudi Ministry of Health.

The fourth one is in the U.K. This is with one of our SaaS partners, so with Nourish. Nourish is providing software services to multiple long-term care facilities across the U.K. I think they have more than 300,000 beds actually that they're providing, which is about 1/3 of all the care homes that they're providing services to. And Ascom is Nourish's exclusive alarm management partner for the long-term care market. So again, we work with them to bring that part of the offering to the table as a part of their bigger offering that they want to take to their customers.

And then, finally, in the enterprise segment, we talked about secure establishments just a moment ago. So we were able to also win the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, a long-standing customer relationship. So this goes back to what we talked about in the Region North and Region South Europe part, being able to leverage our customer relationship where we're already in there to expand the offering that we have with them, in this case, again, working with a system integrator, so ISG, which is a big Swedish technology company that's focused on security, surveillance systems. And our solution from Ascom really covered one of the key areas that they were looking for. And this is important for us because this is one new correctional facility that Sweden actually has a government program running right now to build almost 17 new correctional facilities over the next 5 to 7 years. And so, now, with this as a blueprint, we're in a really good position to bring that to the Swedish enterprise secure establishment.

So I just wanted to give you kind of an update on where we're headed. Again, I don't think you'll see -- we're not changing the strategy. What we're doing is, focusing and really setting out to execute on that strategy as we go forward.

If I move to the outlook for the year, so again, guidance 2026 that we already brought you at the full year results, we confirm. So low-to-mid single-digit revenue growth at constant currency and the EBITDA margin of 10% to 12%. As mentioned, we have a strong order backlog. We think that's a good start to the second half of '26, and we're confident about that guidance and really think we are well positioned now to capitalize on these opportunities because, again, the market is really pulling in that direction and in a direction that is very aligned with where Ascom's solution and product portfolio. So yes, there's challenges in the market. Geopolitical tensions will probably remain through the second half of the year. But we think we are really quite well set right now to finish the second half of the year as we move into and start to get really following that for '27.

So that's what we had for you today. I'm going to hand it back over to Kalina, and we're going to open up the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

Kalina, you're also on mute.

[Operator Instructions] I see that we already have a couple of questions. First one coming from Jorn Iffert.

Maybe while he is unmuting -- I don't hear the question. Do you?

No.

No. So maybe while he is unmuting, we do have 2 questions that have been asked also in the chat. So maybe we can go ahead and start with those from [ Christoph ]. Thank you, [ Christoph ]. You had 2 questions in the chat. One was around supply chain constraints for semiconductors. How will that impact further business? And what measures have you taken to counter this problem?

The main thing that we're seeing right now is, from a semiconductor perspective, that the boom around AI is really increasing dramatically the demand for semiconductors. That has 2 outcomes for us. The first one is that we have worked with our suppliers, and as Kalina mentioned, to secure some stock of critical components in advance to make sure that we have some stock to get through this, and you saw a little bit of that reflected in the inventory increase.

And then, the second one, just in terms of how that will impact the further business, we have also, as you can imagine, high demand equals challenging prices. We have, together with, I think, almost everyone in the industry, been actively managing our prices vis-a-vis our end customers to take those things into account.

The second question you had asked was, you said you expect a further increase in the share of software revenue. What are your midterm goals here?

We haven't actually stated, and I don't think we would be ready quite today to state an ultimate goal for software as a percentage of revenue. Our goal is, though, to continue increasing that. And again, moving -- today, we're more a software-enabled services business. And so, we have projects that are heavy on the project side, relatively speaking, and light on the software side. And by moving to these common components and to a platform offering, that's going to allow us to really transition more towards a software company that's enabled by services where that software will take on a larger percentage of the revenue, and that's also part of the way that we will continue to improve the margin as we go forward. But I don't have today a midterm goal that I'm not quite comfortable sharing with just yet.

I don't know if you wanted to add anything, Kalina?

No, nothing to add from my side.

And I see [ Jorn ] is here now. Just needs to come off mute. There we go.

Yes, now it's working. I'm not sure I was blocked before. It's Jorn from UBS. The first question would be, please, can you give us the update what the organic sales in the health care segment was in the first half?

Second question, please, your gross profit margin was down due to mix. At the same time, software sales seem to improve. So what can you really actually do that the rising share of software sales also becomes gross profit margin-accretive as this should be a key driver for the midterm profitability expansion?

And the third question, please, on your order intake, which was pretty strong. How would have the order intake would look like in terms of organic growth if just the orders for the next 12 months would have been reflected year-over-year?

Can I start with the last question? It's a little bit easier -- not easier, easier and complicated at the same time. On these multiyear agreements, what they are is, they're frame agreements that then a customer calls down. And by calling down, I mean, they give you a frame agreement that says we're going to build, I don't know, 5 hospitals over the next 7 years or we're going to roll out these mobility devices over the next 7 years. But what they don't tell you is -- or not 7 -- 3 to 5 generally. What they don't tell you is, we're going to do 100 in year 1 and 100 in year 2 and 100 in year 3.

Depending on the market -- Germany is one area where we have quite a bit of these frame agreements that run 3 years. Typically, they tend to call them down a little bit faster than they would have said at the beginning. So I'd be hesitant to say if it's 3 years, it's 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 to be fully transparent. But it really depends a little bit on the market.

The second thing that you need to recognize in there is that in that order, if it's a multiyear agreement, you have the software, you have the project revenue that's in there, and you have the customer service, the service agreement revenue that's in there. So the service agreement revenue has the advantage of being multiyear and will continue on long after the project keeps going, but that's a part of that order number as well. It's not a significant -- it's not the most significant part typically because service is, as I'm sure you know, a percentage of the total value of the deal that you've done, but it's still in that number.

And then, the -- now, I forgot the second and the third questions, but I stick [indiscernible] the topic.

One of the questions -- so the other question was on the development of the gross profit margin. And indeed, in the gross profit, we have material costs and personnel costs most broadly, right? And then, it depends a bit on the mix of what we have sold during this half year. So sometimes, it is going to be more hours that relate to projects. And it also depends on the stage of the projects because very often, we sell first the hours. And then, in the end, we deliver the mobility, right? And here, we have varying levels of gross profit on these topics. Obviously, mobility has higher gross profit as it does not contain any hours of work, which is just being delivered. So it is basically then just the margin minus material. So that's why it is -- what we see now in H1, I would not say that this is some kind of negative trend. This is not the case. It is just the situation that we stand -- that we see now with the product mix in H1 between projects and mobility.

And the first question was back around health care versus the other segments, if I remember correctly. Kalina, maybe you want to comment on that one?

Yes. In the first half year, we grew predominantly in health care, so more strongly in health care and basically flat on enterprise, whereby we need to consider that enterprise also includes, in our definition, OEM. And last year, we had a very high base on OEM because we had unusually high demand from our OEM customers, where this year, it was normalized. But health care grew stronger. I think this is what we see.

Okay. I mean, I can go back in the queue, but I would have one follow-up. We can also touch on this later. On the gross profit margin question, the strategy to better commercialize the rising software share, what do you need to do that this becomes more visible that the gross profit margin can really trend towards 50% again? But you can also take this [indiscernible] I can go back in the queue to take the other questions if you prefer.

That's okay. I can answer it pretty quickly, and then we can move on. There's 2 parts to that. The first one is, to have a solution that is -- I don't want to talk too technically, but we would call it containerized and deployable on a cloud. Why? Because when you can do a managed deployment, basically, you are going to sit down and say, here's my solution and this customer needs this, this and this. I'm oversimplifying now. But you can put a check in the box by the things they need. And then, the configuration capability that you have a configuration script that basically deploys exactly those things together in a cloud managed services environment. So there was one thing to have that. We have -- we start to have that now on the long-term care side. We're moving towards that also on the acute term care solution.

The second is that your customer has to be in a position to catch. So I can pitch. But if I'm pitching it to a customer who's still sitting on Windows servers with an on-prem solution, then the catching part doesn't work. So it's really an evolution of both us and them. From a market perspective, on the -- so we already have our first deployment of that solution on the long-term care side. And that I mentioned earlier, it's helpful for us and helpful for the customer because IT is not the biggest part of their budget generally in long-term care. We're going to have that on the acute care side.

And the -- if you look at the markets, U.S.A. is quite ready for that. They have a lot of the bigger health care providers in the U.S. that are already on either their own private cloud actually, or they're using AWS or they're using Microsoft Azure, but they're already in a cloud-based environment, and they're actually asking us, "Hey, when can you decomplexify your stuff and put it there?" In Europe, not quite as fast. You have a little bit more GDPR, data privacy, data sovereignty questions that each of the countries are kind of asking themselves. So some people say, you can't deploy anything that has patient data on a server that sits outside of country X.

In Asia, it really depends on the market. When you go to some place like Australia or Singapore, I would say, in some cases, Singapore is actually ahead of the rest of the world on some of these things. So it's kind of a market-dependent thing, but it's 2 things that have to move together.

We have the next question from [indiscernible], would you like to speak? Otherwise, I see that also you have written the question in the chat. We...

Can I answer this one?

Yes, please.

So there's 2 questions in there. R&D is growing again. So I would just -- you said that's a good sign. And I would actually state it as we're investing in R&D, and that is a good thing. The best investment opportunities for us right now in R&D on the health care side are in 2 spaces in particular. One is that platform and cloud capability investment because it is actually something the customers are also moving more towards. So, a customer is -- just because we re-platform, that's uninteresting for a customer. But the fact that we're re-platforming, and by doing that, we're decomplexifying the customers' own IT environment, that is the value to them and that they are interested in doing. And so, that's the #1 opportunity.

The second opportunity is really around this medical device integration. And in particular, one of the areas that we are pushing quite strongly now with some of our clinical partners is everything that is around how do I optimize the alarms and the alarm management and even the alarm sounds, to be very honest, how do I get rid of some of the alarm sounds to be able to provide a better environment for the patients and also a better environment for the caregivers. I don't know if you've ever walked into an ICU. But when you walk through an ICU, literally every machine in the room is beeping at a regular basis, and it's even beeping for totally normal stuff. So what we're working on with some of the medical device providers, and there is now a standard that has been established for how to communicate around this between the different devices is, how do we better manage those alarms so that when it's an alarm, it's real. When it's not, it's just a normal process. So those are 2 areas that are absolutely interesting.

And then, vendor neutrality is nothing new. Why hasn't this led to stronger growth so far in your opinion?

Where vendor neutrality is interesting in the most case is around this medical device integration. So if you go into a hospital around the patient bed, you will have devices from Drager. You'll have devices from GE. You'll have devices from Hamilton. You'll have devices from Becton, Dickinson. You have infusion pumps. You have ventilators. And again, it's really, really rare to go into a hospital that has the same -- that has -- it's a total GE house or it's a total Drager house. It almost doesn't exist.

Why now and why not before is because before, it was actually difficult to get to integrate with these devices because the standards were not very clear. The standards are becoming quite clear now. And so, even the medical devices are providing what I would call open APIs to be able to integrate with them. We have an integration library, that's what we call it now, of more than 400 devices that Ascom can integrate with around the bedside. And now that the devices and Ascom are getting better about talking to each other around those devices, that creates that growth that you may not have seen in the past. But the -- again, why it's interesting also is because if you take -- each of these vendors also provides medical device integration for their devices. And what happens is, if you go that route, you lock yourself into that company and their devices, and very few health care providers are willing or wanting to do that.

I hope that answers your question.

Does that answer your question? Yes. If you want to follow up, I think you can unmute yourself. This seems not to be the case. Then looking whether there are any more questions in the chat. I think we have answered them -- all of them so far. Yes, I see there is one more raised hand. Please go ahead.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

This is [indiscernible] Capital. Congrats for the good results. Just thinking, can you remind us of the seasonality of your profitability? So we've seen your first half figures at the bottom line, and we've seen your targets for the full year, which might now look a little bit conservative. Can you just help us understand what seasonality is there? And below the EBITDA, what do we have to sort of take off to get to the bottom line?

Yes, happy to do so. We do have a typical seasonality skewed towards the second half in that usually, the second half is stronger than the first half. Of course, there could be exceptions when there are some big projects. But typically, we will have more projects being closed in the months of November and December than we would have throughout the year. This also has to do with the desire of the customer to finish projects by year-end. And this results in the fact that normally, in the second half, we have better profitability just due to the operational leverage of the cost. So therefore -- maybe I can add to that. Therefore, despite being below our EBITDA range of the 10% to 12% that we have in the guidance, we are confident that we will be in this range by year-end for the full year.

Great. And just if I can add on a little -- a second question. I heard you talking about -- in your presentation about the electronic medical records, et cetera. David, you arriving at the company afresh and looking at the product suite that Ascom is supplying to hospital clients, particularly, do you see the product range being focused as it should be? Or do you see opportunities to expand it in adding on functionalities?

Right now, I would say, we're where we need to be, and we need to execute and deliver on what we have. I think the integrations we have right now with the EMR are excellent. We integrate with Epic. We integrate with Cerner. And we can build the integrations, and we have done to other local EMR or HIS systems.

One of the spaces that I get a lot of questions about is sensors and wearables because that, in long-term care but even also in acute care, is quite an interesting and up-and-coming topic. My view on that one right now is that it's still an extremely immature market. And what we see is, there haven't been -- there's been very few, I would even struggle to name one other than maybe the Apple Watch, and that's really something different, that have really penetrated on a global scale and have lasted more than 12 months.

And so, what -- the strategy that we have on that one right now is, we will -- when we go to a long-term care provider or when we go to an enterprise customer, what we say to them is, tell us what wearables or sensors you have, and we will integrate them. We're not yet -- I don't think the market is mature enough where Ascom should be today saying, "Hey, that's going to be the wearable, that's going to be the sensor and therefore, we're going to try to pull them literally into the platform." I think that's going to take a little bit more time.

As you watch that -- maybe you watch that space as well. But as I watch that space, what -- I see a little bit the flavor of the year. And so -- and even with our customers -- we have customers who start a project and say, can you integrate this, and we do. And then, a year later, they've found something even more amazing than something else or that wearable or sensor provider actually is no longer in business, and so they need to go to something else. So for me, not yet mature enough to be integrating those, but definitely a space we are watching.

[Operator Instructions] There seem to be no more questions. Of course, please feel free to reach out to me either directly or also through our Investor Relations e-mail any time if you have questions in the future. But I think we can close this session. So thank you very much for your questions. Thank you for your participation. This concludes our half year results conference. The presentation, as well as the press release and the half year report are available on our website. Thank you very much, and have a good day.

Thank you.

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.