Hello and good afternoon. On behalf of H C Andersen Capital, I'd like to welcome you all to this presentation of the Q2 Half One 2025 Report from SKAKO, which was published last week. My name is Philip Coombs, and today I have the pleasure of welcoming SKAKO 's CEO, Lionel Girieud, and CFO Thomas Pedersen. They will take us through the numbers today. Before I pass over to them, I'd like to quickly thank everyone for joining us and remind you that you can ask questions in the chat box below. With that said, I'd like to pass over to Thomas.
Hello everybody, and good afternoon also. A warm welcome here from SKAKO. As normally, I will take the introduction and the agenda on the financial part, and then Lionel will take over and give us a deep dive on a part of our vibration business. At the end, we will touch base on our guidance for the current year. At the beginning, we have this disclaimer due to the fact that we could end up mentioning something about forward-looking numbers and so on. Of course, they are based with some assumptions and also some uncertainties. The agenda, as I mentioned, is as follows here. The key figures, SKAKO at a glance. We are still one focused company in the vibration business. We have those three customer segments, which are minerals, recycling, and fasteners.
130 employees worldwide, headquartered in Faaborg, and then main offices in Strasbourg and San Sebastián in France and Spain. We have approximately 2,000 shareholders, hereof 95% in Denmark, and the Board of Directors and Management holds more than a 1/3 of the share capital. Looking into the H1 report, here we have H1 2025 in brief. I would like to mention here that, as you maybe also have written, we are hit a little bit by the subdued market, which especially has hit us negative in the fastener segment in the northern of Europe. Even though that, we have increased our revenue with approximately 13% to DKK 139 million. We also see an increasing order backlog at approximately DKK 190 million. We also see a decrease in our EBIT with 34% down to DKK 6.7 million.
If we jump into the profit and loss, even though that we increased the revenue with 13%, we realized a decline in our EBIT. Revenue increased due to the big increase in our minerals segment driven by the two large projects for OCP in Morocco. As you maybe have realized, in August last year, we reached two big orders in the minerals segment for more than DKK 150 million, and those should be delivered in 2025 and 2026. The gross profit increased by 3.8% to DKK 36.3 million, but the gross margin ratio actually declined with 2.2 PP. That is, of course, due to the higher share of plant sales, which increased in this first half of the year with 20%. The margin on plant sales is lower than on the after-sales. We saw a decline in after-sales with 5.2% to approximately DKK 35 million.
We have invested in saved people to reach a growth in the recycling business. Also, we have invested in temporary capacity costs for the OCP projects in both France and Morocco. When the revenue actually is not coming 100% from the beginning of the year, it impacts the capacity cost. Therefore, we saw a decrease in our operating profit EBIT. The order backlog is still high, DKK 190 million. It is, of course, driven by a significant order backlog for the OCP. We also saw an increase in order intake and order backlog for the remaining part of the business, which is positive. If we look at the different segments, due to the big OCP order, we see an increase in the minerals segment, which we also saw in Q2. Which was different than in Q1 was an increase again in our recycling revenue.
For the first half of the year, the revenue for recycling was actually a decrease, but it increased in the second quarter. fastener is still struggling very much, and we saw an increase in the first half of the year at approximately 33%. What we also can see here is if we look at the three customer segments, fastener is in the first half of the year approximately DKK 12 million out of DKK 139 million. The share from fastener is below 10%. Looking at the balance sheet and the key financial ratios, as we have been always, we are an asset-light company. Most of our assets are actually non-current and short-term assets. We saw an increase in our assets with 5.6% that is mainly driven by higher cash- in- hands. We saw a decrease in net debt, and we also saw a decrease in our net working capital.
That is driven by the huge prepayment that we received from the OCP projects, which more or less all the time during the project is cash flow positive. The cash flow from operating activities was positive with DKK 27 million compared to a negative cash flow in the same period last year at DKK 23 million. On one of the numbers that we are looking into, it is our net debt to EBITDA 0.5% compared to our target of being below 2.5%. That was what I would like to say about the financial figures. I will hand it over to Lionel to give us a little deep dive.
Yeah, thank you, Thomas. Good afternoon to everybody. Today, I will introduce SKAKO to you, and I will share key reminders and updates on our strategy. As Thomas said before, SKAKO Vibration works for three segments, three industrial segments. The first one and the most important in terms of revenue is the minerals segment with the revenue share which has increased for the last month, as Thomas said, too, due to these two large orders that we got in the second- half year of 2024 for the Moroccan customer OCP. We have the second historical segment, which is the fastener segment, for which the revenue share has decreased. It's quite low due to the mix of revenue and these two orders coming from OCP. The last segment is the recycling industry, and that's a segment that we have been developing for the last years in the group.
We have still in the group six companies and three main companies, I would say, on the six. The first one is in Denmark, in Faaborg. That's the mother company. That's as well the expert center for the fastener segment. The second company is in France, in Strasbourg, close to Germany. That's an expert center for minerals. The last one in San Sebastián in Spain, that's the expert center of the group for the recycling segment. What we do, we say that we develop and we design, we manufacture, and we sell machines for processing bulk product. We are specialized on vibratory technology. We have a quite wide range of products. We usually say that SKAKO Vibration equipment moves, separates, and cleans bulk materials. A short focus on the two historical segments. The first one is the minerals segment.
This is an industry where we process minerals, bulk products like stone and ore, and so on. For us, this segment is split in three sub-segments. The first one is a mining segment. For us, it means mainly customers out of Europe, especially in Africa, and customers and companies which own large mining sites. The second sub-segment is the construction sector. It includes for us the quarries, the sand pits, cement plants, concrete plants, and all of this kind of industry. The third one is the iron and steel industry. In this segment, our machines are used in the first part of the steel-making process where there are materials like iron ore, coke, and these kinds of things before the steel is made. The second segment for us is the Fastener segment. It's split in three sub-segments as well. The first one is the Automotive sector.
You know that this industry is experiencing and facing some challenges currently. The second one is the Construction sector. The Fastener industry is an industry where small metallic parts are made, like screws, nuts, and washers. For sure, we use that in the Automotive sector, but also in the Construction sector. Screws are very used in this industry. The last sub-segment for us is ammunition. I would say it's a sub-segment which has been developing for the last years, with an increased demand from our customers and from companies which work in this segment. Recycling is the third segment. This is a segment, as I told you, that we have been developing for the last years. We do that by two ways.
The first way is that we made the acquisition some years ago of the Spanish company DARTEK, which became SKAKO DARTEK, and which had a very strong experience in processing of waste and old bulk materials. The second part comes from our own old, I would say, know-how from the mineral and Fastener segment. We use that to develop the business in the Recycling segment. I will come back on that a little bit later to give you some good examples. What is important to know in the Recycling segment is that sorting technologies are key in this industry. The goal of all processes, more or less, is to sort the different waste and the different materials. There is no competition between the different types of sorting technologies.
Our type of sorting equipment is complementary to other types of sorting equipment, like, I don't know, something like optical sorter and so on. You cannot have an optical sorter without having before a screen or to have sorted by dimension the bulk material. That's very important to know. We propose four functions for this industry. The first function is Sorting by dimension. We call that screening. We separate the material by different sizes. The second function that we propose is Sorting by density or difference of density. For instance, it could be very useful if one wants to make the recycling of electrical wires to separate the plastic or the rubber to the copper, for instance. The third function is the Feeding of other sorting equipment because with vibration, you can control the feeding and the flow rate of feeding.
You have a very good, as well, distribution of material in all of the wheels of the sorting equipment. That's the third function. The last one is Washing and Scrubbing. It's used to remove the dirt and the mud, for instance, for some waste. Especially, it's used in a sub-segment we call the C&D, Construction and Demolition waste recycling. Here you can see our split of the main sub-segment of recycling. There are five main sub-segments for us. The first one is the most known for everybody. That's Household recycling. Then there is the Metal recycling, the Glass recycling, the Paper and Plastic recycling. The last one that I would like to focus a bit on is Construction waste recycling. You can see that it's a complex industrial segment for us because working with metal is absolutely different from working with glass or paper or plastic.
It requires a lot of knowledge and different know-how from our technicians and engineers. I would like to focus now a little bit on this fifth sub-segment, the Construction and Demolition waste recycling coming from the construction. You understand that. You can see on the screen a typical plant of recycling of Construction and Demolition waste. On the top of this flowsheet, of this picture of this plant, actually, the plants can be divided in two. On the top, you can see the part of the plant which is mainly used to clean and wash and separate the stones or the similar to stones, part of concrete or this kind of thing, this kind of size of material, of big material. In the bottom of the plant, it's more the plant which processes with water, mud, and sand, some smaller particles.
We have a very, very good range of products for the first part of this plant with screens to separate by dimension or washers. This equipment has been developed in the mineral segment originally to work to wash and separate stones, for instance, for the different customers that we have in the mineral industry. More or less for us, this sub-segment of the recycling segment is driven by mineral players. The players are more or less the same. Nowadays, we call that urban mining. It's another solution for our customers to get some raw materials. The players are the same. The technology is the same. I would say the equipment and the range of our products are the same. You can see the strong link between an historical segment that we had for decades in the group and this new segment in the recycling. That's all for me for today. I'll let you now, Thomas, about the guidance.
Thank you very much. As you probably, all of you are aware of, the first- half of the year has not been as expected for the SKAKO business. Despite the lower than expected revenue and EBIT in H1, we still expect to reach our guidance. That is because of the strong order backlog that we have and also the ramp-up of the OCP project. The guidance maintains, as stated earlier this year, revenue growth between 30% and 40% and an operating profit before special items of DKK 27 million- DKK 31 million. Of course, when we are looking into the first half of the year, it also means that we need to reach significant growth and earnings in the second half of the year. Going through the budget and the estimate that we have, we still feel that we are in the range of reaching our guidance. With that said, we are ready to take your questions.
That's great. Thank you for the presentation. We have got some questions, so I will get straight into them. We just had a good walkthrough of the recycling part, and we've got a question here that asks if the ramp-up of sales personnel in the recycling business, when we can expect that to materialize. We saw that there was a return to growth in Q2, so maybe it's already impacting, but maybe you could add a little detail on the sort of timeline for converting sales activities into active projects and how you expect this to evolve.
I can give you the... I would say that what we can say as well is that our current backlog is quite high, and it's coming from this first good last year that we have in order intake and as well from this OCP order that we had last year. For sure, I would say the activity and the order intake end of last year in recycling was not as high as expected. That would explain the average performance that we had at the beginning of the year. The first- half year was good, better than the first- half year of last year in all segments. We are still quite positive about the rest of the year.
Okay, that's great. I'll move on to the OCP project where we have a question about the delays that are mentioned in the first- half. It says, do these delays come with any financial impacts or sort of a penalty for OCP or anything like that?
Not at all. It's coming from the administration of Morocco. It's a quite big project. We had faced some delays coming from an administrative issue, but nothing more. I would say, and Thomas can confirm, that the cash part of the project is very good.
That's understood. If we're staying on Morocco, something we saw in the first- half is a slight squeeze on the gross margin from a higher share of plant sales versus the after-sales. Can we expect that after-sales will also be a part of the agreements in Morocco when these plants are up and running?
Yes, we can expect that, but it will not be tomorrow. It's something for the years to come, not this year.
Okay, great. Maybe you could just add a bit more detail on the margin composition of the pipeline at the moment. The order book is obviously historically very high at the moment. Should we expect that margins will normalize back towards levels where they have been once these projects are back up and running? Maybe you could just add a little detail to how you see the margin breakdown of the current pipeline.
Of course, if you look into the split between plant and after-sales, then of course, due to the fact that the plant sales are driven by the OCP in Morocco have a lower margin than we have on the after-sales, then of course also the second half of the year will be impacted by a lower margin than normally due to the fact that we have higher plant sales.
That's great. We have a question here. We've seen strong growth in the Morocco part, in the minerals part, and somewhat back in the other parts. Has there been a direct link here where more resources are going towards the minerals and that's at the cost of other business units, or is it not related to that and it's individual segment by segment, the different performance?
The performance in the different segments is of course not linked 100% together, but based on the questions that this participant has, we can say that we have ramped up on the OCP and the revenue started a little later than the ramp-up of the capacity costs. That has, of course, impacted the result negatively due to the fact that we have not received that much earning on the project in the first- half of the year than expected. Another issue is that we have invested in saved people in the recycling business, but we also have an overlap between some people who are going on pension and some new employees. That has also impacted the OpEx in the first- half of the year. We have some pensions that actually will impact the OpEx in the second- half of the year.
That's great. I have a question, not from the audience, but while we're on the different segments, you showed in the fastener part that you have some activities within the defense segment. We know that defense in Europe has been very topical this year with everything in Russia and Ukraine and now with the Trump administration too. You say it's a smaller part of the business, but is there a larger opportunity within the defense space for SKAKO?
Yes, we can. This is something that we believe. We are working on developing this business. It is a very secure and, I would say, limited business as well so far for us. It is a bit difficult to enter the business because it is a very limited number of companies which work in this business. It has not been developed a lot in Europe for the last year. It is something new, but this is something that we want to develop.
That's understood. Great. One last question from me. We've seen solid cash flow in the first- half of the year and the debt is falling. Could you add some perspectives on how you're looking at capital allocation? Are we expecting dividends or potentially looking at M&A? What can shareholders expect from capital allocation moving forward?
The strong cash flow in the first- half of the year is mainly driven by those prepayments for the OCP project. When we have received prepayments, of course we will also build up this project during the second- half of the year. The positive impact will then actually be limited in the second- half of the year as we use some of the prepayments to produce for the OCP projects.
That makes very good sense. We're out of questions and almost out of time. I'd like to end the presentation there and thank you both, Lionel and Thomas, for another good walkthrough of the results. I hope to see people who have listened again soon. Thank you for your time.
Thank you.