Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Stuart Shakura, call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the DEUTZ AG nine onths 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, Communications and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Also, warm welcome from my side to everybody on the call. Please note that this call is being recorded and a replay will be available on our website at deutz.com later today. Your participation in this call implies your consent with this. Joining me today are our CEO, Sebastian C. Schulte, as well as our Head of Finance, Oliver Neu. As usual, Sebastian 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 on our financial figures. Sebastian will close our presentation with 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 in this presentation. All documents relating to our nine-month 2022 reporting are available on our website. Without much further ado, I hand over to Sebastian.
Thank you very much, Christian, and also good morning from my side to our earnings call for the first nine months of 2022. As usual, I would like to start with a few highlights on the operational and also on the strategic development side. If we start with new orders, you know, we increased new orders by 0.4% if you compare with the previous nine-month period of last year to a level of EUR 1.52 billion. That's not a high increase of new orders, but we have to keep in mind that last year we had already a record high new orders figures due to that strong recovery after the COVID crisis.
If you look at the book-to-bill ratio for the first three quarters, we are now at 1.09, so still higher than one, but we're moving more towards the normalized level. That dynamic, I wouldn't say is ending, that's too early, but at least it's slowing down to a more healthy level. We also have to keep in mind, Christian will say that later when he will go through the figures, that our order backlog is still higher than EUR 800 million. We are here on very high numbers. If we look at unit sales for the DEUTZ engines, so without the Torqeedo products, we increased by 13% to 130,875 units.
That's quite a development, particularly taking in mind that the first month of the year were due to major supply chain issues, still fairly slow. We have here the summer months of July and August included as well. Revenue rose by 19% to EUR 1.39 billion. Here we see higher rise of revenues than unit sales. See that later. That's partially driven by price increases, but also some other mix effects. What we particularly like is that we managed also to transform that into a bottom-line impact. We increased EBIT adjusted by EUR 35 million to EUR 65.9 million after nine months.
For DEUTZ Group as a whole, that means we're like standing at an EBIT margin of 4.7%, so that's increased by 2.1 percentage points compared with the previous year nine months. Also, you know, we introduced earlier this year the new segment structure, classic and green. On the classic segment, which is pretty much all combustion engines for diesel engines, including the service, we're now at 6.9%. So that's quite a good development, because in the end, the classic segment will be the cash cow for us to last for quite some time going ahead and also to fund the journey towards new technologies. Here the 6.9% shows we're on a good track.
As Christian indicated, we have today published the first guidance for 2022. Earlier this year, we developed the guidance, but we put it under review, given the uncertainties out of that geopolitical situation, particularly the war in Ukraine. Now with nine months and in fact actually 10 months done for the year, obviously we have better visibility, much better visibility, and we know which of the risks have materialized, but also which of the risks have not materialized, at least for 2022. We see now a revenue range between EUR 1.75 billion and EUR 1.85 billion, and we also see an EBIT margin within 4.5% and 5.0%. On the strategic side, we have achieved further progress regarding our hydrogen strategy.
As DEUTZ, we joined the HyCET research project. HyCET is the hydrogen combustion engine truck. We'll come in the course of this presentation to a few more details on that. Also, in terms of company leadership, the supervisory board has now completed the restructuring of the management board. We have now three board members on board already. The fourth board member will join beginning of December. Come to that at a later stage. In terms of product development, we had our own trade fair, so to speak, the DEUTZ DAYS 22 in Stuttgart in the core area. It's a very nice location to present products in our application segments, where we actually introduced a lot and presented a lot of our developments. We actually realized quite a lot of interest from not only our customers, but also from media.
Before going further, summarizing, we can say that after we already achieved some significant milestones in the first half of the year, we were able to continue this path, this journey, and we did continue to generate growth. We also recorded double-digit increases in sales revenues, and most importantly, we also managed to translate that into bottom line impact. If we continue to the next page, please. We informed you already earlier this year in the last two calls on the strategy program, Powering Progress, which we initiated. We're working here with four main areas of action, priorities, performance, potential, and passion. Internally, we're pushing on all of these priority areas, of course, but this year the focus has been a lot on performance because that's where we lacked most in the short term.
You'll see from the results that we are already on good track, particularly with the first step implemented, and I'll bring a few examples in the next minutes. One of the, for this year, most relevant performance initiatives has been really the pricing situation, the pricing initiatives. Because as most players in the industrial sectors, we have been affected, or we are being affected by the significant rise in energy prices, raw material prices, logistics costs, product costs. At different parts of the year, different areas of that were more relevant than others. You know, we saw some initial spikes in raw material that have, I wouldn't say recovered, but at least relaxed a little bit. Energy is still a very big topic.
Logistics was definitely worse earlier in the year than it's now. The whole package here is obviously something which brings a lot of pressure on any industrial company. What we did, we started fairly early this year in approaching that structurally. In the beginning of February, or mid of February already, we kicked off here internally a project where we worked together with not only the sales team, but also our procurement department, our controlling department, the technical department, to define how we tackle this, how we manage to pass on the majority of those cost increases to our customers, and in the end to, you know, to find workable solutions with our customers. Now we can say we concluded not everything, but almost everything.
There are still a couple of customers where we are in intense negotiations. None of these discussions are easy. Across the board, we are here on track to achieve those 8%-12%, which we already announced earlier this year. It will be also something for the next months, as I mean, the period of stable costs and stable prices, which we all benefited from during the last years, that seems to be over for the next years to come. That's also something we had to learn as an organization to live with that completely different environment. Here we are on good track, and we are now much more resilient for similar situations to arise in the future.
I mentioned earlier that we made further progress with our hydrogen strategy, and we're quite pleased to announce here this important milestone that we at DEUTZ joined this HyCET research project consortium, so HyCET, Hydrogen Combustion Engine Truck. That is a consortium of very good names, in particular here the lead partner BMW, then it's us, then it's DHL, Kia, TotalEnergies and Volvo. The aim of this project is that there is a truck being developed which is fitted with a hydrogen internal combustion engine, which is gonna be trialed in transportation logistically. Mainly on site or on larger production sites such as BMW, such as DEUTZ. What's our contribution in there?
The idea is the project is to include in 2 18-ton trucks which are fitted with a DEUTZ TCG 7.8 H2 hydrogen engine. These trucks to be tested in the daily challenges by using them in this regular logistics operation as part of BMW and DEUTZ. For us, it's been so far a very important step because we have informed you on a regular basis on the TCG 7.8 H2 hydrogen engine, which were developed over the last years and which is currently being used already in a stationary genset together with our partner, Linde. This now is the next level. We're moving it from stationary to moving equipment.
We are opening here another route to not focus only on off-highway, but also for perspective here on highway. That's something we're proud of, that we're part of that. Investment volume for the entire consortium is roughly EUR 20 million, and the project term is four years. It's not only to develop our new business model and making money in the future, but in particular also that with that participation, we will continue to contribute here to sustainability in the field of transportation logistics. Reorganization of the board of management is now completed. Dr. Petra Mayer joined us early November, a couple of days ago, as COO. She joined from ZF, coming in from ZF, and this is a new position to be filled.
We didn't have dedicated COO beforehand. The rationale behind that is also that she will be in charge for production, for purchasing, and for the supply chain areas. These are all very relevant areas, and in particular to the area of supply chain is an area which certainly has been important previous years. Given the current change in geopolitical circumstances and global supply chains, we are convinced that this is a role which is, in the future, even more important than it had already been in past years. We are very glad to have her aboard and contribute with all her experience in further developing here our operational excellence. Markus Müller, who's been with DEUTZ for many, many years, most recently as chief technology officer, he now also assumes the function of sales.
He's gonna be the chief sales officer as well. That's also so far very beneficial because one major part of our transformation is technology, from the combustion engine, from the diesel combustion engine, to sustainable fuels, to electrification, to hydrogen. It's very important that we move from being a technology company to being a technology company with a better connection to the market. Having these two functions or two roles in one, under one roof, in one hat, will prove to be very beneficial for our transformation. Timo Krutoff will join beginning of December as CFO and personnel director. It's a classical CFO function, but we'll be very happy to have him as a challenger of the business, as a transformer of the business, including also information technology.
Myself as CEO, I will drive the transformation of the business model further as we already started earlier this year. Looking briefly back to the DEUTZ DAYS, mentioned before our in-house trade fair, where we had many customers visiting and many media guys as well. We introduced, we showed here several products, several technologies in the field of E-DEUTZ, high voltage system. We also showed applications, like here an example from JLG, one of our most important U.S. customers, where we equipped the telehandler with our alternative drivetrain technology. We also show that we are strongly continuing to believe in the combustion engine. Here we showed our most recent development, the TCD 3.9, which is a product we developed jointly with John Deere.
We showed our hydrogen genset, another application of the hydrogen engine in power generation. We showed the [EleTrail system]. We showed an electric mini excavator with Kobelco. We showed an airport tow tractor with MULAG. First sort of product which ranges more into ecosystems, the DEUTZ PowerTree, which is a large mobile charging station for electric systems, where we bring the charging and the electricity on the construction site. We kept it on with the motto, "We ensure the world keeps moving," and we had fantastic discussions with our customers. It was a really very impressive event where we managed to get with our customer to talk about future and to present our innovative products.
Again, as I said, combining or including our conventional internal combustion engines as of today and new technologies in the future. That's a bit of a teaser, what were, let's say, the highlights of the last nine months. Now I'll hand over to Christian, who will get into more details regarding the numbers.
Thank you, Sebastian. Yeah. Let's take a closer look at our nine-month numbers, starting off with the new orders. Sebastian already told you we had a slight growth to nine months of 0.4% to EUR 1.52 billion. If we take a closer look at the single quarter of Q3, we saw a small slowdown there. Q3 order intake was down 9%, bringing the book-to-bill ratio to 0.95%. As already mentioned before, we're seeing a small easing there. It is very different when we look at the different application segments. In agriculture, we still have strong increase, growth of 24.4% in Q3. While on the other hand, the construction business was down 26%, and material handling was down even 38%.
Here we had two U.S. clients with high pre-order levels last year, so it's basically something that is a one-off and nothing to be taken too seriously, overall. Taking a look at the unit sales, after nine months, up 16.5%, driven in part by the classic DEUTZ engines. As mentioned before, they were at 130,000. Again, looking at Q3 as a single event, unit sales for the DEUTZ engines were only flat at 40,400. I'll come to that a little bit later. We had some issues on the logistics side, which basically limited us a little bit to how much we were able to bring out to the customer. Still, it was overall a very solid quarter for us.
On the revenue side, revenues in Q3 were up 15.4% to EUR 465 million, and that was driven by a nice increase in price mix as well as growth in the service business. Just to give you some color here, our average sales price for the classic DEUTZ engine in Q3 was up 17% year-over-year at roughly EUR 8,200. If you look at the nine-month period, ASPs were up 7%, roughly at EUR 7,700. This is also reflected of course in our order backlog. Our order backlog was up 34% year-over-year. If you back out the service business in the order backlog, you arrive at roughly 100,000 engines, which we have in our order backlog at the end of September.
That gives us some nice visibility going forward. A quick glance at our service business. As I mentioned before, we had nice growth also in Q3, but also in the nine-month period, up more than 12%, 12.7% to be exact. This is also equally reflected in the new orders, which were up 14.7%. Also the orders on hand grew nicely by more than 60%. Of course, here, as it is a very swiftly turning business, the impact is not that large. Overall, we can say with the growth in the business, particularly in the parts sales and the DEUTZ Xchange business, we are well on track to achieve our service target of around EUR 500 million sales by 2025.
What's also important to us, we were able to progress with our digitalization strategy. During the DEUTZ Days, which Sebastian already mentioned, we were able to showcase a DEUTZ Telematics project together with DEUTZ Telematics, where we add additional value for our customers, which gives them remote access to monitoring the engine fleet sites. We're working there with partners to have a broader offering for our customers. A quick glance at the revenue breakdown by region and by application segment. Mainly two things to highlight on the regional view. First of all, Americas with a very strong growth at 52% after nine months. Here, the region clearly benefited from a strong material handling as well as a strong stationary equipment business.
On the flip side, Asia Pacific with only growth of 2.5%. Here, the relative weakness of the Chinese market plays a major role. The very stringent lockdown policy of the Chinese government at the moment is not helping business there. Unfortunately, the decision of the political congress in October seems to extend this lockdown policy, so we do not expect any recovery quickly anytime soon here. If you look at the breakdown per application segment, what sticks out is, as I said before, the strong growth in the stationary equipment with almost 50%, but also agricultural machinery is still very strong with +30%. Important, I think, is overall that all our big end markets contributed to our growth, all were in double-digit figures.
As I said before, especially important for us is the service business, which also was able to grow more than 10%. Now a look at our profitability. As you can see in the slide, we were able to increase the profitability in the quarter very nicely versus previous year. We were able to post a 5% adjusted EBIT margin in the quarter, and in the nine-month period, our adjusted EBIT improved to EUR 66 million, as Sebastian said before. Main drivers are the increased volume of business, the cost savings. We had some positive FX effects, but of course also, as mentioned before, we are increasingly able to pass on to customers the higher logistics and material costs with our price increases. So that also helps us on the margin side.
Our EBIT margin before exceptional items for the nine-month period rose to 4.7%. Net income before exceptional items came in at EUR 52.2 million, almost a doubling of the previous nine-month figure. Not surprisingly, EPS came in at EUR 0.43, almost doubling the EUR 0.22 EPS we had in the nine-month period of last year. A quick look at some balance sheet items. On the R&D spending side, you can see that we had also a significant increase, growth of 18% here, but the R&D ratio was stable at 5%. What we are seeing here is that we're seeing a small shift in the classic part of our R&D spending portfolio is coming down while the green part is going up. Last year, 70% of R&D expenditure was classic.
This year, it's around 64%, and this trend is going to continue on the next years. On the CapEx side, at first glance, a very strong increase, but this is mainly driven by our single leasing business effect. We invested in a logistics center. This added EUR 32 million to our leasing book portfolio. This is a long-term contract. If you just look at the brick-and-mortar spending, that was flat year-over-year. Another thing that we have to discuss here is the working capital development, because this was not quite as we had planned. We saw a very strong increase, especially in Q3, in our inventories, mainly due to some issues in the supply chain, but also we had a higher stockpiling level combined with the higher procurement prices.
In total, we saw an increase of more than EUR 120 million in our working capital versus beginning of the year. This, of course, had some spillover effects in our free cash flow or cash flow. Looking at the cash flow from operating activities, despite the very strong EBIT after nine months, the cash flow from operating activities was down roughly EUR 80 million, as I said before, due to the buildup in the inventory level. This, of course, is also visible in our free cash flow development. Net debt additionally is burdened by the high investments in this logistic building. The 32 million of the additional leasing comes on top here. In overall, we now have a $150 million existing credit lines, but we're still, and this is the next slide, very solidly financed.
Our equity ratio remains high at well above 40%, and we still have unused credit lines of around EUR 107 million. We have a solid balance sheet and sufficient financial headroom, including for growth by acquisitions if anything pops up. Finally, a quick glance at our two segments. First of all, our classic segment, where all the diesel engine and the related service is put together. New orders up 0.9%, very similar to the group figure. Unit sales already mentioned before, up close to 30% to 130,000 units. Here you can see on the revenue side, due to positive price mix effects, revenue disproportionately grew by almost 19%. Especially nice for us is that the adjusted EBIT margin was able to grow significantly.
Adjusted EBIT more than doubled to EUR 92.5 million. We're now close to 7% after nine months. This after being loss-making here only two years back in the midst of the COVID crisis. A very nice turnaround. As I said before, it is not, we're not satisfied with this yet. There's still more way to go, and we'll continue to work on our cost basis to ensure that the margin here stays healthy. Because we need this business to finance our investment in the future. As you can see here, when we look at the green segment, it is still very small, but it has a negative EBIT contribution as we continue to invest into the future. The adjusted EBIT was -EUR 26 million after nine months, and this is mainly driven by R&D investments.
The Torqeedo contribution was also slightly negative but really marginal so. As we believe that we'll continue to invest, especially in E-DEUTZ and the hydrogen applications, we will need the classic business to finance our investment in the future going forward. That is my piece on the numbers. I will now hand back to Sebastian for the outlook.
Thank you, Christian. Before moving to the outlook, I wanna just give a bit of an update on also where we stand with the energy supply situation, because you can imagine that's been a bit of a concern for us in the last months as, like for most all industrial players. In Germany, we were particularly concerned about potential effects from potential gas rationing throughout the winter. At the moment it looks like we have that as a country a bit better under control. The gas storages are almost entirely filled, but this might change quickly. This is why we as DEUTZ had to prepare ourselves with measures, how to react, how to keep production going if there were a shortage.
What we've done here for our major site, our biggest site in Cologne-Porz, the assembly plant, we have completed preparations which enable us to switch the heating supply from gas to heating oil in a very short term. Again, it's not a measure which you would do in the long run. It's not the most sustainable approach, but that would be an emergency measure pretty much to keep production, so we've concluded that. At the moment, I don't think we're gonna need that, but it's better to have the possibility than not to have the possibility. Something similar we've done on our second-largest production site in Ulm. Here, we are in the process of implementing an alternative concept also for switching to LPG, which we expect to have complete by the end of this year.
Obviously that's what we can influence by our own, by ourselves. Also important is obviously that we're monitoring our suppliers. When it comes to the large suppliers, we have a very good transparency now with them, on a daily contact with them. So here we believe we're well informed. When it comes to sub and sub-sub-suppliers, the visibility is naturally a little less good. In total, I'd say for gas, if there were a gas rationing, we are prepared and that was one of our targets to have that set up. Also, the whole crisis when it comes to electricity, it's in the short term mainly a price crisis here. We also stepped up again in terms of increasing the share of renewable energy.
You know that we already use green electricity at all DEUTZ sites since 2021. What we also now continued to install is PV systems, photovoltaic system. In Cologne, we have installed the first system, and we are in the process of installing further systems. While Cologne is not the most sunny area, and that when we have installed this will make the contribution, but a rather small contribution. Whereas on our southern sites in Zafra and Safinow, it's a completely different picture. In Zafra, our big components plant in Spain, in Extremadura, here we have now installed two photovoltaic system, which actually contribute to a significant share of the electricity required over there and same for Safinow.
We will use this also as an instrument, as a way also to further reduce our CO2 target by 61% compared from 2017- 2023. This has two effects. First of all, really making DEUTZ more sustainable, but also making us more resilient in that field, in the current field of the energy crisis. Now, moving ahead on the guidance for 2022, we put the guidance on review earlier this year, pretty much before we published it, because that was exactly the time when that horrible war in the Ukraine kicked off, and we had a lot of uncertainty on supply chain and market development.
I mean, still there is some uncertainty, but the uncertainty for 2022 is going down, purely because of our move throughout the year. As we said earlier, actually pretty well. If we look at our outlook for 2022 now, what we see is unit sales in the range between 175 and 185 thousand DEUTZ engines. The demand is much higher, has been much higher. The limitations are mainly coming from supply chain production capabilities here. So, particular in the segment, smaller four liters, the demand is significantly higher than what we can fulfill. So, this is here the reason why we are that range, 175, 185. That translates into revenue EUR 1.75 billion-EUR 1.85 billion, including the service business in particular, and also Torqeedo and other smaller subsidiaries.
We foresee an EBIT margin, EBIT adjusted margin between 4.5% and 5.0%, so pretty much in line with the first nine months, roughly. Free cash flow, that's the only, let's say, slightly negative point where we currently foresee a negative low- to mid-double-digit million EUR amount. Obviously, we are working on reducing the inventories and optimizing working capital to try to hit the higher part of that range. It's also important, in the last month, as Christian explained it earlier, we have to disappoint quite a few customers when it comes to delivery performance purely because of supply chain. We did not do everything to optimize inventories in terms of just-in-time production.
If there was a slight disturbance on the supply of components, that would have impacted the delivery performance of our customers even more. That's why working capital increased. Now with the supply chain becoming a little more stable, it's the time to bring it better under control as you would normally do it. That's our outlook here on the free cash flow. That guidance for 2022 is pretty much in line with the forecast we developed originally earlier this year, and we put directly in the review. Let me also sum up. I mean coming back from the guidance to the first nine months, as we said, as we've seen earlier, we are on track.
We are on track with that growth in revenue, with that growth in profitability. We are not yet where we want to be. That must also be very clear. We see that DEUTZ can achieve more, and we are working extremely focused to unlock this potential what we have. What makes me confident is we saw already in the segment reporting. That makes me feel very confident, that we see how we develop, how we further increase profitability and the business as a whole in our classic segment, 6.9%. That is if we take out, you know, all the investment in new technologies, which in the past years we've never had in that range. That's actually by far the best nine-month performance we've had in the last 10 years or so.
Again, that is not to be happy with that or to be satisfied. We need to be more profitable. We also need to earn here the money in order to fund the journey of the transformation for the future. This classic segment, we believe, will be a cash cow for quite some years to go with us. To cut a long story short, on track, but we will continue to remain on track and to improve further resilience, we developed in the right way. Whatever the future brings in terms of market development, we are well prepared. Thank you very much for your attention. I'll hand back to Christian and to the operator to check whether there are any questions.
Thank you, Sebastian. Operator, we are ready to take the questions.
Thank you, Christian. 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 touch tone 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 Richard Schramm from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, gentlemen. I have two questions, please. One is concerning the price effect. Can you be a bit more precise how much of this affected the increase in pricing in the sales increase? Was it the complete difference between the volume of +13% and +19% we have seen in sales increase over the 6 percentage points? Is this what you could realize from better pricing? How does this compare with your target for the full year of 8%-12%, which would leave a massive remaining figure for the last quarter? Is this realistic, or how should we put this into context here? Thank you.
Yeah. Sure. Thanks for the question. First of all, the 8%-12% is always on an annualized number. We started the negotiations in February, and the first increase kicked in with the beginning of March. Then continuously as we moved throughout the year, we got more increases actively in the P&L. Obviously, with the last negotiations being almost completed, we've got a couple of customers where we're still in discussions, but all but those we have completed. The majority of that round has been now effective from the beginning of October. Yes, you're right that the price increase effect is stronger in the last quarter than in the previous quarters. That's right.
The rise in revenue is not only due to price increase. That delta between revenue and unit sales is not only driven by price increase. We did also benefit to an extent from the U.S. dollar. You know very well our exposure in the U.S. is sizable. So the dollar certainly helped a little bit as well. It's a small double-digit EUR million amount here. It's not as big as one sometimes would think, because with some of our U.S. customers we also have euro contracts to not have too much exposure on the dollar. To cut a long story short, it's two things.
It's price increases. It's a little bit of the dollar and slightly mixed changes, but it's not so much because at the moment the demand is particularly strong for the smaller four-liter engines.
So would that mean that currency was about 3%-4%? Would that be a good estimate here? Further, does this mean that the majority of your price increases will quite obviously then affect the next year, so there we should expect a significant positive impact from this side?
We cannot. We are not in the position to give a guidance or an outlook on next year. What we can say is obviously what we did this year on the price side will, vast majority will help us, will support us also next year. We also need to see what are the cost development for next year, because there's also a delay, in the realization. For us, it's important that we're always staying ahead of the wave. This is what we did well by starting in February earlier. Let's not talk about next year.
We are well positioned with what we did because the majority, vast majority of our negotiations with the customers included a sustainable solution, and we don't need to try to avoid one-time payments as much as we can, so we're here on good track.
Okay. The second question, if I may, concerning the order inflow in green, which was negative. Is this really only a basis effect or what's behind this trend here? Because on the relatively low basis, one might have expected that there should be at least a stable or slightly positive development.
The order intake, as well as the revenues in the green segment is at the moment mainly driven by Torqeedo. With Torqeedo, we did see a bit of a slowdown in growth. I think Christian mentioned it earlier, that in the corona time, that was actually in terms of top line a business which grew significantly because in the leisure area, a lot of people then started to invest in their products for personal, you know, leisure crafts and so on. That's slowing down a little bit. You know from our several discussions that the green products in our core businesses, like agriculture, like construction equipment and so on and so forth, there we are still in the prototype status.
We developed and we sold the first, let's say, PowerTrees, for example, this year, but these are still double digit numbers and not in the thousands. Yes, your, the reduction you see is mainly driven by Torqeedo.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone telephone. Next question comes from the line of Jorge González Sadornil from Hauck Aufhäuser Lampe Privatbank AG. Please go ahead.
Hello, good morning. Thank you for taking my question, Sebastian and Christian. A few questions from my side. First one, could you please give us an update on China and the joint venture with SANY? Then, I'm also curious about the order on hand, the backlog, basically, figure. I have noticed that it has increased compared to the second quarter, despite the book-to-bill was slightly below one. Does it mean that you were capable to increase prices for some of your engines in the backlog? Regarding the working capital, if I understood well, you had basically to increase your inventories because of the situation of the supply chain at this point.
Do you have any visibility when this is going to change? I'm sorry if you already commented on this because I had some issues with the call. Well, maybe those there are already three questions. Maybe you can just go for them, please.
Yeah, let me start, well, Jorge, first of all, good morning, and thanks for the question. Let me start with the last question on the working capital. What we have working capital increase is driven by mainly the two factors. One factor is component and material, yeah. And that is something we are now starting to adjust. As I said earlier, and I'm not sure you were part of that call when I said it, but I'm happy to repeat. Because now with a lot of components, the supply chain becomes a little more stable, so we can here reduce the safety stock, which we incorporated earlier. That's one effect, and we are gradually starting to implement that.
That's something we expect significant impact already in the fourth quarter, but it will certainly not be. We'll not be able to complete all that reduction to a normal level in the next couple of months. We'll need probably Q1 next year on top of that. The other big driving factor was actually the finished goods. In finished goods, we had a few issues with our logistics provider in Cologne. There were actually a lot of COVID cases, and that led to a bit of a buffer in finished goods in Cologne, particularly July and August. We solved that now, so here the stocks in Cologne are down on a more normal level again.
This doesn't help on the group working capital because it needs to first go to the customer. So all these finished goods are now already in transit, particularly to the States and to Asia. So here we see we expect significant impact also by the end of Q4 but will not be back on a normal level entirely. So that'll continue to be done in Q1. So reduction, yes, regarding Q4, but certainly not back to the low levels of Q4 2021. And that's also why we are a little cautious on that free cash flow guidance because we're doing everything to reduce the stocks again. But it just doesn't. It has to. At the moment, it takes some time to pretty much flow through the system.
The other question, if I remember correctly, was on the order backlog and price increases on the order backlog. It is true that, with the pricing initiatives we kicked off in February, we also increased prices on order backlog. That was pretty much a move which we had to do because, you know, we have this high order backlog. We have a coverage of more than six months order backlog for our business, and we pretty much decided we cannot only increase prices on new orders. We have customers also on existing orders. It was initially not an easy discussion, but at the moment it appears that the majority of companies in the industrial sector are doing it like that.
It is pretty much a situation where we didn't have an alternative. Now we're good. We're on track, and that might explain the effect you've seen in the numbers. Your third question was on China. I'll hand over to Christian, who's giving you a bit of an insight on that.
Yeah, Jorge, as you may remember, when we looked at the development of our regional segments, I mean, the Asia Pacific region is the region which the least growth, and that is basically all China. China was a very difficult year for us with the lockdowns still in place. If you look at our SANY joint venture, it had a negative contribution, a small negative contribution, after nine months, with a also small negative contribution in Q3. That remains a difficult situation at the moment. As I also said, due to the continuity of the lockdown policy of the Chinese government, we do not expect any recovery anytime soon in China. It will definitely also be something that we have to monitor closely next year.
We wouldn't expect any too ambitious growth goals there at the moment.
Thank you, Christian. I go back to you.
We have a follow-up question from the line of Richard Schramm from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. I just would like to know about this renegotiations you mentioned with the existing orders. How successful has this been, and what is the possible impact here in the improvement of the pricing of your order backlog? How would you estimate has this helped to improve the pricing component here?
Well, we are not in the position to give details on what are the levels we negotiated with individual customer, that old customers that has also legal reasons. What I can assure you that the majority of the order backlog we were able to touch and or to change. This you see already in the results up to which we just presented, and we continue to see this share increasing in the next quarter and then in the next year as well. The big question will be how is the cost development for the next year. We've seen the hikes in energy at the moment. We've seen the raw material already recovering a little bit.
What's coming next is most likely an agreement between the unions and the companies when it comes to salary increases, IG Metall for Germany. That will certainly have an impact for next year. For me, the question is how long can we keep the prices that we now raise stable, and when do we have to get back again for the customers? I see that as a positive thing. We have initiated actually a constructive dialogue with the customers. At the moment, and last month, it's not the discussion with the customers, you know, whether we have to increase prices.
The discussion is very much how much, by how much, and how much you link to certain indices, such as energy or raw material, and how much you actually include with the base price. For going forward, we're not yet giving out numbers here. That's something which will come then most likely when we will provide the first full year guidance for 2023 after our press conference in March.
Okay. The indexation you just mentioned for contracts, is this now kind of standard clause you have in each contract, or is this still more the exception?
There is no standard in most of these contracts. What we typically have is a combination. We have a combination of base price increases, and then we have a combination of indexations. It's the whole structure of these clauses has changed significantly. Up to a year ago, we often have, particularly with the bigger customers, the bigger companies, we've had already indexation clauses, but they mainly refers to raw material cost development such as copper, for example, or steel, depending on the weight of that particular component.
What was not included in, I would say more than 95% of those clauses, was energy, because energy, unstable energy or energy price hikes like we've seen in the last six months, we were simply not used to in Europe, and that's why we didn't have it in. That is something which is one of the key negotiation factors where we also, where you also convince the purchasers from the customers because they feel the same effect on their side. It's a combination, pretty much. It's a combination. To use an energy component now, that becomes standard. How exactly that energy component looks like, that's subject to negotiation between us and the customer. By the way, also between us and our suppliers.
We're having the same discussions also from the supply chain outlook.
Okay. Thank you.
Next question is from the line of Roland Könen from Value-Holdings . Please go ahead.
Yes. Thanks for taking my questions. I have three. First one is an easy one, housekeeping question on the tax rate. You had 16% roughly in the first nine months versus last year, roughly 0%. What would be the best guess for the full year and thereafter? The second question would be on your view on next year's or the next year. In the last call, you were very optimistic after you were talking to your clients, and the clients were giving positive signals, also for the year 2023. They are asking for a free slot in your production.
Has there anything changed in the last three months, or what is the view of your customers for, let's say the next half year or the first half 2023? The last question would be on Torqeedo. We saw a very big jump in unit sales in the third quarter. I guess you said that the earnings situation is already a small loss there. Could you elaborate a bit more on the earnings situation at Torqeedo? Maybe you could give us a unit number when Torqeedo will be break even. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, thanks for the question. Let me start with the first one, as you said, an easy one, the tax rate. On average, obviously depending on the revenues in our different countries, we always have in a stable environment a range between 15%-20%. Why was it 0% last year? Because we utilized tax losses carrying forward, also from the previous COVID year. You can always calculate 15%-20%, on average, on the tax rate.
In Germany, we have quite a high tax loss carrying forward from old KHD in DEUTZ times, which we can utilize for quite some time, but you can, as you know, only utilize half of that since the last change in that particular law. On the outlook on next year, and yes, it is right that obviously, we're all talking about fear of recession, but our customers are still quite bullish, as applies particularly to the smaller engines. It's too early to tell numbers for next year. We're not gonna do that out of principle. I will avoid numbers, not because I don't have them, but because we're just simply not prepared to share them at this point in time.
What we do observe is still in most sectors and most regions a quite strong demand for the smaller engines. The U.S. is the strongest here, followed by Europe, followed by Asia. Asia is a bit cautious. As Christian said earlier, China is still a very unclear situation now, but the U.S. is quite strong and there are quite a few customers who are agreeing with us at the moment in fixing capacity for the full year. There are other customers who are prepared to agree on fixing capacity on a rolling six-month principle. First six months of 2023 to fix and then only, let's say 80%, 60%, but then rolling into it. There are only few customers who are very cautious on that. Why is that?
Because all our customers, when we talk to them, and, you know, during the bauma fair, I spoke to quite a lot of them. Majority of them actually informs that their order backlog is very strong for 2023. Some even reaching into 2024, others reaching into 2023. Yes, if there is the recession coming in, as some suspect, there might also be some cancellations. At the moment, particularly for sub-4-liter, it's very strong. Yes, in our assessments, we have to be a bit cautious and put always in some conservatism. The customers pull, and at the moment, it's more allocating the available resources for next year, particularly on sub-4-liter.
When we see Torqeedo, you asked on Torqeedo. We give only rough numbers here because it's part of the green segment. On revenue, we are here in EUR 60 million-70 million in the year to date. Obviously on revenue with Torqeedo, the summer months are typically stronger than the winter and the early spring months is. We will not break even this year. When we look at the top line for Europe, we had less sales for the smaller products. That's pretty much because there was a lot of anticipation during COVID.
When it comes to America and Asia, we did sell more, particularly to our partners, Navico and Garmin. On profitability, as I said, we're not gonna be break even this year. We are currently assessing the outlook for next year. It's too early to say outlook for next year. We'll give in February as normal.
Okay. Fair, fair enough. Thanks a lot for answering the questions. All the best for the rest of the year. Thanks a lot.
There are no further questions at this time, and I would like to hand back to Christian Ludwig for closing comments. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Thank you all for listening in, and thank you for your questions. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact the IR department. If I don't hear from you, then we'll speak again at the latest in March next year when we'll release our full year figures. Thank you very much and 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.