Interroll Holding Aktie

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to the SIX Convention Point here to our Interroll Media & and Analyst Conference 2025.

For us, it's a huge pleasure and an honor to have you here this morning. Also, I want to extend a warm welcome to the ones that are listening to this media conference online.

So ladies and gentlemen, for the next while, we will introduce to you the following content. First of all, I will introduce to you how we have restructured, reshaped and refocused the company on markets and growth. We will then talk, Heinz Hossli, our CFO, will introduce to you what has this led to? What are the results, the first tangible results that we could generate. We'll then do a deep dive on sales through our CSO, Maurizio Catino, on technology through our -- through Ulrich Engenhardt, our CTO, me on operations side, and we will then conclude with how we see our achievements, but also a first glimpse on the outlook for the year 2026.

So let's go into a little bit more detail. And for us, what's very important that we want to start from a bigger picture and then more deep dive into our own markets and into our own capabilities. What you see on the macroeconomic time, and we also talked outside here, it is a difficult situation. It's an uncertain situation. We see messages like de-globalization, and we have also experienced that in our own market. And for you, I think 2 messages are very important. First, we, as Interroll, as a business, we are almost not affected. Why? Because we have an international global supply operations and operations footprint with about 16 factories. So we can compensate those changes very well.

On the other side, our customers are affected. And that's what we have seen. That's what we have seen that especially on bigger projects and mainly in Europe, customers are very hesitant in awarding those project because they really don't know how things are developing. If we then dig deeper in our own industry, in our own market, we would say that material handling market is continues to be a dynamic market, a market that is open for innovation, a market that is required because of automation needs in order to compensate some lack of people, it's an open market.

If we then look a little bit more into detail of that market, we see e-commerce rather showing momentum of growth. We see airports being strong. On the other side, we see some on the industrial landscape, especially automotive being rather weak and continue to be weak. All in all, our customers are very open for good innovation. Our own business -- and remember, a year ago, when we were asked at this point, what do you expect for this year? We said at that time, it's probably very difficult to change the sales side already because our order backlog was slow. But if we do our job well, we should see a reverse of trend in order decline. And we should stabilize that or even show some growth. And what we have seen 5% growth we have reported to you in local currency, 9.2% and especially a strong development in the second half.

Maybe a couple of own spotlights before we then go more into detail. We have seen a reverse of trend in China. We have had 2-digit growth now in China after some declines over some years. And Global Lifetime Service have increased its share and will further increase its share because that's a very important business, how we maintain customer relationship. But this was only possible because we restructured and refocused and reprioritized some of our companies and some of our company's footprint in the market.

So before we go into more of these details, I would like to again get some clarity on market. What is the market we work in? What is the market we play? And how do we understand today the market? And there are some of the statistics that you can read, so they are very common knowledge. All in all, for example, Fortune Business talks about material handling market of about $278 billion in 2026.

If we then dig more into details, and we look at the warehouse automation and internal logistics for manufacturing market, Interact Analysis shows here a market of about $36 billion.

If we now go even further into detail and say, what is the addressable market for Interroll for where do we work? Where do we play? We see for 2026, the market of about $8 billion plus, and with a market that is growing and a market where we are shooting for a market share of about 8% plus. That's mainly the areas where we work on.

And ladies and gentlemen, now to say that's the area where we work, where we play. What is our value proposition to the market? And we also wanted to be simple, clear in how we position ourselves in the market. And what's very important intralogistics by their very nature are complex installations. Our value proposition, our brand value, our promise to the market is we reduce complexity for our customers by offering modular and platform-based hardware that means products, software and controls. And through this, we basically serve with our main brand promise: quality, speed, simplicity. And those products are not just individually produced products, but as they belong always to platforms. The system is a proven system. That's mainly how we position ourselves in this market. That's what -- that's our value. That's where we gain momentum.

Being asked a year ago at this point, what do you see this year? Year 2025, I reported at that time, it will be a year of transition, but we should see the first results. We can report to you, it was a year of transition, and we saw and we see the first tangible results. And what -- and before we now -- before Heinz Hossli goes with you in what is the results generated, I would like to briefly share with you what was necessary to make that happen. And we looked at the company on the 3 major areas: strategy, structure organization and culture.

And let's first look at the strategy side. And we basically moved into 3 waves. First of all, strengthen what we know we are good at. What is our value proposition around quality, speed, simplicity? And second, then how to leverage our potential in the market, our customer relationship. And thirdly, what is necessary to lay the foundation, to see substantial growth to come. And I will -- in the next slide, I will show you a little bit more detail what we mean, what was happening behind that.

On the structure side, we needed to restructure the organization, the company in order to make happen what we have decided on this strategy. And culture, and we cannot underestimate the value of culture in the company. It's the foundation. It's the way how we act, how we behave, how we interact, how we lead, and that's why we also have focused some of our efforts on the culture in order to build the foundation and to further develop the foundation.

So let's a little bit go into the strategy and say what is the 3 main areas: strengthening the core, leveraging marketing potential, and laying the foundation for sustainable growth, what is behind there.

On strengthening the core, we looked at the way how we quote, especially on project in order to improve speed, and order improved hit rate. And that's some of the results that we also generated on increased project business. We improved product quality where necessary in order to fulfill our promise quality, speed, simplicity. And we have driven -- on the operations side, the efficiency programs and some of you saw on the gross margin, and also, we have streamlined customer interaction. What I mean is that, the way how we manage project, how we interact with customers, how we execute, that's areas where we are focused on strengthening the core.

On the next step, necessary to leverage what we have. Basically, we use our market access, our market capabilities, and we further strengthened that with clear focus on key account management and vertical market management to grow together with our customers, to help our customers to grow their business and to serve our customers better and some of the results we already see in our figures.

And the second part on leveraging market potential is we have differentiated our approach depending on the structure and the readiness of the market. So highly developed markets are more measured by sales and key account management, while a developing market needed to be -- needed to have development structures. I will show you in the next slide what I mean with that.

Laid foundation, that's the third point. Maybe just a few glimpses Ulrich Engenhardt will talk a little bit more about that. We have established the first development hub in China. The first -- it's fully running. The first 3 projects are running, a Chinese engineering and development speed with a time to market, which is about half of typical time to markets that we know, but that we very well known in China are today a standard on high-speed development. We have also reversed our perspective on innovation.

So we look today at innovation that generates value for our customers in their value chain, so beyond a product. So we combine products and software, hardware and software. And thirdly, we have closed some of our product gaps through the first acquisition of Sortteq, and you have -- and we have been communicated that. And already, we see a good positioning of those products -- of this product in the market.

So what I mean with structure, we have adopted the structure. When you look at today at Asia Pacific, it's China. And there's a high focus on China, both on the domestic market, serving those customers that not only for the domestic market but also for their market then abroad as they export. But also when you look at Southeast Asia, it requires market developments, skills and capabilities, and we have established those.

The same you see in the Americas, United States as the biggest single market focus on sales structure, but at the same time, on Central and Latin America focus on market development capabilities. So we have established those structures. Just to give you a glimpse how we see today market and market development and market approaches.

Lastly, the culture side. Culture is very essential to us. And in a time where we have more autonomy in the region in order to serve market needs, global collaboration is crucial. In a time where knowledge is not so important anymore because it's commonly available, execution excellence is essential. And at a time where transitions happen, accountability is very dear and very important to us. This only happens through people, through development of people as we're helping to fostering people and to helping people grow into their roles and into their responsibilities.

Let me quickly summarize a couple of just glimpses of the substantial work that has been done, some of the results that have been generated. We have put in, for example, positioning ourselves in the battery market. What we mean with that. We have developed the capability to adapt fast to a growing vertical that we didn't serve in the past. We have developed a solution. We have won the first orders, and we are now serving the market, which is mainly driven by China.

When you look at the next one and the e-commerce side, with the acquisition of the Sortteq product, we have an additional solution into a growing market on the e-commerce side. And we are already in listing discussion with some of the important players on this product. But also with cooperating and partnering with IMA E-COMMERCE, we have managed that our products are in their solutions standard.

On airports, with the expansion of our strategic partnership with Smiths Detection. We have secured this business and can further develop the airport business. What we want to show you on the bottom left, MCP Play and the subsequential win of the IFOY Award shows our focus on value chain innovation. So we drive innovation, productivity, efficiency into our customers' processes.

What we mean with showing you the Rolling on Interroll industry event is we are building partners and capabilities into verticals, into markets that we did not serve too well in the past. And we are building and Maurizio Catino, will talk to you about that. We are building our capabilities to develop this more into an ecosystem into a partner network. And with the setup -- and Uli Engenhardt will talk about with the setup of the R&D Hub in China.

We are not only adapting to market needs in China, but we are also leveraging today's ecosystems that are built in China on fast and precise innovation, needing for market development and needing to serve the markets and to grow with a dynamic market that is happening also in our industry.

With this short summary on our priorities, on our structure, on our strategy and our culture, I will then like to hand over to Heinz Hossli, who will now go with you to what did this end up? So what are the results of the work that has been generated?

Thank you very much, Markus. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Also a warm welcome from my side. It's a pleasure to present you the financials of '25.

I start with the order intake as usual. Order intake, CHF 545.3 million, a plus of 5% in Swiss franc. Also, the year of '25 had a very strong FX effect on us and the growth in local currency of 9.2%, which basically came in the second half of the year is encouraging and also looking positively into '26.

What I'd like to highlight here is that this is not coming from one big project. It is broad-based. It's basically from the 3 regions, less APAC, but all 3 regions have contributed to this. It's in the area of Conveyors & Sorters, where the project business rebounded, a lot is related to the e-commerce sector. The same sector where we suffered in the past the order intake and in conclusion, also the reduction in sales.

So on the order intake, clearly, we see a rebound. We mentioned this last year that it's probably too early to have a rebound in sales. One year later, I think I'm pretty confident to say, we will see the rebound in sales in '26. We have now the precondition of a strong sales growth, strong growth in order intake in the second half year of '25, and this will provide the base for a revenue increase in '26.

When we look into the 4 product groups, the product really did well. Rollers, plus 6.8% in Swiss francs did very well. Drives is a minus 1.9% in Swiss francs. Drives has 2 effects in '24. We got a very big single order in the U.S., about USD 6 million, which we knew will not repeat in '25, but also this in local currency is good growth. When we come to Pallet Handling, this clearly is the area where we did not -- we suffered. We did not perform good, and it's also the smallest segment.

What is also good news is the book-to-bill ratio. After 3 years of having a book-to-bill ratio below 1, we now have with 1.06, a positive 1, which clearly means also that we have a stronger backlog starting into '26. And this is really important. This is the base for the future.

Now I come to the sales. Sales by region. Here, the picture is very diverse. EMEA grew in Swiss franc 1.4%. Americas lost 9.8%. And Asia Pacific decreased 3.5%. If you just look at the pure number in Swiss, you could say Americas has a big issue. The FX effect clearly was much higher in the U.S. and in APAC than it was in EMEA.

So when I talk about the FX effect, the overall, you will see later, this is a mix. And the mix is also considering the heavy weight of the EMEA, but clearly, the big, big impact has been in the U.S. dollar, and you can see this also from the exchange rate, how it went down. And considering this as well as that we had a very low backlog, which also the U.S. suffered the most with a very low backlog starting into '25 and then the project orders came too late to turn them in the same year into sales. So also a big portion of the increase in the backlog is in the Americas. This also affected the share.

Now you can see the share with 62% EMEA, even 3 percentage points higher than last year. Americas lost 3% and APAC is stable at 11%. The long-term target, what we always say, of 50% should come from EMEA and the other 50% should come from the other 2 regions remains in effect. And we are deeply convinced that Americas, but especially APAC region has big potential for overproportional growth, and we need overproportional growth to change this picture.

We clearly assume that all 3 regions will grow, but over proportional growth should come from the other 2 regions so that we should go towards this 50-50 split.

On this slide, you see the 6 -- last 6 years. And you see the FX effect on the sales. It is, besides '21, it's considered quite a bit. And this is a compounding effect. And this you see now on this slide. I've shown this slide in a different form also last year, but the compounding effect is really big. It's now almost CHF 110 million sales from '19 to '25. The lines -- the form of shapes is exactly the same. It went up. It went down, but the delta is getting bigger and bigger, and this is coming from the compounding effect of the negative FX difference. And you see the yellow line, which is the nominal figures we publish. And you see the gray line with constant exchange rates from 2019. So it has a big impact. And if you consider that we are now CHF 514 million in sales, CHF 100 million or almost CHF 110 million is huge.

Now I come to the profitability. I'll start with the EBITDA, down 6.3% to CHF 94.1 million or in percentage of sales as EBITDA margin, 18.3%, down from 19.1%. This is mainly driven by the reduction on the sales, but it would be much more if we did not have tailwind from the product mix. So we sold more products, less projects, which gave clearly tailwind. We had announced this already at the half year webcast that we have spent more in R&D and in marketing. This is an investment for the future. And besides that, we still had a very strong cost discipline, which we upheld during the year. Only with this, the 14.0% EBIT is possible.

If we look at the EBIT reduction, 7.8% to CHF 71.8 million, but the margin reduced from 14.8% to 14.0%. This was only possible to the 3 actions I mentioned before. We already said at the webcast end of July last year, that we will increase the spending in R&D and marketing. This is necessary. We need to go for it because it is an investment into the future. We continue this and we in my view, we delivered quite a good EBIT considering all circumstances.

Also the circumstances, what Markus has already mentioned, that we are really in a challenging world. We have a lot of chaos, political issues to tackle. We have President in the United States with changes opinion from day-to-day, which causes a lot of unsecurity, uncertainty and uncertainty is never a driver for big projects, and to release big investments.

The depreciation and amortization is stable, will also be stable going forward. There is not a big change to be expected.

Then I come to the results. The results suffered 10.5% below last year. The reason is quite simple. Last year, we had a positive finance result. This year in '25, we had a negative one. Interest income has been lower due to the interest rates going down. But on the other hand, we had quite significant foreign exchange loss and the delta, the difference from '24 to '25 is CHF 3.2 million adjusting the finance result, which is quite considerably if you look at the total profitability.

On the other side, we had a tax rate of 21.9%, which was lower than in previous years, and it is also lower than the average going forward what we expect. So we said, in average, the group is around 22.5% tax rate. The net result is a margin of 10.9%, exactly 1% point below last year. Overall, I repeated I think it was quite okay year if we consider the external circumstances and then also the transition Markus, as he was talking about and that we had invested clearly into the future, which is visible in the costs with the 14.0% with the decline in sales, we can be not happy, but we can be satisfied. It could have been much worse.

Now I come to the cash flow. The operating cash flow has decreased 41.2% to CHF 54.1 million. The reason is net working capital. The biggest 2 positions is inventories and trade receivable. For you, this is known, but for the general audience, this is difficult to understand that you have huge swings in cash flow, because in '24, the decrease in inventories of CHF 11.5 million and the decrease in accounts receivable of CHF 16.8 million boosted the cash flow. This year, we have CHF 3.8 million more inventories, and we have CHF 10.3 million more accounts receivable. So this decreases the cash flow. And this is not -- you cannot compensate. So this is just as it is, as it works.

The -- especially the trade receivables, this is because we invoiced quite a lot towards the end of Q4. This is just a snapshot end of the year. This has already been changed drastically in January when we got the payments.

The inventory is also with WIP considered. It's not only raw material, but we had slightly higher WIP which is actually okay, also considering that the business on the order intake side has rebounded, we will have more net working capital when we start to grow again and invoice more.

On the free cash flow side, CHF 40.3 million, minus 47.9%. This is just the effect of what goes down. The actual investments with CHF 17.5 million has been lower than in the previous year, and mainly the investments have gone into modernization of manufacturing units, into new machines with higher efficiencies and some very small part into IT.

When we look at this now, considering the reduction in sales, the profitability, which has been lower, the operating and the free cash flow, in my view, is still quite good. It's very strong. So we have now quite a weak year, if you look at the last 5 years, and we still generate a free cash flow of CHF 40.3 million.

Now this slide we show for the first time. I know that this will cause more questions than answers. Fully aware of this. But I think we show it and we clearly want to show it how this has developed over the last 5 years. On the left side, you see the cash and cash equivalents. To mention that the financial liabilities we have in the balance sheet, they are just capitalized lease under IFRS. So we have no bank debt. This is the cash situation, what you see on the left side. How it's developed from '21 to '25.

And on the right-hand side, you see the equity and you see the equity ratio. How this has developed over the same 5 years. We have now ended the year '25 with an equity ratio of 82.0%. So very strong cash and equity position in the balance sheet.

Now I'll come to the other 2 value creation KPIs, return on equity, 11.6%, return on net asset, 18.7%. Both KPIs clearly below last year. Return on equity, more driven by the very high equity in the balance sheet. Return on net assets clearly because of the reduction in sales and the underutilization of the assets we have. We have assets to go almost to CHF 1 billion. For the CHF 1 billion, we will invest into machines, but the manufacturing footprint, if the mix is not changing a lot, we are ready for a very big upward trend on sales. And these assets are clearly underutilized with CHF 514.2 million sales. So this picture will change when the sales are going up again.

Now to the dividend. The Board of Directors has proposed or approved the proposal to bring it to the AGM to keep the dividend stable at CHF 32 per share. This is an increase in the payout ratio. It goes from 43.7% now to 48.8%. And this is also in line to what we said now for quite some time that we want to move from the earlier 1/3 payout to 50% payout as other peers we look at are also on the 50%. And the cash situation clearly allows to make this dividend payment.

This shows the dividend development over the last 20 years from 2005 to 2025, starting with CHF 6 to the CHF 32. And you see the plateau of the CHF 32 from '23 to '25. And with the higher sales expected in '26, and the payout ratio going towards the 50% the dividend should also in '26 go then slightly up. What is remarkable is that there was only one dividend reduction, and this was for the year 2008 due to the financial crisis. Otherwise, the dividend has always been increased or remained stable.

For the sustainability report, not many words. Like last year, we just published this later. We do not publish the sustainability report at the same time. Publication will be on May 22. Some words on the EcoVadis assessment. We showed this also last year. The good news is the 20 companies, which participate, they all got again medal award. Overall, we even outperformed the last year. We have now 7 with the platinum, 9 with the gold, versus 7 last year, 3 with the silver versus 7 last year. And then we have 1 with a bronze, which had a silver last year, and this is the group. For the group, it's very difficult to get into a higher rank even though the individual legal entities, which participate have an average or they have all higher ranking, but it's difficult to bring the group up. But overall, I think this is an excellent achievement.

We have now participated with this assessments over many years, and we were able to improve year-over-year, which is not a given because it's not that you approve, you approve against the average. If you remain stable, you will decline because the average of all the participants at the EcoVadis assessments, they will improve. So remaining stable means you decline, and we could really improve. So we did not only improve against ourselves, but we improved against the mass of companies which participates at the EcoVadis assessment. So this is a great achievement.

Now I come to the end of my presentation. I just would like to highlight that we have more content on the Investor Relations web page. We have also the presentation you see here as a download since this morning ready on the web page. Also the annual report, you can download on the web page. We will also release a video from the CEO around noon. It's not yet released, but this will be released around noon, and you have additional information like chart generator and or the data where you can have a look at.

With this, I would hand over to Maurizio Catino, and he will talk about markets and customers. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Heinz. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I will give you a brief overview on our 2025 from a sales perspective, what we see in the market and in the different accounts.

So we have invested during 2025, a lot of efforts into transforming our sales organization. This was due to the fact that we are experiencing the material handling environment, different approach from 2 main sites. One is from our customers, the system integrators and the other one is from the end user side, so the final user of our products.

What's going on is clear, there is a lot of consolidation going on in the market. So especially some group and system integration started to merge and acquire other companies. And the fragmented scenario that we have seen and experienced in the past is dramatically changing. And these customers are now asking us to be more present in the location and in the countries where they are active. So most globally.

On the other side, the end user was approaching integrators in the past with, let's say, a neutral position. They were not so much interested into the details of what they were buying. But basically, they were interested in the outcome, the final, I mean, outcome of the automation. Now especially the big end user, the global groups are starting to be more and more interested in the details. And obviously, they want and they pretend companies like Interroll to be directly connected with them and discuss directly with them the solution they are implementing. Therefore, our decentralized organization, which was very, I mean, successful in the past required some fine tunes, and we have implemented this during 2025, as I said.

So what we have done. On a local level, we have now splitted the sales team into 3 pillars: the product, the solution and the service. Physically having different people let's say, taking care of these 3 pillars. This provides much more focus, of course, but also this increased our competencies into the people into the sales that they are now more able to discuss at the probable level with accounts, and obviously increase the accountability. So giving them strong -- I mean, and a narrow focus on their product range creates much stronger, I would say, knowledge into their area.

On top of this, we have added, let's say, a solution management team. This is for the system integrators to take care of their needs. So they're asking us to, I mean, keep our promise to be the supplier of choice in material handling equipment. And this is exactly the case, but they want us to be present at least at a regional level. So not acting just in one country, but spread into the region. So this team is obviously a functional team. It's not located in a single country, but can act at a regional level.

On top of this, to taking care of these big accounts now, we have, let's say, developed this strategic team. The strategic team is acting globally. So we have people now assigned to this global account, and in parallel on some verticals, the verticals you well know where we are basically present. And this creates, let's say, 2 advantages. One is, of course, that we can coordinate the, let's say, global business in a much better way. But on the other side, I mean, now having new CTO in place. This gives us the possibility of being closer to the final needs of the end customers.

So the problems are there -- and I mean, having always a system integrator in between, not having a direct contact in some cases, let's say, does not help us to really understand what kind of products the end users need. So this is also a very strong outcome that we see.

So we said we have different scenario. Of course, we have these verticals, and end user one side, system integrator acting globally. But I mean, what we can leverage, what is our real value into this new scenario in the material handling equipment. But this is pretty clear and whole big end users and big system integrators knows this. It's our global presence. So Interroll is everywhere. Interroll is able to produce, to sell, to support our customers in all the regions of the world. We have 16, I mean, production plants in the globe. And this is a tremendous asset that cannot be easily copied by our competitors. I mean consider if a system integrator wants to expand their operation in a different region. Of course, their manufacturing capability cannot be the same as the one they have in the location, but they are historically present.

And then they ask us to support them in the region where they are not having this capability, things now actually, I mean, global situation with tariffs. I mean this is a great advantage that we are producing and manufacturing locally. So in this way, we are strengthening our ecosystem of products, of solutions but also the service. I mean, service is becoming more and more important. Obviously, finding the proper and the right service technician around the globe is not an easy task also for our customers. And I mean our global presence is, in this sense, a very big asset because we can provide direct service with our people globally, but also we can use the ROI partners that can support us also in a very remote location of the globe. And the ROI is the last point, where we want to also, I mean, implement into the program, a different approach.

I can show it here. So first of all, you know that the value proposition for us is still there. So for us, ROI partners are one of the core of our strategy in sales. And therefore, we have decided to invest more into that. We want to expand the program. Already in 2025, we are present in 50 different countries around the globe, and we have increased the number of partner 14 and more to come in 2026. This serves to us also as a early adopter of new technology. Last year, we have presented the MCP Play at LogiMAT. And the first, I mean, sales of this new technology went through an ROI partner.

Last point. This is pretty new in the program. We are asking -- we have been asked by our customers to act as a one-stop shop globally. So therefore, taking the responsibility on technology, which we are not manufactured by ourselves, but some of our partners are doing. Therefore, we have now introduced, and we will trading this in 2026, a technological partnership program into the ROI.

What does it mean? We will basically make some agreements with third-party companies, which are complementing our solution portfolio. This will be obviously branded as Interroll and will be, I mean, sold to our customers together with our solution. So giving to our customers a single point of conduct globally. This is what they need.

So just to conclude my presentation, I want to show you some facts about this new strategy. I showed you this graph already last year. I'm a strong believer that sales is always a consequence, but the pillar of sales is the number of customers that the company is able to develop. And therefore, the number of customers is the basic KPIs for understanding whether we are doing the right things and the things are going in the right direction.

You can see further on, we have increased our customer base in both product and solution business. And as a consequence that you have seen in our order intake in 2025, the growth is coming also linearly up with this increase of customers. So we will keep working hard on this and obviously, increasing our customer base because, obviously, when you have a bigger customer base and the market is rebounding, you are taking advantage of both area, more accounts, but more sales per account in average. This is obviously granting our future growth.

So that's it from my side. I pass to Uli, our new CTO. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today and share how we're shaping Interroll's innovation and technology agenda now and for the future.

In order to deliver on our promise, to drive customers' efficiency and simplify their operations, we will focus on 3 areas. Those are stronger customer focus, value chain innovation and global capabilities. And these are not abstract concepts. We already translated them beginning in 2025 into concrete actions, which we follow through in the time to come.

So let me take you through them. First, stronger customer focus, mainly means appreciating that we're serving different verticals globally and that the speed of change is increasing. Thus, we need to be close to the market, close to the customer, listen carefully in order to derive the right conclusions for our modular system, because we still want scalability in our solutions. And that's, for example, why we built up regional teams in product management, why we granted them greater authority and why we're also then looking into our portfolio mix, what is needed in which region of the market of the world and in which markets.

Secondly, value-chain innovation. We are doing world-class components, and we will stick to our approach because quality is of essence and this is one of our brand promises. But value-chain innovation means to have a more holistic view on what solutions we do provide. And it's looking at the process of the customer and where we can by interacting with software, hardware and controls provides step innovation, because this innovation jumps nowadays do not come from component getting incrementally better. It comes from the interfaces and between software, hardware and controls. That's why we focused our approach.

We opened basically our scope in order to find out what serves customer and customer values. We set up this R&D Hub in China, not only for increased speed and greater market access and solutions there but also to provide us with different perspectives that we probably being a Swiss company might not have just in Switzerland or in Europe. So opening up the scope and then deriving the right solutions for our integrated ecosystem based on modularity so that we can scale is key.

Now what does that mean? We talked about MCP Play already in the course of our presentation. And MCP Play is the perfect example where we combine our engineering expertise for hardware but also on software and controls. And we came out with it in the LogiMAT 2025 with the promise that this will improve, for example, commissioning.

Now the question is, have we delivered on that? And I'm very happy to report this is the last installation, for example, we did 2 weeks ago in Barcelona. And we not only increased the throughput by 40% with this customer, but also made commissioning come down from 2 weeks to 2 days. That's step innovation. And that's what we want to achieve even more so in the future. So it's on us. It's pretty clear what we can achieve, but we need to be very consistent and very precise and having a close ear to the customer in order to come up with those solutions.

Lastly, global capabilities is of essence nowadays. I talked about the speed of change. I talked about in changing environment. So we need to be up to speed on that. What has made us successful in the past needs to be complemented with new capabilities. And those new capabilities on a global scale and on a global level, so we are hiring talent where talent is. And we also strengthened our platform and the platform management by granting them more entrepreneurial freedom, but still governing not in order to having too much complexity.

So we are on our way. And let me please conclude with a personal remark. Tomorrow, marks the 50th working day of me at Interroll. And I expected a strong company, especially on the engineering area, CTO. I'm happy to report that it was exceeded. So we have deep technical expertise. We have great commitment, and we will drive innovation. That's why I'm generally optimistic about our future. Thank you.

Thank you, colleagues, for the overview. Is it -- am I hearable? Okay. So I will now take a moment to quickly inform you about where we are today in operations, what are our major focuses, and then we'll go to the summary and to the outlook.

Again, let's start on our operations network, where are we today? What is our value? What are our assets? And as already briefly introduced to you at the beginning, our unusual assets in our industry is our global operations footprint of 16 factories around the world. So we manage to serve our customers from the region into the region locally. And therefore, our business model, again, is speed. One of them is speed. So speed and delivery is important because in the intralogistics environment, there are many variants to be served.

So we can manage to serve those complexity, those variances at a fast speed locally to our customers. And this we have further developed by improving our proximity being faster in our actions and our reactions to serve the market. And now the big -- and the additional task is now to combine that local availability of resources, that local availability of components, that local availability of competencies, and we now combine them with global standards. And that's why we are building, so we call them a global operations network of experts around the globe, serving this network and serving them in mainly 4 areas. One is industrial engineering. The other one is quality control. The third one is global supply chain. And the first one is digital production.

Let me give you a glimpse on industrial engineering. What is very important that we differentiate between a location with EUR 6 labor cost or CHF 6 labor cost to a location with CHF 60 labor cost but still we follow Interroll standards. And therefore, we can leverage the automation level, the quality, the approach to the market to serve our customers in a unique way in their various locations. The same applies to how we organize our global supply chain, especially in times when factors that were solid in the past, supply chains that we are solid in the past are no longer solid in the past. So we're changing a lot to regional supply chains, but still maintaining global quality. And digital production will help us to even speed up our market requirements in the future, not having to add resources, but adding systems that help us to maintain our quality approach and our speed approach towards the market. So that's a network that we have started to build, that we continue to build in the next while in order to even better serve the market in the future.

I would like to conclude to summarize quickly what has been achieved in the year 2025. This what you have seen on sales, on technology, on the financial results. It was announced. It is a year of transition. However, where we had clear targets and clear priorities. We strengthened the core. We leveraged our capability what you then saw in our order intake. And we have started to build the structure for substantial growth where we have seen the first results. All of this always feeds and serves into our major promise: quality, speed, simplicity and this proven in the market.

I would like to finalize with our outlook. We see signs of market stabilization that have brought it over the course of 2025, supported by growing demand in project business. And feedback from our customers and end users have been more optimistic across most verticals. At the same time, the macroeconomic environment remains challenging and geopolitical tension that causes issues on our customer side could affect the business performance. The long-term trend, ladies and gentlemen, towards automation, driven by productivity requirements and labor shortages continues to support demand for automated solutions making our market attractive.

With this, I would like to conclude our annual analyst and media press conference, and we will now go on to the question-and-answers session. Thank you.

First question. Front?

Remo Rosenau, Helvetische Bank. You have given a general outlook basically on the market a little bit, but you haven't given any outlook on your company specifically in financial terms, whatsoever, none, whatsoever. Why? I mean you could have said we expect slightly higher sales and profits for instance. But you didn't give anything. Could you elaborate on that?

Also online, there is a similar question in this direction. We have a tradition not to giving a clear guideline in which direction it goes, but you have first indications that also Heinz firstly shared with you. If an order intake increases in 2025, that should result in a sales increase in 2026. So that's a logical consequence. Whether this is in the first or the second half depends on the project life or the project timing and running. But this, of course, has to materialize in some effect in year 2026.

On the profits, we have also been asked online a similar question. It is clear that we will maintain our cost discipline on one side. So sales increase develops profitability. At the same time, we will continue. And there we are very clear and very bold. We will continue our investments in innovation and market access. So in this balance, the direction is for 2026.

I agree with you. So...

That's good. That's a good news.

So you could also have said it, but let's leave it there. Moreover, on the more mid- and long-term view, there are also no kind of targets. I mean, you explained quite in detail what you have changed, how you did set up the company now to be more successful again in the future as it has been in the past. That should lead somewhere, right? And don't you have a vision where to it should lead and why don't you share it with us if you have one?

Of course, we have a vision, but we have a best practice in this company led by Paul Zumbühl, in the past. He was not promising, but delivering. And that mindset, we will continue. Is that correct, Paul?

Okay. Then quite interesting was on the culture side, accountability. Apparently, there was a lack of accountability when you started, and that has changed now. I mean, could you give a few concrete examples what you have changed in order to reestablish the culture of accountability in the company?

Yes, happy, it's -- I don't want to focus on the people side whether they're good or bad, that's not the point. We have good people. Accountability also starts with having clear structures. So for example, and I'll take you one example, that's a very obvious one. By establishing a global product and platform management, we based now the structure in one single accountability. So there is somebody responsible for products, somebody responsible for conveyors, somebody responsible for sorters, somebody responsible for pallet handling, somebody responsible for controls and software.

So what that means ? It's not who is maybe sales, maybe product management, maybe production. There is product management responsible for it, specifying the right product, talking, of course, to the regions, and involving and implementing their feedback, but be owning the topic. So individual owning of topic is important. So one is setting the structure and then secondly, helping the people to develop in this direction. That's maybe one example.

And that's a principle that we apply to the whole company. Clear structures, clear accountabilities and then helping the people to develop and own it and grow as they develop.

Tobias Fahrenholz from ODDO BHF. Let me follow up on this a little bit. Could you speak about the start into the year. So the first 2 months, have you seen again, higher orders, higher margins? Just looking back. And when you speak about a rebound of sales without providing figures, does it mean organically or also on reported level?

And last but not least, on the margins, you speak about continuous investments, growth investments. Would that mean that they could come down a little bit? Or should they stay comparable in percentage of sales?

Maybe your -- to answer your first question, how did the year start? We saw a continuous strong development on the product side. On the project side, it's more a question of timing. And so a month or 1.5 months or 2 months are not relevant representative. What we can tell you is that the order pipeline or the opportunity pipeline is strong, remains strong. And now we will see the next few months how this develops.

Maybe I can add here. Now, what is already very clear is that the '26, the FX effect will be on the high side again. Nobody is expecting a strong rebound from the euro nor from the U.S. dollar. The rest is denominated on these 2 currency pairs, and the Swiss franc will most likely appreciate against these 2 or at least keep it stable at this level of today. And with this, a negative FX effect, a considerable negative FX effect is already given.

Okay. But when you speak about the rebound of sales, that means including this FX headwind?

The FX, we cannot calculate no. we see clearly that this can be now minus 4%, minus 5%. In the first 2 months, it was even higher. But this clearly will go down if the currency pairs stay at the level which they are now, if they are not really going further down. But you -- what is clear now the sales in local currencies, they will increase. On the FX, we cannot judge today how the year will end. We will have a negative FX effect. This is clear. How much? We don't know.

Okay. And you did not yet come back on the margin question. So I guess you also hope to see the margin improvement, but the growth investments and percentage of sales, should they be comparable?

Yes, this is what we said. Now the investment -- if the investments stay not in percentage, but they stay in actual spending more or less the same with an increased sales, there will be less, and with an increased sales, we will have a quite big leverage coming from the increase. If you look at what we disclosed, what is the material expense for the turnover we make, and you can add a little bit of the personnel, then you see that our not shown gross margin is rather on the high side, which means we have a very big leverage if we get the rebound in sales. And this will overcompensate the higher spend in R&D.

Any other questions in the room?

[ Thomas Funk ] from [ GAM ]. So because it's difficult to calculate what has been local currency growth in H2? And were there any meaningful price effects from your pricing strategy going into it?

From pricing 0 effect, we did only keep the prices stable for some products. We even reduced the price beginning of '25. So no impact from the pricing. We also kept the prices stable now going into '26. The growth, I cannot even give you the detail how much we had the currency effect for the first 6 months. I don't have this in mind now, but we published the currency effect in the half year report, and we published it now for the full year. So this is -- you will -- you can calculate it, but I don't have it in mind. But clearly, it was higher.

[ Stefan Gaechter, ODDO ]. Can you maybe just come back on the situation in China, how you tackle competition in China? Both in China and maybe Chinese trying to sell their products also on a global basis?

So what -- let's quickly look at China. China is considered from many market players as they call it [ bloodbath ], a strong word. But basically, what is happening, there is overcapacity in China. And so Chinese players are very strong, trying to defend as much as they can. So what is our approach? We look where we generate value on applications where we have strong positions. And we increased our -- basically our pressure in the market with the way how we approach our customers, the way how we approach the applications and the way how we start to differentiate some of our products to serve those markets. And it has generated already to the first positive effects as I introduced to you.

Then when we look outside of China, we right now see, for example, in Southeast Asia spillover effects, of this bloodbath in China that many players are moving outside of China in order to capture their market. So what we do, we have -- we build or we again leverage our competencies. So we invest into markets, market access in terms of sales and service and project competence in order to capture our share. And we see the first steps coming.

Have I answered the question?

Yes.

So it's clear. It's -- I mean, China is going to be a challenge, but there is no alternative. If we -- it's not only because of China. It's because the spillover effect into the other regions. And some of the technology centers now happening like electric vehicle happening in China, you have to be there. You have to succeed. If you're not there, if you do not succeed, you do not succeed in the world.

More questions here? If not, we would turn, we have a couple of online questions.

One, it's maybe more interesting question from Walter Bamert from ZKB. If you take, Page 4 and add the figures, are you moving from CHF 500 million to CHF 781 million? That's an interesting approach. That's a creative approach. You can look at markets and market share is also different. You can also calculate CHF 8 billion times 8% market share in dollars and transfer them to francs, then you are probably at a more realistic approach, but thank you for keeping us up on our toes.

Mr. Bamert. And the second point, we had a question on expected recovery in 2026.

From Constantin Hesse.

Can you give us an idea of the magnitude?

I think we have talked about it what we believe what has come in and order intake should result also in sales. Profitability was a question. I think we also given there no guidance, but at least an indication of how we see.

And there was a third question on capital allocation. We can -- if you're there because it's clear, the question is totally valid. And we have there a very clear understanding as a company, as entrepreneurs, our task is to generate value of the money that is given to us. And that means we have 2 ways of generating additional access or success in the market. One is the product side, increasing our competitiveness and the other one is the market access.

So what we do? We have introduced to you that we invest into our market access already, and we invest into our product. We fill gaps or we do additional engineering developments. Now this also includes acquisitions. You have seen last year already in September the first acquisitions and so for us, acquisition -- and it's very clear message to you, acquisition is now part of our strategy in order to position ourself more successful, more competitive in the market. That's one. The second side is growth requires cash. And that's why a growing company will get additional or will take additional cash resources. And third one, we are moving what Heinz firstly has introduced to you more and more towards the 50% payout. And if above that, we do not have good ideas of generate values we will take the normal methods that you know in order to take care of the liquidity that we have. And this -- with this, we would leave it right now because we -- our task is to generate value with the money that we have being given. So that's on that side.

Then -- there was a question on the order momentum second half of [ Sebastian Vogel ]. I think we have answered that, that there was a strong -- a much stronger order intake in the second half and also in the last quarter.

CapEx plans, you want to mention something on CapEx?

Yes. On the CapEx, I think also going forward, we will clearly stay in '26 below the 5% threshold, more in the range of the previous year or the year before, also still going a lot into modernization of factories. So the footprint is there. There is no investment required for growth in the footprint. It is more that we invest into new machines, higher efficiency and keep the equipment and the production plans on a good level.

There's a question -- an additional question on -- can you remind me what percentage of share we are -- revenues are coming from e-comm and airports?

We always said e-com is between 30% and 40%. E-com is not really a vertical, we show as a vertical because e-comm has components in warehouse distribution, courier Express parcel, fashion and also food. So this is -- in 4 of the 8 verticals we show 30% to 40%. Clearly, it has been on the lower side. Now it's second half year, it has rebounded. This is where the growth is coming from on order intake, and we don't expect that this is really going out of these boundaries.

So there is -- another question from [ Pascal Bendinger-Schmidt ]. Can you quantify the potential impact on German fiscal stimulus on your orders and sales in 2026?

No, we cannot. What we can say, they will make it complicated again. That's the strength of German politics. And when this arrives at our customers and turn to orders, I would not expect this, there's a lot of that happening in 2026. We have not heard -- Maurizio have you heard anybody who says, look, I'm now getting subsidies. I'm now getting support. I want to place orders with you. We haven't seen that.

We got the same questions under the Biden administration of this huge program and with the same output. There is not something really visible what you can say you can allocate this order 100% because of this, not the case. It's also not that you see a pattern that you have suddenly a spike in investments, clearly not the case. Then from there and there, maybe there is a project which benefits, this might be the case. But then you see an explosion of business because of subsidies, it's not the case with us.

And there's another question from Baader on market shares and what we show and market potentials that we show.

Let us be there very clear. First of all, even the ones the twos that we show you as officially published dates and figures on markets, market shares are always estimates. We do not work in a market that has statistics that are aligned like in automotive industry today, Daimler Truck can tell you exactly how many trucks not only they have produced but everybody else and they can tell you the share because an official statistic on automotive. We don't have that.

So we have good estimates, and what we have done is taking those estimates that always, they also change from year to year. Also their increases change from year-to-year, and we have transferred them into our addressable market. And that's today our best guess, and as we develop our market intelligence further, we will get some additional insights. And it could very well be that we modify that again.

In general, the message is the market is there, the market is substantial. The market is growing and the market is open for innovation. And that should be good enough.

Yes. Just one additional remark to this question, because it is stated in the question you stated before, CHF 6 billion to CHF 8 billion worldwide. We clearly now relate to U.S. dollar as all the studies are done in U.S. dollar. So Slide 4 shows U.S. dollar and not Swiss franc. It's not such a big deviation from the past.

Then there was a question from Constantin Hesse from Jefferies. Can you confirm that this recovery a sustainable trend?

We would not add more to what we have said.

So another question from Constantin Hesse, my question on growth are mainly related to order momentum. Can you elaborate how orders have performed so far this year?

I think I've mentioned something to that question, and that's enough.

Another one from Constantin Hesse, 12% on second H, can your momentum continue in first H 2026, we will be able to report that in our half year call, whether this momentum has further developed.

It's too early to say after 2 months, especially as a product side, very stable project side, it depends on the closing date.

Then another question from Mr. [indiscernible] Kumar. Just to come back on margins. I'm not mistaken, you mentioned no increase in percentage of sales of costs but to remain stable in terms of absolute numbers.

I think we can repeat again. We will see some increase in markets and innovation, product activity. However, while they -- while, at the same time, sales will increase, they should be properly compensated.

That is what I mentioned before. Higher sales, big leverage will contribute positively to the EBIT margin despite ongoing R&D investments, which will be higher than in the past years. But clearly, the EBIT margin should see a positive momentum.

And there was another question by Mr. Bamert. Are we saying that we are -- that our sales would be at CHF 500 million?

This is, of course, not right. So this is -- if you add up this map, Mr. Bamert, that's not -- that's not what we're saying. Not at all.

Constantin Hesse talks about cash again.

Yes, we can clearly say we have a lot of cash. There's no question. I get these questions all the time. So what are you doing with the cash? Markus have said it very clear. First of all, we try to invest this to generate an added value for the shareholders in the company. Last resort what many other companies are doing, what -- [indiscernible] also mentioned this morning, this is the last resort. The last resort is a share buyback program, but this is only if we cannot invest it in the company.

What I also mentioned to a lot of you in the past is a special dividend is not considered because some always ask about a special dividend. And to make it clear, a special dividend is not considered by the Board of Directors.

And there has been another question by [ Andreas Ulrich ] from Alpha Capital. There has been unusual instability in your management position in recent months. Some thoughts about that.

It can be very simple to lead on our general management, our executive management, you basically have to serve 2 major capabilities. One, you have to be top in your function in what you do. And secondly, you have to be culturable, aligned or in a sense, fit into the culture of the company. If one of those areas are not good enough, you're not good enough to develop this company further.

And in the 2 places that we had to replace those -- one of those key elements were not there. And so we -- in clear communication, we had to do there the necessary correction. Another question.

There is another new one.

I have another observation. In the past when we were talking about Asia, it was more the tone that technologically, the integral products are a little bit too advanced for the market. And now you are talking about that Asia is morphing into a growth region for Interroll. So something seems to be changing in the market or in your product landscape or in your way going to the market? What has changed for Asia and probably emerging markets on a whole.

Maybe it's worthwhile to differentiate that a little bit in a couple of answers. So first of all, what do you see -- there is almost brutal change in technology and own understanding in the Chinese environment since the COVID times. And before that, China was organizing -- the Chinese markets were for many industries, a little bit the same. The good enough product came from China. The more advanced products came from Europe, or from outside.

And what you are seeing in automotive industry, in some of the machinery industry, that has radically changed after COVID. China did their homework and started to build on Chinese speed innovation capabilities. Today, technologies on electric vehicles, on batteries are happening in China for the world. So one to say, I'm just going to serve a niche market that is becoming less and less is no answer.

Second, our task is to understand where we, in our products and solutions have capabilities to serve the market. And that's what we are focusing on. And that's where we're gaining momentum and not try to position ourselves in the niche and hope we will survive. But to go into the applications with growth potential, where we add value on products, controls and software and serve the market and competence, project planning competence. And it's going to be a fight. That's very obvious like the others, but we will face the fight and we will find our way. Is that answering?

Partly. So the change is more that you're really attacking these markets now going into the market, find the parts that are interesting for you that you can serve probably they are there and just need to be better addressed.

And the market -- totally right, fully, but also in the markets that will not be only important for China, but have spillover effects into the world. There is another one. I guess another one. Maurizio?

Yes, I mean, [indiscernible] he's asking, looking in 2026, which are the verticals you are expecting the most to grow, I suspect, this missed, and which one will drive the growth for the upcoming years?

Well, I would say that looking into 2026, for sure, our verticals are stable and growing in the area of warehousing distribution and the CEP business, so the Courier, Express and Parcel. We see still the momentum there. The automation is needed more and more. I mean workforce is not easy to find, and it is a tough job. So I mean, the automation driver is there.

Airport business is still solid. Of course, we are closely looking at the situation in the Middle East because I mean, when it comes to airport business, this is, of course, a part of the world, which is pretty much important and developing quite strong. In general, let's say, industrial automation, especially when it comes to automotive, you all know is not surprise, where anyhow, our exposure is not so high like other markets.

There are a couple of trends that we are still monitoring pretty close. One is the e-grocery. So grocery has not really yet able to, I mean, move into the e-commerce because, I mean, the cost related to the delivery of grocery is still too high, and their margin are pretty small. So there, there is several attempts from some of our customers and integrator. And in general, the FMCG, so the fast-moving consumer goods market is stable growing. We have accounts in that area. And yes, we believe that this area will provide us with some good business for next and coming years.

So we have no more questions online. Are there any last questions from you? If not, we will then also close the Q&A session. We again want to thank you very much for coming, for honoring us with your visit, for your questions, for your support. And we will now close the session here and see each other outside at the [ airport ]. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Interrol's Presentation of Half Year Results 2025 Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am [indiscernible], the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] and the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Markus Asch, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for your introduction. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. With me decide me is Heinz Hossli, our Group CEO. We welcome you on our half year results presentation 2025. And ladies and gentlemen, we are glad and honored that we have so many participants in this meeting. Let's quickly go through our today's agenda. I will start with the group overview and my reflections on the first 150 days, its priorities, its achievements, but also the areas where we are working on in order to gain additional momentum. After that, Heinz Hossli will present the financial performance. And at the end, we'll have a live Q&A session as already announced. You can raise your questions. For organizational purposes, we decided not to offer the chat to ask written questions.

For those of you who have been in calls before, this is probably a very well-known slide for you, and I particularly would like to summarize and repeat the markets we are working on. Interroll is playing in a small niche segment, in a small segment of a rather huge markets, the material handling equipment manufacturing market. And we are working, we are playing, we are acting in the internal logistics solutions segment of this market. Even though the entire material handling equipment manufacturing market is more than CHF 200 billion, it is expected to grow even more with about a compound annual growth rate of 6%. Our markets -- our relevant market is about CHF 6 billion to CHF 8 billion worldwide and rather more and more getting dynamic, both in terms of development of the market as well as the technologies involved, and we have a relevant market share of about 8% to 11%. That's the area where we are focusing. And that's the area where we are developing our solutions towards.

If we go to the next slide, and you have seen those in presentations before, there's basically no change in the first half of 2025. However, ladies and gentlemen, what I would like to focus on is one of those small information, our 16 main factories, and that represents our worldwide operations footprint. More to that later on during our presentation.

This slide shows the 8 verticals or industries that we focus on, that we're working on. And you might ask yourself the question, where is e-commerce? And e-commerce for us, ladies and gentlemen, is not a vertical or industry why it touches so many difference of our verticals of our industries. For example, warehouse and distribution through your expressed parcel. But for those companies who more and more go into omnichannel, it also applies to fashion and retail. And more and more, it also goes into food. Those markets where we have special focus and attention, they are the ones who are highlighted in yellow.

Let's go from a general market approach to our business model. And on one side, we see the markets, and I already introduced to you that the market is increasingly being more and more dynamic. We also see the material handling market as a relevant market with new entrants with focusing on consolidation. So on one side, we see a very active market. But let's now focus on how do we serve that market. And our business model, ladies and gentlemen, has the customer in the center. We focus on being close to the end customer and its main applications and providing them with what we can do well, providing them with proven state-of-the-art scalable technology with our product platforms. And that end user approach with getting close to the end-user applications help us to drive best possible solutions with the result that the end customer understands the value that we can provide to their solutions. And in best case, already specifies us when additional investments are happening.

And on top of that, by focusing our end customers, we do understand their pain points in applications where we can improve our products but also where we can develop new possible solutions. Here, you can see our main product groups. It starts with the rollers, it moves on to drive, and it then goes on to conveyors and sorters and we have pelletizing. All of these product groups have one basic structure in place, and that's the platform strategy with modular, scalable and flexible components that are individually configured in order to provide best customer solutions. Service is also very essential to our business and it differs in relevance on rollers and drives compared to conveyors and pallet handling and service is included in each and every product group.

Let's move on to innovation. At LogiMAT in April 2025, we have launched the MCP PLAY at the left-hand side. And in June, we received the highly respected IFOY Innovation Award for this groundbreaking innovation. What is so essential with the innovation? It serves two major pain points in our industry. One, it simplifies the installation and commissioning approach by substantially reducing complexity in the nature of projects that is always complex. So by driving standards, we reduce complexity. On the other side, it improves the operation for the end user by being more efficient and reducing energy efforts. On the right-hand side, you see the HPP product that we launched in 2024, high-performance conveyor platform with the multibelt switch, and this is gaining now step by step and more acceptance, and we will see that to develop further.

I will now move on and share with you my reflections of my first almost 150 days. I would title it with strategic investments, global expansion and innovation that are the basis for sustainable growth. What do I mean this? First, the market we serve, as already introduced to you, is substantial. And what is even more important, through our value proposition, through our capabilities and solutions, we help the market to develop, to help the market to grow. Our value proposition of standardized configurable solutions serve the needs of the markets ideally very well.

Now in order, and that's what you see as the second line, in order to regain growth, it is essential to increase our competence at our customers and their applications. We, therefore, have restructured our market competence, including key account management, our solutions, it's in vertical market management and there have extended our capabilities. These investments into people and competence is seen today in our P&L, but will produce the results in the next month to come.

As mentioned before, our global sales and operations footprint is almost unique in the industry. And ladies and gentlemen, this gives us a competitive advantage and opens further potential for us in a political more and more uncertain environment. What is now essential that we localize this competence in the market to serve regional requirements. In order to gain and capture the potential that we see in those markets, in those regions. These investments, we have already decided immediately and they are already underway, and we will see -- we already see the first results, they are noticeable.

On the innovation side, ladies and gentlemen, required extensions to our platforms are initiated and well underway. Further focus will be on innovation along the value chain of our customers. And that's very essential as we work in complex projects, innovation that is driving benefits into the value chain of our customers is far more valuable and it's far above products and solutions. It's value chain innovations.

Our successful strategy in the past has been refined and decided which will be the basis for our priorities and sustainable long-term growth. On top of that, we have restructured the organizational setup. It is already up and running since first of July this year. And that will also serve as a basis for further market growth and regain momentum.

Let's quickly talk about a few markets, relevant results that we have been able to secure and we are very thankful at this point of time to report to you that we have results of our market and our product initiatives. So let me take the first example. We have secured our first overseas orders from top global lithium ion battery manufacturer. And this -- taking -- let's pause a moment, taking this an example, this is happening today. Battery manufacturing technology is happening in China. So you have to succeed in China, not only for the Chinese market. But with the Chinese manufacturers worldwide as they dominate the battery manufacturing markets. So we see already orders not only in China, but we see orders in China also for the world for different battery manufacturing sites in the world.

Second point is airports. Airports, as you all know, are back at their peaks. And we have secured there -- and we have shown you one possible or one example. We have secured already some wins and together with our global lifetime service, we are working on additional projects where we reinforced and combine our capabilities, both of products as well as service as well as refurbishment in order to prepare the airports for additional goals.

Also, we see there is a clear rebound in e-commerce, starting but not limited to the Americas. And with our solutions in conveying and sorting. One side, we are well positioned and we work on additional solutions into that market but also to share the growth that already we see and get a momentum, get a share of the growth that is happening.

This is a brief introduction of our major priorities, our major focus and some of the results that we were able to produce in the first few months and with this overview completed, I would like now to hand over to our group CFO, Heinz Hossli. He will go through us through the figures, which are the results of the described activities.

Thank you, Markus. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Also from my side, I'm happy to present you the results of the first 6 months '25. I would like to start with an overview -- to give you an overview before I go into the details. Starting with the order intake, 0.8% decrease in Swiss franc, but -- and this is really the but, we have gained in local currencies, 2.7%. So from a really negative turn to stagnation, we have now seen a slight growth, and the early indicators are also promising going forward that e-commerce will make a comeback. And this -- you can also read in the newspapers that the very big ones have announced already orders. It is not yet with us. This will take some time, but clearly, the signs are much more positive than they have been in the past.

When we look into the regions, we have seen this, and we always mentioned this, we are most positive that the first growth will come from Americas in e-commerce. This is happening. This has started and we have seen some first projects in the first 6 months. This is also why the order intake of Americas has increased. In EMEA, we have basically a stable situation. And I'm also always talking now in Swiss franc. So in local currencies, it's clear the U.S. dollar had the strongest headwind. This is even more growth in local currency. EMEA also the euro had a downward trend. So stable in EMEA means in local currency, positive and we could also stabilize and now show a slight growth in China, where we lost in the last couple of years, but quite a lot. And this is now a positive sign out of China, but we have lost in other countries in APAC where the project business is -- has been slow for the first 6 months.

When we look at sales, it's a positive sign even though it's basically stable like in the first 6 months of last year. But also here in local currency, it's a plus of 3.6%. This is quite a good achievement considering that we started the year with the lowest backlog in the last couple of years.

Looking at the region, sales increased in EMEA and Asia Pacific, whereas the Americas, and this is basically also because of the lower intake in the second half year, '24 from the projects. The Americas has suffered a little bit, but they will catch up in the second half year.

Coming to the EBIT, we see a decrease of 7.7% to CHF 27.6 million. If you look at the difference in Swiss franc, last year, CHF 29.7 million, with basically the same sales. You can see that we have a higher cost base, and this is mainly driven by higher R&D costs and marketing costs. These are investments for the future, as also already outlined by Markus. Overall, we clearly commit to keep our strong cost discipline up and this is also what we see. There is really only two areas where we have seen major change, and this is really an investment into the future.

The highlight of the first 6 months for me is clearly the cash flow. The operating cash flow increased by 34.6% to CHF 21.8 million and this is mainly coming from optimizing net working capital. Now a little bit more in detail, the order intake at CHF 284.1 million. As mentioned in local currency, a plus of 2.7%. If we look into the 4 product groups, we see roles growing 5.1%, drives minus 8.4%. Here, I would like to make a remark that in the period of last year, we have been awarded with a very big onetime order in the Americas, which has been around CHF 5 million. So this explains why this is minus 8.4% this year. Conveyors and Sorters, this is coming from the e-commerce, first signs of a rebound, plus 8.1%, mainly coming from the Americas. Pallet handling, this is the very cyclical product group, which we see up and down, and you will see on the next slide in the positive sign, but in the order intake, minus 19.1%. And at the end, the book-to-bill ratio, 1.15% basically at the same level of last year where we have been 1.16%.

Looking now into the sales, we see a slightly different picture. You can see that the [ rollers ] plus 4.1%, drives only 3.1% negative. Then conveyors and sorters, here, you see the big difference where we have seen quite a good growth in the order intake. The sales still lag behind with a minus 7.3%. As mentioned before, this is mainly driven by the Americas region. On pallet handling, very negative in the order intake, but with a plus 38% very positive in the sales. Nevertheless, the Pallet handling doesn't make a big difference on the total sales.

Now the sales by region. And here, we clearly see the development, EMEA and Asia Pacific with the growth in Americas, it declined compared to the previous year, as mentioned before, the reasons are clear by the decline in Americas is there. The order intake in the second half year '24 from the project business was low, and this affects the invoice sales in the first 6 months of this year. This will, as mentioned, change in the second half year. When we look at the split by region, we see that EMEA has slightly increased to 62% from 60% last year; Americas, 28% loss 3 basis points compared to last year; and Asia Pacific gained 1 basis point to last year. So there is not a big movement by end of the year. As always, Americas will catch up as they have a lot of project business, and this will be on the cost of EMEA. And hopefully, APAC will remain stable or even show an additional growth.

Looking at the EBIT, minus 7.7%. This looks quite a bit. But in absolute amount, I think this is okay as this is an investment into the future. As mentioned, we have higher R&D costs. The R&D cost, you will not find directly in the half year report as this consists of external costs and a lot of personnel costs. And then we have also invested a little bit more in marketing. We had big shows at LogiMAT and the big show in the U.S. And we have also with the MCP PLAY, a lot of equipment to present on the shows, which has been booked into the cost. As we do not capitalize anything on R&D, everything is expensed immediately, and this is why you see the impact in the P&L.

The strong cost discipline. This is where we are fully committed also to continue in the future. This has been a good and basic pillar of the profitability and to protect the profitability even in a downturn. And even though the result looks compared to last year, not really good despite the investments in R&D and marketing. But if you compare this with '23, it's basically the same level. Amortization and depreciation in absolute terms remained unchanged. This had an impact on the EBIT in percentage of sales now with 11.1%, in the previous year it was 12.1%.

Looking at the results, there is not much to say. We have a negative financing result coming from FX currency losses. Due to the big natural hedge, we have, the currency losses are really minimal, but nevertheless, it is negative slightly negative. And in the previous year, it was neutral. The interest from the cash we invest is also lower as the interest rates have come down. And the tax rate is slightly lower than last year. This results in a decline of 11.3% to CHF 21.2 million or in percentage of sales, 8.6% versus previous year, 9.7%.

Free cash flow, CHF 17.1 million, the operating cash flow of CHF 21.8 million, in percentage of sales, 8.8%. So this is an increase compared to last year. And as mentioned already in the first introduction with the overview, this is mainly coming from the optimization of net working capital. The free cash flow is the result of lower investments. The investments in this first 6 months with CHF 7.2 million has been even lower than last year with CHF 8.5 million. So the combination of an increased operating cash flow with less investments shows the free cash flow increase and in percentage, the increase is 54%. So this is quite considerable. And to me, the cash flow is the highlight. It's also worth to mention that even in a difficult market environment, Interroll always can generate free cash flow.

Now I come to this long-term value creation chart, where you see really a long-term return on equity, 9.1%; return on net assets, 14.9%. What I need to mention is in the first 6 months, there is always a negative effect due to seasonality, which is shown in the figures. The return on equity it's quite difficult to reverse because this is highly related also to the equity ratio. We have now almost 80% equity ratio, which is very high return on net assets, this automatically will reverse and go into the direction where we have been between the years '14 to '19, we expect slight increases when we start to see a growth of the sales because the assets we have, the assets are more enough to produce a much higher volume. So we have capacity to grow strongly with current capacities, and this will then increase the return on net assets over the long term, again.

Now I come already to the outlook. As mentioned, the E-commerce sector is showing early signs of a rebound, big integrators have already seen firm orders and this will take some time, but with a time lag of 6 to 9 months, we should also see this in our order intake. For now, what we can say is the signs of market stabilization has emerged at least regionally with growing demand for large orders in the project business. The feedback from our customers and end users is increasingly positive in the warehouse and distribution segment, also in courier, express and parcels, mainly driven by the rebound of e-commerce. Also in the airport business, we expect a sustainable growth going forward. Nevertheless, we continue to operate in a challenging macroeconomic environment with geopolitical tensions, which could impact business performance.

However, the long-term trend of automation, driven by the need for productivity gains and labor shortage are clearly signs that increasing demand for our solutions, our commitment to quality, speed and simplicity remains our building block, and we also will put the customer into the center more than in the past, as mentioned also by Markus. This is also the investment into sales, and we will continue to shape our culture.

Before I come to the end, I would like to highlight that we have now in our Investor Relations web page, more online content. The link is shown here on the bottom, and please have a look at it, and we always are open for feedback and for suggestions for improvements. Please just contact investor relations at interroll.com, if you have something which we can improve on the Investor Relations website.

With this, I'm at the end of my part, and we will start the Q&A session.

The first question comes from the line of Constantin Hesse from Jefferies.

Three questions, please. Number one, long-term question in terms of the restructuring of the organization that you're going to regain momentum. If you can maybe share a bit more color on what you've done there, what your targets are, also maybe a little bit of a word on competitive environment?

Second question, order intake, if -- obviously, we saw KION's results yesterday, they were also quite impressive in terms of the warehouse automation side of things. And they've also been mentioning e-comm, though they did say it was obviously not a sustainable growth driver but they do expect an improvement in the second half, too. So if we think about order momentum for you, how should we think about this potential recovery curve. Do you expect book-to-bill to remain above 1 in the second half? Maybe just some color here would be interesting.

And lastly, on free cash flow for the second half, if we could just get some color here on working capital movements and CapEx.

Thank you very much, Mr. Hesse. I will answer the first question on structuring and regaining momentum and Heinz Hossli will answer the second and the third. Let's quickly look at the first one. So what have we done -- I indicated to you that for us, an excellent basis and operations footprint. Now one is essential that we focus ourselves also on the relevant markets with closeness to the customers and the market that basically we are rebuilding the company from a more European-centric to a customer-centric organization.

What does that mean? The relevance of Asia and especially China, the relevance of America has to be equally valued in the organization as the relevance of Europe. What does that specifically mean? Our structure, our decision-making progress in Asia is equally now represented in the Board. We have established also product management and engineering already in China, and we are building that, why? And let me give you an example, and I mentioned that before, like the electric vehicle industry. It's not about China, it's about the world. so relevant -- we have to be the relevant customers are, not only for the domestic market but for the relevance in the world. So we have restructured that and also the whole organization has been main leaner and much faster to decide. That's a brief answer for your first question, [ Hesse ].

Then I take the second question regarding the order intake and what you mentioned regarding the publication of KION. I think KION also made very clear where this is coming from. This is coming from e-commerce. And that this is also where we say we see light at the end of the tunnel, much more I cannot say to this, what I stated already before. When such a big integrator gets a such big project takes 9 -- 6 to 9 months [indiscernible] in an order intake, it could lead even up to 1 year. The projects they got there massive. It is clear with the indications who is the end customers or the end customer and are also positive to see something if it is still end of this year or early next year, that's too early to say.

Regarding your third question, the cash flow, what I can say is free cash flow will also increase in second half year. We might invest into CapEx a little bit more in the first 6 months, our infrastructure, but not really much more. And overall, we will continue also to generate cash flow in the second half year, but we cannot give you a number. We don't have a forecast for this.

Can I just follow up on the order intake. So obviously, order on book-to-bill was north of 1 in the first half because orders were clearly relatively low in the second half of last year, you had a lower backlog. So the improved order intake clearly had this impact. But looking at the momentum into the second half, do you expect orders to accelerate into the second half? How should we think about book-to-bill as we go into the second half? Just to kind of like frame the story in terms of the recovery curve here.

Yes. What we expect is that the business on the product side will continue more or less in a similar fashion as in the first 6 months and for the project, as mentioned, it might be very possible that we get an increase, but we see early order intake in the Q4, but we cannot guarantee this, it can also be that it's Q1 but that we expect the increase in orders in the next 12 months is clear.

The next question comes from the line of Sebastian Vogel from UBS.

I also got three questions. The first one is a bit of a follow-up question. As you said, right, the reference to the 6 to 9 months until you will see these orders on your side in your order book as well. And then you had made the reference to the 12 months for the larger ones paying. Again, coming back to 6 to 9 months, meaning that you also expect some smaller products or some smaller project related to orders coming from e-commerce over there? Or is it just the big ones that anyway come in the next 12 months? That would be the first question.

The second one is, if you can remind us a little bit if you have a ballpark figure what's the overall e-commerce exposure on a group revenue basis, that would be interesting? And as well, the same applies to airport exposure. If you can see some light over there regarding revenue exposure, that would be great.

Sorry, can you repeat the last one?

Airport exposure on the group.

Yes. Share of revenues.

I'm quickly answering the first one. So you're perfectly right in your valuation. So we are already in discussion also with those relevant players and we see momentum on the smaller projects that will happen this year in order intake. The bigger ones, as mentioned by Heinz Hossli, they will take the time until they are structured with the big system integrators.

Your second question regarding the e-commerce share, this is roughly 30% to 40% which is related to e-commerce. And as mentioned before, there is also a portion of fashion and food included there. It's not only courier, express and parcel.

And airport.

And on the airport, the share is between 5% and 10% of revenue.

We now have a question from the line of Walter Bamert from [indiscernible].

Good morning, everybody. This is Walter Bamert from Zürcher Kantonalbank. My first question relates to the growth initiatives, is it correct that those costs in the first half about 1 percentage point EBIT margin? And do you expect that to phase out over time or are you stepping up those initiatives?

So if -- I didn't understand you 100%. Clearly, your question was the EBIT effect that we have today. Will that remain or will that phase out there is a clear task for us that this will -- this is right now immediate investments that we already see some of the results in the next 6 to 12 months. And this is, of course, will phase out. as we are very strong on our cost side as soon as we gain momentum, our task is to invest what we can afford and not to jeopardize the EBIT.

Sorry, maybe in addition to what Markus Asch said, now when we go back into a growth mode, we have a high leverage, and we will -- we still can invest and you will still see an increase in profitability due to the high leverage.

But that's correct about 1 percentage point in the first half?

That's correct.

Okay. And then regarding the e-commerce orders when a system integrator gets CHF 1 billion in orders. And assuming you would have 100% market share on that those orders, what would be your revenues?

This we cannot give you an answer. This depends on the scope of the project. This depends...

On the technology and the structure yet [indiscernible] this is impossible to make a reference if ever.

So I have to refer to the 10% market share you have in global material handling then?

Yes.

And in July, you didn't see that much of order activity?

The only thing what I can say about July is that July looks that we are clearly above last year. So there is a growth compared to the previous year period.

Good. And the order backlog that you have currently, the bulk of that is for installation in the current year?

Not all no. There is a big project we mentioned it also in the Americas where the invoice sales will be next year. The majority of the backlog is for this year, but not all.

We now have a question from the line of Lasse Stueben from Berenberg.

Just one additional follow-up on competitive landscape. I was just wondering if you've seen any big changes here. Just given you know it's been a tougher market now for 2 to 3 years. It looks like we're coming out of that, but just wondering if you've seen any big changes in the competitive landscape and if that's what's really driving some of the higher investments you're making now to take advantage of that.

And there is a clear increase in a competitive landscape, Mr. Stueben and we see that mainly driven by China, Asia Pacific. And there is multiple reasons. First of all, they have been investing heavily in the last few years. And second, they have some issues in China that the market is not growing, so they keep growing outside of China. And that's why we have made a clear decision that we have to face competitors where they are. And it's a one like [indiscernible], for example, very aggressive low profits, up to no profits in China and outside of China. So we use our value. We use our momentum to -- and we have already the first orders against them. So we use our momentum both in China as well as in the world. That's clear. unless we face competition and when we will not be able to succeed in the market worldwide.

We now have a question from the line of Martin Bechard from [indiscernible].

I have three, if I may. I'll ask them one by one. In your press release, you said you received sizable projects in North America and Middle East. And did you receive these orders before or after the liberation Day on the second of April?

So the first question, it was -- the Americas was after. And the EMEA was before. But this has been -- there is no relation to the liberation day.

And around this liberation Day, did you see some customers being hesitant hesitate around this day? Or did you see also some projects being pushed out which will come maybe in H2? Or how did your customers react to this?

Mr. Bechard, there is a different behavior. What we see in Europe that there is a bigger hesitation on awarding bigger projects or going ahead with bigger projects. They're doing smaller projects as the uncertainty is heavy. When we look at the United States, we don't see that behavior. So they are going ahead with the orders, they are going ahead with the project. And we even will develop, as indicated, some momentum as we have a true U.S. footprint that many others don't have.

In addition to what Markus Asch said that in the U.S., if the tariffs now remain we just gained actually competitiveness because we produce in the U.S. and some of the European big integrators, so they have no local production, so they produce in Europe and ship to the U.S., and this is changing the landscape quite a bit.

Okay. And my last question is around the cost of steel. And because of the tariff from steel, the price is going up, how will affect this in the second half? And do we increase price because of that or do you think something will stick through P&L and diluting a little bit to margin or what is your plan there?

I can tell you what the strategy. We produce in the U.S. for Americas, we buy steel in the U.S. for Americas. So the primary effect of the tariff is not really directly visible, but the secondary effect this will go to every company because this steel industry in the U.S., which is not competitive in the first place with this huge protection shield will be less competitive in the future and steel price -- I assume steel price for everybody buying steel in the U.S. will go up. And this then will be handed over to the customer.

And we already sold out and we already see that the market price in the U.S. is much higher than in Europe and in Asia Pacific also because of the raw material because the steel is much higher.

The next question comes from the line of Mitch [indiscernible] from Octavian.

Maybe the first one on R&D. Can you maybe say what you're focusing on? Is it new solutions? Is it just for new verticals? You highlighted food now. So can you maybe talk more about the opportunities there long term? That would be my first question.

We are not disclosing our strategic initiatives. What we can say, we are carefully extending our platforms mainly into serving regional demand and some of the markets that I indicated to you before.

Okay. And last year, you also did a small acquisition in India. I mean what are the plans there? Do you also have some organizational change and see opportunities? Or is the focus really more now on China and Americas?

As we are fully aware, India is a very sustainable market and a little bit decoupled of volatilities that we see in other markets. So we have a very clear strategy to build. We are now building right now the basis and prepare the company for sustainable cost in the next few years. So there is no derive of focus in India. The big difference between India and China is India is a market by itself with growth momentum that we focus. China has huge effects not only in China, but also in the world, that's why we treat it differently.

We have a follow-up question from the line of Sebastian Vogel from UBS.

I have two follow-up questions, if I may. First one is on pricing. What is the sort of current pricing backdrop that you see in the industry and how you fit in there? And the other question would be on your transaction exposure. Just to be clear there, does your answers previously mean essentially that pretty much everything what you sell in the U.S. is also locally produced. If you can share your thoughts there, that would be great.

Yes. On the first one is price. The pricing of the competition -- sometimes we know it, sometimes we don't know it, but this is also not relevant. Now we provide the value to the customer. We are clearly not a price leader, but we are the leader when it comes to return on investment over the long term, and we get the price premium compared to our competition.

On the second one, with the U.S., it's Yes, it's difficult to say where it goes, but clearly, the prices we tend tenancy go up.

And if I understood you right, Mr. Vogel. you said how much of the share we sell in the U.S., we produce in the U.S. It is -- it's above 90%. So we have only international, some platform components that we provide internationally, the maturity above 90% if [indiscernible] in the U.S. by U.S.

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up question from the line of Constantin Hesse from Jefferies.

Just one question. I just wanted to go back to that competitive landscape question. And clearly, you already answered the pricing question versus value. But what I'm trying to figure out, right, a lot of the -- as we know from various other industries, the Chinese has typically gained a lot of share by us being aggressive on price. Now from what I understand, this is a bit more difficult in this industry because a lot of customers -- the cost of failure of the warehouse is obviously something that you don't want to have because your profitability is already very low. So I'm just trying to get a feel for how should we think about as these Chinese tried -- a lot of these Chinese manufacturers try to gain share in other markets with regards to their products with regards to the quality of their products as you said they've been investing quite heavily over the last few years. Have you seen an improvement in these -- in some of these products when customers decide to go for a Chinese competitor, is it mostly pricing driven? Or are you actually seeing that customers are quite happy with the quality that the Chinese manufacturers are offering these days? So just a bit of background here could be quite interesting thing.

So first of all, there's one basic principle that we take very seriously in the company, in the executive management never under estimate Chinese. If you do this, you see what's happening and just look at the automotive industry. So we take them very seriously. What we see today that technology, they are catching up, but it's not that we have like in the automotive industry, already reversed situations. When today, the orders are being awarded. It's mainly price issues. And our strategy there is a very clear one. First of all, we have to remain competitive. What does it mean, not the cheapest. We will not win against the Chinese in terms of price, but in terms of value. So what we do is price-wise be in a competitive range and provide additional value. That's what I mentioned, not only on the product, but also on the products with controls and the product is controlled and [indiscernible]. So we provide value beyond the product. That's our approach, and that's our strategy.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Markus Asch for any closing remarks.

So ladies and gentlemen, again, thank you very much for participating in the call. And thank you for your questions. It shows the interest, it shows also how you have supported us over many times for us. What is essential. We are very openly communicated to you where we see how to date our strength and our weakness is what we're doing, what we are prioritizing where we are focusing in order to regain momentum, but also puts the company on sustainable and long-term growth. We are building the basis where it's required and we have continuing the success that has been successfully established over decades. We are keeping our basic business model of quality, speed and simplicity because it provides scalable solutions to the market. We again want to thank you very much that you honor us this your time with your questions and with your support.

Thank you very much for participating in this meeting.

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.