Hello everyone, to the Basler earnings call for the first six months. We wait for another 30 seconds or one minute that everyone is on board and then we start. It looks like everyone is on board. Again, warm welcome to the first six-month earnings report of 2025. Warm welcome from Ines and myself. We're going to go through the presentation together today as last time. Before we start the presentation, we have to, yeah, read or at least hint you to our legal disclaimer that all the content we are giving today are based on views and assumptions made by the management using information available at this point in time. These are also forward-looking statements by nature, and they are subject to significant known and unknowns and risks and uncertainties. The presentation today, and we are happy to present you, a good momentum, a positive momentum.
We will start with an executive summary. I will sum the situation up. Ines then will dig deeper into the financials, giving you a quick glance at our share, development. I take over again for the outlook. Hopefully, we have at the end of the call a lively Q&A session. We are happy to answer all your questions. Starting with the executive summary and with the market environment we have seen in the first half-year 2025. To put it in a nutshell, the market situation was still not stellar, even though it was a bit better than the industry expected it. For the German industry that exports worldwide, bookings were down by -4%, and billings were up by 9%. What you can see is billings, high single digit. That was better than expected.
In the, let's say, last months of the first half-year, the booking situation went down so that we see, yeah, bookings much weaker than billings. There is at the moment not a significant positive momentum in the industry, but we come to our situation later. If we look a bit deeper, especially, yeah, all verticals, despite semicon, advanced notes, and everything that is artificial intelligence related, and also besides logistics and warehouse automation, all markets and verticals seem to be quite down. Also, when you look at the industrial PMIs in the advanced, yeah, nations that we sell to, where high-tech machinery is being developed and produced, these PMIs are around 50, sometimes a bit lower, sometimes a bit higher. In general, still a relatively slow situation from a market perspective. There was also one significant flop, especially in the EV battery.
There were high hopes in the whole industry that capacities will be built up in electric vehicle battery production. The yield is pretty low, so you need a lot of yield management, which also means a lot of vision technology can help. These high hopes are dashed due to the slow demand and falling demand of EV battery, overcapacity, changes in policy also, that lead at the moment to the situation that many of those projects are stopped or even canceled. What is a much better situation than the years before are the inventory levels at clients. They reached normal levels. We really see the demand. There is no muting effect due to high inventory levels at client side.
From the competition situation, with the especially Chinese and Asian competition in China and Asia-Pacific, and this slow market situation, the intensity was pretty high the first month, first half-year, in 2025. We talked a lot about it in the last call. The newspaper is still full of it. The unclear U.S. tariff situation and geopolitical uncertainties hold back CapEx decisions. This means for our clients that their business is unsecure and also muted because 99% of our clients are CapEx machine or CapEx device makers that integrate our vision technology into their machines or devices. What came on top in the second quarter of this year was especially a significant FX headwind, due to the depreciation or devaluation of U.S. dollar, Chinese yuan, Japanese yen, and Korean won against the euro. We will talk later about this. This definitely had quite an impact at our P&L as well.
How have we done in this market environment? Also here in a nutshell, we outperformed the market by far. Bookings up 22%, billings up 20%. As explained in our last call for Q1, we also participated or benefited from larger orders in the fourth quarter that we carried over and built in the first quarter chip. The good momentum in order entry continued. The sound order entry in the first months of the year and actually in the later months of this first half-year, we also had increasing bookings that at the end led to a situation that the second quarter in book-to-bill ratio is significantly above one, which also gives us a good momentum for the third quarter. Strongest regions in the whole first half-year, U.S. and China outperforming significantly the rest of Asia and also the European market. The gross profit margin improved by 0.7% points to 47.2%.
However, we had quite some negative effects, especially in the second quarter due to FX. We lowered our break-even point already with all the initiatives last year and the cost-saving programs and went into the year with the break-even point of EUR 180 million. However, due to the change in FX, this break-even point is at the moment more in the range of EUR 190 million. All in all, we are pleased to give also not only the revenue and bookings growth here, but also to report that we are back in the black numbers with a pre-tax result of almost EUR 8 million and an EBIT margin of 7%. Looking at the team structure and size, due to the cost-saving programs compared to the middle of last year, we more or less reduced by 60 FTEs over the course of the last 12 months. The distribution has not changed much.
There are slight deviations, but we also have some allocation changes here from a function perspective. More or less, you can say distribution is kept stable, but we are 60 people less or 60 FTEs less on board compared to the mid of last year. The increase in sales and the reduction in staff have caused a situation where we are back in the R&D quotas where, by and large, we want to be around 13%, coming from a relatively high number of 15.5%. Also, 13% is high. We are, let's say, still on the gas pedal regarding investments into new products. We don't have a specific or launch specific new products in the second quarter, but in all these areas, mainstream product systems, performance product systems, 3D vision technologies, and also a new onboard also the line scan systems.
We all invested in that and especially also invested further heavily in our pylon software development kit where all our products are based on. This is the design kit or this development kit for our clients with which the client can combine all the hardware he gets from us and also connects our hardware and integrates our hardware into this specific system or device. To give you some highlights, what we have done, we were on multiple exhibition shows over the course of the first half-year. One of the recent shows was the Automatica in Munich, one of the big automation shows of the world. We are presenting here technologies, vision technologies all around, robot guidance, and also certain in logistics and also in the production space. We position ourselves here as a solution provider, combining different components into a solution for, for example, robot guidance.
Another interesting topic we brought with us today is from our innovation department. In our innovation department, we are at the moment working on new concepts, how our clients can virtually test our products because typically our clients test hardware before or during their development project. One of this is quite a heavy effort, and it also takes some time to get hardware, to install hardware, test it, and then maybe change it again. We are working on virtualizing this based on NVIDIA Omniverse space. We were also on NVIDIA's global tech conference in Paris, demonstrating this. You see some pictures how this looks like. Below in the picture, you see a virtual scenery. Actually, all our products become virtualized.
The customer is setting up the scenery, and then the customer can virtually exchange and test different products in the virtual space and then acquire all the hardware that is a good fit. This is definitely a time-saving for the client. This is all pretty new stuff, but we want to also showcase some of the topics we do for the longer run. All this pays in our strategy to move step by step from a camera company in the factory automation space to really become one of the largest full-range providers in the computer vision space, addressing multiple vertical markets and offering multiple components and also combining those components to a pre-configured or bundled solution. I hope this has given you some glance from the executive standpoint. I will continue and hand over to Ines for the financials.
Thank you, Hardy, and happy to present the financials to you. Here on the first page, we are continuing the view where you can see the sales distribution by region. I think following up on the second page that we presented to you, right? You see the trend of an increase in the Americas and Asia. This is in the distribution driven by the major projects and also really the strong development that we are seeing in these two regions. Jumping to my favorite picture so far, I would say, here's the bookings and the billings. You might recall that in the last quarter we indicated that our bookings of EUR 52.1 million might be indicative of the revenue that we are expecting in Q2. Now looking at the outcome, we think it was really indicative.
Taking a look at the picture we had for Q2, it is really that EUR 61.2 million in the bookings, which is a momentum of 26% above what we really had last year. The 22% you saw on the first page was for the first half year in comparison. This time we have to say the EUR 61 million we don't hold really indicative for the next quarter, but we are definitely pretty pleased on the performance of the bookings. This is again driven also by a larger project in China and the Americas, which will help us in the usually weaker quarter of Q3. Holding against weaker bookings, but also usually lower turns in the third quarter of the year. Overall bookings and billings, good performance and according to our plan. Jumping from the top line to the gross profit margin, I think this might be even more interesting.
I like the EBIT picture even more or even better. What do we see here? You see that in euros, of course, the gross margin declined and also our gross profit margin declined. That has majorly three components this time. We have about a EUR 7 million decrease in comparison or lower revenues in comparison to Q1. We have a volume impact here. On top of that volume impact, currently the currency effects are hurting us. That started in the last months of Q1, but we didn't have a really big push in Q1. We had a nearly EUR 2 million effect from currency in Q2, which hurt us in the revenue, of course, but also had a push through to the gross profit. We have some natural hedges and hedges in place, but it's still not a full natural hedge in there due to our structure.
You also can see the impact of the tariff. Since Q2, we are pushing the tariffs over to our customers, but we had a little bit of a delay in the push implementing the project. We are currently for this Q2, running at a negative impact of around $400,000. For the future, the push is in place. We are basically plus minus zero here in the effect, but we have to keep in mind that pushing that tariff has a positive impact, so to speak, to the revenue by the zero impact of the gross margin and the EBIT, also having a negative percentage, yeah, to the gross margin in percentage and the EBIT in percentage. Same picture here.
I think also last time here we were, yeah, we were already indicating that the 10.1% of Q1 was a very, very good, very good performance of that quarter, driven by the volume and not so much impacted by the FX. What you can see here is really a push through mainly from the gross margin. We are losing from the volume. This is the one angle, but also you have the push through in the effect from the X-ray and also from the tariff in here. This mainly explains what you're seeing. We are running good on our operative costs. A little bit of a positive upside in here, but of course the picture looks way lower than Q1 due to the volume and those two effects. It's not really surprising to us, but it's of course lower than Q1.
For us, it's continuing, yeah, our driving the top line and taking care of our cost position that we have. Here you have the usual overview. This is H1 this year against H2. I think you heard us talking about it now. You see the positive ratio of order entry against sales. You see the increase in the gross margin overall. We are 47.2%. We wanted to be at nearly 50%, and we did calculations of what would have happened if we wouldn't have had the exchange rate impact. We think we would have been closed a little bit under 50%. Pass is there. Of course, we want to highlight the EBITDA because our EBIT is impacted by a lot of depreciation currently. No cash flow impact in here. The EBIT margin of now 7%, which is trending into the right direction from our point of view.
Jumping from the bottom line of the P&L to the free cash flow picture. Here, different picture, at least from the OCF for Q2. What do we see here and where do we get help from? Of course, we had a positive period resigned, but we are also having a lot of help from the working capital. We are collecting our receivables. Our inventory drives down according to plan. We had a little increase in the liabilities from our suppliers, but that was initiated. Overall, good performance on the OCF. The ICF is also according to plan. The free cash flow, you might recognize that OCF and ICF here are not adding up to the free cash flow picture because you see that in the tables that we are also issuing. There's a EUR 500,000-ish missing from an exchange rate impact that we have to show separately.
These are the major impacts and the cash impact on the cash accounts is not displayed here, but going into the free cash flow. That drives us to this picture, which displays again the free cash flow and our cash positions and also the cash at the end of the period. Here you also have the cash flow from financing. We are returning our debit positions and reducing the debit positions accordingly. This is how, despite the positive cash flows, you see the cash flowing down, positively impacted, of course, by the performance and overall in the direction where we currently want to see it. Overall picture, cash by the end of the period, nearly EUR 19 million and liabilities to banks being down to a little bit below EUR 50 million. Yeah, strike. Strike completed.
Jumping now to our shareholder structure, I think we are going to show the picture again, right? No major changes in here with Robert Basler holding again at the 53% and our free float at 28%. Really no major deviations to last time. Major deviation to last time when we showed the picture of our share performance, which is quite positive. I think today we closed at EUR 13, but we were coming from EUR 6.09 at the beginning of the year and we closed the quarter with EUR 12.32. We bet the index got way. We just expected here as well.
Okay, this brings us already to the outlook. I guess one of the most interesting parts of the presentation also for you. Talking a bit about the environment we expect for the second half year and about the specific topic of U.S. imports. I mean, things are volatile. As we all know, they can change every day. We want to bring across again our philosophy that there are certain things that we are able to influence. On the left-hand side here to bring you up to speed, we roughly deliver from the German factories into an export into the U.S., roughly a value of EUR 30 million on an annual base. Certainly, this is depending on product mix and also local demand. Then our U.S. entity is selling this to our client. On these transfer prices, obviously, we are paying tariffs.
As Ines mentioned, we have installed a system that is passing through the tariffs, exactly the tariffs that we are more or less exactly what we are paying. We don't earn money on it, but we do it in a very transparent way. Our clients, and thanks to our clients on that side here, are willing to take it. We also believe now with the increase in tariffs from 10% to 15%, as it looks like at the moment, our clients will behave the same way. The impact on our side is limited. However, during Q2, as we have had a time delay in implementing this in our systems end-to-end worldwide, we lost some money on the way. This is approximately EUR 500,000, a little bit less actually than Q2, but maybe when we have to shift to the other tariffs, there will be always a small delay.
In general, we can pass it through and we think the impact will be limited. There are also aspects in the second half of the year that are not under control, not under full control at least. The one element is the demand itself. When we looked in the beginning of the call into the picture of the European industry with a negative bookings trend, there might be a slowdown in the market, even though we see a good momentum in our books outperforming the market. We are also facing strong headwinds regarding U.S. dollar and Asian currencies that cost us quite some gross profit, a couple of percent points actually. What, as an environment, do we expect overall? We believe, in line with trade associations, that the market that has grown in the first half year might, on an annual basis, be more making a sideway move.
We also do not expect in the current macroeconomic situation that the purchasing manager indices will change a lot. They, to our perspective, most likely will wobble around the 50. Trade and geopolitical conflicts continue, and this will mute further the investment climate, as mentioned, also when we look back into the first half of the year. We expect also, in our assumptions now, that currencies stay that weak on the U.S. dollar side and Asian currencies. If this would change dramatically, then also this will be a benefit to us. At the moment, we calculate with these weak foreign currencies against the euro. We also assume that the intensity of competition will stay or even rise because in this market situation, where there is just a limited number of projects, everyone is fighting about these projects.
We also have a good indication that larger project business in the logistics and also semicon AI-related applications in China and in the U.S. will give us additional opportunities, most likely in the second half of the year. We need to win those projects, but at least we see signs that they will be there. All in all, please bear with us. The visibility and predictability is very low at the moment. Customers order very last minute. We have typically two to three weeks lead delivery time. This means for us, we have visibility of one or two months max into the future. For us, this is flying, not flying blind, but flying in a foggy landscape.
Taking all this together, looking at the first half-year performance, looking at the good order momentum end of Q2, and also considering this market, more difficult market landscape or continuing difficult market landscape, we are convinced that we can be better than our original guidance. Therefore, we increase our guidance for the full year from revenue in the corridor of EUR 202 million - EUR 250 million. Formerly, we guided EUR 186 million -EUR 198 million, so a substantial increase. On the earnings margin, we formally guided 0% - 5%. We go up from 2% to 6%. This might be a little bit less than you would have expected with such a revenue, but this is mainly driven by, or maybe mainly caused by, the headwinds of FX.
Yeah, this forecast for 2025 gives us good momentum and also makes us confident with our mid-term plan to grow, to get the company back to a 15% CAGR by and large, get it back to a sound profitability of at least 12% earnings margins, and realize by and large $275 million in 2028 with a strong cash conversion rate of 70%. Here also, the assumptions have not changed. We need next year a better market environment, even though this year we are most likely really able to outperform the market by far. Also, for this mid-term plan, we need a better market landscape. We are now the third year in a row in a difficult market, so there are high hopes that at least next year the market will start to recover. Another aspect is we need to remain access to the China market.
I mean, after our revenues went down a couple of years ago, we stabilized the revenue in China, and now China is even growing faster than other regions. Also here, this market needs to be an element in order to realize these goals. Having this said and giving you this outlook, we are ready for a Q&A session. Our colleague and operator here, Manuela, will open the call. You can either use the chat function. Manuela will help to read through it, or you can raise your hand and make yourself visible, and then you can ask your question directly. Yeah, so happy to answer your questions now.
Yeah, first question comes from Lasse. Please unmute yourself. You can now speak.
Hi, good afternoon. I would have two questions and then maybe a third at the end of this time. Order intake in the second quarter was pretty strong again. Can you just talk a little bit about where that's coming from? You mentioned logistics was good. I think one of your U.S. peers also started talking about consumer electronics starting to improve. Those geographic shifts in production seem to be slowly coming through. If you could just talk a little bit more about the verticals, that would be very interesting. The second question I would have is, with the new guidance, it implies that at least on the top line, you're going to be somewhat weaker than in the first six months of the year. Just off the back of Q2 orders, we're obviously very good.
I think I read somewhere that the exit rate out of Q2 into Q3 on orders was also pretty good. I'm just wondering, give some color on how much conservatism you're kind of baking into potentially, I guess, Q4 being a lot weaker than all the other quarters. Thank you.
Thank you, Lasse, for your questions. From the order intake perspective, to shed some light on Q2, there was basically a stable momentum in all regions. What we have seen again in the second quarter were projects in the logistics space in the U.S., also projects regarding AI production, machineries. It's mainly semicon/electronics in China. We also have seen some orders in EMEA happening in the second half. There was in Europe also a slight positive momentum, but in Asia-Pacific, the rest of Asia outside China, the situation is still difficult. A bit better situation in Japan, actually, in semicon. In Korea, also Taiwan, still a pretty difficult situation. With regard to the question, guidance second half, obviously it's a bit weaker from top line what we plan. There are mainly two reasons. One is the low visibility, and we also want to be a bit careful.
We know where we come from the last years. The other topic is, besides the low visibility, we are also talking about project opportunities. If these projects, larger projects, come or not come, this can make quite a difference. This makes it at the moment a bit cautious, even though there is definitely a good momentum in the second quarter order entry. Also, July was also not too bad from an order entry standpoint, given the situation also that normally the third quarter seasonality is low. Definitely, you are right. We are a bit careful for the second half of the year here, but there are reasons why. Let's get some more transparency into the second half because for the fourth quarter at the moment, for example, we are still too far away to judge on it.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Lasse. Other questions?
Next question is coming from Robert. Please unmute yourself.
Robert.
Hi. Can you hear me now?
Yes.
Oh, perfect. Thanks for taking my question. Just to follow up on what Lasse said, especially when looking at the second half. I know we're not in normal times, but in normal times, I remember to have a more semi-Asia-heavy H1 and less semi comparatively in the second half. Since China semi was driving H1, are you kind of afraid that this driver might not be sufficiently compensated for by European industrial as it has been in the past? Would you say that the semi space is so much focused on very specific larger projects that this seasonality does really apply at the moment?
More questions, or is this mainly the question?
My questions are kind of disconnected this time. Maybe we'll just take it one at a time.
Let's start with a reply to this and then we go further. The situation that you refer to is especially for the smartphone and tablet industry. This typically, you are absolutely correct, is that the high season is in Q1, Q2, and then the production equipment is getting installed for the Christmas business. This business, so the smartphone industry is still relatively weak. There is this seasonality you won't see this year too much because simply the business is still relatively low. What we talk here is mainly about semicon AI-related topics. There is no, yeah, Christmas season in this because these produced boards, like the Blackwell boards, for example, from NVIDIA, they go typically into server farms. There is no special season for this. This is why you see those projects most likely over the whole course of the year without such a significant seasonality that we typically know.
I think we will see it again once the smartphone industry is picking up again.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. My next question would be on tariffs and FX a bit. One thing I remember is that one major competitor has its production facilities in Canada. Considering the tariffs now in Canada, I mean, they might be temporary, no one knows these days, but this should be kind of positive. Is this also sparking some interest from U.S. customers, or are they still laying low so you don't see any potential shift in market share? Also, when I look at the U.S. market, especially now, not only because of tariffs but also because of the currency headwinds we've seen, are you still trying to serve at least the more commodifiable cameras from Singapore? Have you increased this, or is this still something you're thinking about implementing somewhere along the line?
Yeah, so most likely when the spread between Singapore and Europe will stay at around 5% points in tariffs. These tariffs, as mentioned earlier, are only based on transfer prices, so not on the end price for the customer in most of the cases, not in all, but in most of the cases. The investment to bring a significant amount of the value in supply chain through Singapore, from Singapore to the U.S., most likely does not make sense. It will stay for us most likely a backup solution or maybe kind of a hybrid, but not a significant change. This might change, and we are ready for it and prepare further about it if the spread is getting higher. This is the situation with our supply chain with regard to competition.
At the moment, as we are, especially against our North American competitors that act in Canada or the U.S., we are typically well positioned in terms of pricing. This is very different from Asian competition, especially China. Here the price difference, even though they might have in some cases an advantage due to tariffs, is not that large, so that we do not fear mentionable impact on our market share.
Okay, perfect. Thanks. My last question would be on working capital. We've seen quite an improvement in inventory turnover. That's great. I was just to give me an idea overall where you are now and where you see like what improvements you might see and if we can expect them in the second half of the year or is working capital at the moment not like at the center of your concern?
Can you pick this one up? Yeah, actually we see a positive trend, as I mentioned, in the receivables. That was really increasing and driving the days up in the first quarter, but now we see it coming back. We decreased the receivables by about $5 million and collected them. That has definitely a positive impact. Our inventory was also down by around $2 million. In the days of inventory, we are about pretty stable now, a little bit below 105 days. We want to be a bit lower, but that is always a good trade-off in what you might invest in order to serve the orders that might come and find a good equilibrium there. Currently, the 105 days is an okay-ish value for us, but further to improve. Because of that and some investments, we had our positions in the payables build up. That can improve a bit.
On the other side, we are really managing all of our payments now pretty straight and don't want to hold anything back. You're seeing the positive impact there because really there is no delay anymore, which has positive and negative sides, of course. There is a bit more potential, especially in the inventories. I think we tried to mention that in the last quarter, we are currently suffering a bit from the Chinese customers having pretty long payment terms. We are expecting that kind of turnaround to a steady state swing in October, November. We are back to a normal rate because then this drive that we had is going to turn on a normal rate. There we are expecting the receivables to further decrease.
Okay, perfect. That was very helpful. Thanks. I'll go back to the queue.
Thank you, Robert, for your questions.
Okay, thank you.
Someone else?
More questions from Stefan. First one goes into the direction of project work. How long does it take to work through the two large project orders from the U.S. and China that we received in Q4 2024? Was there any follow-up business in Q1 and Q2? What type of industry were those projects?
Yeah. A typical timeframe to ship those projects is three to four months. This is also why you have seen last time in Q4, we got the orders. We then shipped mainly in January, February, March, and some in April. We got again some of those project orders. Yes, we have follow-up orders and we got them in the second quarter, also here, more late second quarter. We will talk also here about a timeframe of roughly three plus one month. Three to four months is typically the delivery or the delivery schedule. On top of this, we continue to fight for more. We see opportunities in addition to this in the second half of the year. As mentioned, these projects are under high competition also. It's not a done deal. With the results we have shown, we are confident, but it doesn't make us lazy.
We work hard to get next months too. The industries, that were the third question, I mentioned this already. It's mainly at the moment in warehouse automation, logistics, and in production of PCB boards or semicon elements for AI technology sold to server farms. These are the main drivers at the moment in those projects' business. We hope also to see for next year more projects in the landscape of the smartphone industry. There are some rumors that innovations will come, hardware innovations with the smartphone manufacturers, but it's a bit early at the moment to talk more in detail about it. Also, it's immature, but at least there are some signs and this would be good if we see again a cycle after three years of quietness in this market.
Second question goes into the direction of semicon. As there's a trend to invest more in the U.S. into the semicon industry, how will we prepare due to the tariff situation into potential supply chain changes in the U.S.?
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, the question is whether we are competitive with the current price points we offer to our clients by passing through the current tariffs. The semicon customers we have in the U.S. at the moment, I mean, they are at the moment satisfied with what we can offer. As we have a broad variety of products, we don't see an opportunity actually to really have a direct investment and produce in the U.S. because this would, let's say, be a third production house for us. We also need to consider that a lot of electronics that we buy for our products, they don't come from the U.S. originally, so you have to pay import tax on that anyway.
This is why we foresee for the mid-term to stay with two production houses, Germany, Singapore, even though the industry hopefully will grow the semicon industry in the U.S. We need to see whether we need to ship more from Singapore if the spread is getting too high or whether we can live with the current 10% - 15% rate.
Okay, then we have another question from Martin. Has Basler experienced lately that Chinese customers are more inclined to do business with European vision companies, Basler instead of U.S. vision companies due to the geopolitical situation and the tensions between the U.S. and China?
Obviously the U.S. market is closed for Chinese competition. As China itself is also not growing at the pace those competitors want to have it, and also Asia-Pacific due to the slow consumer electronics markets is not in a boom phase, the orientation from the Chinese competition goes definitely into the direction of Europe. The only way is to compete and to be better and to be closer to our class customers. The good thing is in Europe, the customers are still willing to pay a premium against Chinese competitors. Chinese competitors, in most of the cases, go through indirect channels, so there needs to be a European trading house in between that also wants to earn some margins, so the price aggressiveness is not one-to-one hitting the market. Last but not least, many European machine builders/device makers also ship their devices into the U.S. market.
Therefore, they wisely make a decision whether they want to integrate Chinese components because this ultimately is at least giving them the risk that the design machine could suffer from import problems or export problems into the U.S. market. Other questions?
Maybe we can confirm, Robert, your hand is still raised. Do you want to raise a follow-up question? Maybe no. We have another one from Lasse, please.
Hi, one more follow-up if I may. Just a question on European revenues in the second quarter. They were down slightly year on year, also sequentially. I just wanted to check, is that just a function of the, like a bigger, like one of a smaller project in the first quarter or what were the dynamics in Europe? I think you mentioned that order intake in Q2 in Europe was ahead of revenues. Just wondering the dynamic also into the second half, just given everything that's going on. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. The dynamic is, as you mentioned, the Q2 revenue were a bit weaker. In the second half of the second quarter, the bookings picked up, so that we have definitely a positive book-to-build momentum also in Europe. The reason why I would say if we look at the, especially VDMA data, is mainly we are outperforming the market. It's not so much a market effect, it's performance of our sales team.
Great, thank you.
Welcome, Lasse.
There seem to be no more questions from the audience.
Okay, if there are no more questions, we thank you for your attention, also the lively debate. If there are questions after the call, please do not hesitate also to contact our IR manager, Verena, in order to follow up. We are looking forward to our Q3 reporting and give our best until then.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.