Good day ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's Earnings Call of the Fielmann Group AG following the publication of the Fnancial Half Year Figures of 2025. With this, I'm happy to hand over to Fielmann's CFO Steffen Baetjer.
Hello. Ingmar, that was definitely the most enthusiastic intro we had in a long time. Thank you very much for that. I think it's just it really, given the way the company performed, I think this is the right setting, the right tone, so to say. Welcome everybody to our earnings call for the half year one results that end, that is the period ending 30th of June. Today is the 28th of August. We already published our preliminary numbers just ahead of our AGM on the 10th or 11th or something of July. No real news, but still we want to give you the opportunity to hear a little bit more on the numbers and definitely give you the opportunity to ask any questions you might have. You are all aware that this is the half year one results call we're going to host.
In September we're going to host a more comprehensive session on our Vision 2030 and Vision 2035 and targets 2030 that we announced at the AGM where we're going to peel the onion a little bit further for you and say what does all that mean, where does all the growth come from, and what does that mean for margin and CapEx? Are these guys going overboard with acquisitions? No, we're not. That is all September's meeting. Today is all about the earnings of the half year one. Let's jump straight to the summary. Before we do that, I have with me Niels Scharvichter. Most of you know, maybe Niels, you turn on the camera, there is Niels. Hello. Niels has been, as I introduced him to some of you, as he was one of my guys working in the CFO office for Fielmann.
He has been with the company six years, then left us to do some equity research, then came back. I'm very happy to announce that mid of August we promoted Niels to permanent full time Director of Investor Relations. Patrick Muller, who was with us for a few months, helped us tremendously in taking what we had, telling us what normal companies should have, helped us through the AGM. He's now taking a well-deserved break and we thank him very much for everything he did for us and he basically helped Niels to jump into this position. I'm actually super proud that somebody who after school decided to do his first professional endeavor with Fielmann is now a Director in our company and part of the senior management team. Thank you very much for everything you've done, Niels, so far.
Good luck and very glad to have you on board, albeit in a different role. With that, we go to the summary of the first half year in a nutshell. We continue our growth trajectory. We have a slight delay here. Yeah, we continue our growth trajectory. We continue our margin expansion. We are in a challenging environment. Consumer sentiment is still, because of everything that's going on, is still difficult consumer sentiment in the U.S. In the first quarter we had a lot of snow, even a lot for upper Midwest standards, a lot of snow. Then we had Liberation Day right at the beginning of the second quarter. All that was absolutely not helpful for consumer sentiment. It has picked up since; in late May, June it started to pick up. Still, across the world, challenging consumer sentiment. We do have a strong development across all major markets.
We have a very strong development across all product categories. Very happy with the numbers that we're producing. You see that group sales increased by 12%. 4.5% of that organically, roughly 8% come from the U.S. acquisition. Shopko Optical that we consolidated fully for the first time on July 1st, 2024. With that, we're basically down to organic growth for the remainder of the year. Just want to flag that to you so that you don't expect all these big numbers from now on, quarter by quarter, it's going to be organic. 4.5% is good. It's not great. It's definitely at the low end. Over the last five, six years, we delivered around 6% organic growth. With 4.5% in that environment, we are satisfied. Vision 2030, our target is around 5% organic growth in that part of the business. We're kind of there.
It's definitely on the lower end of the range that we're going to deliver. Group's adjusted EBITDA profitability, we always said, and I've been saying it for the last two years actually that I've been working for Fielmann , just had my anniversary one and a half weeks ago. For the last two years I've been saying we're working on profitability, we're working on profitability and we're working on profitability. Adjusted EBITDA improved significantly. Margin for the group is now at 24% after 21% last year, Europe at 25%, U.S. at 15%, all with quite impressive growth rates. That is the usual mix. That's the great news about our business. There are no news in terms of what we do. We're pulling the same levers that we've been pulling.
You know, cost control, efficiency in the stores and improve, continuously improving sellout structure and all that drives profitability for the business. It gets us fully into the target corridor that we have. Adjusted EBITDA, EBT increased also substantially by 29%. Margin is now at 12.9% after 11% in the last year. That is despite, you know, us adding EUR 300 million and EUR 300 million in debt, which obviously is not helpful for EBT. You know we have all the PPAs, so the acquisition related write-offs of the intangible. Despite all that, our margin is improving and it's actually quite a nice pyramid shape that you want to have as a CFO. You want to have group sales at 12%, adjusted EBITDA by 26% and then adjusted EBT by 29%. You have this pyramid structure. The further down you go in your P&L structure, the higher the percentage growth rate.
That shows you that we're looking at operation leverage here, which is exactly what we're aiming for. We confirmed, and I know this is boring, but there are quite a few companies who didn't. We confirm our outlook that we published for the financial year 2025. We're saying nearly 2.5 billion sales, 24% margin for the group. Looking at the results, you see why we do that. We have a slide later at the end of the presentation on that and we announced Vision 2035 on targets for 2030 in our AGM. As I said, in September, we're going to talk about that. On the next slide, you see the numbers basically again but in a much prettier shape. You see the total consolidated sales with the organic growth CAGR actually for 2023 - 2025 was 12%. We're pretty stable on the consolidated sales growth rate.
CAGR for adjusted EBITDA was about 19%. Now this, you know, the last year we were 26%. We see an acceleration but that's also acquisition driven. Q2 in profitability, we typically talk about year to date, but Q2 was a bit lower. That's basically a phasing of our marketing expenses. We really held back, you know, with timing the marketing a little bit according to season. That changes every year because, you know, we're not one of these companies that says we always do this campaign then and then we do the other campaign then. We phase it a bit. There's an EUR 8 million difference in marketing spent between Q1 and Q2. If you factor that in, for the Excel guys among you, that's in other operating expenses. If you factor that in, then you see that actually the profitability across the quarters is pretty similar.
Product mix, we always, if the sun is with us, and it was this year, especially in Germany, if the sun is with us, we always have a slightly higher cost of goods sold in Q2. That's basically driven by more sun and therefore more sunglasses, and margin on sunglasses, margin without prescription is lower than margin on glasses with prescription. That's basically it. Because all the northern Europeans, once the sun comes out, they come to Fielmann and they buy new pair of, which is right, adjusted EBITDA. We talked about 28% or 29% growth. The CAGR for the two years is 23%. We see an acceleration, we see a stableness in the sales growth, we see an acceleration in the profitability growth, which is exactly what we wanted. Bit more into detail. The top line growth, or the top line, increased by 12%.
By now, everybody knows that song. Let's look at what we mean when we say all product categories and all countries. Here you see the product categories. First, you look at it, and sunglasses is the only one category that held me back by writing double-digit growth in all product categories. Sunglasses still at plus 9%. All other categories at double-digit growth. This is obviously mainly influenced by the Shopko Optical consolidation, especially the contact lenses. Because the contact lenses are, you know, it's a strong product in the U.S. organically. We put that here for you, so there was a measure of anything worth 5% for monitoring a contact lens business at 5%, and adjacent healthcare services relatively small, high growth because all the eye exams we do in our U.S. practices as basically adjacent.
Those eye exams done by the optometrists are actually adjacent healthcare services, grew by 87% organically. It's still 50%, but that's because we're really trying to broaden in the U.S., we're trying to broaden the availability of doctor appointment, and that's why that category grows. It also grows because we have our eye care, eye health checkup in Europe, eye care that is developing quite nicely as well. First, undoubtedly, which you have heard about, growth in lens sales, I were 4%. Some of that influenced by our U.S. acquisition. Organically, to be honest, SVS Vision a bit struggling. If you put together the SVS and Shopko , and you treat them as if we acquired them all on day one, you see a slight, slight growth in unit sales in the U.S. and we're flat to slightly positive in unit sales in Europe.
As I said, very, very challenging consumer environment at the moment for us. We're pretty happy that we're outperforming the market with our growth partially by this growing slightly above zero. It's partly because we're growing quite extensively as we do in countries like Spain and Austria and the Czech Republic and Poland. We see that there the economy is a lot more vibrant and therefore we also see that we have a lot higher unit sales than for example in Germany. Innovation is driving our adjacent eye health business. We have the, as I said, we have the eye checkup and then we have the business in the U.S. and you might, you know, all these trends that you see here are basically the foundation for our 2030 targets.
These strategic growth drivers that you see on this page and that we talked about are basically the growth drivers that we're going to use to get to our 2030 targets. As I said, that's more in context. I'm going to tell you a story. Product categories overall, you know, ignore sunglasses double digit growth. We're very happy with, very happy with that. If we look at the individual markets on the next page you see the company growing, the group growing at 12%. Obviously in the U.S. at 143%. That's driven by the Shopko Optical consolidation. I'm so glad that this consolidation part is over and we can talk about real numbers going forward. All the other countries as you see 5%, 8%, you know, 5%, 6%. Really a healthy development. Think about where we stand and what the state of the world is and what market position we have.
You have an absolute market leader in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In these countries we're still growing by 5% and 6% and outperforming the market overall. We're still at mid single digit and that's as we always said, you know, 4-7% is our guidance for organic growth in Europe. The U.S. is now our second largest market which is still driving the integration of the businesses. I said earlier in Q1 we were done with the systems integration. The management team, integration, management, now it's all about business model transformation. We're trying out a few things and identify the winning formula for all the U.S. but still all that integration really drives profitability. As you will see on one of the later slides, the profitability has really improved quite dramatically. Actually, we're higher in the U.S. profitability now than we were individually in those companies when we acquired them.
Spain and Portugal, still our high growth dynamic countries, they're outperforming the market. I always said the great thing about our country portfolio is not only that we touch the lives of a few hundred million people and help them to hear and see the beauty in the world better, but we also have a great portfolio of countries in terms of very, very mature market leading companies in GSA, you know, and then some really hot growth engines in Spain and Poland and then some, you know, next generation growth countries like, you know, the Czech Republic and others. That's basically where you're going to find Poland. You're also going to find Italy. They have returned to growth. We closed quite a few stores there because we had to review our profitability profile and it was not a profitability profile.
It now is still mid teens in terms of profitability for the year. Italy has also now returned to broadcast after the store closures. They're only 2% but still, you know, after everything the country went through, it's pretty great. We're continuing to become more and more international. 39% of sales are generated outside Germany and that's just because of the U.S. dollar that depreciated against the euro quite dramatically. Otherwise, we would have hit our target of 40%. In 2023 we were at 30%. Quite a dramatic increase in, you know, out of Germany sales which helps us to be, you know, a lot more balanced across the global economy. Looking at profitability on the next slide, significant margin improvement. I told you all that. You read about it. Europe at 24.8%. So 25%, the U.S. at 15%.
Europe is going to be there or thereabout for the end of the year. We said that in our guidance for the year. The U.S. is going to improve a little bit. Definitely not to 20%. Somewhere between 16% and 18%, 19% ish. That's where the U.S. is going to land. They're going to improve further and further. Thinking about that, they came from just under 10% by the end of 2024, ending up at mid teens high. Mid teens is going to be a great success and we're very happy with first of EBITDA. I think I'm the machine gun looking at half the numbers. We also look at the balance sheet. Pretty happy actually. Very happy. You need to move that finger away from the numbers. Yeah, thanks.
Cash generation in the first year, you know, we had a bridge facility for about EUR 305 million and we refinanced EUR 275 million. Despite that decrease in financial debt which we paid out of cash, we still have EUR 100 million more cash at hand than we had at the year end. We're going to pay a dividend of about EUR 96 million. First half year we worked for volatile, second half we're working for the company to provide the company with enough cash to grow and invest. Net debt to EBITDA, so unadjusted EBITDA, our leverage is at 1.1. If you adjust for the dividend that we then paid like two weeks after the cutoff date, it's still 1.2 coming from 1.7. Pretty dramatic deleveraging. That's all because of the strong cash generation, the EBITDA growth. Two pronged approach.
We're actually paying down debt, we're actually accumulating cash and we're growing the EBITDA at the same time. That's how we deliver the business. You know that in terms of leverage our policy is, you know, we feel very comfortable with anything that is below 2. We're at the lower end of that and that is including leases. I mean, so the major part is leases. Our equity ratio improved and jumped over to over the 40%. One of the bigger effects for those who look in detail at the balance sheet is the currency translation. Euro to U.S. dollar, U.S. dollar depreciated from 1.04 against the euro in December to 1.17. That really drives a decrease in intangibles, goodwill and right of use assets, aka rent or leases or whatever you want to call it.
That effect decreases our balance sheet by EUR 45 million alone just because of that currency translation effect. As I said, it's all a non-tax advantage translation and not transactional. On the next page, looking at our cash flow, cash flow statement is mainly impacted by the U.S. acquisition and obviously the growth in the business. Operating cash flow jumping from EUR 198 million -EUR 236 million. The main difference here is slightly lower cash conversion with paid out bonuses. Slightly higher bonuses, so the provisions went down, the cash went out. The cash conversion rate between operating cash and EBITDA moved from 86 - 83, still a very high cash generation. The driver behind the growth is the EBITDA improvement because we're a cash on transaction business. People get their glasses and they pay.
Yes, we deal with health insurances and all that, but the major part is with cash on delivery and that's great for a very healthy cash flow profile. In the U.S. we actually take down payments on ordering, so we actually have a slightly, you know, we actually have a positive working capital effect from growth there. That was too small, but you would see cash flow from investing activities. EUR 37 million probably was EUR 15 million. If we just look at the maintenance and growth CapEx. Remember we paid for the Shopko Optical acquisition on the 1st of July, this is the 30th of June, so it's not in here. If you just look at maintenance and growth CapEx, we are this year at EUR 37 million. Last year we were at EUR 33 million, and that is basically in line with our growing business.
The prior year, you know, why is the prior year EUR 15 million when you already spent EUR 15 million for maintenance and growth CapEx? Because we had disposals and we have basically securities and provisions and basically to generate the cash. That was an EUR 18 million cash inflow. EUR 33 million minus EUR 18 million is the EUR 15 million and this year we didn't do any of that in a significant manner. It's EUR 37 million and this year it's EUR 7 million, it's EUR 0. That's why you have EUR 37 million and EUR 15 million. Cash flow from financing activities all over the place. -EUR 100 million this half year, +EUR 96 million last year.
We paid our Shopko Optical acquisition on the 1st of July, but to make sure that we can pay on the 1st of July last year we had to increase our debt by, as I said, you know, initially EUR 200 million, EUR 280 million. That was the cash inflow. This year we basically repaid the debt. We raised the Schuldschein, that's a promissory note, but I think everybody knows Schuldschein. That's basically what we did here in financing. Then we have the repayment of leasing liabilities and that's in line with our growing business. We remain highly cash generative. We have a high, high quality balance sheet that still may be on the lower end of the leverage. We're pretty happy with that more conservative approach. Funding risks and opportunities for this year that we see, opportunity would be a strong organic growth in our established European markets.
You see it in those markets, we are really doing good in those markets that have a more vibrant economy, like Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain. That's where, as soon as that happens, it has a direct impact on us. Germany, it's still a bit of a problematic case and still fully dependent on Germany. Let's hope that sentiment concludes. We still do have great potential for expansion. Optical retail in the U.S., in Spain, Eastern Europe, and hearing aids. Hearing aids, you see it. Spain and Eastern Europe, you see it as well. In the U.S., as I said, we're trying out things. We're in the middle of the business model transformation. For us, we don't think quarter by quarter, we think more longer term. For us, laying a proper foundation and really, really addressing the U.S.
market in the right way will help us in the long run to really reap the benefits and bring the U.S. to where we want them to be, which is a strong organic grower with a margin that's very similar to our European businesses. That's what we're doing at the moment. One of our more senior management team members has now transferred to the U.S. He was our strategy manager. He has now transferred to the U.S. and is living there and working there and basically running the business model transformation together with the U.S. leadership team. Our Chief Sales Officer, Bastian Koeber, is spending now about 10 days a month in the U.S. to help with that. We really have full focus now on the business model transformation in the U.S. and that will bring us tremendous joy and potential for expansion in the future.
Probably only a quarter of that this year is around, but definitely for the future. Primary eye care is still definitely a promising market. You see that we're growing. You probably listened to what we said at the AGM or the strategy recording that Mark and I did and where we also talk about this as being a small but very important piece of what we're going to be doing over the next five years. Risks unchanged, consumer sentiment is impediment where the growth, skilled labor shortage is becoming more and more an issue that we have under control. Trade conflicts and tariffs, for now, the EU and you know, have a deal. Our industry analysts said, you know, they signed the deal and it has very little impact on the optical industry. We always said that at the moment we don't see any problems there.
Let's see how long those agreements hold before we're happy. At the moment I would say trade conflict and tariffs are going a little bit down on the risk. The biggest risk remains by far the consumer sentiment. Now, let's get to our outlook for 2025. At the last slide, we're totally on course to achieve our targets. Customer satisfaction is where it should be. Our target customers are happy and that's great because happy customers talk about their experience and happy customers return. Unit sales at 4.7 million. We said around 9.5 million. I talked about the reasons and we're confident to get into that direction. Total consolidated at nearly EUR 2.5 billion. I can fully confirm that consensus is about EUR 2.47 billion and we think along those lines as well.
Adjusted EBITDA of around EUR 580 million at a margin of about 24% with a European margin around 25% and the U.S. margin being in the high mid-teens. We are confirming that. The adjusted EBITDA margin is increased by what we said, that we didn't know how all that financing and the acquisition, goodwill impairment, write downs and all that work. We said it's going to grow at a similar rate while it's been growing 1.7% so far. We're pretty confident in that. We are one of the companies who basically say, yeah, it's end of August and we confirm our targets for the year. With that, I came to the end of my short presentation and we have a bit of time for you and me and I hand over [crosstalk].
Yes, thank you very much for the presentation. We will now be happy to answer your questions in a couple of minutes. For a dynamic conversation, we kindly ask you to ask your questions in person via the audio line. You can do this by raising your hand if you're dialed in by phone. Please use the key combination nine followed by six, or our chat box if you're not able to speak freely. We have received a couple of questions. Mr. Abbott, you should be able to speak now.
Yes, can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay, excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Steffen. Yeah, you usually like for us to limit our questions to two, so I'll do my best. The first question, it's a multi component, but it's regarding all regarding the U.S. I mean, we saw the Q2 sales number actually down versus Q1. Could you give us an indication how much of this was FX translation effect, whether there are normal seasonality patterns here, and kind of what measures you're taking and what you expect in the coming quarters there. Then I'll ask my second question.
Thank you. As I said, it's an interesting environment. Q1, we were still up against the weather, which was a lot worse than usual in the Midwest, and that means a lot. Q2, Liberation Day. President Trump's announcement of the magic formula for tariffs didn't really help a lot for the stock markets, and you know how dependent the Americans are on the stock markets for everything in their life, especially retirement. That wasn't helpful. That really knocked down consumer sentiment. We could instantaneously feel that people were hitting the brakes, going into full backward throttle to say, look, we don't know what's going on with the economy, with my personal income, so we'll be very cautious with what's going to happen here. We really sense that. Your sentiment is right. We've seen that consumer sentiment came back up beginning mid May. June looked better, July looks better.
We still revised downwards internally our expectation for the U.S. sales, because we just had to. Obviously, the FX effect was also not helpful. Overall, I'd say not the greatest year for our U.S. experience. Plus, as I said, we're in the middle of changing the two companies into one and changing the way they do business. That obviously also leads to a bit of distraction. Midterm, next year, the year after, we're still very, very confident that we've done the right thing and working on it. We see the margin expansion at least, and once we're through with the business model transformation, we're going to see an uptick in U.S. sales as well.
Are you gaining or losing market share? Do you have any insights there?
We see. Total U.S. market share is.
No, I mean in your region. Sorry, in your region.
I just wanted to say we're under 1%, so if we take European levels, we still have 30% to go. We do see that our competitors are actually reporting higher organic sales or growth figures than we are. We're looking at that. We do see we're looking at day one conversion rates, which is one of the primary key indicators for us, which basically means how many people come out of the optometrist's office with a prescription and how many of those file it with us or leave immediately on the same day or how many leave and then come back or go somewhere else. We see that number is actually pretty stable, slightly trending downwards, which would be an indicator for losing market share. Our biggest issue at the moment is doctor availability.
We're specializing on the more rural parts of the upper Midwest, which is great when you're there and you're running because there's not a lot of competition, which is not so great if one of your doctors retires or leaves the area and moves to a city. Then it's very hard to attract doctors to work there. Once you don't have doctors, then you don't have a prescription and that's not great for sales. That's currently the biggest issue. We did a lot of hiring over the summer. We now have after Labor Day, which is I think next Monday or the Monday after next, we actually have the highest availability of doctor hours ever. We expect the business to pick up. Yes, so far we're seeing lower numbers in our numbers than what our competitors are reporting for the U.S.
Okay. You did feel obviously the FX effect in that quarter, the translation.
Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Okay. For the group as a whole, my second question, please. I mean, you address.
That was a very long first.
I'm sorry. I'll be done. You said, as we know, clearly no scope effects, it's all about organic sales growth. To achieve that, your guidance or where the consistent level is, where you felt comfortable, you got any 5, 6% growth in the second half, more toward the upper end of half of that. I just wondered what you, you know, what under optimism at this stage being in mid August or end of August with that number.
We're going to see a pickup in U.S. sales, and we do have quite a few campaigns ongoing now after the summer coming out in Germany and in all our markets, basically. This morning I had a forecast meeting with sales, and yesterday we really go through each country and say what are the activities. We just closed out. We talked extensively about the July results, all of which I'm not going to share, but I'm going to tell you that nearly EUR 2.5 billion is what I see currently in the numbers that I have as a forecast for this year. Okay, thank you. Thanks for your question.
Mr. Abbott was raising his hand right in the beginning of your presentation.
Making sure that's how we know Craig .
Okay, we move on to the next participant. Mr. Rossi, you should be able to.
Speak now and place your question, please.
Yes. Good afternoon. I hope you can hear me well.
Yep, yep.
Thank you. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for taking my two questions. The first one is to come back on the U.S. I heard that you were expecting a pickup in sales in the second half of the year. I recall that during the call in May, you were saying that almost 85% of the margin improvement was coming from organic growth. In a worst case scenario, have you planned any contingency measures or mitigation measures in case of a less optimistic scenario, in case of a prolonged adverse consumer sentiment there? That's my first question. The second one is regarding the rollout of your teleoptometry platform. Could you share with us any KPIs of what you see in terms of customer profiles? Were you able to attract a new profile of customers or what's the conversion rate there? Thank you.
Sorry, the rollout of.
Yeah, your teleoptometry platform, you know, the high health checkups and so on.
Okay. Thank you. Definitely can talk about that. Number one, the U.S., if something happens and what are our mitigating measures? First of all, we know that the U.S. is a big market and it's a big investment for us and we definitely want to make it work. We know that we are basically in the U.S. trying to change the way the Americans are going to experience visiting their optometrist and their opticians. We know this is not a quick fix and we know it's going to take a while to do that. Any mitigating actions we're going to undertake cannot harm or impede the long-term development of the business. Firing opticians is not on the menu. Firing doctors is not on the menu. Accelerating in making them more efficient is definitely on the menu. That's why we're shipping quite a few people from Germany to the U.S.
to consult and help there. As I said, one strategy manager working there and our CSO basically being there to consult and to meet and to help and guide and do whatever you do as a board member when you're looking at your second largest market. Mitigating actions that we have are relatively limited in the U.S. in this case. We're still bringing together the two organizations. Yes, we took a rift, as you say in the U.S., so a reduction in force. We still see here and there people that we can let go, mainly in the back office department, like the insurance, handling the finance. We're becoming more and more integrated and working on that. That's number one. Number two is marketing expenses, where we're becoming a lot more selective in how we spend it.
Number three is being a little more careful in terms of expansion because obviously if we're in the middle of changing the business model and a new store is going to lose money even in the U.S. for the first time, 10, 11, 12 months, then it doesn't make sense to accelerate that expansion now. Also, we always said for the last one and a half years at least that we said, look, we bought these two companies, now let's bring them together, let's make them work before we continue expanding on that. That's what we're doing. These are the three mitigating levers that we have and that we're actually pulling. The optometry platform, our eye health checkup, we showed that in the AGM. I think we also showed that in the strategy review recording that we posted in July on our website.
You see that we're getting to more and more customers who are actually excited about that, and we're growing at quite tremendous rates. That's because it's still a low level. We are now at over 200 eye health checkups that we've done in Europe. We're obviously doing all the stuff in the U.S. where everybody has to see an O.D. before they get a prescription. In the U.S., in Germany, and Europe, we're attracting a lot of customers so far. It's mainly customers who are in store anyway. We're not there yet that we see a lot of people coming in our stores who have never been at a Fielmann. Quite frankly, that's very difficult in Germany because we have 56% market share in units. Finding somebody who's never been to a Fielmann is a bit difficult for us. We are happy with the development.
We're going to expand it, and we're definitely pursuing our idea of turning this into a pan-European platform for all sorts of opticians and making good headway there.
Okay, very clear.
Thank you, Steffen.
We move on to the next participant. Ms. Gomez, you should be able to speak now and place your question.
Hi, thank you for having me. Very helpful clarification so far and Craig actually stole one of my questions, but if I could clarify on the marketing spending. It was a little bit higher in the first half. I understand that you were mentioning calling out some of the summer campaigns that help give you confidence for the sequential acceleration we should see in the second half. Does this mean that marketing expense cost will be also sequentially higher in the second half to support that growth in the U.S. and also in your core markets like Germany? That would be my first question, just as a clarification.
Yeah, I said that marketing cost in the second quarter were EUR 8 million higher than in the first quarter because of the phasing of those campaigns. If you're asking a specific question and I happen to have the file here, if you give me a minute, I'll just look it up so that I give you the precise number and then I don't lie, which I shouldn't. We just finished the forecast and so far we spent in marketing for the year EUR 44 million first half year and our forecast for the year is about EUR 84 million. We're not going to see, you know, we're going to see targeted marketing expenditure but we're basically going back to first half year, like second half year. So EUR 44 million -EUR 84 million, slightly less marketing expenditure, which is obviously a mitigating action to slightly less enthusiastic growth in our sets.
Thank you, I appreciate that. If I could just go into the cash allocation priorities in terms of the dividend payout policy, we are seeing a reduction year- over- year. If you could give a little bit more color into the thinking in the short term, I would assume there's a focus on obviously the debt payments that are there. Any other insights would be helpful in terms of how you are planning for the rest of the year.
Sure. Our dividend policy is we want to have our investors obviously participate in the success and the growth of our company. We're looking at payout ratios of the profits attributable to shareholders of in the 60%. We've been doing this last year. We've been doing this this year. We will be doing it. Usual caveats apply. We will be doing this next year. We increased our dividend payout by 15% because our profitability grew by 15% from 2023 to 2024. That's basically how we look at it. We say if the company grows and the profitability increases, then unless we do something major, we should be having our investors participate in that. You've seen our leverage profile, you've seen our target. We have, you know, to keep with, to be within our target range of leverage. We have about 0.9 or 0.8 after dividends in headroom.
Multiply this with EUR 580 million in EBITDA. That gives you the debt capacity that we have should we do something. I don't really see that the dividend for the next years is under any imminent danger unless something really, really, really big comes along. We're pretty happy with the profile that we have. I personally feel we're slightly at 1.1. We're probably at the lower end of our target range for leverage. I think before we're cutting dividends, we should be increasing debt, which will better utilize our balance sheet that we have. That is super stable. That's how I look at it. No imminent danger for your dividend payments.
Appreciate that. Thank you.
Thank you. In the meantime, we haven't received any further questions, so everything appears to be answered by now. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. We therefore come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for your shown interest and a big thank you to Steffen for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. It was a pleasure to be your host today, and I wish you all a lovely remaining week. With this, Steffen, I hand back over to you for some final remarks, which concludes your call for today.
We definitely want to have Ingmar more. We want to have more Ingmar than grumpy Germans on the call. Thank you very much, Ingmar, for being our host. Thank you all for joining. Thank you very much for your questions. Thank you very much for the continued dialogue that we have with each of you between meetings and conferences. I know that I sometimes have to be a grumpy German, but I definitely enjoy the exchange with you and you give us a lot of food for thought. You know that we've been changing the way we do investor relations over the last year. I hope this format is now great for you. We have Niels, who is a great guy, so reach out to him. We look forward to the next highlight, which is a mere three weeks away. That's on September 17th in Frankfurt.
You can join us in person or online for our Capital Markets Day analyst day where we are really, really going to spend a lot of time on A, your questions and B, definitely on Vision 2035 and the targets for 2030. We hope to see and hear you there. Thank you very much for your continued interest.