Comet Holding Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Comet Half Year Results 2026 Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Valentina, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Ulrich Steiner, VP, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Valentina. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Comet's webcast and conference call on the first half results 2026. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate your interest in our company and are pleased to have you with us today.

Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the disclaimer included in today's presentation. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements based on our current expectations and assumptions. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the disclaimer.

Joining me on today's call are Stephan Haferl, Chief Executive Officer; and Christian Witt, Chief Financial Officer. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions.

With that, it is my pleasure to hand over to our CEO. Stephan, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ulrich. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to the presentation of Comet's half year 2026 results. We are pleased to have you with us and sincerely appreciate you taking the time to join the webcast today. Before our CFO takes you through the financial results, I would like to provide some context on the macroeconomic environment and the key developments across our end markets during the first half of the year. This will help put our performance and the business trends we have seen over the past 6 months into perspective.

Let's start with a high-level look at the performance of the first half of 2026. We have delivered solid net sales growth with a year-on-year increase of 5.6% for the first half of the year. More importantly, we have seen a significant acceleration in momentum from the first quarter into the second quarter of this year with net sales growth surging to 25.7%. This increased dynamic underscores the strength of our business model and the effectiveness of our strategic initiatives in capturing market opportunities.

On the profitability side, we continue to expand our margins despite ongoing currency headwinds. This is a testament to our high operating leverage and increasingly to the success of our efficiency improvement initiatives. Our efficiency program remains on track and is expected to be fully implemented by the end of 2027, resulting in a projected sustainable EBITDA improvement of CHF 20 million to CHF 30 million per year from 2028 onwards.

The strength of our order book is another positive indicator of future growth. Our book-to-bill ratio stood at 1.48 for the first 6 months, up from 1.36 at the end of the first quarter '26, reflecting robust demand and a healthy order pipeline that supports our net sales outlook. In addition to the good progress in our financials, I'm excited to announce the completion of our new Penang manufacturing facility. The investment resulted in a cash outflow of CHF 19.3 million in the first half. We are preparing to ramp up production and initiate product qualifications in the second half of the year. This facility will expand our manufacturing capacity, enabling us to meet growing customer demand and support our long-term growth strategy.

In summary, our strong net sales growth, margin expansion, operational efficiencies and strategic capacity investments provide a solid foundation for sustainable value creation. Although our first half ROCE of 8.7% was below our cost of capital of roughly 9%, we expect to generate positive economic value for the full year 2026. We remain focused on executing our strategy with discipline and agility, confident in our ability to capitalize on market opportunities and drive profitable growth.

With that in mind, let me now provide an update on the market environment and the key trends shaping our business, focusing first on the semiconductor and electronics sector, followed by an overview of other key industrial segments. The market environment remained highly favorable throughout the first half of the year with sustained positive momentum and strong performance across all regions. Growth continues to be driven by structural demand for AI infrastructure, advanced packaging and leading-edge semiconductor technologies.

Reflecting this stronger-than-anticipated market environment, industry forecast for wafer fab equipment were revised several times to the upside during the first half, underscoring the strength and resilience of the current investment cycle. Overall, the semiconductor and electronics market remain a dynamic space with innovation and investments driving robust demand and promising opportunities ahead.

Turning to other industrial sectors. The picture is mixed. In manufacturing, industrial activity remained subdued throughout the period, reflecting ongoing trade tensions and persistent differences in regional economic performance. While demand varies across geographies, the overall market environment remains cautious. In security, we continued to see strong momentum driven by increased investment in critical infrastructure protection and the growing need for resilient security solutions. These structural trends continue to support long-term demand.

Finally, in aerospace and defense, market conditions remain favorable. Commercial aviation continued to benefit from high aircraft utilization and sustained demand, while defense market was supported by a further increase in government spending, providing a solid backdrop for growth. In summary, while the semiconductor and electronics market are expanding with strong growth drivers, other industrial segments present a mixed landscape.

So with the market environment in mind, let's now look at how we were performing. Each of the 3 divisions, Plasma Control Technologies, Industrial X-ray Systems and Industrial X-ray modules have made significant progress, contributing to our overall growth and strengthening our market position. Let me begin with the PCT division, which continues to drive strong growth for our company. We're proud to report record orders and robust demand across PCT's product line. This momentum is a testament to the division's innovation and market relevance.

A key highlight is the advancement of our Synertia platform. This cutting-edge solution in boosting customer engagement and enhancing our competitive position in the market for radio frequency generators and matchboxes. Synertia's capabilities are resonating well with clients, opening new opportunities and deepening existing relationships. To support this growth, we are rapidly expanding our workforce and investing in infrastructure. Notably, the new manufacturing plant in Penang is coming online, which will significantly increase our production capacity and enable us to scale efficiently to meet rising demand.

Turning to the IXS division. We have seen remarkable progress over the past period. The division more than doubled CA20 purchase orders compared to year-end 2025, reflecting strong market acceptance and customer confidence in our offerings. The division has now received in excess of 10 orders with an ever-increasing funnel of further opportunities for its innovative X-ray system, especially designed for defect recognition in the semiconductor industry. We have also expanded the CA20 product portfolio with solutions for specific applications in the semiconductor industry, enabling us to enter and compete in new markets while positioning IXS for sustained growth. Additionally, through focused cost optimization and restructuring initiatives, the division has improved profitability. These measures have enhanced operational efficiency and will support long-term financial health.

Finally, the IXM division has delivered solid sales growth, driven by strong demand in selected markets such as security. The manufacturing segment within IXM has shown signs of recovery supported by government initiatives and increased defense spending. These factors have helped stabilize and grow our industrial business. Moreover, IXM has improved its market position by focusing on quality and delivery excellence. This commitment has strengthened customer trust and differentiated us from competitors.

With this overview, let me conclude with a summary of the first half year. Now in the first 6 months of 2026, we have laid a strong foundation for future growth and significant upside remains as we continue to execute our plans. As we expected, sales gradually improved throughout the first half of the year with acceleration gaining momentum as we move forward. Our PCT division delivered a solid performance, benefiting from an accelerating market recovery. Demand across our product lines has strengthened, supported by a broader upswing in the semiconductor sector. Notably, this recovery has expanded into the NAND segment, but mainly driven by data centers and not by volume markets such as smartphones or PCs.

At IXS, the strategic repositioning and restructuring efforts we undertook are beginning to show tangible impact. Overall, the growth driver products, CA20 and Synertia are building momentum, contributing to an increasingly positive outlook. Looking ahead, we remain confident in our ability to sustain this upward trajectory. The foundations we have established, combined with ongoing market recovery and internal improvement, set the stage for continued growth in the second half of 2026 and beyond.

And before I go into a more detailed outlook of what we expect for the rest of the year, I hand it over to our CFO for an in-depth discussion of the figures. Christian, please take over.

Thanks, Stephan. Good morning, everyone. A warm welcome to our half year results presentation also from my side. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to provide a deeper look into our performance during the first half of 2026 and share insights into our financial outlook and priorities. Our top line growth was driven by strong performance in the PCT and IXM division, complemented by solid results in our X-ray systems. This combination has contributed to a robust net sales increase compared to the same period of last year.

We are also pleased to report that our gross margin has returned above 40%. This improvement is primarily the result of the operating leverage that kicks in with increasing volumes, and that's despite exchange rate headwinds, which we are still facing compared to the first half year of 2025. Our ongoing efficiency program is progressing as planned. And as Stephan already mentioned, will bring us cost -- our cost base down, resulting in a projected sustainable EBITDA improvement of CHF 20 million to CHF 30 million per year from full year 2028 onwards.

Key measures include process improvements in various core processes and leveraging our new hub in Penang, not only to expand production, but also to build out non-production functions there. As we look ahead, the investment phase for our new facility in Penang is largely behind us. By the end of 2026, we expect most of the planned investments to be completed. As a result, we expect to leverage the benefits from the facility and the production capacity and to return to strong free cash flow generation in 2027.

As we look ahead, our focus is clear. We remain committed to profitable growth, which includes harvesting the returns from the investments and the hard work of recent years. We have built the foundation, expanded our capacity and are entering new markets, namely the RF generator market with Synertia and the advanced packaging inspection market with CA20. Now disciplined execution is the key. By managing the ongoing upswing with focus, operational excellence and discipline as well as expanding the commercial success of our new product lines, Synertia and CA20, we will unlock the full profitability benefits of those investments and create sustainable value. We will continue to make targeted investments in strategic projects, including research and development, the Penang facility and into executing market access topics. At the same time, we're implementing our efficiency program, which is on track to be completed by the end of 2027.

Now let's take a closer look into the specifics of our financial results for the first half. We started the year with differing top line growth profiles across our divisions. The divisions, PCT and IXM, both delivered strong performance, achieving net sales growth of approximately 15% in constant currency. In Swiss francs, PCT still recorded growth of 6.9%, driven primarily by the ongoing recovery and strong momentum in the semiconductor industry, with increased customer investments and higher demand across key applications supporting this positive performance.

IXM reported revenue growth of 10.6% in Swiss francs, reflecting continued strong demand for its new products. In constant currency, IXS grew 6.9% and remained broadly stable year-over-year in Swiss francs. Lower sales of legacy systems and markets from which we are strategically withdrawing were more than offset by higher sales of our CA20 platform. This product mix shift reflects the successful execution of our portfolio strategy and positions the business for stronger, more sustainable growth going forward. This is supported by multiple system orders received since January 2026 and is confirming our successful entry into the market.

At the profitability level, both PCT and IXS have succeeded in improving the EBITDA margins during the period. For PCT, the improvement is primarily driven by the positive effects of operating leverage, which is typical during growth phases. As the division scales its business, fixed costs are spread over higher sales volumes, leading to enhanced profitability despite FX headwinds versus H1 2025. In contrast, IXS improves its operational performance, thanks to restructuring measures implemented in the second half of 2025 and a better product mix.

These initiatives have optimized processes and reduced costs, contributing to margin improvement. However, IXS remains EBITDA negative at this stage. This is because we continue to invest significantly on the same level as in the last 2 years in expanding the product portfolio in the semi space with CA20, as previously outlined by Stephan. The division plans to maintain double-digit million investments in 2027 with breakeven at the EBITDA level for CA20 product family expected latest in the fiscal year 2028.

Turning to IXM. The decline in EBITDA margin is entirely due to currency headwinds and will improve in H2 2026.

Let's now turn to some key operational KPIs. Revenue increased by 5.6% in Swiss francs to CHF 239.8 million. And on a constant currency basis, it grew even more strongly by 12.7%. The negative impact of U.S. dollar exchange rate will ease in the second half year, provided the exchange rate remains at its current level. Gross profit margin returned to a range we are used to, that means above 40% after some weakness in 2025. This was driven mainly by operating leverage that overcompensated for negative FX impact. In addition, we implemented initial price adjustments, which we plan to selectively increase further to offset inflation, resulting in higher -- from higher input costs, especially for transportation and raw materials.

Thanks to the higher gross margin as well as our efforts to keep cost at constant level, EBITDA grew far faster than sales, namely by 36.5%, resulting in an EBITDA margin of 13.1% versus 10.1% in H1 '25. The costs associated with our efficiency program and the move to the new facility in Penang amounts to CHF 4.5 million in the first half year. Without these investments, the EBITDA would have reached CHF 25.9 million or plus 56.1% on a comparable basis with a profit margin of 15%.

For full year '26, we confirm the expected negative impact of approximately 3 percentage points from both initiatives or in absolute numbers, around CHF 15 million to CHF 18 million on the EBITDA margin, most of which will, of course, be spent in H2 '26. At the bottom line, net profit increased slightly less than EBITDA, namely by 33.4% to CHF 13.5 million from CHF 10.1 million last year, reflecting roughly CHF 7 million higher tax expenses year-on-year that could not fully be offset by significantly better financial results of minus CHF 1.1 million compared to minus CHF 3.4 million in previous year.

Regarding returns on capital employed, there was a slight improvement. While profits were higher, capital employed also increased primarily due to the higher inventory levels amid the semiconductor upswing and the addition of the new building in Penang to the asset base. Looking ahead, we expect to more than exceed our cost of capital in financial year '26, thereby creating economic value.

Let's now move on to the key KPIs from the cash flow statement and the balance sheet. Our capital expenditure in H1 was notably higher than usual, amounting to 12.2% of sales. This increase was primarily driven by our biggest investment, which is the facility in Penang. This investment represents a significant milestone for us as it expands our production capacity and enhances our technological capabilities. It is our new hub in Asia, which positions us well to meet growing customer demand and is a cornerstone for Comet's future footprint. We anticipate that once the Penang facility is fully operational, our capital expenditure will return to a more normalized range of approximately 4% to 7% of sales. This aligns with our historic CapEx levels and reflects our ongoing commitment to maintaining and upgrading our existing assets while carefully managing our investment pace.

Turning to cash flow. Our free cash flow was negative CHF 19.3 million in the first half of the year. This was primarily driven by higher capital expenditures, Penang, as mentioned, and the necessary buildup of inventory and receivables to deliver growing sales volumes. Net working capital and percent of sales is decreasing as planned, which will continue throughout the second half of 2026. As a result, our cash and cash equivalents declined and we temporarily moved in a net debt position.

I want to emphasize that this is a planned and temporary phase, directly linked to our strategic investments. We expect the situation to reverse in the second half of the year, free cash flow as well as net debt position. This is driven by increased profitability and lower CapEx and net working capital increase than in the first half year of '26. Our strong balance sheet provides ample financial flexibility to continue investing in growth initiatives while maintaining a solid credit profile as recently proven in the reissuance of our CHF 60 million bond and a quite competitive margin of 170 basis points.

In summary, 2026 is a period of significant growth, transformation and investments for Comet. We are delivering on profitable operational growth, accelerating our order intake for market entries like CA20 and start to ramp up our new Asian hub in Penang. We are thereby further strengthening our competitive position, drive improvement operational performance and cash flow generation, ultimately enhancing shareholder value.

With that, I'll hand back to our CEO. Stephan, over to you.

Thank you, Christian. Let's now turn to the outlook. Having reviewed our first half 2026 performance, I would now like to share our perspective on the evolving market dynamics across our key sectors. The semiconductor industry continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience and growth potential despite ongoing geopolitical challenges. We expect a sustained growth momentum in the semiconductor industry. This upswing is underpinned by several factors, including ongoing technological advancements, increased demand for high-performance computing and the expansion of emerging applications such as artificial intelligence or 5G. While volume markets are recovering, the pace remains somewhat muted, reflecting a cautious approach by end customers amid macroeconomic uncertainty. Nevertheless, the overall trajectory is positive, and we expect this trend to continue strengthening in the coming quarters.

A key driver of our optimism is the wafer fab equipment market, where market price estimates have been revised upwards several times this year. Industry forecasts indicate that WFE CapEx is expected to grow between 17% and 27% in 2026 compared to 2025. This level of investment signals strong confidence from semiconductor manufacturers in expanding and upgrading their production capabilities to meet future demand.

Turning to our Industrial segment. The recovery is more gradual and selective. The manufacturing sector is experiencing steady improvement, although growth is moderated by ongoing geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions and regional economic disparities. In the Security segment, demand remains strong and sustained. The increasing complexity of cyber and physical threats, combined with accelerated digital transformation initiatives is driving significant investment in security solutions. In aerospace and defense, we are witnessing a continued production ramp-up and a robust aftermarket. Geopolitical tensions and evolving defense priorities are fueling increased investment in this sector.

Overall, the market outlook for the remainder of 2026 remains positive, although growth dynamics varied across sectors. The semiconductor sector's broadening recovery and strong capital expenditure plans provide a solid foundation for growth. Meanwhile, industrial markets are improving selectively, requiring us to remain agile and responsive to changing conditions. Our diversified portfolio across high-growth and resilient sectors, combined with our commitment to innovation and operational excellence positions us well to navigate these dynamics successfully.

This brings me to the final slide of my presentation, including our outlook for full year 2026 and quantitative guidance on full year 2026. Turning to the broader business environment. The semiconductor industry continues to be the primary engine of growth and opportunity for Comet. Semiconductor cycle remains strong across all regions. One particularly encouraging development is the starting recovery in NAND CapEx, although it is still linked mainly to data center applications. After period of cautious spending, NAND manufacturers are accelerating their investments, signaling renewed confidence in future demand for NAND. This recovery is expected to become an additional driver for the overall strength of the semiconductor equipment market.

Order intake for semiconductor-related products and services remains at a high level, underscoring the continued confidence of our customers in the long-term growth prospects of the industry. However, we remain vigilant regarding potential sources of uncertainty, most notably the impact of geopolitical tensions on the semiconductor supply chain and industry dynamics. While these factors introduce some risk, we believe our diversified customer base and global footprint provides resilience against localized disruptions.

In this dynamic environment, our focus is clear. We are committed to capturing significant growth opportunities ahead, but we will do so with discipline. Having invested substantially in expanding our capabilities and scaling our operations over the past years, our priority is now to harvest the returns from these efforts. Therefore, disciplined execution of our ramp-up is essential to realizing the full benefit of these investments. Simultaneously, we are driving the commercialization of our next-generation product family, Synertia and CA20. Innovation remains at the heart of our strategy, and we are advancing cutting-edge technologies that will enable our customers to achieve higher performance as well as efficiency and reliability in their applications.

These new platforms will be critical to sustaining our competitive advantage and capturing emerging market segments. An important milestone in our operational strategy is the successful ramp-up of our Penang site. The start-up of a new manufacturing facility is a complex process that requires careful coordination across internal teams. Additionally, we are on track to complete our efficiency program by the end of 2027. This program is designed to optimize our cost structure and operational processes with a targeted positive impact of CHF 20 million to CHF 30 million per year from full year 2028 onwards.

Looking ahead, given current market conditions, our operational plans and the enhanced visibility we now have, we are providing quantitative guidance for fiscal year 2026. Net sales are expected to be in the range of CHF 540 million to CHF 570 million. The EBITDA margin is anticipated to be between 14% and 17% of net sales. This figure includes one-off items amounting to approximately 3 percentage points. Excluding these one-offs, the EBITDA margin is expected to be in the range of 17% to 20%.

Now this guidance reflects our confidence in the strength of the semiconductor cycle and the effectiveness of our growth and efficiency initiatives while also acknowledging the potential impact of external uncertainties. We remain mindful of the geopolitical and macroeconomic challenges that could influence the industry, but we are confident in our ability to navigate these complexities through disciplined execution and a diversified business model.

With these final remarks, I conclude our presentation. I would like to thank you for your attention and now open the floor to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Martin Marandon-Carlhian from ODDO.

My first question is on the order intake. So based on the H1 book-to-bill, Q2 order seems to be around CHF 210 million. So first, do you think that kind of run rate is sustainable for the following quarters? And if that's the case, it seems to imply, is there a lot of conservatism in the guidance or that some orders will be for '27? So is that a fair assumption there? And I have a follow-up.

Thank you for your question. Christian, do you want to take that answer?

Happy to do so. First of all, the guidance is what we -- where we want to come out, what we expect to happen. What do we expect for H2 in terms of order and delivery pace? We will, of course, have more deliveries in H2, and we will also have a continued good order flow in H2, leading to a reduced book-to-bill for H2 versus H1 because H1 was a bit extreme, but a very strong continued order flow is what we expect in H2. So I think that -- I hope that answers your question. Yes, we expect a continued good order flow. Yes, we will deliver more than previously. That will result in a slightly lower book-to-bill for H2.

Okay. And is there any orders for '27 already or it's all for '26?

Yes, we have. Look, there is -- it depends. And the divisions are quite different there. In PCT, of course, you have a couple of customers who place a 1-year order now. So it will not all be delivered at the spot when we can deliver, but that will be delivered over time. And then you have other equipment. Some of the IXS equipment has a short lead time of 6 weeks. If you have a project with a customer where you develop the final product with the customer and then sell it that might have a delivery time for more than 6 months. So I think that's a mixed picture. And yes, we have some orders in there for '27.

Okay. Very clear. My second question is on pricing. So I understand that you did not really increase the prices for a long time. So what's your strategy around pricing today? And if you implement some price increases, when do you think they will be visible in the P&L? And also, if you could give some color on whether it could concern some of the majority of the products or just a section of products and what type of magnitude of price increase we could potentially expect?

So maybe I'll take the first part of it. In general, we are definitely committed to value-based pricing. Now having said that, we have already started to adapt prices across the full product spectrum since the beginning of the year, and we will continue to do so going forward in order to adjust for inflationary pressures that we are feeling on the input side, but also on the transportation side, as I think Christian already mentioned earlier.

Christian, do you want to add and give some more color to the question?

I think as you mentioned, it is inflation-driven. It is also different from product family to product family when these things happen and how they happen. But in general, we expect that some of the price increases are included already in H1. Part of it will come in H2, and we will see that as a continued trend. It is not something which happens once and then we jump. It is rather something which happens gradually and continues as part of how we deal in a true partnership with our customers.

Okay. And the last one, if I may. The last one is on Synertia. I mean you mentioned in the press release a significant increase in qualification and customer engagements there, especially for the matchboxes. So what does it mean exactly? Does it mean we get closer to an important high-volume order there? And also, does it concern not only existing customers, but also new customers?

Yes is the answer to both questions. So we are working on delivering at the higher volumes and the orders that are coming in are now from a growing spectrum of customers also geographically.

Next question comes from Oliver Wong from Bank of America.

I just wanted to kind of ask about the orders. I understand, not asking you guys to kind of guide on orders, but just wondering kind of from your experience since, I guess, given that we are sort of in the beginning of the semis ramp, and let's say, you did CHF 210 million in Q2. In general, over, let's say, the medium term, would you expect orders to kind of trend upwards in the coming quarter or at least stay at around this level? And then just wondering if you can give any more color on the composition of the orders in Q2. Is there any reason, any one-offs or any reason why perhaps it would potentially trend down?

Thank you for the question. I can maybe take a first stab to this. And clearly, it is based on the same information that you have and is a little bit in the realm of speculation. But when you look at how the projections of our principal customers look like, both in the front end for wafer fab equipment, but also for advanced packaging. With all the CapEx plans that they have, we anticipate that we will see a continued growth in orders at least for a couple of few quarters before it perhaps starts to, let's say, plateau. But again, this is how we look at it and also interpret the messages that we receive from the growing number of customers that we have across the value chain. Yes, I'll pause here.

Christian, do you want to add something from your perspective?

I'd like to add one point. As Stephan pointed out, this is like the fundamental ongoing demand, which is increasing, steadily increasing and there's a strong pull. Some have been faster, others have come later, but they are all there and they are all pulling. So that's very clear. We have had a couple of stockpile orders in the first half year, as just mentioned. So on an absolute number, we do expect that H2 is rather higher than lower than first half year. But the stockpile orders and give me everything now what you can type orders, you get that in the beginning, you don't get that a quarter later again. So on the absolute numbers, the orders might increase a little bit, order intake in the second half year, due to the fact that we have a couple of stockpile orders in there, as just discussed with colleagues from ODDO. And as we will have stronger deliveries in H2, that's why the book-to-bill will go down in H2 versus H1.

When we look at it, how we position Comet and why we see the orders and the strong increase in order intake coming and continuing, we are building capacity. We are expanding capacity for '26, for '27 and beyond. That's what we are doing that because we see the customers' demand. And I think that answers on the one hand or clarifies what is the underlying demand and where do we see a couple of, I wouldn't call it onetime effects, but stockpile orders, which we frequently have when such a ramp is starting. So that expectation for H2 on the absolute terms might not be much higher than H1, but the fundamentals behind it are clearly growing. That's what we expect. That's what we prepare for.

Maybe I can add 2 more points there. I think we haven't seen yet the full development of the NAND CapEx in our books. As I mentioned in my speech, we are seeing that the cycle is starting, coming to Comet. And so I expect orders on the NAND side to continue growing in magnitude. That's the first point. And the second point that I can allude to is what we see on the side of our sales opportunities funnel now across the value chain, so including advanced packaging, the funnel is growing much faster, much faster than our incoming orders. So there is a lot of potential for further incoming order growth.

Okay. That's very helpful. But just to clarify, so the stockpile orders was mainly in H1. And so for that reason, in H2, perhaps orders on an absolute basis will not grow too much more than in H1. Is that correct?

That's the projection we see at the moment. But very sincerely, in -- to look ahead, the speed of orders and the ramp to look 3 or 6 months ahead is something where we were all -- none of us were surprised by the ramp, but the pace of the ramp is something which has changed, I think, on a biweekly basis. So that might change this way, that way. But at the moment, it is as you described that we see it.

Got it. So for our models, we should project, let's say, CHF 210 million in Q2, perhaps there's a chance it won't be as strong on a quarterly level going forward.

As I said, half year 2 is rather higher than half year 1. On an absolute basis, when you take out the stockpile orders, then you have a clear increase, and that also shows the path towards 2027 and onwards.

The next question comes from Craig McDowell from JPMorgan.

Just my first question, I've got a follow-up as well. I wanted to ask on your manufacturing capacity in PCT. If we use latest WFE estimates in '28, there's sort of projections of north of [ $300 billion ] of WFE, and we assume your share of WFE remains stable, say, 45 to 50 bps that might imply PCT revenues around CHF 800 million. Can you comment whether with current and planned capacity, you'll be able to serve this kind of demand in 2028? And also if you could talk about your -- the supply chain into you, so downstream of you, how you're sort of managing that downstream supply chain to meet that kind of demand?

I'm not sure that we acoustically understood everything. So I'm trying to interpret what you asked. One thing that I did understand is your question concerning mid-term capacities, if I'm not mistaken. And there, I can confirm that with the build-out that we are completing in Penang, we have capacity till 2028, which will be comfortably above an output of CHF 1 billion per year.

Now apologies, acoustically, we did not or at least I did not understand the rest of the questions. Christian, did you catch them?

It was around your suppliers into you, so your own component suppliers. Are they running at the same pace?

Okay. Now, I understood. So whether or not we have choke points in our own supply chain. At this point in time, knock on wood, we have no serious choke points in our supply chain. Obviously, we are working on escalations as is customary in an upswing on an everyday basis with definitely a handful of our vendors. But so far, all these choke points have been able to be managed, and we are not suffering like, for instance, back in 2021 and '22, supply chain near disruptions that caused prolonged delivery times on our side to our customers because of missing material.

Super. And then as my follow-up, I wanted to ask in addition to the strong orders, can you speak about consignment inventory at your customers? What level of growth are you seeing and in what product categories? And do you factor in consignment inventory draws on your customers in your '26 guide?

Yes. Christian, do you want to take the consignment question?

Yes. We do see clear increases in consignment. The customers request that we put multiple into what we call the consignment bins than what we had there before. Customers are very stringent in monitoring that they get what they need. And sincerely speaking, that's very good. If our customers manage the upstream well, that's good for us as well. So that's what we see on the consignment.

And when you look to our stock movements from the beginning of the year to now, a good piece of the increased inventory is consignment as demanded by the customers. What we are also watching is, is it just sitting there or is it getting used? And we see that the stuff flows. So they're managing their stock and their supply chain very well. That's good. We increased the bin sizes, so how much consignment we have at the customer site. And we see that the customers are continuously using it and increasing their output on our products. So that's what we observe, and it's confirming what we mentioned before, what's our plans for H2 and beyond.

The next question comes from Martin Jungfleisch from BNP Paribas.

I have 2, please. First one is really a follow-up on the capacity ramp. I mean your guidance kind of implies CHF 350 million or so in revenues in the second half. Just how should we think about the phasing here? Is it more like a gradual increase in Q3, then maybe like around CHF 170 million, CHF 180 million in Q4? And with orders being around CHF 200 million now, what do you think about the ramp phasing in Malaysia? Can Q4 -- or can you typically by Q4 have an output of CHF 200 million or more? That's the first question.

So currently, the capacity build-out or bringing manufacturing online is mostly focused on Flamatt, Hamburg for the systems. And then in Penang, it's mostly the matchboxes that are being transferred from the leased building where we have been since 2020 into the new building, our new Penang site. When it comes to the build-out of capacity and then also the build-out of output of vacant capacitors, this is going to be incremental this year and then accelerate throughout 2027. As I mentioned in my speech earlier, the second half of this year is dedicated to ramping up and qualifying, verifying quality, getting customer verification for the capacitors in Penang. And thus, it is going to be incremental while we are in Flamatt bringing online the required capacities.

Enough capacity, I guess, to serve demand for next year?

Yes, yes. Absolutely, absolutely.

Okay. Okay, great. And just secondly, on margins. I mean, obviously, quite solid margin in the first half. When you look at the also implied margin in the second half, if you exit the one-offs, we should probably be around 21% or so. With that -- with revenues probably higher next year, is that 21% sort of the floor you will also see for next year or would you expect any specific mix effects that were included in 2026? And maybe also how would you think about the one-off costs also moving into 2027? Is it like a similar level? And should these be offset by savings incrementally? Just any thoughts you have.

Christian, that's down your alley.

So let's go on -- I mean, guidance for '27 will be in March. But I think a couple of effects we can -- we have mentioned, deliberately mentioned, and let me shed some light on that. Number one, on the onetime cost. The onetime cost for the 2 major items we have, which is our efficiency program, which includes costs plus some severance as well as the ramp-up in Penang, which is basically the cost of running 2 facilities and then the qualification cost when you basically ramp up new products on a line and you have quite a bit of scrap when you do that. So that's the 2 major cost factors.

What will happen to those next year? On the efficiency program, we will have only minor remaining costs for some redundancies next year. So that will not be the key issue which will weigh on next year. When you look at the Penang ramp-up, we have a number of phases for the different types of vacuum capacitors we are ramping there. So we will see a portion also for next year, but we expect that to be lower than what we see for this year. So altogether, for the onetime effects, we will see a much lower amount next year than we see this year, much lower.

When it comes to savings, as mentioned, we expect by the end of next year to be between CHF 20 million and CHF 30 million of savings in our -- basically in our fixed cost base. And a good part of that we will already see in '27 as the measures are being introduced gradually, some in '26, some throughout '27 and the savings come in whenever we have completed the measure. So you will see a substantial improvement also on the cost side for 2027 on the onetime cost side as well as on the sustained functional or fixed cost side.

The next question comes from Sebastian Vogel from UBS.

I have 3 questions. I will ask them one by one. The first is on your margin guidance for this year, the 14% to 17%. Of course, for the second half, that implies an even wider range. I mean, we are late July in the meantime. Why do you think you need to have such a wide range for the second half?

Shall I take that directly, Stephan?

Yes, yes.

I think there's 2 points. One is the volume. What will be the exact volume in the end of the year? And number two is there is a couple of uncertainties on the mix side. We have, depending on product customer, product history, whatever, we have quite a variance in the margins per product also within PCT and within certain product groups. So that is the reason why the range is still relatively wide given that we are at -- in July.

Got it. And then 2 quick 4 smaller follow-ups on the one-off cost is CHF 15 million to CHF 18 million for this year, how much was H1 related?

CHF 4.5 million.

And then the other quick one with regard to CA20. What are sort of the normal lead times from turning an order into sales for these sort of machines?

That's quite a variance, and I would hand over to Stephan.

Yes. That's a good question. It really depends on the application, how standard or non-standard the application is. I would say turnaround times can be for a simple application around 3 to 4 months, but it can go, like Christian mentioned earlier, clearly above 6 months when there is also a part of qualification included. And mind you that there is always a question of the time from order to delivery and then from delivery installation to the actual factory acceptance test or the handover of the machine to the customer and then subsequently the revenue recognition.

Next question comes from Michael Inauen from Zurcher Kantonalbank.

I have also 3 or 2.5 questions. So I'll start also with CA20. I was just wondering, you mentioned you doubled your orders, which is surely a good sign. But I'm trying to understand where are we in terms of acceptance of the CA20 in the market? Is, let's say, 10 to 15 machines that you have or orders that you have, is that already something you would call, let me be a bit provocative, you would call victory? Or are we still in the phase where clients are buying it and trying it for certain, let's say, niche applications? How do we have to look at that maybe?

Well, thank you, Michael, for the question. So we will never start with victory lap, just to say that clearly because that market is super competitive in general, and so that wouldn't be appropriate. What I can say there is that we have repeat orders for certain machines from customers that have gone way beyond qualifying and testing, but are now incorporating the CA20 into their workflows as a proven tool of record. And so from that perspective, I think we have created last year a bridgehead and now we are really penetrating the market. With certain customers, we are already there. And with others, I repeat what I said before, we have a very handsomely growing sales opportunities funnel that we are converting throughout the year into next year into actual orders. I hope that gives you some color.

Yes, that's good. And the second one on NAND. So you mentioned it a couple of times when I follow the SSD players like SanDisk, Kioxia, these guys. I mean, they are all becoming extremely bullish on SSD into data centers. And trying to understand also here, I mean, you're having great order intake. NAND, in my opinion, is only at the beginning of a ramp. So how do we have to look at the pattern here going forward? What would you expect if -- I mean, let's say, everything else aside, NAND is strong and then NAND is coming on top. So how do we have to look at that, for example, for '27? Because your NAND exposure, I would expect is still pretty high once the ramp there really starts.

So what I can say is that the growth that we've seen in the first half of the year was with the launch likelihood mostly associated with -- associated to DRAM and logic. And as I alluded to earlier, I personally expect the NAND cycle just to sit on top of that and accelerate growth throughout the year. So again, in the second half of the year, if you take the stockpile orders of the first half out, we definitely see a growth and presumably accelerating into '27, maybe even into '28. But I mean this is now very speculative.

Yes, yes, I know. I get it. No, that helps. I have a somewhat similar view there. And just brings me to the last question. I mean I think -- I mean, all the analysts are discussing it with most of the semi companies now. I mean you also have a mid-term guidance outstanding. Do you expect the peak around 2028? The wafer fabrication equipment estimates are also around, I think, CHF 200 million for 2028. How would you see the pattern towards your mid-term targets? Would you still see the peak in 2028 or would you see a jump in '27 and then like flat in '28? So do you have a view on that development?

So we're not really discussing mid-term guidance. We will comment on that certainly by next year. But we are not different from what we said at the Capital Markets Day of last fall. And there we alluded to a potential peak of cycle mid-'28-ish. How after the peak, the market will evolve is obviously also very speculative. So we don't have more visibility than you there. And I would kind of stay with what I communicated, what we communicated back at the Capital Markets Day, and that is an assumed peak of cycle in mid-'28-ish.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question from the phone. Back over to Ulrich Steiner for any written questions from the webcast.

We have received 2 questions, respectively, questions from 2 analysts, written questions. The first is from Lucas Glemser from Berenberg. I think, Lucas, if you're in the call, the capacity question has been answered. Part of the current lead times question is also answered with CA20. But the question is also about current lead times in the other divisions. That's the first question. And the second, certainly for you, Christian, is the expected CapEx for full year '26. These are 2 questions from Lucas.

Christian, do you want to take the last question?

Happy to take CapEx question first. I think for what we expect for 2026 full year is somewhere clearly above 7%, but also clearly below 10% of sales for the full year.

Excellent. And then maybe on the lead time -- for the lead times, some have already been answered. I think we have a wide spectrum of lead times. Some of the simple products, both in IXM, PCT can have lead times of less than a month. And then depending on the complexity, that can also go all the way up to 3 months or if engineering changes need to be done 6 months. When it comes to IXS, you have the widest span of lead times. They can be as short as 2 weeks for highly standardized products for electronic inspection and then in excess of 6 months, depending again on the amount of engineering changes or product enhancements that need to be done in agreement with the customer to meet the specific requirements of the inspection application. So it's a wide field of lead times depending on the actual product within the portfolio that we have and bring to the market. I hope that gives you some color.

And the last analyst asking questions again about capacity. And I think Reto Huber from Research Partners, we have answered this question. The other one is quite a detailed question about booking of the CHF 4.5 million onetime costs. The question is, if they are included in the G&A expenses that increased by CHF 3.7 million. And I do not know, Christian, if you can answer that on top of my head -- of your head.

Actually, I can. Most of it is in G&A. That's correct.

Okay, perfect. Then that was the final question. Are there more questions on the phone?

No more questions from the phone.

Okay. Then we can conclude today's webcast and conference call. Thank you very much for taking the time to participate today. We truly appreciate your valuable input and contribution. If you have any questions or would like to share any additional feedback after the call, please do not hesitate to contact us. The contact details, you have received them. Thank you again for your participation. We wish you a wonderful day.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Comet Full Year 2025 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Ulrich Steiner, VP, Investor Relations. You will now be joined into the conference room.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Comet's Full Year '25 Results Presentation here in Zurich. Also welcome to those following us over the webcast or in the conference call. Today with me for the results are our CEO, Stephan Haferl; and our CFO, Christian Witt. Before we start with the presentation, as usual, we will make some forward-looking statements that probably do not reflect the development during the year. So please note and read the disclaimer. After the presentations given by the gentlemen, you will have the possibility to ask questions.

With that, I'll hand over to Stephan for his part.

Thank you, Uli.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Comet's Full Year 2025 Results Presentation. We appreciate you taking the time to join us today, whether you're here in person or in the webcast. Now before our CFO, Christian Witt, walks you through the financials, I would like to take a moment to see and set the scene by outlining the broader macroeconomic environment and the key industry developments that shaped our performance over the year. Now 2025 was a year of progress. Financially, it was below our expectations at the beginning of the year, but it allowed us to prepare well for the next phase of the semiconductor investment cycle.

In a highly volatile and unpredictable market environment, we still delivered top line growth of 2.6% year-on-year. This reported growth was thereby significantly impacted by foreign exchange movements, in particular, by the weak U.S. dollar against the Swiss franc. Excluding the currency effects, our underlying performance becomes clearer. On a constant currency basis, sales grew by 7.3%, reflecting solid demand for our solutions and the strength of our positioning with customers. Turning to profitability. EBITDA came in below the prior year. This was driven in part by the same currency headwinds, but also by product and regional mix effects and by our investment into future growth.

These strategic investments aimed at strengthening our products and platforms, expanding capacity and preparing the company for the next growth phase. The operating environment in which we found ourselves in 2025 was marked by elevated volatility and limited visibility. Geopolitical tensions and trade barriers caused customers to delay or pace investments and for us to hold and postpone shipments. So what did this mean for us? First, we refined and adapted our strategy to reflect these realities. We sharpened our focus, re-prioritized certain initiatives and added targeted elements to our strategy to strengthen execution and resilience. I will come back to this point later.

Second, and importantly, we made tangible operational progress. In 2025, we secured our first high-volume orders for Synertia with momentum continuing to build. Also, we booked several repeat orders for our CA20 X-ray systems moving from development and qualification into the market. These developments lay the foundation for scalable growth in the coming years and reinforce our confidence in the long-term potential of our portfolio. In parallel, our most important infrastructure as well as transformation project, the new site in Penang, Malaysia remains fully on track. The handover took place just a few weeks ago, and we expect the site to become operational in the second half of 2026, supporting both growth and efficiency as volumes increase.

So to summarize, while we are not fully satisfied with our overall performance in 2025, we have made meaningful progress in positioning the company for the next phase of growth. Now this brings me to the market environment we are seeing today, which is defined by two parallel dynamics: AI-driven structural growth in semiconductors and a selective uneven recovery across industrial markets. AI demand is no longer incremental. It is shaping, reshaping the semiconductor industry. It is, so to say, the main show. This is most visible in wafer fabrication equipment with spending focused on AI critical logic and advanced memory.

Within memory, the recovery is also uneven. DRAM outperforms NAND for now, driven by strong demand for high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators. Tight supply conditions have supported pricing and therefore, improved industry profitability. NAND by contrast is recovering more gradually, reflecting still weaker, although also growing demand. This divergence in end market strength has directly influenced investment behavior across the industry, even with a disciplined approach centered on optimizing existing capacity rather than expanding it. Total wafer fab equipment CapEx grew by approximately 11% year-over-year in fiscal 2025.

In the broader industrial landscape, activity is stabilizing with multiple indicators pointing to a bottoming process. The recovery remains, however, uneven. Automotive and EV-related semiconductor and battery demand continues to be soft. At the same time, we are seeing strong growth in nondestructive testing demand from the aerospace and defense sectors. Overall, the operating environment remains complex. Trade restrictions and tariffs are contributing to elevated uncertainty and pressure on margins. Meanwhile, government infrastructure programs provide selective support, though their impact varies by region and also application. With this market context in mind, let me outline the key milestones achieved across our divisions in 2025, starting with the division PCT.

Now PCT is benefiting from increased exposure to the AI market, which is driving meaningful growth opportunities. This higher AI exposure positions PCT well to capitalize on the expanding demand for advanced technologies. However, it is important to note that the benefits from recent upgrades have been limited to date. We view this as a temporary phase with the upside largely deferred to the evolving investment cycle. Our pipeline remains robust and on track, highlighted by Synertia high-volume manufacturing orders received towards the end of 2025 and continuing into 2026. These orders represent a significant milestone to us -- for us. In preparation for the growth ahead, our Penang facility start-up is also progressing well.

We are making solid advancements in supply chain readiness and operational efficiency to ensure we can meet the anticipated increase in demand in the coming years. At IXS, the first commercial sales of our CA systems were achieved in the second half of 2025. This milestone marks a significant step forward in bringing our innovative solutions to market and validates the strength of our technology in real-world applications. To support this momentum, we have increased our investment in go-to-market efforts for the CA20 platform. We are expanding our range to better meet customer needs and accelerate adoption across key segments.

In addition, IXS has been selected as a partner in the so-called Joint3 program, enabling us to leverage shared expertise and resources to accelerate further CA20's development and market penetration. To sharpen our strategic focus on the semiconductor sector, we are undertaking a restructuring within IXS. This transformation is designed to streamline operations, enhance agility and concentrate our efforts on high-impact opportunities within the semiconductor space. In the IXM division, our new core platforms are now fully production-ready, marking a critical milestone that enables us to meet growing customer demand with confidence and reliability.

This preparedness is underpinned by the successful commissioning of our new clean room facility in Switzerland, in Flamatt, significantly strengthening our manufacturing capabilities at IXM. We have also improved the speed from R&D to production, allowing us to bring innovations to market more rapidly, ultimately strengthening our competitive position. In terms of market presence, IXM has achieved meaningful market share gains in both the U.S. and China. Importantly, we have successfully managed the tariff burden, mitigating its impact on our cost structure and pricing competitiveness. Together, these advancements position IXM for sustained growth and enhanced value creation.

So let me summarize 2025. In the semiconductor market, recovery is progressing, but at different speeds. Within this environment, the key memory segment is still experiencing slower growth but is expected to accelerate over the next few quarters as volume markets pick up again, increasing the need for higher production capacities. While industrial activity remains subdued and competition intense in parts of the business, our X-ray divisions are responding with focused execution and enhanced differentiation. These actions position us well to manage pricing dynamics and benefit from improving order momentum over time. At the same time, we are making tangible progress in Synertia commercialization for PCT, moving steadily from qualification into broader market adoption. This represents an important strategic milestone and a meaningful growth opportunity as we scale.

In X-ray Systems, profitability remains weak; however, this is a deliberate choice as we are prioritizing targeted growth investments to strengthen our technology position and expand future addressable markets. While this impacts near-term margins, we believe it is the right decision to unlock long-term value. By contrast, X-ray modules continue to demonstrate solid performance even in softer end markets. Execution has been strong. Cost discipline is evident and the business is delivering resilient results despite external headwinds.

In summary, 2025 was about positioning rather than peak performance. We were operating in mixed market conditions, but we made intentional choices, investing where we see profitable growth and advancing key commercialization initiatives. These actions are designed to strengthen our competitive position and set the stage for improved growth and profitability over the medium term.

With that, I hand it over to our CFO and an in-depth discussion of the figures.

Christian, please.

Thanks, Stephan.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to walk you through our financial performance for the year 2025. Over the past year, we saw increasing momentum in our PCT division, supported by stronger customer engagement and expanding demand across the semiconductor industry. During the year, our IXM innovations gained meaningful market traction with new wins and broader adoption. Near-term earnings were impacted as expected by targeted growth investments at IXS. These investments support our long-term strategy to reposition the division towards the semiconductor industry. As the year progressed, we delivered sequential margin improvements in the second half, reflecting higher volumes, improved execution and operational efficiencies.

Finally, we pushed ahead with the construction of the Penang site, which was fully funded from operating cash flow, demonstrating our ability to generate cash across the cycles. That brings us to a closer look at our financial results for 2025. Let me start with our performance in the first half of 2025. In H1, we delivered results that were significantly ahead of H1 2024, with revenue up more than 20% year-on-year. This strength was largely driven by PCT. As we moved into the second half, the external environment became more challenging. Increased macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty drove greater caution in ordering patterns, particularly regarding the timing of orders and deliveries.

As a result, we saw an atypical sales pattern with H2 revenue broadly in line with H1 '25 rather than the seasonal uplift we would normally expect. Despite this flatter revenue profile, we managed to improve profitability in the second half year. EBITDA margin increased by 2 percentage points to 11.1% compared with H1 2025. Importantly, market dynamics began to improve towards the end of the year. We saw stronger customer engagement and an improvement in order intake already in December. This momentum has continued into the first two months of financial year 2026. While we remain mindful of ongoing global uncertainty, these early indicators give us confidence and clear confidence as we enter the new fiscal year into the further development.

Let's now take a closer look at divisional performance. Before I do, one brief remark that applies to all divisions. Our operational performance is not fully reflected in the reported figures. Across all divisions, results were impacted by currency effects ranging from more than 5% in PCT to almost 4% in IXM and over 3% in the IXS division. This was driven by the weakness of the U.S. dollar against the Swiss franc more than any other currency development. Let me turn back to the performance of our divisions. PCT achieved a growth of 3.9% in Swiss franc and close to 10% in local currency. From a margin perspective, mix effects played an important role. These were not limited to the product mix in PCT, where we sold a higher proportion of lower-margin products, but also extended to the regional country mix, which developed unfavorably during the year 2025.

As a result of this mix and foreign exchange effects, gross margin came in lower year-on-year, and this translated into a lower EBITDA margin of 15.7% compared to 20.4% in previous year. Turning to IXS. We continue to invest decisively into the future, which is reflected in a still negative EBITDA margin of minus 6.8% in 2025. The progress we are making with the new CA20 system, especially designed for semiconductor market is truly encouraging; however, developing the market and increasing market penetration require ongoing and substantial investment into development and marketing. We invested a double-digit million Swiss franc amount in 2025 and committed the same amount also for 2026. We expect the breakeven for CA20 at the latest in 2028. IXM, on the other hand, delivered a very solid performance.

We achieved 4.8% net sales growth in Swiss francs and 8.7% in local currencies, alongside with a margin expansion from 15.4% to 15.9%. The better margin was supported by the division's strong positioning with new products for growth industries such as semiconductors, combined with a continued focus on cost efficiency. Beyond this, IXM also successfully managed to limit the impact of U.S. tariffs and foreign exchange effects on its results. From a regional perspective, most regions continued to grow sales, except North America and China. China, however, remains at a high absolute level. What we are seeing there is less a structural weakness and more a phase of consolidation as the market digests the exceptionally strong growth rates of the past few years. In IXS and IXM, the lower sales figures in China primarily reflect portfolio actions.

We exited selected less profitable activities, which were clearly the right decision from a value creation perspective. I will now turn to the group's financial performance in the financial year 2025. Net sales increased by 2.6% in Swiss francs and 7.3% in constant currencies, reflecting resilient underlying demand across the group as well as the impact from adverse foreign exchange developments, mainly from the weaker U.S. dollar. The gross profit margin of 38% in '25 compares to 42.8% in the prior year. The decline in gross margin was primarily driven by negative FX as well as an unfavorable product and regional sales mix in PCT.

These factors more than offset the benefits from operational efficiencies, which we were able to realize in the year 2025. EBITDA totaled CHF 46.3 million with an EBITDA margin of 10.1%, down from 13% in the full year '24. The year-on-year decrease in EBITDA margin was mainly attributable to the lower gross profit, while operating expenses remained broadly stable. Net income amounted to CHF 12.2 million after CHF 32.8 million in the prior year. The overproportional decrease is reflecting changes in the recognition of deferred tax assets as well as negative impact of [ FX ] movements in the financial results. Turning to shareholder returns. We propose a dividend of CHF 0.5 per share, representing a payout ratio of 31.9%. Let me take you through the free cash flow development. In 2025, we significantly increased our CapEx to CHF 42.5 million or 9.3% of sales compared to the only CHF 12.8 million or 2.9% in 2024.

The main elements contributing to the higher CapEx were the new fully owned site in Penang as well as the new clean room facility in Flamatt for IXM. These projects are foundational investments that strengthen our operational capabilities, expand capacity and support future revenue growth and cost improvements. Despite these elevated levels of CapEx, we achieved a positive free cash flow of CHF 8.5 million for the year. This reflects the strength of our operating cash flow and enables us to fund growth investments organically without compromising financial flexibility or without increasing leverage. As a result, our balance sheet remains very robust. We continue to operate with a conservative leverage profile, are net cash positive at CHF 5.3 million and hold a strong cash position of nearly CHF 100 million in cash and cash equivalents.

While progress in 2025 was meaningful, it represents only the first phase of what we believe is possible. We will continue to emphasize growth and profitability. What has become clearer is that we have multiple levers at our disposal to further improve both profitability and sustainable growth. This year, we are actively pulling those levers. A central pillar of our approach is cost reduction and efficiency improvements implemented across the entire organization. This is not about short-term fixes. It's about structurally improving how we operate. We have identified the key success factors that matter most, and we are now focused on addressing them decisively and consistently by moving from identification to measures to execution. All of this is happening against the backdrop of a business environment that has changed dramatically over the few past years -- past few years.

Volatility, inflationary pressure and shifting customer expectations require us to cautiously and continuously adapt. But this transformation is also an opportunity, an opportunity to streamline our organization and to critically reflect on what we do, how we do it and where there are better ways or more effective ways of delivering what we need to deliver. At the core of our decision-making is a fundamental question. Are we prioritizing investments that maximize impact towards our strategic objectives for growth and profitability. That question guides our capital allocation, our operating decisions and our priorities as a management team. That said, developing Comet in this direction will also be reflected on our 2026 performance. First, our cost reduction and efficiency program.

This program is not short-term cost-cutting exercise. It addresses both strategic and operational dimensions of the business and the group. We focus on reducing costs while increasing return on investments through disciplined resource allocation and through structural analysis and measures we are taking in the company. Importantly, related costs will be predominantly expensed in 2026. The investments will impact EBITDA by approximately 1.5 percentage points in this year. ;However, the benefits are sustainable. From 2027 onwards, we expect the recurring revenue gains to very clearly exceed the investments made in 2026, creating a clear net positive contribution to our earnings. Second major development is the Penang ramp-up executed as a controlled dual site transition. Throughout the ramp-up phase, we will maintain our existing operations to protect revenue streams and service levels. This will result in a time-bound overlap in 2026.

And with this, that will reduce EBITDA margin by an additional 1.5 percentage points in the year. It is a conscious decision to derisk execution and to prepare for future development and cost improvements. Taken together, these two initiatives explain why the reported EBITDA in 2026 includes transition-related one-off costs. For this reason, we are guiding 2026 on adjusted EBITDA, which better reflects the underlying operating performance of the business. To conclude and summarize, Comet stands for at a clear inflection point. At PCT, we are seeing new product revenues being beginning to meaningfully contribute to results, and we see the ramp-up to take shape. At IXS, the strategic transition into semiconductors continues to make promising progress. While this transition temporarily weighs on margins, it is deliberate and value accretive.

IXM delivered solid growth, driven by new products and continued expansion into new markets. This growth was achieved despite a challenging external environment. Across Comet, we are laying the foundation for sustainably higher profitability. Our cost reduction and efficiency improvement program is being executed in 2026 and is designed to structurally improve margins, capabilities and so forth for the whole company. Finally, we are leveraging our new Asian site in Penang to scale production, optimize our cost base and further strengthen business resilience. The main CapEx for the site will be spent until the end of 2026. From a financial perspective, the investments and the transition underway lay the foundation for long-term value creation.

And with that, I conclude my review of 2025 and then hand it back to our CEO for an outlook on 2026. Stephan, please.

Thank you, Christian. Let me turn to our journey ahead. Before -- there you go. Before I talk about our outlook for 2026, let me take a moment to share a few thoughts on how we further developed our strategy last year with a focus on 2030 and the direction we're heading. I want to be very clear about one thing from the outset. This is not a change of direction. It is a consequent evolution of a strategy we set in motion in 2019. In 2019, we made a clear choice. We decided to focus our company on semiconductor-led growth, sharpen our portfolio around core technologies, expand decisively in Asia while maintaining a strong global R&D backbone and improve execution discipline through the BOOST program. That strategy has guided our decisions over the past years. What you see today is an evolution of that strategy. It's a logical continuation.

Over time, markets and customer needs evolve and scale creates new opportunities. First, we are moving from a semiconductor-led growth focus to an all-in semiconductor approach. This reflects the central role semiconductors now play across industries and our conviction that this is where our strongest long-term value creation lies. Second, we are leveraging our core competencies more deeply rather than spreading ourselves thin, we are expanding into complementary domains where our existing technologies, know-how and customer relationships give us a clear right to win. This allows us to broaden our relevance along the value chain while maintaining focus.

Third, our geographic strategy is also evolving. Our earlier Asia expansion created a strong foundation. With the new site in Penang and our localization plans in Asia, we will be closer to customers, improve resilience and enhance cost competitiveness while continuing to rely on and expand our global R&D backbone. Fourth, execution remains a priority. The BOOST program was about discipline and delivery. Building on that experience, we are now rolling out a cost savings and efficiency program designed to structurally improve margins and scalability without compromising innovation or growth. All these elements point in the same direction. They are not isolated initiatives. They are connected steps along one strategic path. And this path leads us to 2030 with the intermediate financial goals we set until the next peak of the semiconductor cycle currently expected to happen in 2028. Now let me start with the headline message that frames our outlook.

Wafer fab equipment spend is set to accelerate in 2026 and momentum in other industrial markets is improving. First, semiconductors. The positive trend in the semiconductor and electronics industry is continuing and strengthening. What we are seeing today is not just a cyclical rebound, but a stronger-than-anticipated ramp driven by capacity constraints and shortages across several segments, including NAND. These shortages are accelerating customer investment decisions and pulling spending forward. As a result, the outlook for the semiconductor industry in 2026 is becoming increasingly bullish.

While Q1 will follow the usual seasonal pattern with a slower start to the year, the underlying trend is clearly upward and momentum builds steadily as we move through the year. This is reflected in wafer fab equipment spending expectations for fiscal year 2026 which are expected in the range of USD 122 billion to USD 135 billion, representing growth of roughly 10% to 20% year-on-year. That is a meaningful acceleration compared to 2025, and it supports our conviction that staying all in on semiconductors is the right strategic choice. Secondly, we expect momentum to improve across other industrial segments in 2026. In aerospace, sustained air traffic growth is translating into higher demand across the supply chain. In defense, spending remains structurally strong, supported by long-term geopolitical realities rather than short-term cycles.

In Automotive, overall vehicle production is broadly flat; however, the picture is improving. Traditional volumes are stabilizing. And importantly, EV demand is showing early recovery signals after a challenging period. Of course, we remain realistic. Trade and tariff risks have not disappeared. They continue to add cost, complexity and volatility to the system, which often cannot but be absorbed by ourselves. However, our focus on operational efficiency, regionalization and disciplined cost management will allow us to absorb volatility and negative impacts while continuing to invest in growth. So as we look into 2026, the outlook for our industry is constructive, and our confidence is building.

We see accelerating semiconductor demand within a sustained growth cycle, supported by structural drivers across multiple end markets. Importantly, the recovery is broadening. Memory CapEx is returning alongside continued strength in logic applications. Operationally, higher utilization rates and a favorable mix shift are beginning to support margin expansion. Order momentum is building as we speak, particularly as we move into the second half of the year. At the same time, we remain mindful that volatility remains elevated, both macroeconomically and geopolitically. Our approach is, therefore, balanced. We are positioned for growth while maintaining discipline and flexibility. Against this backdrop, our focus for the year ahead is clear.

We are driving the commercialization of next-generation product platforms, ensuring that innovation translates into revenue. We are scaling our Asia footprint and deepening local capabilities to stay close to our customers and strengthen our role in the value chain. And we are enhancing transparency while sharpening our cost and profitability focus. This brings me to the guidance for 2026. While we are confident that net sales in 2026 and the adjusted EBITDA margin will significantly exceed 2025. That means excluding one-off items of roughly 3 percentage points will improve year-over-year. We are not providing quantitative guidance today. The semiconductor cycle is beginning to turn. And while volatility remains, visibility is only gradually improving. As the year progresses, we expect visibility to continue to improve and intend to provide more quantitative guidance.

Overall, our outlook reflects strong confidence in accelerating growth and a meaningful improvement in profitability as we move toward our peak of cycle targets. With these final remarks, I conclude my presentation, and I would like to thank you for your attention and now open the floor for questions. And you're back, Uli.

Thank you, Stephan. Thank you, Christian, for the speech. So we start with questions here in the room. Those who follow us via webcast or conference call will have the opportunity to ask questions later on. Before we start, a few remarks. First, wait for a microphone that will be distributed by my colleague. State your name and your company and if possible limit your question to two. First comes from Michael Foeth.

Michael from Vontobel. Two questions. The first one is, given that you're not guiding quantitatively, it would be helpful to have an understanding of the order trend in Q4 and also maybe some indication on where the book-to-bill is standing currently after two months. And so that would be the first one to really help us understand how the dynamics are looking. And the second one would be if you can give some indications on what you mean by all in semiconductor, what are the consequences for the businesses that are not related to the semiconductor industry?

Okay. Let's start with a question on the order trend and the book-to-bill ratios. When we look into the full year '25, that was somehow below one. If we look into the Q4, it was nearly exactly one. And if we look into what we expect for the first quarter, we said it will be clearly above one, and that's what we see in the first two months already, and we see that development continuing. So we can see in the numbers as well as in what's behind the numbers and ahead of the numbers, we can see the pickup. So I think that's in terms of book-to-bills, what we see, what we expect and where we are coming from when we say we expect a book-to-bill clearly above one in Q1 and how it goes -- it translates or it's put into context of coming slowly starting in Q4 with a pickup and then much stronger in Q1.

Second question. Thank you, Michael. What does all-in mean for us? That is kind of a layer cake. It starts perhaps with how we spend our R&D money, which is very sizable. When you look at the functional cost block of our P&L, we spend very high amounts in R&D. And all in, in semi means we only spend on semi products and product platforms. Over the past 5 years, we still had parts of the R&D part being used for non-semi or maybe near semi applications. That is one aspect of all in. Another aspect of all in is that we are deliberately discontinuing products that are non-semi-related even up to the point where we may look into divesting certain activities. I hope that gives some color to your question.

Michael Klien from ZKB. Also 2 questions. One is -- so you say 300 basis points on the EBITDA margin. But obviously, your margin is 10% in '25. We're expecting it to be much higher in '26. Maybe you can give us a bit of a guidance on absolute terms. I mean, how much is it really? Because if your EBITDA moves up strongly, it's much higher, obviously, than when you calculate with 10%. So just to understand what are we talking about here in absolute terms, at least a little bit as the first one.

Okay. Then let's go to the first question first. Look, there's a reason why we are giving the guidance we are giving. And the reason is basically the main driver for our profitability is volume. And in volume, we see the very clear signs, as just described, for the uptick and for the start for the beginning ramp. Where we have less knowledge, let's put it that way, is how fast and how steep. And if you imagine the curve and you don't know which quarter it starts to really take a steeper turn, and you have one year or four quarters, then if that's a quarter earlier or later, makes a huge difference.

So that's the reason we know it's going to be very good. We just don't know how good. That's the reason we don't guide the sales numbers quantitatively because it would be very broadband. And consequently, it doesn't make too much sense to talk about the EBITDA because what's driving the EBITDA in the end is the volume.

But just a follow-up, how can you then say it costs you 300 basis points of the EBITDA margin?

Well, that I can very easily say because I know more or less what the expected cost range for our efficiency program is. We know this is a program we are doing together with a consultancy, a major consultancy. It's a structured program, and it goes across the whole group. So we know plus/minus what we will spend there. We have an estimate what we'll have in other related costs in order to achieve the savings to be somehow precise. And with that, I have an estimate what this might cost us. So I know this is plus/minus 1.5 basis.

In Penang, I know what type of costs we expect for the Penang ramp-up. And that is cost which include scrap material while we have a qualification process for our backup manufacturing there. That includes that we have the two facilities that includes moving, that includes a couple of project costs and so on. So we know more or less what cost elements we have. And as we know the cost elements, we know the -- how many percentage points that will more or less be. We are pretty precise there.

Maybe I can add a little color to it. I mean the forecasts that we see, and as I mentioned earlier today, in unit volumes is something I haven't seen in my role up to date. And as you also know, the leverage that we have on volume is rather strong, steep. So the outcome can vary not wildly, but strongly depending on when we reach peak volume this year. So if we reach peak volume at all this year. So that -- we're putting ourselves on the side of caution rather than trying to give you a broad band that definitely covers it, and we do not want to send back either.

This didn't count as my second question.

Take the third one.

So the third one actually is just on the new products, Synertia and CA20 together. Synertia, just trying to figure out if you had more high volumes order than you announced at the CMD and with the -- because there was a slide where you show it. And CA20, do I see the revenues already in IXS because in H2, you had a pretty huge jump in revenues in IXS versus H1?

So the answer to -- the first part of the question is yes. The answer to the second part of the question is we are booking revenue for CA20 as we speak. So whereas we had predominantly order intake, most of all in the last quarter of 2025. This is now turning into revenue as we speak, while further orders are coming in.

Thank you, Michael, for your questions. Do we have another question in the room? If not, then -- do we have any questions from the conference call?

Sir, so far, there are no questions from the phone.

Okay. Then feel free to ask questions. We have ample time to answer those.

If you want to do that over a fresh coffee.

Good. So then if there are no questions in the room, if there are no questions in the conference call, then we can invite you to a coffee and some very small snacks. Thank you for coming over. Looking forward to continue the dialogue with you. Have a good rest of the day and a good weekend.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

So 2 years ago, when we met here for the last Capital Markets Day, the world has probably been a little bit different. But let our management explain today how we manage this situation, how we look forward for the next few years, what we plan in terms of technology, in terms of financials.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, either here in the audience, in the webcast or on the phone. Great that you took the time to follow the presentation today. You've seen probably already the agenda. We'll have a first part with our CEO, Stephan Haferl; and our CTO, André Grede. After break, we'll have then the business colleagues from IXS, PCT presenting on progress in their businesses, and the last part is then for CFO to translate everything that has been told. How does it translate into financials.

Before we start, two things. First of all, I give you some time to read the disclaimer. Please be aware that we make forward-looking statements. And the second point is please switch off your mobile phones or put them on mute.

So 5 speakers, as I said already today. The first speaker to which I hand over now is our CEO, Stephan Haferl. Stephan, please.

Thank you. Thank you, Uli. So Comet is a story of constant evolution. over 75 years of adapting to and driving some of the biggest technological and with this also societal shift in modern history. Comet's history began in 1948 with a focus on solving challenges in X-ray technology, more specifically medical X-ray, a commitment to innovation and serving society that has shaped us ever since. In the '60s, we expanded from X-ray vacuum tube expertise into vacuum capacitors, entering high-frequency markets like broadcasting and telecom. The '70s marked our move into industrial X-ray components, establishing Comet as a key player in nondestructive testing.

In the following decades, our technology supported major breakthroughs from the first CT scan to space missions, while we refocused on advanced industrial applications. The acquisition of Yxlon in the 2000s, today's division IHS, we transformed ourselves from a component supplier into a full X-ray systems provider, and now in the era of AI and automation, additions like Canadian software company, ORS, the development of the Synertia and our CA20 system platforms are enabling smarter software-driven manufacturing and inspection for next-generation semiconductor and electronics devices. And that's really been Comet's story, more than 75 years of adapting to change, staying ahead of and driving every major technological wave.

From the first X-ray tubes in the '40s to today's AI-powered Inspection and Plasma Control Systems, we've continuously evolved with the goal to innovate for sustainable progress of our societies, of humanity.

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to our Capital Markets Day '25. We sincerely appreciate that you have taken the time to join us today and to listen-in on our journey ahead. Over the next sessions, Uli has already introduced them. We would like to share with you why we are confident that we can continue and further build on the successful past I have just introduced. But before we look into the future of Comet, let's take a moment to see where we stand today.

Comet's current ability to innovate for sustainable progress is powered by our truly global footprint with strong roots in Switzerland. Our headquarters near Bern remains the heart of the company. It's where our technology leadership began and where our core R&D still takes place. But over the years, Comet has grown into a global player. Today, we operate from 12 locations across 3 continents with more than 1,800 employees worldwide. We have manufacturing, application engineering and/or R&D sites, not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany, the U.S., China, Malaysia and South Korea, close to our customers and to the innovation hubs that drive our markets forward. This global setup gives us both reach and resilience. It allows the ability to serve our customers where they are, adapt quickly to the local emerging trends and ensure a stable, efficient supply chain.

In 2024, our net sales reached around CHF 445 million with 62% of sales generated in Asia about 20% in North America and 16% in Europe. That reflects the strength of our position in the world's fastest-growing high-tech markets, particularly in semiconductors and advanced electronics. So with a strong global footprint and deep roots in Swiss precision, Comet is well positioned to serve the world's most demanding industries with a clear focus on the semiconductor ecosystem from chip design and fabrication to inspection and quality assurance.

Our business is built on two core technologies: high-frequency power on the one side for plasma processes and X-ray technology for nondisruptive inspection and metrology. Together, these two technologies are among the enablers of the semiconductor world, making modern electronics faster, smaller, less power-hungry and more reliable. Let's start with our largest business, Plasma Control Technologies or short PCT.

PCT is #1 globally in vacant Capacitors and Matchbox, critical components for precise plasma control in-chip manufacturing. Our products enable our customers to achieve stable, repeatable and highest plasma processing performance, the foundation of every advanced semiconductor process. In '24, PCT contributed 56% of Comet's total sales and continues to grow alongside the most advanced nodes in the industry.

Next is our X-ray business, which is divided into the two divisions, X-ray Systems or in short IXS and X-ray Modules in short IXM. IXM is the global leader in high-end X-ray sources, providing the precision and reliability needed for inspection in industries such as semiconductors, electronics, automotive and aerospace. And with IXS, our X-ray Systems business, we rank among the top 3 in industrial inspection systems globally, supporting customers from R&D to full-scale production. Together, these two X-ray segments contributed roughly 44% of group sales in 2024.

So across all our technologies, we play a vital role in the industries we serve, especially the semiconductor industry. We're enabling our customers to push the limits of what's possible. At the same time, we are ensuring quality and efficiency, the pursuit of highest possible yield in shortest time, in every step of the process. Now technology leadership is obviously very important, but it is also so that value creation is very important. By enabling, among other things, the future of computing and data storage, we're not only advancing technology, we're building a resilient growing business, and the numbers tell the story. Over the past 25 years, our sales and EBITDA have risen to new levels through every cycle. And as we continue our journey and transformation, our focus will turn ever more on semiconductors in line with our aspirations of technological leadership and in pursuit of higher profitability.

As such, very clear, semiconductors are at the core of our strategy and a tremendous growth opportunity. So how do we plan to continue the long-term success story of Comet? As we just outlined, our technologies are integral to some of the most advanced industries in the world. The future is being shaped by semiconductors. We are not simply following the industry, but actively driving it forward. This is why our focus on this sector is increasing as we anticipate exceptional long-term growth opportunities. So where do we play in the semiconductor ecosystem? Comet serves multiple parts of the semiconductor ecosystem. At the top, you see the major players in wafer equipment manufacturing, such as Lam Research, Applied Materials or Tokyo Electron. They all depend on highest precision plasma control equipment to enable the manufacturing processes that build the chips that power modern life. This is where our PCT business actually excels. We are one of the preferred partners for RF Power Delivery, technology for these equipment manufacturers, ensuring stable, repeatable plasma processes that are essential for every wafer produced.

Then as chips move through the production chain into packaging, testing and quality control, our X-ray technologies come into play. Our X-ray Modules from IXM and Systems from IXS are used by leading foundries, IDMs and OSATs to inspect complex packages and ensure defect-free processes and products. We work closely with all of these companies, helping them secure quality and reliability down to nanoscale-precision. So whether it's enabling advanced plasma processes or ensuring the highest inspection standards, Comet is right at the heart of semiconductor manufacturing.

So to summarize, Comet is deeply, deeply embedded in the semiconductor value chain, from front-end wafer processing to back-end inspection and testing. Our position gives us a front row view of the industry and a very clear sense of where the next growth wave is emerging, and that is very crucial because the semiconductor market isn't just growing, it's transforming. AI, electrification, connectivity and automation are driving unprecedented demand for advanced chips and the inspection solutions that make them reliable. So let's take a closer look at the manufacturing flow and where Comet delivers its progress-enabling solutions.

From left to right, every chip obviously starts with the design and raw materials through a highly repetitive, a cyclical series of highly complex and repeated steps such as lithography, deposition, etching, polishing, iron implantation, layers of functional materials are added in a structured manner patterned and refined to form billions of tiny transistors. Now Comet plays a critical role at multiple stages in the front-end wafer fabrication through the hundreds to in excess of 1,000 steps in the cyclical front-end manufacturing process. To the right of the slide, and at the back-end assembly and testing process prior to holding a package and functioning chip in your hands. At the heart of these front-end processes is Plasma.

Our RF Power Delivery System, matching networks and backing capacitors create and control the plasma with extreme precision. This ensures the accuracy, the repeatability and yield that advanced chip production demands. In other words, without stable plasma control, you simply can't build today's nor the next generation of chips. Then in the back end of the manufacturing process where chips are diced, bonded and packaged, our X-ray technologies take over. Our high-end X-ray and CT Inspection Systems are used to analyze connections, bumps and detects defects in advanced semiconductor packages, a step that's becoming more critical as chip architectures grow increasingly complex.

With our AI software-driven inspection solutions, we help customers guarantee reliability before chips even reach the market. So across both front-end and back-end manufacturing, Comet is essential, enabling precision, quality and efficiency at nearly every stage of the process. That's what makes our technology not just important but indispensable to the semiconductor industry's progress.

So we've seen how Comet technologies are essential across multiple steps of chip manufacturing. Now let's step back and look at the bigger picture, the market dynamics shaping this industry and where the next opportunities for growth lie. So the semiconductor market is one of the most dynamic and strategically important industries in the world. The very bedrock of the world's electrification and our society's digitalization. It's driven by constant innovation, new applications and structural demand that extends far beyond consumer electronics. We're seeing growing complexity in chip design, architecture and manufacturing processes. Each new generation of chips pushes the limits of engineering physics, requiring greater precision and more sophisticated equipment.

At the same time, miniaturization continues. We're now moving from traditional 2D and 2.5D chips to 3D architectures, stacking multiple layers to boost performance and also power efficiency, very important, increasingly important. And finally, the industry is evolving from individual devices to fully integrated solutions combining compute, memory and sensing into compact powerful systems. Each of these transitions is accelerating demand for Advanced Plasma Control and Inspection Technologies, which are the core focus areas for us. But what is fueling this furious drive?

Now the megatrends creating this momentum are very clearly digitalization, electrification and increasingly AI, which together are shaping the modern world. The first wave driven by Industry 4.0, cloud computing and the Internet of Things, connected machines, factories and data streams. The second wave, which we're in today is powered by AI, autonomous driving and immersive technologies like augmented or virtual reality. These applications demand ever more powerful and energy-efficient chips. And ahead of us lies the third wave with 6G connectivity, quantum computing and Industry 5.0, where humans and machines will work together in ever -- even more ever intelligent automated systems. Each wave drives near exponential growth in chip demand and with it, the need for precision manufacturing and increasingly inspection and metrology. With this growth in demand, and market size capacity expansion goes hand-in-hand.

Now between '24 and 2026, more than 70 new semiconductor fabs began or are expected to begin construction worldwide. Asia continues to dominate but we're also seeing renewed investments in North America and Europe as countries seek to strengthen their local supply chains. For Comet, this global wave of fab expansion means the long-term demand for our RF Power Systems and X-ray Inspection Technologies. In other words, as the semiconductor industry scales up for the next era of growth, Comet is already inside the technologies and processes that make that progress possible. So with over 70 new fabs being built around the world and more to come until 2030, it is clear that semiconductor capacity will be expanding rapidly and thus demand for our products. But what is just as important as the scale is what kind of chips those fabs are making and what technologies are driving demand because as the applications become more advanced, the chips behind them require even better products and partially entirely new technology. So how is the market and application landscape we are focusing on shaped?

As we look at the semiconductor landscape towards 2030, we're talking about a market of roughly USD 1 trillion. But what really matters isn't just the size, it's how that value is distributed. Most chips by volume will continue to serve consumer products, consumer markets such as smartphones or mobile devices, IoT devices or automotive systems. These volumes are critical for sustaining fab utilization and driving scale efficiencies. Yet the real value creation is shifting, nearly half of all revenue is expected to come from AI and high-performance computing applications. These segments demand the most advanced technologies and highest utilization of leading-edge fabs.

Now the AI chip market is expected to grow approximately 4x to 5x from '24 to 2030, driven by large-scale infrastructure and also increasingly edge applications. While there are only estimates available what share of total industry growth AI chips will represent, the rapid expansion makes them a pivotal driver of value creation. So the large promises and opportunities of AI are driving semiconductor demand and reshaping the industry for years to come. AI applications and requirements on the associated semiconductor devices are the most significant driver of front-end and back-end innovation. From generative AI models and data centers to edge AI and smart devices, the performance demands are skyrocketing and requiring faster, smaller and very, very important, more power-efficient chips. And that demand translates directly into needs for new manufacturing technologies.

We are enabling the next generation of chip making with our leading-edge plasma control. Our new Synertia Plasma Control platform is designed to meet the precision and performance requirements of AI chip production. In short, AI is pushing the limits of what's possible today and Comet's technologies are helping to make it possible. But what needs to be achieved?

Now when we talk about pushing the limits and innovation in semiconductors, it really comes down to one key objective, efficiency. The industry is working to deliver more compute power, more data store per square millimeter of silicon, per watt of energy consumed, the data package transferred and stored. That efficiency comes from two technology trajectories. First, continued and efficient physical scaling of individual devices, make it smaller, shrinking transistors to ever smaller sizes and moving, for instance, to gate-all-around architectures. Chip makers can pack more logic on every wafer, thereby increasing density and performance. This transition, which begins with AI and high-performance computing applications will later cascade into mobile and consumer markets. Or in other words, as I explained before, today's value chips will become volume chips over time.

Second, from so-called heterogeneous integration. As physical scaling reaches its physical and also commercial limits, chip makers are combining and stacking multiple chips into so-called advanced packages. This boosts performance without relying solely on transistor shrinkage as well as it boosts power efficiency. And that's where Comet's X-ray Inspection Solutions are becoming essential, ensuring reliability and precision in these complex 3D architectures and packages. So whether it's controlling plasma in the front-end processes or inspecting stacked dies in the back end, Comet's technologies are vital to enabling this new level of efficiency.

Now let me elaborate a little further. Let's first look at transistor scaling. Despite increasing headwinds to sustain Moore's scaling law, the pace of advancement from process node to the next remains at present, unbroken, requiring accelerating speeds in technology development and also deployment while still yielding decisive performance improvements. As an example, TSMC's plans for moving from the N2 to the A14 technology node in the next few years with each new node improving performance decisively while also, and that is very important, reducing power consumption. For Comet, this rapid pace means understanding the industry, the industry's road maps and speed in bringing solutions to the market is of the essence. We're focusing our R&D and investment exactly where our customers are pushing the limits. This means addressing rising process complexity, enhancing control and staying close to all the leading equipment makers.

Now the reward for this is clear, growth opportunities, growth. As the semiconductor industry moves through these technology transitions, every new node, every new architecture and every new application creates additional demand for advanced manufacturing tools, the very tools that incorporate our plasma control equipment. The wafer fab equipment spend is expected to grow from just over USD 100 billion today in '24, '25 to nearly USD 170 billion by 2030, driven primarily by foundry and logic applications. That said, NAND wafer fab equipment is also set to expand in the coming years with a projected CAGR of 15% between '25 and 2030, growing even faster than the overall WFE market. IE continues to be the biggest accelerator driving the adoption of new process technologies like gate-all-around architectures and later CFET. At the same time, the industry is being shaped by structural forces from AI demand and advanced node investments to geopolitical developments and the global race for technological sovereignty. These are long-term growth drivers that create sustained opportunities for Comet.

Now what is driving this WFE growth? Demand for new technologies and new capacities. Let's briefly turn to one of the big forces driving demand, the explosive growth in memory, fueled by AI, data centers and increasingly also edge applications. What you see here is the outlook for both DRAM and NAND through 2030. And the trend is clear. Massive capacity expansion is anticipated, led for now by data centers. Starting on the left with DRAM, it is projected that the world will require almost 3x more memory capacity by 2030, 86 exabytes in 2030 compared to 32 exabytes in '24. And while mobile and PCs continue to grow modestly for now, the real engine is, as mentioned before, data centers, which more than tripled over that period. That's because AI workloads are very memory intensive.

On the right, NAND shows a similar story, but at even bigger scale, the market is expected to grow from 868 exabytes to more than 2.2 zettabyte by 2030. I don't even know how that number looks like, to be honest, but I promise you, it's big. Again, data centers are the dominant driver growing at 27% annually and accounting for almost half of all demand by the end of the decade. This is a structural shift. Memory is no longer just a PC or smartphone component. It has become core infrastructure for AI and hyperscale computing. Every new model, every new cloud service, every new GPU cluster increases the need for faster, more efficient and more reliable memory. And this circles back to the previous slide with memory demand also contributing substantially to WFE growth in the next few years.

So to sum up, as AI accelerates the pace of semiconductor growth and innovation, Comet is right there at the inflection point enabling faster, more efficient and more reliable chip production through its leading portfolio of RF power equipment for plasma control. We've just looked at how AI is accelerating front-end innovation, but the story doesn't stop here. AI is not only transforming how chips are made, it is also reshaping how they are assembled, integrated, packaged and tested. In fact, AI is now the most significant driver for both front-end and back-end innovation. AI applications are pushing semiconductor technology to its limits. They demand more computing power, as mentioned, higher bandwidth and lower latency while consuming less power. And that means innovation must happen across the entire manufacturing process from the front-end wafer fabrication, where performance is sort of defined to the back-end packaging and inspection where reliability is ensured, but increasingly also power efficiency and thermal management of such chips. And that's exactly where we play a key role by enabling both ends of the process with our leading-edge plasma on the front side and on the packaging side with X-ray technology. So what is an advanced package or what is advanced packaging?

Now as traditional spatial scaling will eventually come to an end, packaging will increasingly lead the way by co-packaging individual semiconductor devices into one advanced package, increases in speed and cuts in power losses can be achieved by, for instance, drastically reducing transmission lines. Thus, the industry is turning to heterogeneous integration, of which advanced packaging is a critical enabler to unlock another powerful lever for performance, power efficiency and system innovation. In 2.5D and 3D packaging, multiple chips CPUs, GPUs, memory and specialized accelerators are very closely positioned side-by-side or stacked and interconnected to act as one high-performance system. This approach not only boosts compute performance, but also improves power efficiency and reliability, which is essential for AI and HPC applications. Today, advanced packaging is one of the most important innovation areas in semiconductors and Comet's X-ray Nondestructive Inspection Solutions are becoming indispensable in quality control, ensuring that these complex 3D architectures, 3D structures are perfectly bonded, aligned and free from defects. And how is this market evolving?

Now the growth trajectory for advanced packaging is still sort of in its infancy, but advanced packaging is currently one of the fastest-growing and most strategically critical areas of the semiconductor value chain. As mentioned, as device complexity increases, the ability to integrate multiple chips efficiently as close as possible to each other, either side by side or on top of each other becomes essential. The challenges of placing these chips closely side by side and/or on top of each other, thereby drives demand for precise inspection and metrology solutions. The advanced packaging market overall is expected to grow at a solid 9.5% CAGR through 2030. But the segment most relevant for Comet, back-end, metrology and inspection is growing even faster at 11.3% per year, reaching about USD 850 million by the end of the decade. It's also important to note that this market is highly concentrated and geographically focused. Roughly 90% of revenues are generated thereby in Asia and the top 6 suppliers control more than 80% of the market. This is why we continue to invest in people, especially in sales and service roles in the region to support customers who rely on us for testing and qualification.

In this industry, speed matters. Support needs to be on site within hours, not days or weeks. For us, this represents a strategic opportunity as our customers push the limits of chip packaging and stacking and interconnect density, they rely increasingly on advanced inspection capabilities to ensure yield and performance. Now with the multiple growth opportunities in our divisions, how does our overall addressed market look like? Now given my outline of the past minutes, unsurprisingly, we're in the right place at the right time, especially with our focus on the semiconductor value chain. So let's take a closer look at the size of the opportunity in front of us.

What you see here is sort of a key takeaway for our investment case. Comet's addressable market is growing significantly faster than the overall market. On the left, you see the total addressable market growing from approximately USD 4.2 billion today to USD 7.1 billion by '28, an increase of about 69%. But the more important chart is on the right, our serviceable addressable market, that means the part we can realistically win given our current product portfolio and product platforms, that market more than doubles over the same period from USD 1.7 billion to USD 3.5 billion, representing 105% growth. The reason is simple. We are positioned in the fastest-growing segments of the market, and we continue to extend our reach through forward integration and new revenue streams, particularly in semiconductor metrology and process control. But what does it take to capture these opportunities?

Now let me elaborate in what follows on some of the most important building blocks and priorities, building blocks, which enable us, building blocks that are required for us to capture these growth opportunities through focused and disciplined execution. Now first and foremost, our journey forward is defined by our further increasing focus on semiconductors. In today's rapidly evolving tech landscape, the boundaries between front-end and back-end process are blurring, fueled by the increasing demand for higher performance, higher efficiency and heterogeneous integration. This convergence has opened new opportunities for innovation and growth. One key aspect of this convergence is the emergence of advanced packaging. This trend is reshaping the semiconductor industry. And we see it as a significant opportunity for us to leverage our expertise and capabilities, especially on the X-ray side of our business. We are uniquely positioned to capture value from this convergence through our deep knowledge and experience in plasma control, X-ray and process technologies, and these core competencies have allowed us to stay ahead of the curve and develop cutting-edge solutions that meet the evolving needs of the market.

And furthermore, the transformation we are undergoing is being accelerated by geopolitics, which are reshaping the global semiconductor landscape. As the industry adapts to these changes, we see new avenues for growth and collaboration that will further propel our success. So how do we move from where we are today to a scalable, high-margin growth company? Now our strategic approach is straightforward: drive faster growth, operate more efficiently and strengthen our culture. These are our strategic pillars. We are dedicated to leveraging our expertise and market-leading positions in Plasma Control and X-ray Technologies for the semiconductor market to drive innovation and deliver exceptional value to our customers.

As we look to the future, we see a world of many opportunities to expand our reach and impact. By focusing on accelerating growth, we aim to capitalize on emerging trends and market dynamics to drive revenue growth and profitability. Through strategic investments in current and new technologies, R&D, our footprint, partnerships and market expansion, we are positioning ourselves as a market and technology leader poised for success in the years to come. In parallel, we are committed to enhancing efficiency across our operations, optimizing our processes and leveraging digital technologies to streamline our internal workflows and drive operational excellence. By embracing a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, we are empowering our teams to work smarter, faster, more collaboratively, driving efficiency gains and cost savings that will fuel our growth and profitability.

But perhaps most importantly, we are focused on strengthening our culture. A culture of excellence, integrity and collaboration that defines who we are and how we operate, how we do things. By fostering a culture of trust, respect and empowerment, we are building a strong foundation for success, attracting top talent and driving employee engagement and satisfaction. So how does this transformation then translate into concrete actions for each division?

Now each division has a clear set of priorities and initiatives, but they are all built on the same company-wide foundation, a unified and common strategy and market focus, a common operating model, shared infrastructures, footprints, functions, process technologies and vision. This ensures that while each business drives its own product road map, we move forward as one organization, one Comet, fully aligned in how we grow, how we execute and how we create value. Our foundation is clear, a people-driven culture built on curiosity, integrity, passion and excellence. Our core focus, semiconductors, driving quality innovation and technology leadership, and in this industry, success requires true customer obsession, knowing their road maps, adapting ours and delivering solutions that essentially and eventually win.

To achieve this, we cut complexity, move faster and stay focused on what really matters across all divisions. These priorities and several more included in the slide unite us. To shed light on PCT's strategy, and [indiscernible] will talk a little bit or a lot more about that later, the division aims to transition from a component supplier to a full RF power system provider, offering comprehensive solutions for the semiconductor and electronics industry. By focusing on plasma process control for advanced semiconductors, PCT is further establishing itself as a key player in this technology, scaling Asia-based manufacturing and R&D to serve global OEMs faster and more cost effectively enhances the divisions and obviously, Comet's competitiveness.

In the IFS division, and Isabella will talk quite a lot about that later, we further specialize in high-end X-ray and CT Inspection Systems for advanced packaging and semiconductors. These technologies drive efficiency and reliability from early prototyping to manufacturing, offering a range of solutions and integration services close to the customers and markets, we cater to clients' needs from the lab to the fab with precision and expertise. In IXM, investments in dedicated semiconductor X-ray sources, software, analytics and AI empower customers to make informed decisions and excel in a changing industry landscape. Strategic restructuring in traditional markets enhances profitability and agility, positioning us for success. Our focus on semiconductor technologies, graphic expansion in Asia and digital transformation drive operational excellence and growth opportunities. Common to all divisions is that high-performing product portfolios addressing the key points industry are key to our growth. Now how do we go about this?

Now the growth elements of our One Comet strategy are leverage, expand and broaden. Leverage is anchored in what we do best, high-frequency power, X-ray, system design and thus the continued advancement of our Synertia, CA20 and Dragonfly platforms. These core competencies have been instrumental in shaping our success and will continue to be the foundation upon which we build our future growth, where we spend also the majority of our R&D investment, leveraging our strong core competencies. Beyond the focus on our core competencies, we are actively expanding into complementary domains, very close to the core, in line with rapidly evolving demands of our focus industry, exploring adjacent and complementary technologies and services that will allow us to offer superior process-centric solutions to our customers in the semiconductor ecosystem.

Furthermore, we are strategically entering targeted markets to strengthen our position and broaden our relevance in the semiconductor value chain by identifying and capitalizing on new growth opportunities, we are positioning ourselves for long-term success and sustainability in a rapidly evolving industry landscape. Our expansion into adjacent technologies and services will not only enhance our offering, but also solidify our presence and broaden our relevance as a key player in the semiconductor ecosystem. But having excellent products isn't enough. Permanent physical and scalable presence in the market regions of our customers is of equal importance.

Comet's gateway to Asia, where our customers sit and its customer -- so our customer base is for Comet, Penang. Penang was once primarily an electronics assembly location and has evolved since the '70s into a fully integrated semiconductor ecosystem from front-end design to advanced packaging, testing and equipment manufacturing. Today, more than 50 global semiconductor leaders operate here. In short, Malaysia is becoming the new Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley of the East with Comet positioned at the heart of it. In Penang, we're investing where it actually matters most in scalable, cost competitive and future-ready production capacity. Penang is a strategic milestone for us, our flagship expansion project and a key pillar of Comet's global footprint and strategy. Construction of our own building is progressing fully on schedule and within budget. Once complete, it will double our current production capacity, giving us the flexibility and scale we need to support long-term growth. The new site in Penang is more than just an expansion. It is a strategic hub that strengthens our presence in Asia and enhances our ability to serve customers regionally. We are executing this in well-defined steps after securing land in 2023. We're now moving to full operations in the second half of 2026, so actually next year.

During this transition, we'll gradually shift appropriate production activities, shared services and back-office functions to the new facility. These moves ensure business continuity while scaling efficiency. The building adds over 15,000 square meters of production space and follows a very clear road map to becoming our Asian hub, the latest by 2027. This expansion brings multiple strategic benefits, long-term efficiency and scalability, a balanced and resilient global network, cost and scale advantages and importantly, proximity to our regional customers.

In short, Penang is how we are also securing future growth besides investing into future product and service offerings. So while our investment in Penang strengthens our operational backbone and global capacity, innovation and people. The third strategic pillar remain also at the heart of our long-term success. Now at Comet, we believe that sustaining growth means more than scaling production and product platforms. It means developing technology and talent together. Our approach is simple but powerful. Technology improves our daily lives and education improves technology. That's the cycle that keeps innovation moving forward. We're deeply engaged in programs that strengthen that cycle from our apprenticeships and training programs to our collaborations with leading universities worldwide. We're also proud to be part of the European CHIPS Diversity Alliance co-funded by the European Union, which promotes inclusions and skills development across the semiconductor industry. And our efforts are being recognized, for example, with the SEMI Europe 20 on the 30 Award in '24 and again, also in 2025, celebrating the next generation of innovators at and within Comet. All these initiatives reinforce one message. Our commitment to innovation today ensures we can sustain growth and leadership tomorrow. Just as we invest in people and innovation to build long-term resilience, we also take responsibility for how we grow. With that, we make sure that progress today does not come at the expense of tomorrow. For us, sustainability is not a site project, but part of how we innovate. Under the same guiding principle, innovating today, sustaining tomorrow, we're advancing both technology and environmental performance across our operations. silently, calmly.

You can see this in our progress on carbon disclosure and transparency. In 2024, Comet achieved a CDP score improvement from C to B, moving ahead of the industry, actually, regional and global averages. This reflects stronger data quality, clearer targets and tangible action plans for emission reduction. One of the key enablers is our expansion of renewable energy use across our sites, including the new facility in Penang, we are integrating solar electricity generation and green electricity sourcing, and we're on track to exceed 80% clean electricity by the end of 2025. These initiatives are not only about responsibility, they're about resilience by reducing our environmental footprint.

We also reduce cost exposure, increase energy independence and strengthen Comet's long-term competitiveness. Now this brings me to the end of my speech and the end of the introduction of the Comet Group. Now to emphasize the importance of technology, I'll hand over at this point to Andrea Grede, Comet's CTO. Andre, please join me on the stage.

Thank you, Stefan. There you go. Good morning, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, let me take the chance to welcome you as well here to our Capital Market Day 2025. So I'm going to speak a little bit in the next 30, 35 minutes about how we are positioned or how we are well positioned in the technology game in semiconductors. And when the VP Investor Relationship asked you to speak about technology to the investors, it's always a little bit difficult, right? I will try to explain it as simple as possible.

On the other side, I want to be correct. But most important for us is, of course, we don't want to give away our IP. So please understand that we cannot share everything, especially not the newest things we are working on, but we want to give you some confidence what we are doing and that we are doing the right thing. And as I said, that we are well positioned in the game. So let's start again with the ecosystem that Stefan already described, where you on top have more and more companies developing semiconductors, designing semiconductors, processors, certain application systems.

But on the other hand, you have fewer and fewer companies who are able to afford the environment that is needed to produce these semiconductors. So actually, there are only some big ones for logic left, some special ones for things like hybrid -- excuse me, high-bandwidth memory and so on. But with advancing technologies and challenges and performance in this industry, there are few and few companies who can really do the last technology node. And they, of course, rely on their suppliers. So if I am a little bit overconfident, I would say technology is actually not driven by -- or at least not only driven by these companies like Samsung or Intel or TSMC.

I mean, they built now 2-nanometer chips. Who enables them to do this? All the companies who make the equipment, who develop the equipment because you can think of the coolest, best, most performance structure if nobody gives you the materials to do it, if nobody gives you a process and the tools to put the material into hardware that is doing what you once sought out or simulated, it will never become reality. And that's why the supplier of systems like us or subsystems like, for example, PCT really have such an important role. And although a lot of things for you may be like sometimes new surprising. You see new kind of memory coming, new kind of AI chips coming, new technologies you hear about, all these things are rarely -- nearly never a revolution.

There are road maps over many, many years. All these things are evolutions step-by-step learning based on a lot of experience. And I mean, we have the same examples in our company. When we started with Synergia, we knew it would be a long way, a long challenge. And we also knew that it would not be an easy way into this because the generators were new for us. But you will later hear from Ulrich how he with his team now finally succeeded and really placed this new technology in the market. We are finally there. And honestly spoken, if you look back how many companies were there 5, 10 years ago supplying generators into the semiconductor market, and I really mean the top tech nodes at the top 3-tier OEMs in this market, it's still the same number of companies plus Comet.

Nobody else has really succeeded to get qualified at the top-tier customers on future high-volume tools. And this is really achievement, as I said, which does not come overnight. It depends on a lot of work and, of course, on a lot of experience. And that's the same on the CA20 side, by the way, we are not just talking about it anymore. We have not just people testing it, you will see that customers start to adapt this new technologies to their processes, and Isabella will speak about this. So the dependency in this very complex demanding environment is bigger than ever before, all the way up from the companies designing semiconductors all the way down to companies like us who supply the equipment needed to make the next or achieve the next technology node.

So I want to, as a next step, look a little bit at like what is really driving these next technology nodes. And of course, from a like end customer or from a financial, from a business perspective, it's topics like AI, life science, autonomous driving, all these things. If you look at these things for more like a little bit more with the technology glasses, you will see it is mainly about what Stefan said, performance. And performance can be more computation power. But performance can also be, I want to load my or charge my electrical vehicle faster.

So scaling up current, scaling up voltages. And at the end, it is not just about functionality per square meter or square millimeter anymore, it is now per volume, and it is always about functionality per cost. Because even if you think that a complex AI chip today is quite expensive, if you see it with relation to the computation power 20 years back to a simple CPU, which cost at this time, I don't know, $20, $30 if you bought it, you will see that this relationship is always improving as well.

You get more power per cost. And the main drivers from a technology point of view are actually 3, if you simplify it, of course, a little bit. So the first one is scaling. And scaling is not just making things smaller. You know scaling has especially developed in semi to the third dimension. So we are scaling not planar structures anymore. We speak about scaling volumes where we make devices or systems. It's about advanced architectures. For example, you have not a single processor anymore. You have processors for certain domains for certain tasks to increase to scale performance. You have advanced architectures now like the 3D scaling, heterogeneous scaling of systems.

And you also have new, for example, memory-centric architectures. On the other side, you have the technology and technology can be actually a lot, but a very famous example, for example, is the development from planar FETs over FinFETs to gate-all-around FETs. We are now speaking about complementary about CFET. There are other technologies where you, for example, try to use the magnetic properties of material to store information MRAM instead of using the electrical properties.

And all these things, these drivers must be somehow enabled. Somehow at the end, you must do it. As I said, you can have an idea for the most brilliant concept. The question is how you do it at the end. And it's about materials, for example, there's a lot of scientific activities now about around 2D materials like [indiscernible]. It's about materials like moly that was just introduced for achieving better connections, especially for small structures. And on the right side, the other 2 points are manufacturing equipment and processes. At the end of the day, you need to take this idea, you need to take the material and you need to make it a ship.

And then it's about testing and inspection because what you can see and measure, you can't understand and when you can't understand, you can't fix. So this is actually what is enabling all these drivers in the technology chain. And you see our playing field, CE playing field is on the process equipment side, where we, on one side, help to make equipment so you can produce semiconductors. And it's now with our quay inspection tools in semi also about the inspection part, seeing what happens, fixing it, making it better. Let's start at the famous front end, which is, of course, not new to you, and I try to put the chain here again, as you know, the production chain, of course, it's highly simplified. But to summarize again, what we are doing in the front with [indiscernible] and his team at Plasma Control Technologies, we are driving the process with energy, with power for plasma.

So if you consider plasma the tool to do the work to deposit something, to modify material, remove it, you need an energy source to drive it. And it is not just a simple energy source like a 220-volt wall plug, need special kind of energy, you need a special way to control it. And that's what we are doing there with our whole chain now from the Synergia RF source generator. Now this year released via the Synergia match using the same control system and the certain connectivity to the Synertia generator and the wet caps, which are still in a very important element.

So if you look at the 2 most important process steps, which come in many variances. Then we speak about with respect to plasma, we speak about deposition and we speak about etching. Deposition, we speak about applications like PECVD, which stands for plasma-enhanced chemical waper deposition, ALD, atomic layer deposition. There are also special processes, butter processes, how you adapt metals, all these things. And they are run by plasma using RF as an energy source. There is not only RF, there is DC as well.

DC is used for other things in plasma. It's a little bit more rare if you speak about advanced processes. There are reasons why you cannot apply it, especially if you speak about processes for nonconducting materials like on wafers. There is the RF as energy source I just spoke about, and RF can be anything from low frequencies, 400 kilohertz all the way to several gigahertz as you use it in remote plasma sources. And there are more and more other energy or power sources or ways to create energy and shape it, which are summarized under non-sunicidal signals.

This is things like bipolar pausing, but also like tailored waveform. And if you look on the right side, you see applications like etch, very famous dielectric edge conductor etch, but also things like ALE, atomic layer etch. And you see the most important process steps, which you have probably heard about like high aspect ratio structures where you want to drill very small holes through a very thick substrate, for example. There are things like VA spacer gate edge, all these things you need to make a device. And last but not least, they -- both sides come with more or less the same challenges for the generator. So repeatability is the holy grail in this industry.

Our customers make hundreds thousands of chambers. So every generator you deliver, which is such an important or we match as well has such an important influence on how the energy goes into the chamber and does the work, the repeatability starts really with the RF subsystem. So this is a very important requirement, which is not easy to achieve. And then it's about uniformity, about fast transient, especially in these new processes where things like gas mixture, but also the RF power you apply or other things you're using are changing very quickly. Efficiency is a big topic. I mean, if you see how much energy just a EUV system is using to do an ANF fab, and you have several of them.

And then you have these RF generators, 2.5 kilowatts, 5 kilowatts and even more, efficiency becomes a very important topic. And then, of course, you add complexity with multifrequency systems with waveform shaping, with non-sinosoidil signals. These are all these things which you need to control the plasma, not just more precisely, but certain species in the plasma more independently, so you can really make these new smaller structures. I was asked very often in the like last year about how this matching works or where this is going. This is will vacuum capacitors be replaced by solid-state matching. And I can already tell you, no, they will not disappear. And I want to explain a little bit why because I read so much about it, as I said, we are asked very often and matching RF power is one of the most important things in this supply chain of energy for the plasma.

For a simple reason, you cannot directly create, for example, the voltage needed at the plasma with the transistors available today. So you need to do something like what is called matching. And I have chosen it as an example, as I said, because it is so important, and we were asked to often. And so I want to start with what is driving this part of the power delivery chain. And yes, there are more and more requirements, which are about speed and transient. And there's already a difference in speed, how fast you can match to a new plasma condition versus handling the transient of the plasma. And what you can see here on the right side, without going to any detail, you see on the left side, there are coming some kind of shaped signal. We call this a multilevel port signal.

And you see the color in the red there, you see that there's a high reflected power. And then you can see how synergia suddenly starts the match and the generator of the system matching and in just one pile strain, all the reflected power is done. And what you see on the right side, these short spikes, this is handling the transient. The transients are still there because then the plasma, when you change the energy supplied or the power supply to the plasma is changing abruptly from one no point to another. And you see how the system is adapting to it in sub microseconds.

So this is one of the big challenges, no questions. but there are more. There were challenges before, there were achievements before. There is performance we deliver today, which cannot be replaced by just being good in speed. It's all about the operation area. So all these plasma tools are not just doing one process step. There are many process steps. There are different processes. There are different working conditions, different gas mixtures, different chemistries they are using, different pressure, different power they are supplying and so on. So finally, you end up with a lot of what we call load conditions, which you must be able to handle with your RF system. And the thing is also our customers develop these basic processes. They ship tools to their customers like TSMC, but the story doesn't end there.

These systems are in the field for 5, 10, 15 years and longer. And these end customer continuously redevelop or improve these processes with their growing knowledge over the years. So very quickly, it can happen that the load point, which is at a certain position in the shop there really moves dramatically because TSMC has a new idea for a new process. Our system, if it is a good system, should still work. And you have to think about these things as well. So the working area is a -- operation area is a big challenge. And then as I said before, everything is about efficiency, accuracy, repeatability. You must calibrate things. They must be all the same.

This is what we are doing in our factory. This is what we have a special lab for that we have set up in the last years. But calibration is only removing the offset. So the technology we are choosing will give -- have a lot of influence how your system is, for example, fluctuating or how it is drifting. And all these things are connected. If something is not efficient, it means it burns energy, it becomes warm. And if it gets warm, of course, dimension change, and this is where drift starts.

So all these things have to be considered as well. And last but not least, all these things we are doing in the front end, there are a lot of varieties. So you need to be scalable. And customers want scalability quite quickly. They ask suddenly for more voltage or more current that the match must deliver or they want a different frequency and then your technology must deliver the same performance, not at certain 0.5 6 megahertz, but maybe at 60 megahertz -- or they -- we have a big library of network types. So we are not just doing a match as you see on these pictures, which delivers into a plasma. We have matches which split the power and feed several chambers. We have matches who split and can adjust the current so you can drive independent coils in an inductive coupled plasma. We have topologies like [indiscernible], pie matches, [indiscernible]. It's a big variety. It's a big product portfolio you need to be able to do with a technology.

If you summarize it and maybe also to go a little bit to the core of this, yes. So there are 2 extremes if we speak about RF matches. On the left side, you see the classical match based on vacuum capacitors, which is fantastic in efficiency and is extremely repeatability because for a simple fact, there is no better dielectric on this planet physically than vacuum. Everything else, if you do it differently, you will introduce losses and where often losses come with reduced repeatability.

It has -- it is not so good in speed. So just discovered a failure, we didn't find doing out the right one. It is fantastic in the operation area, of course. But what it is not so good in is speed. Speed is the limitation for our vacuum capacitor match because it is a mechanical system. And then you have the extreme white side where you are -- where you have the same challenges, but you can only fulfill one very good, a classical semiconductor or solid-state match is extremely fast. You can't do it faster. You can do it more or less infinite fast.

And finally, it doesn't depend on the match anymore, but on your -- the reaction of your plasma or the network. But if it comes to repeatability, if it comes to efficiency, it is clearly the worst one because it has the biggest losses. It is also clearly the worst one if it is about operational area. If I say I want to do -- go from 3 kilowatt to 10 kilowatt. It's difficult to do it, and it's then also much more costly. And they are not just these 2. There is a lot of things, a lot of flavors inside that we also look at.

For example, now with the new Synergia match, which came out this year, which is working really as an interconnected system with a generator. We can do new things. We can really leverage the repeatability, efficiency, the operational area, which we have with our VAs. But the way we synchronize it, we can get tuning, not for all applications, but some applications, we can get it as fast as a solid-state match.

Again, it does not work for everything, but we can do it for a lot of processes, and that's why we collaborate with our OEMs, especially on these topics because that's also the most cost-efficient solution. And then there are other concepts like what we call hybrid matching. And I cannot tell you because there we have some really new ideas. We are still working on. There's a lot of IPs, how and what we are doing it. But there, we try to bring these 2 best worlds of solid-state matching and classical recap matching together at a reasonable price. Last but not least, there was place for one more box, and there is something what I hear about very often as well, and it seems that confuses people like matchless systems or direct drive.

So honestly spoken a lot of this, what you hear is very often also some kind of advertisement. I can tell you the direct drive you hear about uses a lot of vacuum capacitors, good for us. But there are other technologies which I consider matchless. And matchless is all about these [indiscernible] signals. That's things like bipolar pausing, that's things like tailored waveform. What is important to understand, these systems are an add-on. They come together with RF. They are used, for example, tailored waveform to better control the and energy in an etch process. They are an add-on to the toolbox. They are not replacing 60 megahertz, 40, 27, 30 megahertz RF.

This is important to understand. And of course, we know these systems. We are looking at these systems. We are working on things. Last but not least, maybe a last slide about the technology we are using in front end. So you heard Stefan already speaking about our digital platforms capability. This is really a change we introduced with Synergia. And actually, it took quite a while until it like reached the market, was accepted.

But now with these advanced nodes, our customers really see the advantage of the capabilities in the data range about the synchronization we can do with equipment that we can do with the new platform. And I will actually leave it to Yi to speak more about what we have achieved there and how this is now really hitting the market because you could say with all these data-driven analysis, 2, 3 years ago, we were a little bit ahead of the market. Now is a time where it's really needed and it's actually a unique selling point of the whole Synertia system. So short summary for the front end, where do we play and what do we do. And as Stefan said, we are leveraging the technologies we have, which will not go away, which are used for 10, 15, 20 years after they were introduced into the semi market. And don't forget, this is how the semi market works. You add new technology.

That does not mean that the old one is going away. So it is running for quite a long time. Of course, we are now expanding with Synergia with our new ways to process data in real time, especially a real-time control platform. We are processing and expanding also into new processes in the back end, which we will hear a little bit about because they are turning towards plasma as well. And very important for us, the new technology platforms we have developed give us a lot of capabilities. That's why I spoke about the match example. At the end of the day, we need to pick the right one. We need to pick the one which has a sizable market, which solves a high-value problem at our customers and which does it for the right cost. We are not a university.

It's not about developing the fastest match, the generator with the highest output power or highest frequency or whatever. At the end of the day, we must solve the customer problem, and we must do it for a certain cost. Let's jump quickly from the front end to the back end. And I want to speak a little bit about the increasing importance of the back end because a lot of things you're seeing, as I said, these are all evolutions, not revolutions. There was a lot of scientific activities, but there were already also a lot of specialized solutions in the advanced packaging market before. And you see a little bit the time line what was introduced when. And for example, the embedded bridges, which Intel is using today with their chiplets, this was actually already introduced like 10 -- 8, 9, 10 years ago.

There is a big change in this market, and that was on one side, on the commercial side, the driver, which is AI, which needs this kind of advanced packages to really deliver the performance. But there is also another reason which is that the scaling, the new technology nodes and the front end, they have become so expensive and so complicated at the same time that this opened the door for these technologies because they are also not cheap, right? Doing a complex setup with chiplets and HBMs and in output communication into advanced package, this is not a cheap thing. But compared to what you need to spend now in the front end to make advances with respect to MU, with respect to performance, this is now a viable option, and I can tell you it will not go away again.

So this is one of the reasons -- the homogeneous scaling down to smaller structures is not that. But there is a gap that is now filled and completed by advanced packaging. The second thing is that we are really going from devices to systems. Again, AI as an example, where you cannot reach the same integration level, even not with the most advanced PCB technology. You need to bring memory and CPU closer together. They are made in different technologies. You cannot make them on the same wafer. So there is nothing else in an advanced package to do it to achieve the performance. But AI being on the front end, the high-value game, the driver for the moment, this will clearly also be used for other things.

Other things will benefit from this environment. If we speak about advanced sensor system, our hard systems, maybe with their own energy storage on board. All these things will now be accelerated by this development. And last but not least, after from devices to systems, there's a third point, which is you can simply now combine also the perfect technology node with a reasonable or a balanced cost.

So you don't need -- if you make something on a wafer, you need to use the same technology node for everything. But that's not very cost efficient. Maybe I make use a new processor with a 2-nanometer process, but all the in output networks around digital or analog, of course, you can use a much older technology node, which is much more cost efficient. So advanced packaging is also a way to optimize which technology for what cost to use in a device. And on the top chain, just to remember you, I have showed such a classical packaging process of the past. And it's, of course, simplified. The message that should come across is so far in the back end, everything was more or less in 2D.

Of course, there were already advanced packages, which included processors and sensors. But normally, they were placed side to side. They were connected via distribution layer. And then you see the normal steps, you had overmolding and then you either -- before you either do some bonding to the lead frame, so you can connect it to a circuit board or you build up these boards on the backside, so you can -- which we call ball grid arays, so you can solar on the PCBA. But these were mainly the steps done to do a package. And a big difference, especially with the testing was, you packaged a device. Maybe this was a $0.50 device, maybe it was a $5 device.

At the end, you tested it. If the device was bad, you scrap $5. So if you had a reasonable yield and you normally have because the complexity was much lower, that was not such an issue. Now you have started building complex devices and these complex devices are made of -- or systems are made of high-value devices, the memory, extremely expensive, such an HBM, especially if you put 8 in a package. And then all the chiplets, the CPUs, may be a different one, maybe some optic for communication. So the value of these packages is extremely high. And of course, you cannot simply, like I said before, $5 device doesn't work [indiscernible].

You cannot do this with a $30,000 AI system or package or you don't want to do it. The business case will not fly anymore if you work this way. So there's a very simple strategy coming with this, which is called good die or good material. You need to check the devices before you put them together. if they are good. And when you have the different assembly steps, you want to check in between as well because in your value chain, if something goes wrong, you quickly want to take the chance to either repair it or you want to stop assembling and not put more good material in to finally scrap it because of one bad device in the system.

And this is -- if you do this in 2.5D or 3D, there is an inspection gap because so far, you could test everything from outside. You could look from the top or from the bottom and you always saw what you had to see. This is not possible anymore. There are only 2 ways you can do it. You either take this thing if you have an issue and you cut it open and you look for what was going wrong or and Isabella will speak about how this works. You take a 3D X-ray or 2.5D X-ray system and look inside, you save a lot of time and find the problem much faster. You increase not just your output, your quality, but you can also directly feed back the information through your production loop and increase your yield and make sure you do not lose another system or device.

To do this, you hear a lot about 3D inspection, about the CA20, about us with inspection system in semi. And by the way, it's an important step for us. Don't forget, so far, we were delivering components, modules, subsystems to the front end to the ones who are making the machines to produce semiconductors. In this case, we start the same way. We make the components and the modules like the X-ray tube and the corresponding high-voltage generator. We make all the handling around it, but now we also make the system. So we have advanced from delivering subsystems to delivering systems at least in the back end. And I have selected, I would say, the 4 most important things in such a system. And the message I want to bring across is all this is in our hand. And let me start with the light source with the X-ray source, which is done by AXM by the team of Michael Berger, who is here as well.

So if you have questions in the break, please take the chance and interview him directly. But I want to shine some light on IXM on this team and how important they are in this inspection chain because -- you will hear later from Isabella, there are many challenges you have to solve. But at the end of the day, you want to see things very precisely with a high resolution and you want to do it fast. And this all starts with the light source with the X-ray tube because it sets, you could say, the limits of what is possible. How much power do you get out, but also how much resolution can you at the end, achieve. And this is what I want to explain here because you can play this game at home, right?

If you have something -- if you have like a big old light bulb and then front, you put an object and you have the shadow on your wall. And then you take a small LED where it seems the light comes out of one point and then you will see the same object, but the surrounding will not be so blurry anymore. The picture will look much sharper, much higher contrast. And the reason and the challenge is the same for X-ray. You want to have X-ray coming out of one single point, then your picture would look like this. But that's not the case because we are accelerating an electron beam and finally, this thing hits the target and it hits it at a certain surface.

And this defines what we call our focus spot, the spot we can focus the X-ray to. And now if you do it like this, you will see there is not just light coming out of one point, it's from the edges as well, and then this happens. And this finally defines if I have 2 objects close to each other, can I still separate them? This is what defines your resolution. And this comes with a lot of more challenges the team of Michael has to solve. It's not just that you have such a small focus spot because we have a small focus spot, all the energy goes to one point.

So sooner or later, you will melt away the target. So the question is how do you can still get power out of this because if you don't have enough power on the target, you don't get enough light. And again, no light, no possibility to see fine structures. Then you have to keep this focus spot and see we speak about 400-nanometer resolutions. You have to keep it extremely stable. Of course, all these things are heating up. And now how do you make sure it is not wing around because that would mean your projection is wing around as well. If it does slowly, if you can measure it, we can maybe use our AI-driven inspection software to correct for this, but you cannot correct for everything. And this is what needs to be understood here because you are used to your smartphones, which are getting smaller and smaller.

And to be honest, the whole optics compared to a professional camera system is like it's nothing, right? And you can do so many corrections by AI if something is looking back, AI is estimating, guessing how it could look like and makes the face or whatever looking nicer or complete. This is not possible here. If there's information missing and I use AI to generate this information and put it in, how can I make sure that I have not just made the picture nice, looking nice instead of seeing the defect that was there.

So again, the tube is so important because this is the beginning of the chain. Any resolution and speed you lose here, you cannot recover. And that's why there's such a competitive advantage for us to have this in our own hands and to have the strong collaboration between Michael's team, IXM and Christians and Isabella's team on the system side. Last technology I will speak about today, and I will not go into the automation, which is important as well and the high-voltage generators, which are made by XM, which now also have lifetime monitoring, which is extremely important for uptime and semi, right?

Systems cannot go down. This is pure money running away. We leave this for today. But of course, I want to speak a little bit about what we are doing with respect to AI. And I don't want to speak about how we use AI in the company to be more efficient, how to write and test code using AI, we are doing all these things as well. I really want to speak about AI in products and a little bit about the technology behind our platform, Dragonfly as used for our inspection system. So you see the whole universe, let me call it like this, of AI there. And what we are mainly using and is the part of machine learning and deep learning. So you are very used from the news to generative AI, generating additional information by AI.

What we are more focused on for our products is learning, teaching machines by data. And if we speak about deep learning, a special method of machine learning where you use neural networks. And we are creating them on our own. This is not like public models or stuff you can use like [indiscernible] or these large language model. This is really done by our group in Montreal. And we also give our customers the possibility to train these models with their confidential data so that they can train the model to exactly discover and recognize their defects. That's the automatic defect recognition. But maybe I can go back there for a second, so you see the video again. Another important thing we are doing driven by deep learning is the so-called segmentation.

This is actually one of the most important features of this platform. You get a 3D volume made out of pixels after the scan. But now you must train the computer to understand, for example, this is an example of a battery, where does the electrode material start? What in this gray picture, what X-ray finally is in this gray scale picture is the electrode and what is the separator and what is the electrolyte. So you need to teach the computer to do what you could do with your eye when you look in the picture and say, yes, this is where the head starts. This is where it stops. This is where the flower starts or the table, recognizing these boundaries and [indiscernible].

This is something the computer has to learn if you want to later use it for things like automatic defect inspection, but also, for example, like measuring how big something is. So this is things we are doing there, we are really embedding AI into our products, and that gives us another big advantage, especially with our inspection system. Let me quickly summarize where our technology plays today and especially where it will also place tomorrow. So as I already showed for the front end, yes, we leverage the [indiscernible] and the [indiscernible] itself we have. We have still a big demand also for new capacitors.

Just to tell you, this development is going on as well. And we are expanding, especially with Synergia with our data-driven solutions further into the front end also into new processes there. For example, don't be confused, we are not building lithography systems in the future, but the the mask, the photoresist you're making, the way you co it, the whole process to make sure after the development, you really have a stable EUV pattern. This is now going towards plasma processes as well. The same in the doping, right?

If you have a gate-all-around fat, there is epitaxy doping you can do, but you can also use plasma for doping because you cannot just use the ion beam for a top. It's now a 3D structure. You also have to do it on the side. So there are more and more processes, challenging processes where RF and plasma is used. And of course, as I explained before, we must make sure we have so many possibilities now with our new technology platforms, more than we could ever design in terms of products. We must choose the right things together with our customers. And on the back end, we leverage our X-ray technologies, which we have developed over many years, not just for the system, but also all the technology we have in our IXM tube division.

We are finally broadening into the semi market. Yes, we have achieved this. Again, Isabella will show you where we are with the CA20. This system is now used to inspect advanced 3D packages. And there are also new challenges and chances, opportunities for PCT because as you see on the picture there, building the redistribution layers, drilling these we to what material ever, glass or in future very likely. All this requires plasma processes as well. And we have made a big step forward and will continue with our AI-driven software platform.

There we have really a lot of possibilities. This Dragonfly platform is not just used to inspect X-ray pictures. It's actually quite famous in the scientific community. It can do a lot of advanced things like data fusion, and there are many chances for us to further develop the technology, but also the market we are serving. This said, I'm looking at the clock, and I think I can make the next announcement immediately, which is the coffee break.

[Break]

Thank you. So welcome back. To the next session, and it gives me immense pleasure to actually introduce a -- not a new face to Comet. She's been with Comet for many years, but a new Comet face to the Capital Market Day. We will continue the next session with a deep dive into IXS, Industrial X-ray Systems. And the deep dive will be led by [indiscernible]. She is Global Head of IXS and VP of the Commercial stream. And later on during the Q&A or the [indiscernible], she will be accompanied by Christian Driller, who is our VP of R&D and Operations and equally a Global Head of IXS. Without further ado, Isabella, please take over and give us a deep plunge into where we are with IXS.

So today is a very exciting day for me and also for IXS because I would like to present to you how smart X-ray inspection is enabling our semiconductor industry through precision to see better, through speed to be faster and also through AI technology to see more. But before we go into that, how did this whole start? And I would like to basically take off where Stefan left. Our daily life is influenced by AI. And we are basically living in that world. But AI did not just come around the corner like that. It was evolving over time, and so also did our journey. So 4 years ago, when we decided to go into advanced packaging, nobody talked about advanced packaging. Today, 60% of the GPUs value is comprised of advanced packaging technology. So this means tremendous change. So what does this mean?

You've heard a lot about the technology from Andre and also from the market from Stephan. But let's take a deep dive into that. So we can separate in 2 basic streams. We have the volume production and the volume market, and we have the high-end packaging market. And if you look to the volume production. You see single-layer functions. And you see like sizes that we are inspecting between 60 to 100-micron and on the single layers around 10 micron. To put it a little bit in perspective because sometimes we talk about micrometer levels, like what is that actually? So if you take one hair, just one hair, I'll pick one, I have a couple of them. If you take one hair, this is around 100-micrometer in diameter. So that means on the volume packaging market, you basically look at solar bars there are big as one hair diameter or less like 60%. And on single layer fronts, you are even less power like 10%. So 10% of diameter there, which is when it comes to volume packaging market and it's a single layer structure, it's not that challenging anymore. If you would have asked us 4 years ago, we would have probably given a different answer. But we are now looking at the high-end market at the high-end advanced packaging market. And you heard that before from Andy, the 2.5T 3D chips, they are becoming more complex. And you see it up there, the upper layer you see the complex structures, and they are even the simple ones. They are chips now with 16 levels. And that means you need to have precise image ideation and you need to have an inspection envelope that helps you produce these packaging chips. And you're not only looking at micro bumps. You're looking at via, you are looking at TSV to through silicones. These are the bars that you can see, the small connections. You are looking at wafer alignment. You are also looking at C4 bumps, but you're going even further down, even below 20 micrometer, so 20% of hairs diameter, but sometimes even less, we are right now at 2% of the hair diameters. So something you cannot even see with your own eyes anymore. That's why you need AI in order to enable the semiconductor industry to enhance their inspection portfolio and be able to increase yield in the advanced packaging market.

But it's not only the yield that is challenging for our for our customers, it's the winning the time to market race. In the semiconductor industry, it's all about being first, being having the first technology. So it's crucial that you work together with the top leading partners in order to help them win the time-to-market race and enable them. Second, as I mentioned before, finding structural defects and critical defects in this complex structures is crucial. So the inspection strategy in advanced packaging is also evolving. And last but not least, in the past, you had like one design, you had one product ramp up at a time. Now you have multiples a day to ramp up. So you need to be very flexible in solution. That altogether brings a huge challenge to the advanced packaging industry. And that's why they need insights in order to be able to create 4 sites to control the process. That being said, 0 defects truly matter in the advanced packaging industry. And how do we contribute from an inspection point of view to this world. And these are 3 levers that we are basically tier headed. And that is clarity. I'm going to explain that in a second, to see better efficiency to be faster and insights through our product brand Dragonfly, our AI brand to see more. And those 3 levels come also better and Andre mentioned it briefly before, it's all in one hand. But it starts at the imaging chain. If you don't see it, it's not there. That's why you need to have the perfect setup in your X-ray system, you need to have the perfect imaging chain fitting to the customer need and the customer challenge in order to be able to increase efficiency, to control the data flow to control the inspection flows. And then you use AI on different levels, so you can have interactive inspection when you're looking for ground troops when you're doing research. -- then you use Dragonfly 3G world, and you can do a detailed image analysis, segmentation and also measurement of your specimen that you're looking at.

Second is that when you're in a ramp-up phase, you want to have a guided inspection. That's what you do when you use steel learning models. You can bring in your own inspection workflows, you can basically -- it's so easily set up, you can do it by yourself. I would challenge everyone that you can do it as well. And you can see in real life data, what is happening. And then last but not least, comes the process flow. And that means 24/7 process operation where you get feedback back from each process step, and that is far back into your analysis tools so that you can see if by process working or not. Do I have critical defects? Do I need to stop the process? So where does Comet X-ray come into play in the inspection envelope and where are we enabling the industry. And these are 3 levels. First of all, it's root cause analysis. There is when you're looking at a specimen, you're looking at a part. And in the past, it took you days, weeks, thousands of dollars to basically scrap a ship, to dissect it and basically look and every layer is it good or is it bad? You can use X-ray now, and this is where we brought it to that level that you can see that in hours. Second is failure analysis. As I mentioned before, product ramp-ups are now on a continuous basis in advanced packaging. Sample inspection is a crucial when it comes to this complex design. This is where you need a fast input, and you need guided inspection so that you can use your deep learning models to help you become faster and to help you increase yield in a timely manner.

And last but not least, the process control step in the inspection envelope where it replaces a tremendous role is when you are looking at every process step and you get the feedback back. So I have talked a lot now. But what have we really and truly achieved over the past years? In 2023, we launched our first manual inspection system for chip on substrate. In 2024, we brought out the automated system. In 2025, we brought the chip-on-wafer feature to that system and also for root cause, deep root cause analysis. But we did not do that by ourselves. We work with the top players in the market to always have the pulse on the market and to develop a tool and a system that fits in the inspection envelope of the future and that really helps create our customers to create value. And that led to something very important for us. This got invited to be part of the next development in the semiconductor industry. And you can see that up there, it says joint 3. We are part of the joint 3 consortium where we are developing together with the industry, the next level of glass level packaging. This is the next stage that is driving that want to drive the industry.

But what does this mean inspection strategy, inspection envelope? Well, as you can see, you would say like, well, you're at the end of the supply chain. Why do you -- why are you making such a big fuss out of that? Well, this is because advanced packages, as I said before, are extremely complex. We need a lot of attention are extremely expensive in the manufacturing. And therefore, you are and customers want to talk to you on every level in the supply chain. So that means we are talking to customers in advanced packaging on design level, on material supplier level, on chiplet foundries, on interposer foundry levels and, of course, OSATs and IDMs. But basically, we are covering now in the inspection strategy in our envelope, the whole supply chain because it's so tremendously important to serve the advanced packaging industry and helping them to succeed winning the time-to-market race and increasing yield. Nice pictures are nice, but numbers are better. And therefore, what have we achieved over the past years.

In 2023, we had like 5 engagements, and we started out. We had good engagement with industrial suppliers and also with leading IM. But right now, we are at over 60, and we are globally active. We are in '25 qualification stages, and we have 5 orders received compared to '23. Is that enough? No, because advanced packaging is basically hitting off now and taking the next level. And here, we are going to continue working with strategic partnerships because for us, it's extremely important to have to pulse on the market and be globally active to be in cocreation with IDMs, with foundries and also with OSATs so that we develop the right product for them in their right use case and also to have a global customer engagement on the complete value chain to be part of the semiconductor road map.

So to summarize that, the semiconductor industry in advanced packaging has a huge challenge, and that is increasing yields by building around packages. With smart AI, we can enable this industry in the complete inspection envelope to support them to win the time to market risk. But we are also ready to scale. We are ready to scale when it comes to failure analysis. We are ready to still when it comes to product ramp-ups, and we are ready to scale when it comes to process analysis. And last but not least, we are part of the future of the semiconductor road map, and we are engaging in partnerships globally from the U.S. to Europe to Asia, and we are part of joint 3. Thank you very much.

And now I will hand over to my colleague, Joeri Durinckx and from President from PCT.

Thank you, Isabella. So also a warm welcome from my side. It has been indeed 2 years since I presented here for the first time. And when I presented 2 years ago, we were talking about PCT, PCT growth opportunities, transforming the organization, transforming the organization from really a contract manufacturer, which is where PCT started into a higher performance organization that delivers our system solutions to our customers.

So today, what I'm going to talk about is that we are uniquely positioned for sustainable growth driven by technology, leadership, deep customer trust that we've created over the last 2 years and collaboration, combined with strategic alignment that is aligned within the needs of the semiconductor value chain. We have a strong foundation in plasma technologies. The PCT division combines decades of process control know-how with a culture of innovation and self-reinvention which I'll also talk about that enables really our customers to improve their own device performance, yield and cost. Supported with a global footprint and the transformation, which we started in 2023. We're at the moment strategically positioned combined with a high-performance team to meet the next-generation technologies.

So in summary, PCT is really ideally positioned to capture the emerging opportunities turning these market inflections into significant growth for the future. So we further -- without further ado, I'll continue the rest of the presentation. First of all, Stephan spoke about the end market of $1 trillion. If you look 2024 to 2030, the end market IC demand will grow to this $1 trillion market. Stephan also explained that this comes with unique challenges. It's driven by AI. It's driven by power consumption challenges, so there is a definite need in new technologies to reduce the power consumption and also that footprint of those ships. I don't know if anybody follows the news, but today, people don't talk in data centers about teraflux or something, they talk about gigawatts of data centers. It's the power consumption that goes in. Just to give an idea, one of those 1 gigawatt factories or data centers that they built, they contain approximately 500,000 GPU chips just for one data center. That's without a memory that goes with it. That's without the power supplies that are needed to support it. But it's a huge, huge investment, but it's also a huge driver for the next-generation technologies. So there is from the market and expectation to continue to downscale but also come up with alternative technologies that reduce the power consumption and reduce the footprint.

So Andre already touched base, Stephan already touched base. We're moving from the Nano era to the Angstrom area, which we talked about already last time. But technologies, we need to continue to evolve from the gate all around eventually 2030, 2035 or maybe later to the CFA technology. And this is mainly for foundry and logic applications for the most advanced chips. As also explained, the memory will also need to continue to go through the transformation due to the increasing demand of the memory itself. And there, we will see a continuous evolution from 2D to 3D in these applications itself. What does it mean in regards of process equipment.

In regards of process equipment, that means that the overall WFE will grow with a CAGR of approximately 8%. But what's really positive about it and as explained by these new technologies, the number of applications, the number of steps will continue to increase. The complexity will continue to increase. As such, also the number of equipment and RF processes in those equipment will continue to increase. So PCT is uniquely positioned because that means for us specifically that the overall CAGR for the RF subsystems is going to grow faster than the WFE itself, approximately with 11% in the same period of time. When we split then the plasma process in WFE, the total available market in 2024 was approximately $106 billion. If you subtract lithography, which is ASML, the remaining, which is approximately 1/3 is plasma processes with a total available market of $36 billion for our end customers, which are the OEMs. If we split that, we know that approximately $19 billion is going into etch, which is the main driver of that market and the remaining is the position with $17 billion.

If you take a little bit deeper look, you can also see that etch is driven by 3 applications, conductor, dielectric etch and then there is strip, deposition, there is PVD, PCVD and ALD. Why is it important to mention we are part of the most significant markets that are in those specific applications. And that's really well positioned with the major OEMs. We spoke about becoming more resilient. I'll talk about it a little bit later, but this is also a piece of the puzzle understanding where you engage with which customers on which applications to enable future growth has been one of our focus areas.

Talking about transformation and customer obsession. When we spoke in 2023, we came from a contract manufacturing background. There was a definite need to transform the whole PCT organization to really become customer obsessed to really become much more resilient, operational efficient creating a global team with a global approach because our customers went global. So having local regionalized approach as no longer worked. And then of course, there was a need to broaden our portfolio with a much higher speed and expand our SAM, which Stephan also spoke about, we've been able to do so.

In regards of operational efficiency, Penang is a piece of the puzzle, but working on our processes, how we're globally set up how we engage with our customers, how we do engineering, how we do NPI, how we execute in our fabs by more automation are all remaining pieces of the puzzle, which go into the operational efficiency I will not go into too many details about that, but know that we're working on those. One global team getting close to our customers really being engaged early on from the R&D co-developing, co-creating with them on the new applications, so you can be successful embedded in is one of the things that we're working on. This is how we're set up with the account teams, how we engage with our product managers, how engineering collaborates and we've been able to achieve that too. I will talk about broadening our product portfolio, and I will be talking about expanding our existing market. When we look to expanding our existing market, we have, of course, the piece of the puzzle, which talks about the overall products that we deliver, which are our vacuum capacitors, our matches and our generators. Coming from a contract manufacturing background with limited key accounts.

In the meantime, we've made such own amount of progress that we're no longer engaged with only 1 or 2 key accounts but we really have 5 strategic accounts globally where we have active engagements, close collaboration, co-creation with. This also results in that we're getting much more diversified in our end applications for the foundry, logic, memory that we are part of the value chain. So this will enable us, again, to become much more resilient towards the future, a little bit less dependent on the SEMI cycles because our whole portfolio is now rolled out into different applications and different end markets. When you look to the broadening of the portfolio, there are, of course, activities in technology that we're doing. Andre explained already a little bit. But when we look to vacuum capacitors, we are not just waiting on our customers to tell us what to do. We're continuing to drive the road map with higher power density, smaller form factor, innovating by different materials, also how we manufacture our specific applications. Match, we -- and I will share in a little bit more detail. We come from an old generation match technology. Now in the meantime, we have the Synertia platform where we also enable that technology into. So it allows us to do much more faster and transient with the matches that helps to solve our customers' problem. The generator is a SAM expansion. It's about expanding the portfolio. And there, the main focus areas are power cures and then fast tuning both shaping. I'll show a little bit more, but it really enables us to be the only one to really deliver a fully integrated system from the whole value chain.

So looking back a little bit. In 2023, CMD, we had really only the Synertia 13 megahertz, 1.5 and 5-kilowatt generator in the portfolio. It was a new platform. Andre explained that we had to make a lot of investments there. We still have the old map with Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 2b technology in. In the meantime, because of the global organization, being focused, customer access, I'm proud to announce that now we no longer have only the 13 megahertz, but we have in the 13 megahertz, expanded the range with 2.5, 3.5. We've also been able to deliver to customers 27 and 40 megahertz and 60 mg -- 27 and 60, 40 megahertz is planned to release and go to customers towards the end of the year, beginning of next year. So there is a vast expansion which happened in the overall portfolio, which broadens the SAM again and the number of opportunities, which we're engaged with our customers. It creates way more opportunities, but it also requires a lot more improved features which we need to develop. And that's where the co-creation with the customer becomes critical that we continue that.

On the vacuum capacitors, we've made also a lot of progress. We've continued to develop with our customers. But the big change compared to CMD 2023 is that we now have also deployed our generation 3 controls into our match. We launched that in March 2025 of this year. In the meantime, we have already over 15 customer engagements because of the data that we were able to show, the improvement that it delivers, the tuning stability that it gives, the reputability that it gives. So that in itself creates a lot of market traction, a lot of positive momentum, but it also shows that with the development of the platform, we now have it and rolling out new products with a much faster pace has been shown that we've been able to create all these new products over the last 15 to 18 months. But it also means that we have, at the end, now a fully integrated system where the generator and match can communicate at equal speeds, and we've been able to demonstrate to customers that this brings significant value if you are really a fully integrated subsystem supplier.

In regards of the Synertia market updates that we have, similar like Isabella mentioned, in 2023, we had limited engagements under evaluation with our customers. We have limited qualifications, and we have no high volume commitments or orders from our customers. Due to this close to the customer collaboration, the new global organizational set of the transformation that we went through, we have more than 50 engagements with customers all over the globe. Engagement can be about multiple frequency, multiple applications. This doesn't include the match itself. This is purely generator. We, in the meantime, have also more than 30 qualifications ongoing where we're on the lab or on the tool that goes to the end customer for qualification. But I think the most important is that we've also achieved that we have more than 15 high-volume orders confirmed, which will fuel the pipeline and growth for PCT for 2026 and beyond. Because as Andre explained, once you're qualified and you're in getting them the additional volumes that come with it as the tools number increases is going to fuel that. So we have more than 100 active engagements with more than 1,000 volume orders that we have in the pipeline. So we're well positioned to enable future growth and the Synertia platform is finally yielding on the generator side, but also on the met side with the new projects that we're doing.

What is also really important to realize is that we're not only focused on one area. We really have these engagements across the globe, across all these multiple new accounts that I spoke about. So being able to support that required a lot of work and a lot of effort in setting that up, but we are really diversifying and making sure that, that is the case. And of course, the customer adoption is driven by all the advanced features that we bring right the fast posing the power accuracy, but also the pulp shaping and out-of-frequency unit capabilities that we deliver. In summary, we're in the right market. The PCT growth will come from the customer intimacy that we've created over the last 2 years and that we will continue to work and continue to transform the organization with but also the speed that it brings in our to co-create with our customers. Everything needs to go faster. The size of times become shorter. So continue to reinvent ourselves that we are in pace and in sync with our customers is key to succeed with that. And also, we keep focused on the resilience and resilience is not only how we optimize our overall operational efficiency and flexibility, but also how do we go more resilient by being more diversified and more customer installed base. So the focus areas are remaining focused on the customer obsession, expanding the product portfolio and then creating that resilience and with continuous innovation, we will focus on continued customer success and overall success of PCT.

And with that, I hand over to our CFO, Mr. Christian Witt.

So thanks, Joeri. Hello, and welcome, everyone, also from my side. After Stephan, Andre, Isabella, Joeri have presented where we are going as a company. What's the progress we've made in our key new product and business initiatives, I'll take you through where this leads us in terms of sales and growth as well as through what we'll do on the other side to improve our efficiency.

First, let's have look at what changed since 2023. Since 2023, a couple of things which have changed in the market in an environment have been discussed by the colleagues. It's the AI, speed, flexibility, these things, which you need in the business today much more than 2 years ago. The other point, which clearly changed regulatory and the general global environment. And altogether, that also requires us to have some additional business priorities, and that means it's growth on the one hand, which is our key driver, but also looking much closer at efficiency and resilience, things we need to take, and we are taking care about much more and focusing more on than we have done in the past. So taking all that together, where will it take us in 2028 in the next, what we think will be the next peak of the cycle.

We've updated our midterm ambitions to reflect the change in exchange rate as well as the expected timing of the peak of the cycle. We expect net sales in Swiss francs of CHF 670 million to CHF 770 million, with an EBITDA margin of 22% to 27% and the return on capital employed of 27% to 32%. What's the key drivers behind the change or non-change whatever you call it? We have considered the devaluation of the U.S. dollar, which hasn't only happened in the past, but it's a systematic step, which is expected to happen also expected by the financial markets, the future rates to happen over the next years. And it's something we should consider. That's as we are reporting in Swiss francs. If you were to look at us as a U.S. dollar company, it's a very clear message. In the next peak of the cycle, we are a $1 billion company. And that's basically the same message we've sent 2 years ago. And dollars, there's no big change. There's a slight change in when it will happen as the whole SEMI cycle has shifted, as everybody knows. And when it comes to turnover, it is the same thing which we have shown here 2 years ago.

In terms of EBITDA, we'll go a little bit into what's happening, but there is, of course, some impact, no matter in which currency report and show it if a large part of the cost base is in francs and euros as well. and the revenue is mostly in dollars that has an impact. So altogether, that's our midterm ambition for the area of the cycle, CHF 670 million to CHF 770 million, or in other words, around $1 billion in turnover and net sales, 22% to 27% of EBITDA margin.

Let's get a little bit into how we are getting there and what's driving us to get there from today to a peak of cycle in possibly 2028. Andre, Joeri, Isabella, they've all clearly shown you have to plant the seeds early, and then it takes a number of years until you harvest. So where we've planted the seed yesterday, we have us today and tomorrow. When we plant the seeds today, we harvest tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We've always been ahead of the curve of rolling sales and growing our R&D to really have the technological edge the value add for our customer developed. We have done that. We'll continue to do that. That's the core of our company. We'll be focused in high conviction projects and segments highly adjacent, as Joeri has shown, highly adjacent also in the case of IXS, where we have a base and industrial-based business, which has allowed us with our competency to step into SEMI. So that is our key, which we'll continue to do. And as we are -- we still have a resilient, strong balance sheet and setup, we do that also throughout the cycles. We are, we have been and we will be ahead of the sales curve with our R&D.

Let's look a little bit where is the specific factors which fuel our growth and that's a second focus, we, as a company, now need, also where we enhance efficiency and strengthen resilience. Key aspects for growth First and foremost, it's the seeds we have founded in the past in PCT, especially in PCT because that's where we have the lowest cycle. Where we continue to penetrate our existing customers with existing products with new products, where we penetrate new customers, expand our markets, expand our reach in the market. That's the biggest contributor to our growth. The second big lock is that we have new products, new segments and services, which we have been developing, which we have launched, which we are launching. And that's on the one hand, inertia. And that's, on the other hand, pivoting the X-ray business towards SEMI, CA20, what Isabella presented for the systems as well as for the related modules is a key part of that driver. And last but not least, you've heard both of them is Isabella and Andre talked about the software and how we do that with our Dragonfly. That's another platform, which is key in order to fuel that growth in new products and services.

Having a look at efficiency and resilience. The key point is this is the second focus for us in order to develop our company for tomorrow. And what's the key drivers here number one, and Joeri touched on that as well. It is looking at the processes and becoming more efficient in what we do and how we do it. Second point is, well, how can we take advantage of our new best cost site in Penang. And we've seen -- we are very well on track. We have a large facility we are building there to host on the one hand, production. So that means shifting blue color work to Penang and growing blue collar work in Penang as well as significant office space because we want to shift more and more also white call work to Penang and use that as best cost side. So basically, that is the second key pillar when it comes to cost efficiency is. First, how many resources do we need? Second, how can we shift some of those resources to Penang and grow there in Penang instead of high-cost countries?

Another point, operating leverage, I think that's pretty clear. When you look at our capacities today, we run plus/minus one shift, sometimes a bit more, but there is a clear case for the leverage in terms of our production capacity. We are set up to bring the volume in. We are doing the work with our customers on over that comes, we'll see the operating leverage coming through. Product line profitability, that's a multifold topic. But of course, we are looking into our different product lines, other product lines, which need a turnaround, are there product lines which we might or might not want to continue, but here we're talking small stuff, not big stuff, but that's the usual type of cleaning company should always do in its product portfolio. We do that diligently. All of that is needed in order to ensure our growing profitability for tomorrow.

Let's have a look how that converts into numbers and what it means in numbers. When you look at net sales, very clear. The key part is volume and mix on our products. And that is the key driver, as just explained. You harvest today -- sorry, you plan to see today, you harvest today and the day after tomorrow and day after tomorrow. Second part is the new business, and that's mainly, not only but mainly CA20 and Synertia. And that is the contribution we will see from our new business in a year plus/minus 28%, which is not where we want to be in the future, but which is an intermediate step because as I said, we plan to see today the harvest tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. While we are really doing this Synertia as well as CA20 goes clearly beyond what we have in here for our [ 2028 ] ambition. And FX, as mentioned, as long as we talk in Swiss francs, we'll have this effect in dollars, you wouldn't see this effect.

Let's look at profitability, how numbers are the convergency numbers over here. Again, the volume and the price/mix effect has the key impact and that is the volume from our current product line as well as the modernized portfolio, the new product lines, which we are bringing in, which also come in at a higher gross margin. Second important point here is that efficiency will play a different role. In any case, we have an FX issue and we have opportunities on the efficiency side. So working on that will bring us between 5 and 7 percentage points in EBITDA between today and 2028. Focus points there, on the one hand, it's really the restructuring, which we have started in the non-SEMI business from IXS in order to enhance profitability. It's also the efficiency measures I mentioned, and it is utilizing our best cost locations in Penang and possibly elsewhere. So that's the key drivers behind our profitability improvements towards 2028.

Let's look at the divisions and this picture should be pretty familiar to everyone who has a campaign in the company for a while. We have around 2/3 of our revenue in -- from PCT or we will have -- we don't have it today, but we will have it as PCT is growing slightly at a higher rate. But when we look at profitability, we have the same picture as we've seen in the past. IXM will be plus/minus within our group range PCT being a highly differentiated pure SEMI player will be clearly above that. And IXS, and I'll come to that in a second, will be slightly below the group average. ROCE, same in general, just IXM to its capital intensity is a little bit lower here, but that, I think, is also a familiar picture.

Let's take a little bit closer look at the divisions, what's driving the growth as well as the profitability development in the different divisions. And it is, as you will see slightly different drivers here. PCT, as mentioned, it's the penetration and it's the market growth as well as is the uptick in Synertia with our new product lines there. That's the growth side. On the profitability side, it's the operating leverage that is, for sure, the strongest driver, but it's also efficiency measures and PCT, as this is the main use of our new site in Penang, that shift and pivoting towards pindown has a significant impact as well. Looking at IXM. IXM has renovated its product portfolio in the past years. So this will be kicking in, in the next couple of years, improving sales and also improving the margins we can have with new state-of-the-art products in the markets. So on the growth side, on the volume side, on the profitability side, is volume on the one hand and efficiency measures. IXS. Here, the growth driver is the pivot to SEMI. It's not the industrial business. It's the pivoting to SEMI. As mentioned, were CA20 and related products. And when we look at the profitability, it's basically 2 key drivers. One is that pivoting to SEMI, which has a different gross margin profile than an industrial business. But on the other hand, we have started to rightsize the organization in the industrial part. That is the second important driver to get our profitability in IXS to where it needs to be.

IXS, I'd like to shed some more light on how we look at IXS because if you see IXS from the outside, it's one division and it makes a loss. And that is not too transparent and we look at it differently, and we'd like to share that view also with you. For us, okay, for us, IXS, we look at it as 2 business lines. One business line is our industrial business. And on the business line is CA20 and the semi segment. So when we look at 2024, we have invested order of magnitude CHF 10 million to CHF 15 million in that year just to go into the SEMI market. That is R&D, and that is market access, both important and both needs funds. So that is basically that part. If you take the other part of the equation, you have a 5% to 10% percentage points EBITDA business. That is not where it should be for an industrial business, but that's where it was in 2024. When we look into 2028, then for semi and CA20, this is clearly the intermediate step to go to where we really want to go, what Isabella mentioned. In 2028, we'll be at least breakeven. That is pretty clear. And in our industrial business, we'll be at a benchmark level for the industry, which will be, for sure, more than 10% EBITDA for that part of the business. So this is the way how we look at it. We look at it as 2 business lines, and we'll continue to share that view and a certain transparency on that with the financial community because we understand that it's important for you to know what we are doing here, what is the investment case and what is the industrial business.

Looking briefly at cash flow. We have an operating cash flow, as you know, which funds our operations our standard investments, our growth, which also funds midsized investments in, for example, Penang now, it's a facility of about CHF 80 million, including the [indiscernible], which we are funding out of our operational cash flow of the years. And it's also able to fund some bolt-on acquisitions, for example, to accelerate growth in certain areas. You can develop something, if you want to accelerate and can buy something in terms of development of product that can make sense. And if it's smaller acquisitions, it's well to be financed out of the operating cash flow. The stability we have enables us to operate throughout the cycle and to conduct our business. throughout the cycle, we'll continue on that path.

Looking at capital allocation. Key driver is we will continue to invest into growth. That's R&D and market access with an R&D ratio of about 10% to 15%, but there could also be the mentioned bolt-on acquisitions targeted M&A, for example, on the technology side. We'll maintain an adequate balance sheet for us as a technology company, so rather leverage and the financial flexibility to execute on our strategy. Shareholder returns, we will pay the dividends according to our policy. And if there are other ways to return money to shareholders, and that would be the best way we would, of course, we hesitate to do so. Some housekeeping on other financial KPIs, and let me focus here just on 2 CapEx between 3% and 7%. We are low to mid and CapEx intensity in our business. When it comes to backups and IXM, it's a little bit more in production when it comes to IXS and to the match box. It's rather assembly, rather low capital intensity. So maintenance CapEx is about 2%, about 3% to 7% is what we estimate throughout the next couple of years.

Working capital, net working capital. We'll go to slightly below 20% as group. And when you look at today's -- where we are today versus where we will be tomorrow, the key driver there is inventory. We still have some high inventories from the last ramp. And we have, as Joeri mentioned, changed some of the ways how we do these things, to build our resilience, and that includes we know quite well how we get our inventory improved. Our inventory levels and will get mostly thereby to a net working capital ratio below 20%.

Let me wrap it up. What's the key driver to get to growth and to profitability. It's the growth initiatives on the one hand. But on the other hand, it's also a second focus on improving profitability. And that means looking at our cost position, looking at our cost efficiencies. It also includes looking into how to best use our best cost site in Penang, which we are finalizing in 2026. And the mentioned revisions of product portfolio and similar. Solid financials for growth, what does it mean? At first, it means that we prioritize and focus our spending in terms of R&D or CapEx on the key pillars which we need to achieve our strategy in future growth and that we remain other than that, a very healthy capital structure. How will that change and reform commit? There's a couple of things without going into details, but it starts with a fully transparent culture. It goes on to infrastructure like IT systems. Look, we are a standard industrial company when it comes to execution. Why shouldn't we have a sender system that's much cheaper and much better. By doing that, we are able to really leverage our group size. And as Stephan mentioned in the very beginning, our fundamentals, which we have in common as a group. So that's the key takeaways. In the end, it's how do we enable commerce transformation to growth and profitability.

And with that, I'm happy to hand back to Stephan for the wrap-up.

Thank you, Christian. And let me close Comet's Capital Market Day presentations for today by trying to stitch and bring all together. So we've looked at how Comet is executing today, delivering on our plans, expanding capacity and investing in innovation, people, customer proximity, which is extremely important.

The world around us is obviously, as you know, changing very fast for us. That means our own transformation must continue with equal speed, determination and also measured risk taking. We are operating in an environment defined by shifting geopolitical and economic conditions, coupled with an industrial transformation that is reshaping the semiconductor landscape as well as our societies.

Supply chains are being realigned, technology road maps are accelerating and regionalization is becoming a defining force. These developments create both challenges and opportunities to which we need to respond proactively. That's why pushing ahead with our own transformation is it's not optional. It is essential. We are strengthening our organization, modernizing our processes and investing where we can make the greatest impact in technology leadership, customer proximity and operational excellence.

Pursuing this transformation with determination will ensure that we maintain our leadership in RF power and X-ray and continue to be a relevant and trusted partner in the semiconductor industry. Our transformation is about preparing Comet for the next phase of profitable growth. That is reflected in our updated midterm guidance.

Over the past year, we've continued to strengthen the foundation of our business by improving operational resilience, expanding capacity, footprint and sharpening our focus on the markets where we can actually lead. As a result, we're now able to update our midterm guidance to reflect both the progress we've made and the realities of today's market environment. The midterm outlook remains weighed down by a challenging business environment, marked by slower-than-expected adoption rates across key markets and continued currency headwinds.

Persistent exchange rate volatility has pressured margins, as Christian explained before, while a more cautious spending climate is delaying customer investment decisions, tempering growth momentum in the coming quarters. Our updated guidance remains, however, ambitious, but it is grounded in solid opportunities and execution. It reflects a company that is transforming, scaling and ready to capture growth as semiconductor demand rebounds and recovers. We see structural long-term growth in our core markets.

At the same time, we're managing near-term volatility through disciplined cost control and operational agility. With our transformation fully underway, we are confident in our ability to deliver sustainable growth, stronger margins and improved cash generation over the midterm horizon. In short, our updated guidance is not just a forecast, it is a statement of intent. Comet is positioning itself for the next cycle stronger and more focused than ever.

Now before we go into the next slide, before we go into Q&A, let me summarize why we believe Comet represents a compelling investment opportunity, not just for the near term, but especially for long-term sustainable value creation. First, Comet's foundation is built on mission-critical RF and X-ray technologies that sit at the heart of semiconductor innovation. As chips become smaller, faster and more complex, the tools and technologies needed to manufacture and inspect become even more essential. We are uniquely positioned at the center of that evolution.

Now second, the structural growth drivers behind our business are stronger than ever. We are aligned with local and global long-term global shifts reshaping the industry on to which we have cost our focus. Our technologies are enablers of those transformations. Third, our strength lies in focus. We hold leading positions in high barrier, highly specialized market niches, backed by deep customer integration, and these are areas where expertise and trust actually really matter because they define, decide the outcome.

Fourth, we are developing a scalable and resilient operating model supported by a very global footprint. This combination of operational discipline and geographic reach gives us the agility to weather market volatility and the strength to fully benefit from growth cycles.

Fifth, our capital allocation remains disciplined, supported by a strong balance sheet. We invest where it matters while maintaining financial strength and accountability. And finally, we have a clear path to profitable growth and sustained value creation. This is the road map we are already executing.

So in summary, Comet's story is one of opportunity, innovation, discipline and execution driven by people who believe in pushing technology forward and creating lasting value. We're proud of the foundation we have inherited, but also continue to build and even more excited about the road ahead.

Now at this point, I'd like to thank you for your attention and patience and continued trust in our journey. And with this, we'll go into the Q&A. But before we do that, we have to, I think, reconfigure seriously. No, no, you are not going to do that. We will reconfigure here. Yes, thank you. The smallest from these.

Good. Thank you, Stefan. So while the colleagues are rearranging the stage, you heard a lot about technology, strategy, commercial aspects, financials. Obviously, you will have some questions about that. So we'll start with the Q&A. I ask the colleagues to join me on the stage. Three housekeeping things.

First of all, limit your questions to 2, please. Second, there is 2 colleagues around with a microphone. So wait until you have a microphone that also colleagues in the webcast can hear you. And last but not least, state your name and your company, that would be great.

And with that, I see that Michael is the first one to ask a question.

Michael, Vontobel. Two questions. The first one is I was trying to piece together your market outlook for your service addressable market, which you expect to more than double versus your targets, which imply sort of 60% growth. Even if you adjust for FX, the addressable market, it looks like somehow a piece of that market is going somewhere else. So trying to bridge that. And the second question is a lot of growth drivers that you mentioned. But currently, things are not growing so much as we saw with your latest update. And I was wondering what trigger really should we look for to see that growth accelerate over the coming 6 to 12 months?

Thank you for that question. So I understand the first part is you're puzzled by how fast our SAM grows versus our growth. Remember, when I spoke about the SAM, I specifically said that is the part that we can address with our current and near future product portfolio of product platforms. And so as we start to continue to expand that portfolio, you have to think of this in the following way.

So if you add a new feature, a new member of family to, for instance, PCT Synertia platform or a new feature set to the CA20, that opens up the SAM immediately, whereas you have to go through that painful process of qualifying that feature of qualifying that new family member for Synertia and that comes at the later stage. In other words, as Christian showed, we are always when it comes to R&D, which then results into portfolio expansion way ahead of the curve of sales. So SAM grows typically in a company that increases its portfolio of offerings faster, sort of ahead of the curve versus your actual sales. And the second part of your question, what are the proxies? What do you have to look into?

Well, what we see now ever more clearly is that the CapEx, the real CapEx that has happened over the past couple of years, mostly with the hyperscalers, that is now really starting to pull in more and more activities and CapEx in the wafer fab equipment area that trickles down and hopefully, that trickle will turn into a stream over the next 3 years. When will it happen? So I mentioned in my last words, we will probably still see some sluggish behavior in the next few coming quarters. But then it is just a fact of having to equip those many fabs that are in construction or near termination of construction, like I mentioned in one of my very, very first slides, and that will translate into real orders and real shipments converted into sales for both divisions and with the division IXS pulling IXM along.

Good. Thank you, Stefan. We have a next question from Nik.

La from Octavian. Maybe my first question. So recently, you mentioned there is an increase in NAND spending, but it's mainly on the upgrade side. Can you maybe just give us more clarity on that? What exactly is being upgraded? Are these existing machines that are maybe repurposed or just part of these machines that are changed? So just some clarity around that would be helpful. And on my second question would be China and competition there. What are you seeing there? Because I remember 2 years ago, there was a conversation, yes, competition is coming, but 2027, 2028. I mean this is not the peak of the cycle. So are there some players there emerging? And how is your market share shifting there?

So let me take that first, and then Yuri is best positioned to talk about upgrades because he is deeply involved in that. So a year ago or maybe 2 years ago, I mentioned there are activities happening in China. It's kind of -- it's like a garden full of mushrooms, right? It's mushrooming.

Well, that's not surprising. Look at how China as a country is investing into the semiconductor ecosystem. And you see that across the board. And so we see that from especially the wafer fab equipment makers, a mushrooming of activities and applications that they can or at least say they can cover that the investments that the nation, the state of China is making is probably bearing fruits, right? So is this something we should be concerned about? For the time being, definitely not. We are not positioned in the area where their largest focus is in terms of really what subsystems or equipment they're investing into, but also the level of technology that they are trying to in-source and nationalize. So do we see activities in our field of activities.

Of course, on a low level, they're trying to do a lot of things, but it's not that we feel pressured or that there is anything coming close to a loss of market share. We have a lot of engagements with companies in China, always very clearly within the bounds of the regulations and limitations that exist, and we'll continue to do that, just like everyone else, also the Americans too. I hope that gives some color. to that question and on the upgrades, Yuri?

So we've taken with the team a significant deep dive specifically on the technology upgrades. So we know how to distinguish between all the different versions. Technology upgrade can go from upgrading some of the subcomponents, which is a match, which we're part of the daily business with our customers. That's part number changes, which we then are part of the value chain, up to complete chambers, which complete new technology, and then we're also part of the value chain.

That's why you, by the way, saw a significant uptick in 2022 and also 2023 in our RMA business because we were actually part of the existing technology upgrades. So we're part of it. We know where it plays. It depends on which technology upgrade that the customer is talking about, and then we're trying to capture those opportunities also.

Thank you. Then next is Michael and after that, Felix.

Michaelin,KB. Two questions on IXS actually. I'm trying to understand the Dragonfly story a little better because you mentioned it also in the last press release, first time, and I understand -- or I'm trying to understand if there's a business model around specifically only Dragonfly. And if that is the case, what is it? And what are the economics? And on the CA20, the -- when I talk about it also to investors, the pushback I'm getting is, is it really ready to allow for 100% testing? Or is the throughput enough to be really in the fab with the CA20 -- or is that not even a need that the industry has? So is sample testing still enough, for example?

Isabella, you want to take that one?

Sure. So first, coming to Dragonfly and how is it ingrained in CA20 or in the semiconductor industry. It drives the inspection workflows. So basically, with our deep learning technology, we can create now easy inspection workflows so that you can measure voids, you can measure TSVs, you know exactly where you are. If you remember the picture that I've shown you, the slide screen, through the AI and Dragonfly, you basically can see in real time where you are.

So this is one of the heart next to also our imaging chain that defines the CA20 and the semiconductor approach. And yes, the Dragonfly software has its heritage, as Andre said before, in the science and research area. So here, we have a stand-alone product, and you can use also Dragonfly 3D WALT alone, and it's not only limited to X-ray. So here, we are seeing also scalability potential. And the number 2 was in-line inspection when it comes to X-ray inspection.

Yes, there is a need for that due to the complexity of the advanced packages. So when we look at the volume inspection, I would say, yes, you are right. Sample inspection is enough at some point. But due to the fact that the products are becoming more complex and you cannot see certain defects anymore without either 2.5D or 3D X-ray, you need to have them in line.

Good. And the next question [indiscernible]

Felix Capital.

Two questions from my side. You anticipate by 2028, CHF 110 million to CHF 150 million additional sales coming new business, so Synertia and CA20. How do you came up with that number?

Based on how is the market -- or not the market, how are the applications evolving, right? So when we speak of, for instance, I'm staying with IXS advanced packaging inspection, that is not a homogenous one application, it's multiple applications because there are many neuralgic points that need inspection to a certain point.

And then that problem is solved and then it moves to the next one. And understanding from interaction with the customers where they are focusing and what problems they need to solve or where they really want to keep their eyes on and what the volume is, partially even together with specialists on the side of the customers, we've done our calculations, estimations and then map that also with the competitive landscape, where are we strong, where our competitors strong, where are there me-too solutions that can do the trick and where do you really have to have a CA20 type of technology. We did our planning and came up with a number for CA20.

And the same thing Yuri and his team have done on the Synertia side, where things may be a little bit more clear as it is already a very much established market that is obviously also growing and evolving fast, but it starts from an established point, whereas the advanced packaging, especially the 3D inspection part is something that is more emerging and also needs here or there some guesswork. But all in all, it is a sound number. And believe me, Christian has been drilling down this number quite extensively, sometimes to the exhaustion of some of the colleagues here on the stage. So we are very confident that these numbers are realizable to the peak of the next cycle.

And another question I had is...

I hope that answers it.

Yes, I hope I mean the investors' expectation have been disappointed on the ramp-up of Synertia on CA20, I would say. I hope you have better luck forecasting this time. But anyway, but the other question is on -- I mean, you mentioned recovery and uncertainty. Nevertheless, if you just look at the wafer equipment spend is estimated to reach a new peak this year, CHF 110 billion. Meanwhile, your sales in the semi sector are off the peak in the very good years. What is your assessment from your perspective? Why is that? While we reach a new peak this year, your sales are below. What is the main reason other than FX?

Yes. That's a very good question. The wafer fab equipment market is a very nonhomogeneous market. So for instance, when you look at lithography, as part of the wafer fab equipment market. So in the years, especially of '23 and '24, ASML had the best years and we're actually supporting the wafer fab equipment market, whereas on the plasma side, and Juri showed the kind of the plasma part of the wafer fab equipment market was terribly down, basically mostly supported just by upgrades and service. So it doesn't move -- the areas don't move in lockstep at all, not even partially. Usually, the investment cycles, there are time shifts or phase shifts in between. And what we see now and we're being worn by our customers is that they're saying, "Hey, now it's your turn. Are you ready?

Good. Next question then, Serge.

I will come back on the question of Felix, and I would like to ask this time Yuri, 3 years ago, you mentioned our accelerator market is a CHF 1.7 billion market and you go for 10% market share. Now we know we are delayed, but you have a much broader product range because you had one single product, now you have numerous products. When I look into research, the market is expected to be clearly above CHF 2 billion by 2030.

So let's assume CHF 2 billion around 2028 your target, if you can agree on that. So in Swiss francs terms, unchanged, CHF 1:1, today, CHF 0.8 to 1. So the market basically unchanged if you compare this. So what kind of market share should we expect that you can achieve then by 2028? So if you still go for 10%, then obviously, it would be CHF 200 million. If you go for 5%, it will be CHF 100 million, which would be aligned with the number from the CFO and gives no success to the X-ray product. Is this correct? I you?

Shall I take it? Yes, you are correct. We are still aiming for the 5% to 10%. We have been a little bit more cautious in our projections because of the slowingness of the adoptions. Hence, why you see a slightly lower number.

So cut the [indiscernible] was telling us. This probably goes to...

Let me shed some light on the number without dissecting it completely. What's in there? In there is CA20, that's one significant portion. And then there's Synertia and Synertia consists of the generator and also consists of the Synertia matches where they are not just a replacement but open up new markets.

So these 3 are the key drivers between what I showed in new business. But I think you are totally right with the question, the approach. And when you put the numbers together, you'pe just confirmed 5% to 10% of the market is what we want. On the other hand, if you remember, you plant the seed today, then you harvest tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. In '28, we will not have full penetration of what we can reach in penetration.

Step by step, you complete the product portfolio and with each completed step, -- you go into the market, you qualify for a tool and then that tool is being sold by our customer to our customers' customer. And because of that, you always have a time shift in there. And we do not have full penetration to our potential in the generators in the year 2028. So that's why I said it's the first step. It's an intermediate step on where we really want to go with CA20 as well as with Synertia.

But I agree. You mentioned you have 15 high-volume orders with -- I don't know the numbers, but was really impressing. So I would say the visibility is much bigger than you tried to explain to us. Otherwise, I didn't cut it.

Maybe there's also a little bit a misunderstanding how this market works in terms of winning market share. So if we speak about a market of CHF 1.7 billion, this is all the tools delivered, right, a year with generators, matches, RF power supplies on. You cannot like this win the market.

Even if you have the best, the cheapest product, whatever. This market uses, I don't know if you ever heard it, something called CopyXact. These systems are like extremely complicated. So existing systems, they are under this rule. No supplier, especially no user like TSMC touches them if there's not a problem because it costs so much money to change something to reconfigure something. So what you can win, what you're going for, especially with new technologies is the new kind of tools introduced every year.

So Ji and his team have won some very important tools, which we will see in the future. So they won the race being qualified on these tools. But these tools will now come into the market, and they will scale step by step. And as I explained also before, they will not immediately replace all the old tools. So this is a little bit how the things are set up.

And as soon as these tools come into the market, there is a like step function where PCT wins market share and then over the years, they scale and they are there for a long time, and this is in the continuous market share you have. And every year, you add additional market share by winning new tools. This is how the system works. And of course, you can see that this depends a lot on how these tools, which we have won now scale in the next years with the new nodes.

And I want to add to what Andre says, there is a distinguish between a new product, which becomes like mainstream normal usage. And sometimes you're lucky, you hit a jackpot and one of those tools is a hyperscaler where suddenly the demand goes exponentially out of the door. The problem is we're in this phase where we know we're on the tools, but you don't know whether they become a mainstream product or they become a hyperscaler. If we have the jackpot with one of them, the number is way too conservative.

Okay. So let's go for the jackpot.

Yes. So Serge, I see you're not totally satisfied, but I'm sure we can talk about that during the upper.

We have a question here in front.

I have 2 questions. Can you profit as well from the investments in the military defense business I heard once that maybe with your business, with the X-ray business, you could profit. And the second question is, how much does the U.S. tariffs hurt Comet? And how do you want to avoid it?

Let me take the first one, and then you can talk about tariffs. And by the way, has anyone followed up on the news as something happened in Washington today? No. Okay. So defense. We have some of the X-ray business, particularly on the side of IXM, and I invite you to talk to Michael Berger, who's hiding some -- he's standing back there. He can shed some details on it. Yes, also on the side of defense, be it for ammunition or for vehicles from fighter jets to tanks, there is nondestructive testing happening.

And we have customers who cater to that business. And essentially, Michael has seen over the past 2 years, definitely an increase in demand, an increase also in revenue in his business catering to that part of, let's say, the global economy. It is not significant. but definitely something that for Michael's business, for IXM is, I would say, not super important, but noticeable for the Comet Group overall. It is a side business. It could increase.

It has increased, could increase. It's -- I don't want to earn money on that stuff to be very, very, very direct. It happens so that we do.

But Michael can give you a detailed download of where we are participating. So if Rheinmetall has order books that are basically just exploding, then typically, they require also nondestructive testing provided, among other things, by X-ray systems that typically do not come from IXS. That is not something that IXS is or has been involved in over the past 10, 15 years.

Maybe that answers it, but there he is ready and prepared to give you a download on tariffs.

Let's look at tariffs. How do tariffs affect us and let's, for the time being, look at U.S. tariffs. It's very different for the different divisions. For PCT, there's hardly any effect. Why that? Because most of our customers import themselves. Many of our customers, also U.S. customers don't even ask us to bring this stuff into the U.S.

So that is for us an administrative issue. We have to deal with it together with the customers so that in the end, these will be hardly effective anywhere. When it comes to IXM, we have a significant business with the U.S., a significant share of the company's business is there, and we produce in Switzerland. And it's not a production you can easily double somewhere because it's high CapEx and high know-how. So that is something where we are hurt with tariffs, but that is a 1-digit amount. And there is a couple of ways how to temper the effect of the tariffs. And there is ways like partially assembly over there. If it is really hard, there are some rather administrative ways how to do that. But that's the 2 structural ways how to approach it. It is not a major topic for us.

The key is rather the uncertainty the whole tariff issue has brought to the industry. One more fact, which is important, when you look at the setup of Comet, for what we do, we have one of the best setups and global footprints you can possibly have. We are a Swiss company. And we have production facilities in the U.S. if we need to, in Malaysia as a major hub for the future, in Germany and in China. And by that, no matter how the world turns, I think to have a better flexibility than us, it's difficult. I'm very, very happy with the setup we have. So that gives us options.

Good. And thank you for your question. And we have one from Sebastian, please.

Sebastian Global UBS. I got also 2 questions. The first one is with regarding to the Synertia. You mentioned on this slide the high-volume orders. In that regard, 2 clarification, if possible, a, what means a high-value order in that sense, what means high for you? And the second thing in that regard is how quickly is such an order turning into sales? Does it have a translation time of like 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, someone or beyond that number? The second question is going to the CEO. In the beginning, you mentioned about the outlook that it could be a bit sluggish for the next couple of quarters before you see then a bit of a stronger ramp-up. Was that mainly related to semi? Or was that a broader perception for all the business in aggregate? If you could shed light on these 2 points, that would be appreciated.

So high-volume orders means in reality that we're qualified by the end customer that we have officially been audited by the suppliers that we are a high-volume ready site. And that means that we have worked with our customers on the forecast for next year, and we're locking in orders, and POs for those volumes for next year. We're mainly working on forecast for the moment. In regards of delivery time, we are well set up for the moment with our suppliers and with our supply chain. So we expect to be able to deliver the first units actually starting the first quarter of next year.

And to the question about the sluggishness or the slow temperate situation for the next couple of quarters. It is to a certain extent in the semi, but then definitely also very strongly in some of the non-semi markets that we're serving, be it automotive with the exception of batteries where we expect next year that the gut that has accumulated over the past 2 years will be resolved and lead over to, for us, a better investment climate. Aerospace will continue to be on the positive side, but both automotive and aerospace become less important for the group, still rather important for IXM and to a certain extent also for IXS.

So my comment was mostly mainly on semiconductors as pretty much my entire overview was completely captured by semiconductors as this is really where we want to focus.

Does that ...

Good. Then we have another question here in front.

Wong from BMO. My first question is, you mentioned that currently, you have for inertia, 15 high-volume manufacturing orders and for CA20 5 orders. What sort of level of orders do we need to get to for you to hit your target for 2028?

It needs to be clearly higher, but we would not like to disclose any sales prices, related sales prices numbers or there. I think as the colleagues pointed out earlier, what we do and what we have modeled very diligently is let's look at the different applications. Let's look at where we are qualified and where we are going to qualification and let's look at how the buildup of these go step by step. And that is exactly the path we need to be on and we are on in order to reach our 2028 targets.

And my other question is I just wanted to drill down on the upgrades again. I was wondering, it seems like so far, you're not benefiting too much from the NAND upgrades, whereas some of your competitors like MKS in the U.S. are. So I was wondering if you can give a bit more detail on why is it that certain other components may be getting upgraded more? Is it a software thing? What is it just because one of your largest customers, Lam Research, was quite vocal that they're seeing a lot of business from that.

So talking about upgrades, Yuri shown some light on it. We profited it back in '22 and partially also in '23, but upgrades, that's a large bag of options. An upgrade and especially now also talking about MKS, look at the portfolio of instrumentation they have from vacant gauges to also plasma processing equipment.

Many, many things can be upgraded. You mentioned also software. It doesn't always mean that matchboxes or generators are part of the upgrade package. It really depends on what are they doing? Are they changing materials? Are they just changing the capacity? Are they upgrading the handling? There are many, many things that can end up in an upgrade package, and it doesn't always mean that the plasma part is connected to the upgrade. So yes, it's kind of difficult to quantify, but I hope it gives a little color to your question.

Thank you for the question. I see there are no urgent questions in the room. So -- but probably Fabio, operator, there are questions in the -- from the webcast. No, if that's not the case, then there is a last chance to ask a question.

Okay, I see 2 hands. So then Christian Brown first and then Nate with a follow-up.

Christian Brown,[indiscernible].

I have a question on resilience. It's been a bit of a problem in the past. Now the word has popped up quite a few times, which means it's being addressed. However, I haven't fully understood how you want to improve it. Can you elaborate a bit on it?

So resilience is also kind of an umbrella word for many things, right? Resilience can be, the margin especially.

Yes. So resilience comes in many different shades of grain. Right now, resilience in terms of being able to respond, for instance, on pressures pertaining to tariffs is to have a widespread geographic footprint, right? We can transfer things from A to B in order to lessen the impact of, for instance, tariffs. Well, at the same time, a widespread geographical footprint is also a burden, especially a burden when markets are down because you have to carry the fixed costs.

So right now, resilience for us means that we can carry that geographical footprint, but especially also now with Penang coming online next year, building in that new geographical footprint, a resilience also on the profitability side by shifting more and more activities from high-cost countries to this best cost manufacturing side, just as a part of resilience, the resilience package. Christian also mentioned a couple of things in terms of improving our resilience and maybe you want to add to that point.

I think there's -- I'll expand a little bit on what you just said in Penang. If you lower your cost base, you automatically increase the stability of the EBITDA margin. So that's one very key point. Second key point is when we look into what Stefan mentioned before, the ramp up and the ramp down, there's, for example, inventory mechanisms where we need to be much faster than we've been a couple of years ago. We've been working on that.

We are introducing that. So that is different type of measures to be more resilient. Number one is really the cost base. Number two is processes in the up and down. And number three is, and that's something which we have and will retain, you need to have the right financial structure and balance sheet structure that you as a company can still take your free decisions and you're not driven by banks. And as our business can be lumpy sometimes because the market is and the market is the market, it's the customer, that is something we have and we will continue to have.

Christian Nate, a follow-up.

Maybe a follow-up on the solid state and mattress technology. I mean, when you read LEM Research transcripts, clearly, they're saying they're winning design wins in NAND. Now they're going to DRAM. The one advantage you suggested was speed. But clearly, for them, it seems to be a crucial technology going forward. So why is your perspective so different to what LEM Research is saying? Maybe that would be my first.

So it is not. And I may be this sounded somehow how defensive in terms of speed. We are looking at speed. This is what Synergia can do extremely well. What I wanted to show you is that just form a part of physics, having a big advantage on one side, like speed, maybe a disadvantage of the other. And at the end, there is not one application. And there is different requirements for different applications. So you need to build the right solution for the right problem.

Some new applications, especially, they're very sensitive to speed. Maybe that's the most important point. There are others which are extremely sensitive to like some kind of stabilities, the things you have to measure, repeatability and so on. And there's no magic to get it all in one package. And we are looking at all of these solutions. I mean we have technologies for all these solutions. You could scan our patents and you will see we have developed a specific material combination where we can do super fast matching without vacuum caps.

So we have these technologies in-house. But then we sit down with the customer and we solve a customer-specific problem also with LEM. And these tools, I know which you are mentioning, where you speak about direct drive and the other thing they call Tempo and SNAP. And I can tell you, especially with the direct drive, Comet is involved. I cannot say more. I can -- and as I said, some things are also advertisement, but we are involved with all these critical steps, solutions, new technologies. At the end of the day, we have to solve the most and high-value problems. And that's what we are doing with our solutions. And that's what I also wanted to show you that there are other options we are looking at, which are maybe even better, which can -- which are not just fast, but fast and precise at the same moment.

I maybe want to add a little bit to what Andre says. If you talk about specific customers and specific applications which you're referring to, those are also high power. If you look at the literature of solid-state technology, then you would find easily that there is a disconnect and a mismatch between -- so they are working on alternative technologies, and it's not that what you're referring to.

Okay. And maybe as a follow-up, quite some of the CapEx or, let's say, the big fabs, they're now in the U.S. or do you have some -- I mean, how do you see your competitive advantage when it comes to partially shift in CapEx going there because you moved part of your production. Is that a risk? I mean, do you have to renegotiate with your clients or do against on the spec win side? Or is that really out of question?

So I don't know if everybody knows the PCT global footprint, but one of our biggest offices and key account structure together with application engineers, together with some form of engineering and NPI limited low-volume manufacturing is actually close to our customers in the U.S. We're actually working on a day-to-day basis with them. So with the volumes of equipment going to the U.S., we're actually ideally positioned in the heart of San Jose actually next door to work and continue to work with them.

They're part of the ecosystem since many years, and that hasn't changed. We've moved high volume because their high-volume manufacturing is also no longer in the U.S. to Penang, which is again close to the end customers' manufacturing. So we're actually, like Christian said, really well positioned with our global footprint, independent of where the markets go for the moment.

And if we were to need to do any manufacturing or relocate it to the U.S., for us, it is a very easy exercise, very easy exercise and very fast exercise.

Good. Thank you very much for your interesting question. I'm sure there are a lot more questions you have over the next few days, weeks, months. You have our address from the IR department, just call there or send an e-mail. Thank you very much for being here or following us through the webcast. The people in the room obviously have now the opportunity to continue the dialogue with management during the upper that will be served in a few minutes. Thank you very much for joining us, and have a good rest of the day.