Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to THEON International Plc first half 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. At that time, please remember to use the text box Q&A to submit your questions. I will now hand the conference over to Evangelia Karatzia with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to THEON's half year 2026 results conference call. Thank you for joining us today. I am Evangelia Karatzia, part of the Investor Relations team at THEON. We are pleased to present you today with an overview of the first half of 2026. We will start with a period highlight by Christian Hadjiminas, our Founder and CEO. Next, Philippe Mennicken, our Business Development Director and Deputy CEO, will present market sector and business insights that guide our strategy. Following that, Dimitris Parthenis, our CFO, will present the financial performance. We will close the presentation returning to Christian to address our guidance and future outlook. The last part of today's session will be dedicated to your questions. At this point, I would like to invite Christian to take the floor.
Thank you, Evangelia. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are once again pleased to present another strong set of results that reflect our growing momentum and, in our view, demonstrate both the sector's promising prospects and especially the now expanded EUR 8 billion addressable market for THEON and the potential for our business model and strategy that lies ahead. I will begin with the first half 2026 highlights, as well as the strategic and business milestones achieved across the group in that period, before handing it over to Philippe. Let's begin. The first half of the year has seen momentum build up for THEON, delivering strong financial performance while materially enhancing our strategic platform and positioning the business for continued growth. Starting with our financial performance, we generated record first half revenues of EUR 248.7 million, representing growth of 35.4% compared to H1 2025.
This growth was delivered alongside a 40 basis point expansion in our margin, maintaining our industry-leading profitability with an EBIT margin of 26.2%, despite ongoing portfolio expansion and acquisition integration. Order intake reached EUR 232.5 million, demonstrating continued demand across our product portfolio and supporting a book-to-bill ratio of approximately 1.0x . As usual, order activity is weighted towards the second half of the year, with stronger intake anticipated in Q4 due to the industry's normal seasonality, while further acceleration is expected from early 2027 onwards. Our backlog remains a key strength. Soft backlogs stood at EUR 1.46 billion, complemented by EUR 902 million of contractual option, which of course, we believe they will mostly all of them exercised shortly, providing strong revenue visibility and underpinning a coverage ratio of 2.4x based on the upper end of our financial year 2026 revenue guidance.
At the same time, we continue to diversify our product mix and broaden our platforms. Revenues from non-night vision products now account for approximately 15% and are expected to reach around 19%-20% by year-end, reflecting the successful execution of our strategy to expand into high-growth optoelectronic markets. Overall, the first half of 2026 combined strong financial and commercial delivery with significant strategic progress. We have expanded our addressable market, strengthened our backlog, and maintained industry-leading profitability, providing a strong platform for the remainder of 2026 and beyond. I have to stress it is very important for THEON to retain its credibility and whatever we have promised so far throughout the last three years since we are in the public market, we have delivered. More than delivered, I should say. Now, to provide some further detail on our key strategic milestones.
First half of 2026 was an important period in the continued evolution of THEON as we continue to expand our platform. The transaction and partnerships announced in the first half have led our addressable market almost doubling to about EUR 8 billion and marked our entrance into some of the fastest-growing areas of defense technology. The activities in this acquisition and integration domain for a company of our size can be simply assessed as unprecedented without exaggeration. In May, we announced the acquisition of an 80% stake in Merio, marking an important step in our strategy to accelerate our entry into unmanned vehicle systems and establish a stronger presence in France.
Preliminary engagement between THEON's and Merio's business development and R&D teams have identified a range of identified potential commercial opportunities and technology synergies, which we expect to support future growth and innovation initiatives. Subject to the necessary approvals, state approvals, we expect the transaction to close in Q4 of this year.
Furthermore, we also made a EUR 3 million minority investment in Twin Prime, an AI venture in the U.S., alongside the agreement to establish a joint venture to develop, commercialize, and deploy bespoke AI solutions. This helps to expand our footprint in the U.S. and provides THEON with direct exposure to the rapidly developing defense AI market. In June, we signed a memorandum of understanding with Safran to establish a joint venture focused on the design and production of gimbals for UAVs. THEON will control 51% of the venture, with part of the production expected to take place in Greece.
The goal of this JV with Safran is to establish itself as nothing less than the global leading gimbals company by the end of 2027. We believe with all the work we have done, this is an achievable target by the end of 2027. Last but not least, this joint venture is another evidence, and I would like to stress the importance of that, of one of our strategic premises whereby THEON becomes a prime catalyst for European defense industry integration and especially for French and German and Greek defense industry integration. Finally, we announced our largest investment to date, the acquisition of HGH for an enterprise value of approximately EUR 300 million. This is a significant strategic step for THEON, accelerating our entry into the counter-UAV market and further broadening our technology portfolio. HGH has unique innovation capabilities and has developed proprietary software solution augmented with artificial intelligence.
By leveraging HGH technological differentiation, THEON will further strengthen its product portfolio and create additional value. Importantly, we expect the transaction to be margin accretive within the first year following closing, which we expect to be early Q1 of 2027. Together, these initiatives, which were broadly unexpected by the market, that is the speed and its size as well, significantly broaden THEON's capabilities beyond our traditional markets, marking accelerated entrance into UAVs, counter-UAV, AI, and additional ISR technologies while creating a substantially larger ecosystem for future growth through a significantly expanded addressable market. Following the strategic investment just outlined, our strategic focus is now firmly on successful integration and realizing synergies across our expanded platform, while continuing to deliver strong organic commercial growth.
Again, here, the speed of operation integration is unprecedented, as it has started earlier even than THEON's obtaining approval, as in many cases, A, integration has commenced while seeking final approvals, and B, in other cases like Kappa and Harder Digital, the results have been swift and visible, as it will be further explained in this presentation. Looking at organic growth and one of our biggest opportunities is in the U.S. In order to speed up the industrial entry of THEON into the U.S., the company has commenced its investment in organic growth across distinct units in the East for man-portable products in Virginia and West Coast for electro-optical platforms in Oregon, respectively.
With an initial projected investment of about $30 million to be deployed over the next two to three years, including hiring new executives in product development and BD, which we have already commenced, as well as building our production capacity. Now, I would like to briefly address our investment in Exosens. This was a strategic investment, and THEON has concluded that the stake it currently holds represents a sufficient, and I will stress the word sufficient move, given Exosens position as a key supplier to THEON. We therefore feel that this investment has run its intended course, and now our focus turns to the partnership itself. As a result, THEON has paused the application process to pursue a board seat and THEON's potential ownership stake increase. Above all, we now eagerly look forward to working even more closely together with Exosens to capture new opportunities ahead.
Let me remind you that Exosens is an excellent detector company, and THEON, alongside to Exosens, is an excellent end product company, always in the electro-optical fields. Following a very active M&A period, our priority is now firmly on integration execution. We are progressing with the expected closing of Merio, the finalization of the Safran joint venture before year-end, subject to the remaining regulatory approvals. But in the meantime, we're not sitting idle, as management teams across the group remain fully focused on driving business growth and supporting customers. Our integration process is phased and disciplined with an initial focus on capturing business development and R&D synergies. Both aspects that of course, take some time to produce results, though we have seen much faster results so far in the acquired companies than us had anticipated.
While formal integration activities remained limited until closing, our teams have already identified several attractive commercial and technology opportunities that we will pursue once the transactions are approved and completed. At the same time, we're working to optimize efficiency across the group by improving working capital management, adopting a common treasury management system across our entities, and streamlining key processes. We're also reinforcing our group reporting capabilities to support a larger, more integrated organization, always with a priority to retain the entrepreneurial spirit, the same spirit that brought THEON at its current position. Overall, having significantly expanded THEON's platform and capabilities, our focus is now on successfully integrating these businesses, realizing synergies immediately, and converting the strategic value of our acquisitions into commercial growth and operational efficiencies. Moving on to slide eight.
Before I hand over to Philippe, I want to touch on our integration track record, and more specifically, our proven ability to deliver improved capacity and capability, drive commercial growth, and leverage technologies to co-develop with our partners. Starting with capacity and capability. We can evidence our ability here through the delivery of three times production capacity increase at Harder Digital, exactly as we have been announcing the last two years since acquisition. Alongside, and this is very important, image intensification tubes quality improving from 1,800 FOM to 2,000 FOM. This is a very important quality improvement. Highlighting our commercial growth ability at Kappa, revenue and profitability performance already ahead of our initial expectations, and the group has secured a new contract of approximately EUR 30 million with support from THEON, taking the business above its initial financial year 2026 revenue target.
Here, I would like also to add that we are very, very pleased, aside from the German operation of Kappa, we're very, very pleased with the capabilities of the Spanish-owned entity by Kappa, with the superior quality of its staff members and the results they produce, which allows us also to expand into Spain as well. Lastly, our co-development and ability to leverage technologies can be highlighted by our partnership with ShockEOS, which is already translating into meaningful commercial opportunities. The co-development of the PHYLAX stabilized multi-source system to be supplied to Rheinmetall is just one of a great example of this with an initial committed value in excess of EUR 40 million. Furthermore, I am very pleased to tell you that there is strong demand for ShockEOS products and services, especially in the Middle East.
On the back of it, as we have already announced, THEON is proceeding to acquiring, exercising its option, acquiring the majority of ShockEOS. Overall, the progress across these businesses demonstrates our strong track record on post-merger integration. We're not simply adding new capabilities to the wider THEON group. We're scaling them, improving performance, and leveraging technologies of the wider group while generating new commercial opportunities. Here, I must add that those invested companies, including Merio and HGH, are full of young entrepreneurial lead talent that THEON is already tapping in to take full advantage of. I'll now hand you over to Philippe, who will provide an update on the business and the wider defense market.
Thank you, Christian, and good afternoon, everyone. As briefly mentioned earlier, today, we will touch upon our recent activity as well as the overall market and sector drivers directing our steps. As I hope you have gleaned from our recent activity, we are at the forefront of a new wider market being created, and we have a clear outline of how we aim to lead in this battlefield evolution. We listen to our customers' operational requirements, design products to provide armies with agile, smart tech capabilities, and deliver cost-effective solutions they need to provide them with the technical edge and enhanced awareness in the battlefield. While we maintain our focus on soldier systems, 2026 has been a year where we, as expected, have seen a rising interest by end users on drones and other related ISR products across land, sea, and air.
Leveraging our newly acquired companies, you can now see that we have built an ecosystem of portfolio companies, which have strengthened technological capabilities and provide us access to more domains and accelerated commercial traction in the wider market, creating the foundational layer in order to achieve our vision of becoming a global defense optoelectronics champion. We will take a closer look at Merio today, since the transaction is now closer to closing, and as Christian mentioned earlier, some business and synergy opportunities have already been identified. Merio's role in our ecosystem is to expedite our growth into the evolving air domain. Based in France, Merio operates a similar asset-light business model to THEON and has built a strong reputation across the EU, delivering proven products deployed by major UAV programs.
As usual, the incumbent management team will remain in place to continue Merio's growth path, which they have delivered successfully over the past several years. As a quick reminder, we entered into binding terms in May of this year to acquire 80% of Merio with three main strategic points driving the deal. Strengthening THEON's product suite, increasing our footprint in Europe, and specifically France, and marking our entrance into the drone market, combining capabilities with other group companies. With Merio's competencies added to our arsenal, we strengthen THEON's air domain capabilities and enhance features across our wider ISR product range. We expect this investment to deliver several synergies for the group, including cross-selling opportunities and, of course, helping accelerate the joint venture with Safran.
Touching on these synergies in more detail, we expect the investment to drive cost synergies for the entire group, while also helping drive growth for Merio through access to our global network and R&D capabilities. Our operational base will also facilitate the scalability of Merio's operations. Before our investment, Merio already had a proven track record and a strong market position, which we expect to strengthen further as integration progresses, making its capabilities market-leading. For illustration purposes, we have put three peer companies on this slide, which are amongst the market leaders today in this field. What convinced us to invest was that Merio had all the technical and engineering capabilities to rival its leading peers but lacked the scale of operations, global reach, supply chain, and the financial and human capital that THEON can now provide.
As part of our group, we are confident Merio's capabilities will be amplified, giving us a springboard to capture meaningful market share and become more competitive in this fast-evolving field. Moving now to the market, we continue to see defense procurement in an expansion cycle with a significant growth opportunity for THEON. Global defense spending reached $2.9 trillion last year and is growing quickly, with decades of underinvestment in defense continued to be rectified and budgets and investments increasing globally. In our home market in Europe, we are seeing the fastest growth driven by NATO readiness and commitment to defense program spending from NATO members. Outside of Europe, army modernization programs are in progress across all regions, with significant opportunities across APAC, the Middle East and the largest market globally in the U.S., where we have significant penetration headroom.
This expansion cycle has supported sector fundamentals improve and helped drive sustained growth, with average industrial revenue growth of over 20% over the last 12 months. Margins are growing faster than revenue, highlighting sustainable growth and the shift to long-term contracts is expanding backlog visibility and points to long-term demand. THEON continues to operate at the intersection of this growth and having continuously expanded our addressable market, we expect to benefit from structural growth across the board. Whilst we have expanded our addressable market through recent investments, we'd like to emphasize that this structural growth is being seen across the market. Major budget allocations are being set, as you know, for UAS and counter-UAS systems, which we are targeting with our new ISR capabilities. Importantly, demand for soldier and man-portable equipment remains strong, especially in Europe.
We see our largest opportunity in Europe, where continuous procurement and an increasing number of countries joining OCCAR are driving long-term structural growth in the region. At the same time, we do see countries that have already advanced on night vision goggle procurements moving into procurement cycles for night vision and thermal sights. Outside Europe, some procurement decisions in the Middle East and Far East have been somewhat delayed due to short-term budget pressures. Specifically for Middle East, there is a temporary shift in spending priorities towards drones, counter-drone solutions, and air defense systems. Importantly, we view this as a timing-related effect rather than changes in the underlying demand, while we are also able now to address these drone and counter-drone demands with our new ISR capabilities.
The underlying requirements remain intact, and we expect these programs to progress and procurement activity to normalize towards the year-end and into the first quarter of 2027. This reinforces our confidence in the order outlook and supports the 1x book-to-bill target we set from the outset of the year, reflecting both the resilience of demand in our core markets and our expectation that delayed programs will resume. Overall, we believe THEON is well-positioned to capture the significant opportunities ahead, both within our traditional soldier solutions business and across our expanding ISR portfolio. I hope that gives you a clear overview of the opportunities that lay ahead for THEON. I'll now pass you on to Dimitris, who will dive into our financial performance in more details.
Thank you, Philippe. Let me start by turning to the financial performance for the first half of 2026. As you can see, we have maintained strong momentum through the first half, delivering continued growth alongside our best-in-class profitability. Revenue reached EUR 248.7 million, up 35% year-on-year, reflecting the continued strength on the business and our ability to execute against the significant demand we are seeing across the markets. Importantly, we delivered this growth while preserving our industry-leading profitability. Adjusted EBIT increased by 38% to EUR 65.1 million, with the adjusted EBIT margin improving by 40 basis points to 26.2%, compared with 25.8% in the prior year period. This performance remains firmly in line with our medium-term guidance, demonstrates the operating leverage embedded in our business model, and reinforces THEON's ability to combine high growth with sustained best-in-class margins. Operationally, we continued to strengthen the group's perform in the first half.
Harder Digital delivered further improvements in both quality and output, while we moved quickly to build new capabilities in drones and artificial intelligence. Strategically, we also remained active on the corporate front. As discussed earlier, we made targeted investments to broaden our technology base and accelerate our expansion across ISR, drones, counter-drone, and AI capabilities, consistent with the strategic direction we have previously outlined. Taken together, H1 2026 was another period of strong execution. We delivered significant revenue and earnings growth, maintained market-leading margins, and continued investing in the platform required to support our long-term growth ambitions. Moving on to the next slide. Our strong momentum continued through the first half, with order intake increasing 38% to EUR 232.5 million and revenue growing 35% to EUR 248.7 million, of which 24.7% reflects organic growth.
This represents a sustained book-to-bill ratio of approximately 1x , providing a solid foundation as we move into the second half. Importantly, alongside this growth, we are beginning to see the product mix evolve in line with our medium-term ambitions. Night vision remains the core of our business but now represents approximately 85% of H1 revenue, while non-night vision products have now grown to around 15%. This is an important development for THEON. As we have consistently said, our objective is now to move away from our leadership position in night vision. Rather, it is to build additional revenue streams alongside it, particularly across ISR and a broader digital and platform-based offering. That diversification is now beginning to come through in our H1 revenue mix, and we expect it to continue over time. From a geographic perspective, Europe remains our largest market, representing approximately 80% of revenue.
The Americas contributed around 6%, while the rest of the world accounted for approximately 14%. This mix reflects particularly strong demand in Europe, while also highlighting the opportunity to continue pursuing growth across our broader global footprint. Overall, we are delivering strong top-line growth while progressively shifting the revenue mix towards the more diversified business we are building for the medium term. Turning to our backlog, we continue to benefit from very strong revenue visibility, which is increasingly extending beyond our traditional 18-month horizon. At the end of June, soft backlog stood at approximately EUR 1.46 billion, comprising around EUR 1.2 billion of backlog and EUR 234 million of secured orders. In addition, we held approximately EUR 902 million of options, bringing soft backlog plus options to approximately EUR 2.36 billion.
This represents revenue coverage of around 2.4x and provides significant visibility over our longer-term growth trajectory, including approximately half a billion of soft backlog scheduled for delivery in financial year 2027. It also reflects the increasing weight of longer-term framework agreements and program-related orders within our order book. Moving to profitability, the first half again demonstrated the strength and scalability of asset light business model, with earnings growing ahead of revenue. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 42% to EUR 70 million, with the margin expanding by 130 basis points to 21.1%. Adjusted EBIT increased by 38% to EUR 65.1 million, with the margin reaching 26.2%, maintaining our best-in-class profitability. This performance was supported by gross margin expansion, disciplined cost management, operating leverage, and an improving product mix. Importantly, profitability remained resilient despite the step-up in acquisition activity and the consolidation of new businesses. Finally, net income more than doubled to EUR 74.3 million.
For clarity, this increase reflects both underlying profitability growth and a fair value gain on financial assets. Turning now to slide 21, I will touch on the investments we are making to support future growth. We are deliberately increasing expenditure to support the next phase of growth, both through additional capacity and the development of new products. CapEx increased to EUR 11.8 million in H1, equivalent to 4.7% of revenue, primarily reflecting organic expansion in Belgium and the accelerated capacity ramp-up at Harder Digital during this period. At the same time, expensed R&D increased to EUR 5.6 million, or 2.3% of revenue, as we accelerated the introduction of new products to capture growing demand across adjacent categories. This also includes work to qualify new materials and further reduce reliance on critical minerals.
These increases in CapEx and R&D remain in line with our guidance and reflect the investment required to support THEON's growth trajectory while expanding both our capacity and future product pipeline. Turning to cash generation, underlying performance remained strong in the first half, despite the expected seasonal investment in working capital ahead of second half deliveries. Net working capital absorption improved to 40%, adjusted to reflect prepayments related to recently announced investments. While this ratio remains above our medium-term target of approximately 35%, we expect this working capital investment to unwind as deliveries progress through the following quarters. Cash conversion remained robust at 83.2%, with a modest year-on-year reduction largely reflecting the CapEx acceleration discussed on the previous slide. Importantly, operating cash flow increased to EUR 30.7 million despite near-term working capital headwinds supported by strong underlying profitability.
Overall, the business continues to demonstrate strong underlying cash generation while investing in the working capital and capacity required to support our growth trajectory. Moving to the next slide, THEON remains well-funded with substantial financial flexibility to support the group's growth ambitions. Our financing structure comprises of a EUR 400 million revolving credit facility issued in October 2025, with a five-year tenure alongside a new EUR 325 million, five-year term loan signed in September 2026. Both facilities were secured on highly competitive pricing terms. As a matter of fact, the new term loan was agreed on even stronger terms than the RCF, underscoring the continued support of our global banking partners. Together, these facilities provide a strong and flexible funding position with no near term need to raise additional capital to support our strategic growth plans.
Building on that funding position, I would like to briefly address how we expect leverage to evolve over the coming years. Following completion of the HGH and Merio transactions, pro forma leverage is expected to rise temporarily to approximately 3x. While this is above our target of below 2.5x EBITDA, these investments are supported by a clear strategic rationale. We also have a clear deleveraging path supported by continued revenue growth, successful integration of the recently acquired businesses, operating leverage, and stronger cash generation. On this basis, we expect leverage to return below 2.5x our EBITDA during 2027 and fall below 2x in 2028. In addition, we retain further flexibility through our liquid financial assets. If monetized, these assets would reduce pro forma leverage to below 1x in 2027 and below 0.5x in 2028.
This can also be achieved without necessarily relinquishing our ownership on these assets. Let us also not forget that all these minority investments are now generating capital gains. Taken together with the funding structure outlined on the previous slide, this gives us confidence in our balance sheet position and our ability to fund growth while maintaining appropriate leverage. I will now hand back to Christian, who will present our revised guidance and wrap up today's call before we move to Q&A.
I hope it's clear the progress we have made this year. A lot more than announced has been going on in THEON internally in preparation of integration, looking at the future, which cannot be reflected in announcements. That's why I know internally we're extremely proud, but know the work doesn't stop here.
On that basis, and under the frame that THEON always will remain conservative in its estimates and prefers to surprise the markets on the positive side rather than the negative side. We would like to say that first we maintain our guidance with confidence towards the EUR 600 million target of revenues for this year. We are providing, though, an update to our margin guidance. With increased confidence in our operational efficiencies and expected synergies to come through more recent investment, we can be clear that we expect our adjusted EBIT margin to be at least 26%, not just this year, but over the medium term. I believe this is important also in the context with very legitimate skepticism, all these years, whether we can maintain our profit margins given the increase in revenues.
Well, it seems that we have, again, managed to overcome this skepticism and deliver results like this one, where the margins are increasing while revenues are also increasing. Overall, this reflects confidence in both our operational momentum for financial year 2026 and our medium-term ambition to continue building THEON into a larger, more diversified global defense technology leader in the electro-optical segment of the market, which is about EUR 8 billion, I repeat. I hope we have not only provided you evidence and confidence in that we do what we say we will, but have clearly also outlined the growth opportunities ahead of THEON over the coming years. With that, now it is time for your questions.
Thank you. We will begin the Q&A session now. Please remember to submit your questions using the Q&A text box. I will now hand the call back to management to begin. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Tracy, and thank you, Christian. We have received a few questions already. The first one, does your medium-term organic growth target of 15% include HGH and Merio?
No. As we have already guided, we expect a 15% annual growth, which is going to be complemented by acquisitions such as the one of HGH and Merio. So no, the answer is no, this is not included.
Okay, the next question. By early 2027, THEON will have completed a series of acquisitions over the last two years, including Harder Digital, Kappa, Merio, and HGH, and minority investment in several other companies. For these companies where you have majority control, do you have any plans to introduce a centralized ERP system to optimize group-level working capital needs and inventory levels?
Sure. As a matter of fact, the plan is to centralize a lot of our functions. Finance is one of them. ERP is another one. This is going to help us move on more efficiently in integrating the companies that we have acquired.
Moving to my next question. As your sales mix evolves with a rising revenue contribution of thermal, ISR, and platform optronics businesses, where do you see your net working capital sales trend evolving? Is client advance ratios in platform optronics ISR contracts higher?
Well, we typically anticipate that as we move on to orders from areas such as ISRs, from platforms which relate to more long-term contracts from primes such as Rheinmetall, for instance, which is our customer, we expect that advance payments are going to be paid. We do not know, however, how soon this will impact our net working capital.
Okay, great. Conversion of backlog to revenue and potential supply bottlenecks remain a key investor concern for defense companies. Within your optronics ISR segment, what has been your experience so far in terms of potential risks to your component supply? While extending supply contracts for IITs with Exosens cover your component demand in a night vision component, how confident do you feel about supply resilience for your platform optronics, thermal, and ISR businesses?
Okay, there are several questions here. This is Christian Hadjiminas. I will try to answer as many as I can. First of all, the backlog to revenues. We do not see any bottlenecks. Also in the platform business, we do not see any bottlenecks on supply. Of course, this is easy to say because at this stage, we are at low levels of sales because we just started with Kappa and other products we have. We do not see any major or any sign of threat down the road. The major threat was in the past on tubes. We have addressed that by the expansion of capacity by Exosens and also in Harder Digital, which went in line with the demand. Again, we have to calibrate and not expand capacities before the demand is there. What else? Yes.
That is basically it, and maybe, Dimitris, you want to answer the-
No, no, it is okay.
If I may add here. Any potential supply issues on the ISR business, obviously, we are looking already into this. We do not see any at the moment, but obviously we are always proactive to make sure that we have similar agreements like we have with Exosens for other critical components on the platform side, so that even when the demand goes up, that we are still covered, of course.
Great. Thank you, Philippe. Moving on to the next question. With regard to Exosens. Exosens are planning to three times increase thermal camera production in 2026. How much of a competitive threat does this pose?
First of all, the thermal camera production, we are very happy for Exosens because what we are advancing now is an end product. It is the gimbals. The thermal camera is just a component. We will be very happy, and we are talking to Exosens as we talk to other suppliers, to get proper support like we get from Exosens on the tube side.
Great. Can you provide us with an update on your efforts in getting a BOD seat at Exosens?
Yes, I think that was covered. We paused the process because we realized that there is no need for that, no need to increase, and no interest to increase our stake in Exosens. At the same time, we realized there were so many applications to be done in various jurisdictions that it would draw down on management time, and it was a moot point by now, since we do not plan to increase our equity stake in Exosens. Also regarding the Board of Directors, given what happened the last six, 12 months, where we have strengthened our relationship with Exosens, this may have caused problems for conflicts of interest, although that could have been addressed as well, but there was no need for all this complication. Our relationship with Exosens is better than ever.
I repeat, Exosens is a very good detector company, and we are a very good end product company. These are the highways where we work together parallelly. Thank you.
Thank you, Christian. The next question is focusing on orders and margins. As you have mentioned, you typically see an acceleration in both orders and deliveries in H2. Any comments on what the mix of both orders and deliveries may look like in the second half, and how does this approach your new margin targets this year?
Well, first of all, I have already mentioned that we expect at the end of the year to have 19% of the total revenues to be non-night vision. As you can imagine, the more non-night vision products we have, although we have good profitability on night vision, the more non-night vision products we have, these carry higher profit margins. So that is why we are also very confident about achieving above 26%. Once again, I will repeat, I know I am repetitive here, but as I always did, the policy of our company is to be very conservative. That is why from the beginning of the year, when we give guidance, whether it is book-to-bill ratios and everything is conservative. When the first three, four months, five months of the year, we start seeing the first results for the year, then we would tend to revise upward our guidance.
As I said, our approach is to surprise positively the markets, not negatively. I know a lot of investors would have liked us to say what we believe we can achieve, but it has to be backed by solid facts and solid feedback from the market. So far, everything is going up, and we expect this in terms of guidance, numbers and everything. They are all going up. But again, as they go up and as we increase our confidence that we can definitely deliver, then we will be revising those guidance. Thank you.
Great. Moving to the next question with regards to the investment in U.S. that Christian mentioned earlier. Regarding the approximately $30 million investment plans for the company's U.S. expansion over the next two to three years. Could you please clarify whether this is a newly announced investment or part of an investment plan THEON has already disclosed previously?
Yes. Good question. We have already announced that we will be expanding in the U.S., so part of it was reflected in our CapEx future needs. Now that is, and again, it's spread over two to three years, so it's a $15 million to $10 million a year. Now we have more concrete data where we know exactly what we should be doing, especially in the West Coast, which is for our base, that we're building a base for the platform business in the States. We are more able to give specific numbers.
Great. Thank you. Moving to the next question. Alpha Bank announced the successful completion of EUR 325 million syndicated financing for THEON International. Where will these funds be allocated, Dimitris?
Yeah. This will mostly fund the acquisition of HGH, which is going to be concluded in the first quarter of 2027.
Great. Thank you. One more question on- One second. In margin guidance. In the past, you mentioned the OCCAR night vision goggle contract to be less margin, but despite this, you see EBIT margin more than 26%. Why is that? Is that because of the margins of HGH?
No, HGH is not. If it is guidance for the future, definitely HGH is an important factor for that. HGH has about EUR 40 million in revenues this year, maybe more. Our ambitious target is to double their sales. Here, let me say something which is very important, and of course, to answer your question, this gives us higher confidence to increase the margin. Which by the way, on the traditional products, it gets improved because we are building much bigger volume, and that absorbs a lot of the fixed costs and increases the profit margin. So it's a normal process, which more than compensates for potential more competitive situation in the market for night vision. On the other hand, and I have to spend some time here, we are not conservative on our BD targets.
Let's take HGH, for which we still don't have an approval, but we already have started the process of supporting their sales. I will only say that maybe people have not realized the importance of HGH within the portfolio of THEON. HGH has products that are passive detectors of drones. Passive detector for drones means that they cannot be detected from the enemy. When you combine those things, and initially there's a drone detection by an HGH passive, you pass it on to the electro-optics, which is of THEON, products like TALOS, and then TALOS passes the coordinates to the countermeasures. These are passive systems. As far as drone detection, HGH has the only, that we know of, modern updated with AI system. Therefore, we feel very confident and, for instance, let me give two examples very quickly because I want to be specific.
In the Middle East, of course, there is big demand for that, and this is very helpful also for infrastructure facilities. Therefore, in the Middle East, we see demand, and now all of a sudden, the last few weeks, because of what happened in the attack in a German airport, we see interest coming up, and it's already manifested in Europe about protection of airports. Of course, and this is the beauty of HGH and THEON, two entrepreneurial organization working together. Of course, we are rushing and we are already making the first presentation in this account. Again, we have to wait for the formal approval for the acquisition of HGH, but as I said, we're not sitting idle. BD and R&D integration has started across the board because it needs to be like that.
Last but not least, I will stress again, because at the end of the day, we are talking about human capital. We are really surprised, despite the due diligence we have done before we invest in those companies. We are truly surprised by the quality of the staff, in HGH, in Merio, in Kappa. As I mentioned, Kappa has a subsidiary that is full of young people, very energetic, and I was pleasantly surprised about that. The same thing with HGH. All these companies are acting as entrepreneurial companies. They have in various key markets like, for instance, in the U.S. or Middle East, they already have a presence. Now we are integrating their presence with our presence. In the States, we have Kappa and HGH having offices, and all this we are in the process of integrating under one umbrella.
We are very, very optimistic about HGH, about Merio and about what we have done. Again, in our case, because we need to bring results quickly, BD and R&D integration are the top priorities before, and once we get the approvals, we go to ERPs and internal management processes.
Great. We will see some questions on HGH and Merio. I think you covered most of them. Moving to the next one with regards to the joint venture with Safran that were announced during summer. The question is, can you remind us what are the objectives and the timing and what to expect from this joint venture?
This is an area where I would consider this as an accomplishment of this year, that is the JV with Safran, because Safran is a tremendously strong company, and we are very honored that they have trusted us with this initiative. We, of course, we are working hand in hand. It is not only the fact that only with this combination we can become very quickly the number one gimbal company in the world by end of 2027, but it is also, as I said, it is very important to show signs that are productive collaborations between European companies. So I consider this an accomplishment of THEON this year, and we are very grateful for the trust that Safran has provided us with.
Thank you, Christian. Moving to the next question, I think that's for you, Philippe. Night vision, what about the tenders in Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, et cetera? Details about the timing, the amounts, and if you can give a summary of the situation in Asia in general on the night vision markets.
Yes. A good question. In Asia, as you know, the energy prices have increased quite a lot with the conflict in the Middle East. There are some pressures on the budget, which means, and I think you mentioned it as well during the presentation, that certain projects have gone a little bit back. There are some delays in certain projects. They are not dead. They are still there. We can see them. We're working on them. There's been some delays. Same as we see as well in the Middle East because of priorities for air defense and counter-drone equipment. We expect these projects to pick up again towards the end of the year or at the latest, at the beginning of next year.
Thank you, Philippe. Moving now to the last question about the French market with Merio, HGH, and now JV with Safran. Why are you focusing heavily on the French market? What's the strategy behind that? If you can explain briefly the differences between the three, the joint venture and the acquisitions.
Okay. First of all, as we have stated, we consider the French market as an export-oriented market. In other words, what we're aiming is not to so much to sell to France, although those companies, they sell in France. We're aiming more to take advantage because both of those companies belonged and still belong by young people with the AI technologies, very entrepreneurially oriented. It's not that we're focusing on the French market as a destination, but we're focusing on the French market as an export possibility. Also, I need to tell you that we're going to be establishing an AI center as part of HGH, far beyond what the HGH products, which they already have AI. We see that there's a lot of talents around Paris in the universities, and we really want to take advantage of that.
Now, the difference is that Merio and JV with Safran is exactly the same thing. Merio will be working under the JV of THEON with Safran. HGH, as I explained, is a total different company.
Great. Thank you. The last question for Philippe. Can you please talk about what you're seeing in the supply chain? Is there a disruption in chips and critical minerals?
Not really. Critical minerals, yes. Obviously, as most of you may know, there's germanium used in thermal lenses. But we have taken steps to basically transfer the lenses to germanium-free material, not to be dependent on this mineral. In terms of chips and all other electronic components, yes, there is, I wouldn't say disruption, but the demand is there, but we are still covered at the moment. As I said earlier on, we have taken all the steps basically to make sure that there's no disruption in the supply chain.
Great. Thank you, Philippe, and thank you everyone. I will now conclude the meeting. Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.