Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Stuart, your operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the DEUTZ AG First Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touch-tone telephone. Press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the conference over to Christian Ludwig, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, Stuart. Welcome to you all from Cologne. Before we start, please note that this call is being recorded, and the replay will be available on our website at deutz.com later today. Your participation in the call implies your consent with this. Joining me today is our CEO, Sebastian Schulte, as well as our Head of Finance, Oliver Neu. As usual, Sebastian Schulte will walk you through the highlights of the performance of the group and then hand over to me, as I will provide some more details of our financial performance. Sebastian will close the presentation with our current market outlook and our guidance. After this introduction, we will be happy to answer your questions. Please note that management comments during this call will include forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties.
For the discussion of risk factors, I encourage you to review the disclaimer contained in our annual report and this presentation. All documents relating to our Q1 2022 reporting are available on our website. Without much further ado, I hand over to Sebastian Schulte.
Thank you, Christian, and good morning to all of you for our Q1 earnings call at DEUTZ. Let me start to go through our key operational and strategic developments that have occurred in the first quarter. A few things also beyond that first quarter. New orders increased 10% if we compare to Q1 2021 to now EUR 510 million and still a high run rate of more than EUR 500 million. The trend is still intact here. I can also see that in the book-to-bill, which now closed up the first quarter with 1.14. We had observed slightly higher numbers in the past year, obviously, but still promising that we are in numbers higher than one still at this point. Unit sales, when we talk about our DEUTZ Classic Engines, went up 35% to almost 44,000 units.
While Q1 normally is a little bit of a seasonally challenging one due to January, that was quite a good start. All the production levels have been all right, particularly given the challenges on supply chain, which we'll come to later. We produced 46,000 units in the first quarter, so slightly higher than the unit sales. That is due to transit times, that difference. Particularly March was actually quite positive, 18,000 units in March. We were quite happy with that. How did that translate in revenue? 30% up to almost EUR 450 million all-inclusive here. Also a positive trend. When we come to bottom line adjusted EBIT, we went last year, Q1 was pretty much break even with 0.8. Now we closed at 15.8, which is a margin of 3.5%. We are up 3.3 percentage points on the overall business.
As you know, we incorporated the new segment reporting beginning of this fiscal year, where we are showing our classic business, mainly the diesel engines and the related service, but also the green segment. The focus here in this number reporting, we'll come to more details on the segments later, but classic profitability is almost 6%, up 4.4%. We are quite pleased with that. We are here on the right track to say it like that. Beyond the numbers, some highlights, developments. We started, we kicked off a multi-phase strategy process in February internally with a new setup in management and supervisory board. We defined first targets on that process. I'll come to that later. We will focus a lot on service and pricing for the time being, but more to come. Service acquisitions, and that's here the right keyword.
We continued our buy and build strategy when it comes to our global service footprint. We had closing of minor acquisitions, but fairly relevant acquisitions for footprint increase here in Ireland and the Netherlands. One of the closing was yesterday, just in time for today's call here. On the funding side, we restructured our group's funding, but we'll come to some more details later. We are, in short, already in a good position now into 2027 with that new syndicated loan, which we also closed a couple of days ago. Obviously, that's one of the challenges we're currently facing, the supply chain due to this geopolitical situation. There's one, obviously, to mention the war in Ukraine, but also the development in China. That is one of the focus points for our day-to-day work.
We can say we have so far managed to control it fairly well, and we are now able as an organization to adapt fairly quickly. It does not mean it is easy, not at all. Every day new surprises, but so far so good. This is why I mentioned earlier also the production levels in March in particular. That shows that we have learned as an organization here. Let me move on to give you a bit of first snapshot, first outlook where we stand in our multi-phase strategy process. You will remember from our annual result conference a couple of months ago that what we are doing here is we have implemented a three-phase strategy process. We are looking to these three horizons. One, firstly, the 2022-2025, very much focusing here on the classic business because that is where currently our heavy load of top line is.
We will also define our target objectives for the period 2026 to 2030, and then the vision and targets for how DEUTZ is going to look like 2023 and beyond. When we come to the first targets, it is very important that we further increase the profitability of our classic business by 2023 in particular. The first thing we now clearly defined here in our team is our new service target. Last year, we closed with a top line in the service business of exceeding EUR 400 million. That has been a big milestone for DEUTZ because particular profitability is quite high. At least we believe there is a lot of potential going forward. Now we define the next milestone, EUR 500 million revenue by 2025. That is the target. We are here in the course of defining and implementing measures how to get there.
As mentioned earlier, that's going to be done organically as well as via acquisitions and two minor acquisitions that, again, are relevant. We just concluded one in the Netherlands, Ausma more currently here as well as in Ireland, South Diesel, which closing, as I said, have taken place. Now we are in the integration. More details on that strategy process to be presented in the course of the fiscal year as part of our regular capital market communication points. One important aspect this year for us, and probably the majority of other players in our world, also beyond our industry, is the whole situation of inflation, how we deal with cost increases, how we deal with price increases resulting out of that. We have defined and also partially already implemented here our roadmap.
We see that for the last month already, rising energy prices, rising raw material prices. Energy prices and raw materials are not necessarily directly on our side, partially yes, but mainly also on the supplier side. We have important and tough discussions with them. Logistic is a challenge, as you all know, and then certain components, obviously, that's also reflected. What we defined now is that we're going to increase the prices of the new engine business in the range of 8%-12% on an annual basis. There's obviously a challenge for us that we have this high order backlog, as we will see later with Christian, we'll go through the details. It's even more challenging to ensure that those increases pass through to the P&L very, very quickly. We have significantly increased the pace here, significantly.
We have significantly increased the internal cooperation between the procurement department, sales, and the board and the management in order that we really are faster than before when it comes to this restructuring of pricing and this passing on. The first round of price rises in the new engine business we implemented already. They are effective January 1, 2022 already. We have now initiated a second round. We are in good conversations with the customers, and we feel comfortable, confident that this round is to be implemented by the end of the second quarter. It is not to complain. It is merely stating the facts.
With all these targets here in mind, we can see already that it becomes more and more possible to pass on those costs for raw materials, logistics, and other factors to our customers because that's really what will make us more stable, more resilient, and in the end, better in the course of this year. The next highlight from the past month is the restructuring of our funding. We renegotiated here our syndicated loan. Before that renegotiation, the situation was that we had in place a EUR 160 million syndicate with a duration until June 2024. On top of that, we had three bilateral credit lines of EUR 25 million each, rather short-term, ending in February 2023. You might remember that in 2020, DEUTZ has secured a so-called Corona credit line, which was backed by the KfW, the German development bank. We were able to return that line last year.
In place of that, we implemented those just mentioned three bilateral lines. Obviously, we want to think here longer term and also ensure that we have the right headroom going forward. What we did is now we adjusted the syndicated loan just a few days ago. We closed all that. We terminated those bilateral credit lines. In the end now, we are in a situation that we have the new syndicated loan in place, increased from EUR 160 million to EUR 250 million volume. Terms and conditions have been improved. Details will not be disclosed here, but again, have been improved. We also did integrate here an ESG component where we are looking here on two items. One is the recordable incident rate, like an open safety KPI, where we will link that loan to that KPI that is related to the carbon emissions per manufactured engine.
Very importantly, term now extended by another three years to 2027 with an extension option. To cut a long story short, with that new setup, we do have sufficient financial headroom to master our day-to-day business, but also including for the organic growth going forward. That is highlights to start with. Now I'll pass on to Christian again, who will lead you through the numbers. At the end of Christian's part, I will take over again to give a look going forward. Christian, your turn. Thank you.
Thank you, Sebastian. Yes, I will walk you through our numbers in a little bit more detail, taking it off with the new orders. As already mentioned, after a very strong start already in 2021, we were able to pass that strong number again in the first quarter of this year, a number of almost EUR 510 million, a growth of close to 10%. It was mainly driven by material handling, which grew by 55%. Also the agricultural segment with a growth of 46% was a main growth driver for the order intake. We also had a very positive development in our unit sales, growth of 30%, mainly driven in this case by the classic DEUTZ diesel engines. Our Torqeedo engines only grew by roughly 5%. There was a seasonal effect included here. I'll come to that a little bit later.
The unit sales are basically one-to-one also reflected in our revenue growth, which was also up by 30% to EUR 447 million. As a nice side effect of this development, our orders on hand climbed to almost EUR 750 million at the end of March. When you deduct the non-engine-related business, this still leaves us with almost EUR 675 million, which roughly equates to an order backlog of 90,000 engines for the remainder of the year, which of course gives us some confidence that also for the rest of the year, we will have some solid business. If you look a little bit more into detail on the regional and application segment breakdown, you can see that the strongest region that we had in Q1 was the Americas with a growth of almost 60%.
This is very much linked to the strong growth of our material handling business because this is mainly a US-dominated business. Also very solid was the growth in construction and agricultural machinery with both above 30%, which is also reflected in the growth in our Germany, but also in the rest of Europe, which were in similar ranges. Last but not least, not to forget, the service business grew again strongly by 15%. Service business, of course, in good times does not grow as strongly as the new engine business, but a number above 10% is always a very solid development for service. As this business is especially margin positive for us, it is of course key for us to continue to grow that part of the business as well. On the next slide, you can see our EBIT margin development.
I think the key message here is that we were able to improve the margin not only significantly versus Q1 last year by 3.3 percentage points, but also we were able to buck the trend that we had seen in the last couple of quarters. As you can see, from Q2 through to Q4 last year, our margin slightly declined. We were able to reverse the trend due to the increase of volume business, our cost savings, but also, of course, we were able to pass on the rising cost of raw materials and the risk to our customers. The EBIT margin before exceptional items at 3.5% is at the lower end of our initially predicted guidance for the full year. We will come to that a little bit later. A strong start into the year for us.
Net income amounted to EUR 12.5 million, and the earnings per share came in at EUR 0.10. I admit, though, that our EBIT was only at EUR 9 million. There is a difference between adjusted EBIT and EBIT as we had some severance payments for management changes as well, including the numbers. Let's have a quick look at some other balance sheet items. Our R&D spending increased by 16% as we continue to invest, especially in the green segment. The overall R&D ratio came down due to the strong growth in sales. We are at a 5.3% R&D ratio, which is something that we believe will remain going forward around that rate. On the capital expenditure side, you see a strong increase. The reason is that we have invested in new test rigs, especially also here in new test rigs for the hydrogen engine.
We have started our first investments in the establishment of a new assembly line, a so-called assembly line 6 for the Cologne plant. This is for the larger engines above 4 liters. Last but not least, on the working capital, you see more than EUR 20 million increase since the end of last year. A growth of 8.8% as we are basically preparing for further growth. Also due to the issues on the supply chain, we want to be prepared and are building up some more safety stock to not be caught out cold. This had some effect on our cash flow development, of course. Despite the strong growth in EBIT due to the build-up of working capital, our cash flow from operating activities declined by EUR 7.4 million year over year to EUR 9.7 million.
This then is also reflected in our free cash flow development, which all was slightly down year over year. That also, of course, then is reflected in the net debt, which also grew slightly to EUR 86.7 million. Still, if you look at our equity and equity ratio, with 45% equity ratio, we're at a very comfortable level and well above our target figure of 40%. At the end of the quarter, we had unused credit lines totaling EUR 185 million. As Sebastian Schulte already elaborated, we actually increased that amount with the new syndicated loan in May. We have a very healthy level of credit lines available to us at the moment. Finally, a quick look at the segment breakdown. As you may recall, we have started since the beginning of the year to report in our classic and a green segment.
The classic segment comprises all the diesel engines, while the green segment includes all the alternative drive chains that we are selling and which are under development. The classic segment benefited strongly from high demand across all application segments. Order intake here up also more than 10%, unit sales up 35%, revenue growth only 30%. The reason is that, of course, also in the revenue, we have included the service part. As I said before, service grew by 15%, which is normal in times of the strong growth of new engine business. The service business does not grow as strongly. Nothing to be worried about. We were actually even able to increase our average selling price per head slightly versus last year to EUR 7,470, roughly EUR 0.70. Especially important for us is the development of our adjusted EBIT.
This grew by more than EUR 20 million to EUR 25.4 million. The adjusted EBIT margin at 5.8% is already in line with what we had expected would be our guided range for the full year. Very positive development in Q1. Finally, a quick look at our green segment. Here the situation is slightly different as here we still have a high invest. New orders actually were down. This is due to a seasonal development. We had a very strong Q1 last year due to some engine sales from Torqeedo, which were driven still by the loaner crisis. Unit sales actually were up by 5%, and revenues were up strongly by 30%. No surprise that we still have a loss-making adjusted EBIT. As we already told you before, this segment will still be investing heavily in this segment. We have upfront investments and high R&D costs.
The result at minus EUR 9.6 million is nothing that we're worried about. You have to expect that we'll also at full year end will have a negative result in this segment. With that, I hand back to Sebastian.
Thank you, Christian. Yeah, guidance. Quite a challenge at the moment in this environment to provide a stable guidance. This is why before I mentioned on explaining the ranges of where we are at the moment, I'm going to talk about the current challenges in the supply chain. A lot of those aspects we have already briefly mentioned, but let me go through it a bit more in a structure again. On the parts side, what we see, and not only now, that started last year already with an increasing pace. We see increasing issues in terms of allocation arrangements in the global market.
One big block is the whole electronics topic, the semiconductors, which do play an important role in our products, most notably in the ECUs, electronic control units, where we are on a, let's say, almost daily interaction with our customers, but also mainly with the suppliers and even the subsuppliers in order to ensure here a steady flow of supplies. These semiconductors are built in a lot of our parts. Let me mention a few: temperature switches, starters, generators, throttle valves. You will sometimes be surprised in how many parts you have these semiconductors installed. Obviously, with that shortage, that's really a process to ensure that we won't interrupt our production here. Also, other parts relating to plastics, for example, polymer seals and even components made of steel is a daily challenge.
As I mentioned earlier, Q1 has been, when you look at the numbers in the end, fairly stable, particularly when it comes to output. 18,000 units produced in March is a very solid number. That is sort of on the surface. In detail, behind that is a lot of firefighting on a daily basis. It makes me a little more confident going forward now that how we managed to do this in the first quarter. There will be surprises. What has come with surprises, you do not know exactly what it is going to be about. Of course, as it has become better, the management of these issues is becoming better. That is one aspect. The second aspect is China. I do not mean the market.
I mean really the power outages, which were a problem, particularly in the last couple of quarters, but also the lockdowns we see at the moment there. In the news, we read all about Shanghai, but Shanghai is only the icing on the cake, so to speak. We have all 85 other big cities in China with lockdowns. Yes, that does not go without impact on also our supply landscape. We have pretty good visibility when it comes to our direct suppliers. Also, together with our direct supplier, with the monitoring, the visibility is getting better for the second tier. At some point, you cannot oversee everything. That is what we see, what makes us a little still concerned in the outlook of the rest of the year.
Mentioned already earlier, the price rises beyond the standard surcharges for metals, which have been implemented and have been good practice in our industry for years. Now this environment is less stable. It is more about extraordinary negotiations, both with the customers and with the suppliers. That makes it challenging. Also here, we have implemented quite good processes on both sides here of the value chain. Transportation remains an issue, particularly since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Everything is sort of reshuffled. Sea freight becomes much more important now. Obviously, capacities are limited. Prices are going up in this sense. That is another challenge in the supply chain. Yeah, and the war between Russia and Ukraine in general, obviously, is also a reason for these aforementioned issues to get worse.
We can say there are additional challenges for us in a procurement environment that hasn't been easy before. We don't want to sound too cautious here, but I think it's safe to, or it's important to be realistic. Because what it at least does, it limits the visibility. We can assure you that we're working here with all forces on managing the situation. The numbers in Q1 tell that this is successful. The remainder of the year will remain challenging. This brings me then to the guidance. No change to what we said during the annual general meeting as well as the annual reports conference for 2021. The guidance for 2022, we still have here under review, subject to change, as we say. We developed it in February with the unit sales of 165,000-180,000.
If you extrapolate the numbers we've delivered in the first quarter, we see we would be in that range. It comes all against the uncertainties I just mentioned. That would translate into a revenue range of EUR 1.7 billion-EUR 1.85 billion for the group, classic EUR 1.6 billion-EUR 1.75 billion, green EUR 75 million-EUR 100 million. That would translate into the range EUR 3.5 million-EUR 5.5 million overall. Also here, in the first quarter, we were on the lower end of that. Q1 is due to the January effect in service business, but also new engines, normally a rather difficult one from a season point of view. Classic EUR 4.5 million-EUR 6.5 million. Here we are in Q1, as I mentioned earlier, in the middle of the range. That's promising. Free cash flow, low to mid double-digit million euro amounts. Christian mentioned it earlier.
Yeah, we see obviously we see the EBITDA improvement in the free cash flow. Working capital is an important KPI for us. However, due to the challenges on stability of supply, at least in all the inventories are not in the financial focus right now. The inventories are in the focus of stability of supply. That is why we are here a little more cautious. Again, this is something which I'm confident that we'll get a better grip on in the course of the year. However, having said that, this would be the guidance without those challenges. As we still have these challenges, we put it still under review. We keep it under review. We will inform as soon as we have more clarity on the proper development for the rest of the year. Let me conclude after having mentioned all those topics.
We remain on track. The first quarter was a solid one. There's still a long way to go to move towards our midterm targets. We have achieved a lot of important milestones in the operational business, but also beyond the operational business. I'm mentioning our funding, for example, which is just another topic out of the way. That makes us being able to focus even more on the one end on the day-to-day business, but on the other hand, also on the development and refining of our group strategy that we define. Despite all those challenges we have in the short term, we don't lose sight on the development of DEUTZ in the middle of the long term. We are here on good track. In that sense, I'm thanking you very much for your attention. As usual, we are open for questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selections. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. First question is from the line of Jorge González Sadornil from Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Banking. Please go ahead.
Hello, Christian, Sebastian. Thank you for taking my questions. Three questions from my side, please. The first one will be around China. I have noticed you have not included any reference, but the equity income in the quarter was quite positive from my point of view, only EUR 0.8 million negative compared to something around EUR 5 million, I think, in the previous quarter. I was wondering if this means that you have been able to limit the losses of the joint venture with SANY. Can you elaborate a little bit on this and provide us the volumes for this quarter in China and your expectation for the rest of the year? Regarding the other evolution, material handling and agriculture are the strongest business units at this point.
I was wondering, especially for the agriculture business, if this strong evolution has something to do with the partnerships that you closed with ASCO and SDF, if you are still seeing some improvement on the business because of these partnerships. Finally, it will be interesting if you can comment again on this better scenario to increase prices. I have not really understood well the driver here for you to be able to pass prices better than before. Is this because the demand remains very strong or because your clients are now understanding that, sorry, yes, your clients are now understanding that you really need to increase prices at this point? Thank you.
Yeah, totally. Let me start with the last one, and then we'll move backwards on the prices and on the price increases. I think it's a combination of a lot of things. The first thing, as you said, as you implied, is, yeah, the customers understand as well that the world isn't as it was before. Yes, we see that currently we still have, as we've seen in our numbers, we have a book-to-bill exceeding one. Demand is still strong, particularly for 2022. I mean, we have a high order backlog. Our customers have a high order backlog in their end applications, partially even a higher order backlog than us. At least that's what we hear from them. There are shortages on all sides.
An engine is not a commodity which can be easily replaced by a different one, by a comparable one from a competitor. Sometimes that is an argument from the customers, but it is not the case like that. We have a certain pricing power. We just need to use it. We are getting better able to use this in the current situation where obviously the market environment is favorable for that. On one hand, mindset change on the customers, but also on our end. It takes some time to teach everyone in the organization that the situation has changed. In the last years, we in Europe, in particular, have been sort of confident or have had a comfortable environment in terms of stable prices. That is not the case anymore. Nowadays, there is more room for negotiations. You just need to use this momentum.
What we have done is, as I said, we have launched the first round last year, effective 1st of January. We put in another round. Obviously, no customer is happy about that. We would not be happy either. In the end, everyone sees the necessity and is using this momentum better and better, yeah, on a sort of almost daily basis. That is in terms of the price increases. Coming to your first question, China now, it is correct. The equity result was minus 0.8. Q4 2021 was significantly worse than that. We did have in Q4 2021 a few extraordinary items when it comes to quality issues in China. That is what we have fairly under control right now. The volume, the business volume, is still fairly low. It is below 4,000, below 4,000 units, 3,700 units in the joint venture in Q1.
What makes me positive is that on that level, at least we're almost break even. Obviously, we are really hoping and building that volume increase in the course of the year. I think demand is one thing on the truck side in particular. There we do see some first positive signs on the horizon. The big question mark is the whole situation on the lockdowns in China. The visibility in China is fairly difficult. I think the next final question was on our corporations and the business in the agricultural sector, right? We have, as you correctly said, entered into those new contracts with some customers. These are mainly propagation of existing contracts where we increased our business. I'll say this is already reflected in the forum.
This is more or less due to the general market development in the first quarter. As I said earlier, in the context of price increases, the agricultural sector is still also quite bullish when it comes to the rest of the year. Obviously, we are looking very cautiously on their behavior after the geopolitical changes or challenges. At the moment, they're still fairly positive. I hope that answered your question, Jorge.
Yes, of course. Thank you very much, Sebastian. One follow-up on the prices, on the price increases. Can you tell us more or less the range of the price increase in the first quarter? That was implemented that we saw in the P&L in the first quarter. And the one that you are planning to do in the second quarter, please?
I won't go into those details because obviously, we want to give a range of what we see as a full-year basis. These are highly sensitive negotiations with each of the customers. I have to, I have to, I'm only able to tell you on the grant scheme, we are aiming at the range provided.
Thank you very much, Sebastian.
Next question is from the line of Charlotte Friedrichs from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thanks for taking my questions as well. Three, if I may. The first one would be the feedback from your customers about how your price increases compared to those of peers. Second question would be around changing prices for your order backlog, which is something that we're increasingly seeing now with some of your customers as well, that they are adjusting the pricing wherever possible for the backlog. What are your thoughts on this? Is it at all possible? Is it something that you've looked at? Finally, can you give us an idea of how the order intake has developed now in the weeks of the second quarter that you can see so far? Is it still strong or has there been somewhat of a weakening? Thank you.
Yeah. Charlotte, The first question on the reaction of the customers. As I said, my sense is also they are understanding. No one is happy when you ask for pricing increases, but we do have constructive discussions with the vast majority of them because we have good arguments for our points, right? That is important. Do they compare us with competitors or other suppliers? Yes, they do. They feed us back numbers as well. You need to be careful, as in every number of states, there is a big technical element in those feedbacks. I would rather report outright back here that that is not the problem. What is real is that this year we are putting up lagging behind, but also not being much more aggressive than others. I think we are here in the fair range in sort of industry standards.
When it comes to order, when it comes to order intake, we see development. We see, let's say, at the moment a slight flattening, but still the tendency is still book-to-bill exceeding one. I mean, the reason for your question is we looked at that very, very carefully as well. At the moment, it's still fairly positive, which is why we keep being confident, at least in the next month. The challenge we currently see is not necessarily the market. The challenge is more the supply chain.
Okay. Thank you. The price changes for backlog, I may have missed this because the line was a bit patchy.
Yeah. No, of course. Yes, we are discussing that with the customers. Obviously, the minimum issue is prices for orders. We are also discussing your models for deliveries in the future, regardless of when the order intake was booked. You can imagine negotiations are there increasingly difficult. Again, if you have good reasons and good arguments and you have a good long-lasting relationship, it's our experience that you find solutions which in the end are good for both parties. It is not only about improving our situation. It is also about improving their situation now because our end customers are also participating in price increases. In the end, you want to defend, to say the least, your relative positioning in the chain, in the complete value chain. That is what we're aiming at.
Understood. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask any questions, please press star followed by one on your touch-tone telephone. Next question is from the line of Richard Schramm from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello, gentlemen. Just to follow up on this price increases. I mean, looking at your strong record high order book and your remark that there is, of course, a certain delay in pushing through these price increases, as obviously customers are resistant to accept that price adjustments are made for orders already placed. Is it a fair assumption that there is even a widening gap between the price increases becoming effective so that we have to look for maybe about six, seven months or so before price increases really become effective? You are implementing now?
It's a chain. You're going through, you're going through, not a chain. You're going through waves. We are benefiting at the moment, mainly at the moment in the first quarter, mainly from the wave we kicked off last year in the second half. That's true. Now we have kicked off the next wave. As I said, as a response to Charlotte's question, we need to, and this is one of our focus points here, we need to also address the order backlog in order to reduce the length of these waves. Time will tell, but we remain fairly confident that we are shortening here the time with our new initiative because we have put quite a big emphasis on it. That's also the reason why we communicate that here openly.
Thank you. Also, a question on China. What is exactly the current situation there in your own production and also in the joint venture? Are there restrictions currently, or is production running relatively normal and unaffected from these lockdown measures?
Nothing is unaffected in China at the moment. Our own operations in Tianjin are at least, or have been only affected very, very short times for really real lockdowns. Some weeks, the teams, workers have pretty much camped in the factory. In order to keep the operation running, that's something a lot of companies do at the moment. The Tianjin region is not directly affected in terms of lockdown so far. Our headquarter, our local headquarter is affected because it's in Shanghai. In Shanghai, the majority of the city is locked down. Here, the teams are working in their home offices, which is possible in headquarters, but doesn't make it easier. The joint venture with SANY is so far fairly stable. There's no lockdown at least. Also here, the impact is more from the supply chain, the availability of parts.
As you can imagine, this is not, it's very difficult to make here a stable prediction because these regional lockdowns or regional developments, they happen often quite sudden. Sometimes you believe, okay, your part is stable. Then from one day to the other, it's not. So far, I would say we managed to get through there without as bad impact as one could have had. Again, China is at the moment low visibility on that aspect.
Yeah. Okay. Last point also on China. I mean, you just started, I think, two years ago, an initiative to source more from China, obviously due to the attractive pricing levels you could achieve there. Now, quite obviously, it appears that this has turned into a risk and not into an advantage. Are you already scaling back on this? Are you able to offset missing supplies here with other sources?
No, we're not scaling back. I think it has been the right move to focus also on more sourcing from China, particularly also making use of the own organization we have there. What we need to keep an eye on is obviously what kind of are the relative cost advantages or disadvantages between the regions, China and Europe in particular, when we talk about supply landscape, how static are they or how dynamic are they? That is part of a dual sourcing or the best cost country sourcing that you always update the assumptions in your business cases. That is what we're doing. There is one thing is obviously you do that for price advantages, for cost advantages.
The other thing is also we believe in that business we're in with the combustion engine and obviously scale risks on the supplier landscape in Europe also because of that development in those products for the automotive. We need to focus on multiple sources. That involves countries as China. We keep a high focus on that. Actually, we are here also on track when it comes to delivering, fulfilling the plans we build. We can't rely on that one. We can't rely on that region. We cannot say, okay, in the future, we're going to source, let's say, all the parts from China because the geopolitical environment is changing. We need to be really, we need to keep on these dual sources. We should avoid moving something completely to China.
I believe also the development of the supplier landscape is something which will be very interesting strategically in the next years. Not all the players have made up their mind completely on that. Typically when one door might close or it might be more difficult to go through, another door will open. We have to keep our options open. That is what we are going to do. China, again, remains a very important market for us, both for the supply landscape, but also on the customer, on the revenue side. An important market does not mean the only market. As you saw in the numbers which Christian presented earlier, we are very strong in the European market. We have a very strong footprint there. We also build on our strength, but not obviously neglecting the opportunities in China.
We are a global company with a European core and chances in China. That is what we are going to keep, what we are going to keep for the future.
Okay. Thank you.
We have a follow-up question from the line of Jorge González Sadornil from Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Banking. Please go ahead.
Hello Sebastian. Thank you for taking my questions. A follow-up on Torqeedo. I have read in the release that you are still not in break-even in Torqeedo. I was wondering what are the reasons for this, if it's related to the lead times or if there is any other reason. What are your plans to improve the profitability of Torqeedo, taking into account that the orders for Torqeedo are starting to go down? What are your plans to improve the earnings for this unit? I was also wondering if you can give us some feedback on how the orders evolve during April. That would be very useful. Thank you.
Yeah. Hi, Jorge. Christian, I'll take this question. Yeah. For Torqeedo, we had a weaker start into the year. That is correct. That was expected as we had a very strong Q1 last year driven by some corona-related purchases. What we said at the reason for your figures, we expect Torqeedo to break even this year is unchanged. We expect a positive development in the remainder of the year. I think your question on April was not on Torqeedo. Was it on question?
Yeah. In general, if you can give us some insight on what has happened this last month in terms of orders for the group.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, these numbers are not yet confirmed. I think I mentioned earlier already that the tenth day is still a fairly sort of positive trend. We have still, we do not see a disruption in the demand. We do not see a disruption in demand. As I said earlier, the challenge at the moment is more the supply chain than the market for the current quarters. What will be the interesting question is obviously 2023, 2024, but that is far too early to say. Jorge, we have to defer your question to the next earnings call when we have reliable numbers and audited numbers, which we are willing and allowed to share.
Okay. Thank you both. Bye.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touch-tone telephone. There are no further questions at this time. I would like to hand back to Christian Ludwig for closing comments. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, Stuart. Yeah. Thank you all for participating. Thank you for your questions. If there should be any questions left, please give the investment relations department a call. For all the rest, we'll talk to you at the latest with our Q2 results in early August. Thank you very much. Goodbye.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.