Good day, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft Full Year 2022 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one, and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one, and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Oliver Luckenbach, Head of IR. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much, Sharon, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today for our full year and fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. With me on the call are Stefan Klebert, our CEO, Marcus Ketter, our CFO, and also Johannes Giloth, our COO. Stefan will begin today's call with the highlights of fiscal year 2022. Marcus will then cover the business and financial review, afterwards, Johannes will continue with an update on operational excellence before Stefan takes over again for the outlook 2023. Afterwards, we open up the call for the Q&A session. As always, I would like to start by drawing your attention to the cautionary language that is included in our safe harbor statement, as in the material that we have distributed today. With that, I hand over to Stefan.
Thank you very much, Oliver. Good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our conference call today. Let me start with a review of what we have achieved in 2022. Last year was, once again, a demanding one for us. We faced the major challenge of tackling multiple interconnected crisis, the horrible war in Ukraine, rising inflation and the ongoing supply chain uncertainties all put our capabilities to the test. The restrictions and other negative effects related to COVID-19 could also still be felt. This makes our success in 2022 all the more remarkable. Despite the adverse circumstances, we were actually able to slightly exceed the upgraded forecast following the strong third quarter and again bring the fiscal year to a very successful close. Our achievements in 2022 would have been inconceivable without the dedication of our employees.
I would like to extend my utmost respect and gratitude to all GEA teams worldwide for the exceptional performance they deliver on a daily basis. The trend for all key performance indicators also remained clearly in positive territory in 2022. Order intake increased by 8.7% to EUR 5.68 billion. The order backlog amounted to EUR 3.19 billion and was thus 14.6% up on the prior year figure at year-end, laying a good foundation for 2023. Revenue rose by 9.8% to EUR 5.16 billion. Organic revenue growth amounted to 8.9%. The increase in revenue also translated to higher EBITDA before restructuring expenses, which rose by 14% year-over-year to EUR 712 million. The EBITDA margin increased to 13.8%.
Return on capital employed also improved significantly to 31.8%. In short, GEA delivered again. On the back of these strong results, we propose a dividend of EUR 0.95, EUR 0.05 more than last year. As you can see on chart five, GEA provided its reliability and resilience even in tough times. We exceeded the 2022 targets we set back in 2019 before the pandemic or the war in Ukraine. The EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses is particularly notable at 13.8%, thereby exceeding the original range of 11.5%-13.5%. This margin overachievement was broad-based. Four out of five divisions exceeded the original range, and Farm Technologies was very close to the upper end of its margin corridor. Summing it up, we managed the period 2019-2022 very well.
We walked our talk set with a fantastic financial year 2022, a very good base for our Mission 26. Our continued positive performance also bolstered the capital markets trust in GEA. This is not last, least demonstrated by the title of Investors' Darling 2022 awarded to GEA by manager magazin. We are very delighted with this achievement. Let me now give you an update on the first achievement of our Mission 26 levers, starting with sustainability. Our continued effort in the field of sustainability were also recognized externally, as you can see on chart 8. In November 2022, GEA received an ESG risk rating of 18.3 from Sustainalytics and was assessed to be at low risk. In addition, Sustainalytics also recognized our company as an ESG industry top-rated company at the beginning of 2023.
In December 2022, GEA became a constituent of the Dow Jones Sustainability Europe Index. In January 2023, GEA was upgraded from AA to AAA in the MSCI ESG Rating assessment. We are very delighted by these achievements, which at the same time motivate us to further improve our ESG efforts, including additional disclosures on climate-related aspects. A further sustainability highlight can be seen on Slide 9, the manure enricher for dairy farmers. This manure management system converts slurry from livestock farming into an environmental friendly nitrogen-enriched fertilizer. By using plasma technology, the manure is enriched with nitrogen from the air. At the same time, the pH is lowered within adding chemicals, reducing 95% of ammonia and 99% of methane emissions from manure storage and spreading. The end product provide farmers with cost-effective, sustainable fertilizer, increasing the average yield of the crop by 40%.
An additional benefit of that, the process eliminates the typical odor of manure. Built into a 20-foot container, the system operates automatically, can be monitored remotely, and can be easily integrated into the farm's existing infrastructure. Overall, the solution promotes circular economy, introduces air pollution by 50% in a farm's total greenhouse gas emission by up to 30%. Let me now come to our second lever, innovation and digitization on chart 10. Here, we made good progress by the share of sales from products less than 5 year old, for which we are targeting 30% by 2026, increased from 10% to 14% in 2022. We launched several new products such as AddCool. Our solution makes our Spray Dryers more climate friendly. Spray Dryers are used to transform fluids into powder, for example, milk into milk powder. This is a highly energy-intensive process.
AddCool incorporates a heat pump specifically designed for operation in Spray Dryers and made by GEA. This reduces the need for fossil fuels and allows operators to lower their carbon footprint and energy consumption by up to 50%. Second, an automatic feeding robot for farmers, helping them to reduce their labor costs over time. Third, the so-called Nex Gen Press for the pharma industry. This next generation of modular tablet press makes machine selection easier, facilitates fast product changeovers, and delivers price performance leadership. Let's get me to New Food on chart 11. Driven by the very large order from Novozymes in 2021, the New Food sales share was around 2% in 2022. At the Anuga FoodTec in April 2022, we presented our mobile test center for New Food, which provides our customers with an excellent opportunity to test their innovative New Food product ideas in reality.
Typically, customers in that industry are in an early stage of scaling and are starting with pilot plans or even with paid trials in our test center after the larger jobs get projected. Another highlight is a large order we received recently, which encompasses the engineering of the first cell-based meat production facility in the United States. Here you can see a few more highlights about this order. It is really large scale with a capacity to produce 10,000 metric tons of cultivated meat. This demonstrates how GEA helps to transform applied sciences into a large scale industrial application. Among others, we supply liquid processing, filtration, and bioreactors. You can imagine, we are glad to have received this order. It underlines our leadership in the New Food field, which we have also recently underlined by releasing our New Food report.
This brings me to our third excellent levers starting with sales excellence on chart 13. We grew our organic new machine sales by 7.4% in 2022, ahead of the expected CAGR of 4%-5% for the period 2022-2026. In addition, we defined more than 600 country-specific initiatives across all divisions to further drive sales. Furthermore, we redefined the route to market for selected business units to leverage the existing direct sales and service organization. On the service excellence side, as you can see on chart 14, we even managed to increase organic sales by 11.9%, well ahead of the communicated CAGR to, of 5%-6% for the period 2022-2026.
This strong growth led not only to an improvement of the service share from 34.2% in 2021 to 34.9% in 2022, but also helped our gross margin. This gets me to operational excellence on chart 15. Here I do not want to get into details because Johannes will elaborate on that topic in a few minutes. Just so much, Johannes did a great job with his team and the divisions in mitigating supply chain shortages and market headwinds in the very challenging environment last year. Coming to the last lever, acquisitions on Slide 16. We are still very actively screening all relevant M&A opportunities that would further strengthen our product portfolio, our regional presence and our margins.
Unfortunately, good companies come at a price. So far, we were not able to find the right target at the right price. We continue to screen the market further. That concludes my first part of the presentation. I hand over to Marcus.
Thank you, Stefan. Warm welcome from my side. As Stefan has already told you, fiscal year 2022 was again a very strong year for GEA despite all the headwinds we were facing. The single quarter of Q4 has been very solid. Order intake increased organically by 4.6% year-over-year. Several large orders with a total value of EUR 147 million were received in the quarter in comparison to 3 large orders totaling EUR 74 million in Q4 2021. Q4 2022 was another quarter of strong organic sales growth. Sales was up by 9.7% year-over-year on an organic basis, driven by both strong service and new machine sales growth. EBITDA before restructuring margin reached 14.7% and was driven by an improved gross margin in the service and new machine business.
Operating costs increased due to higher expenses for selling and administration. RC improved further due to the strong improvement in EBIT before structuring expenses over-compensating the increase in capital employed. Our net liquidity declined from EUR 500 million to EUR 346 million, mainly because of our share buyback program, which we finished at year-end. In fiscal year 2022, we bought back own shares for a total EUR 206 million. These shares are held as treasury shares. All in all, a very successful quarter. Looking a bit deeper into the group performance. Order intake grew to EUR 1.36 billion, a 4.6% year-over-year increase on an organic basis. All five divisions grew their order intake organically with one division, on Technologies, even growing at a double-digit % year-over-year.
From that perspective, it shouldn't come as a surprise that from a customer industry perspective, dairy farming has been a strong growth contributor, but also beverage, pharma, chemicals, as well as other industries like marine and oil and gas. I said a minute ago, this quarter has seen several large orders, but also orders ranging from EUR 5 million-EUR 50 million have seen a significant increase year-over-year. Sales continued its growth trend of the prior quarters and exceeded for the first time since the disposal of Heat Exchangers on a quarterly basis, the EUR 1.4 billion mark. Service sales grew organically by an outstanding 11% year-over-year, driven by healthy organic service sales growth of all divisions. New machine sales have been strong, growing by 9% year-over-year. All divisions contributed to this significant organic improvement.
The service sales share was 34.4%, slightly higher than last year. The higher sales, combined with an increase in gross margin, overcompensated higher operating expenses, resulting in an EBITDA of EUR 208 million and EUR 28 million improvement versus Q4 2021. When looking at the EBITDA margin, we are talking about a healthy year-over-year improvement of 0.6 percentage points. Let me continue with the figures of the Division Separation & Flow Technologies, which had again, a very strong year. Order intake grew organically by 7.6% year-over-year. Demand was strong in the custom industries, dairy processing, beverage, as well as marine. From a size perspective, especially the orders below EUR 1 million and larger orders between EUR 5 million and EUR 50 million were the growth driver behind the year-over-year improvement.
The order pipeline looks overall positive due to continued good demand in nearly all regions and customer industries. Dairy processing, Pharma, and chemical look particularly strong, but also New Food and dedicated projects for sustainability are becoming more active. Organic sales grew by a stellar 10.8% year-over-year, with service growing by 16.3% and new machines growing by 6.3%. The service sales share, while being already on a high level, increased further to a record level of 47.3% in the quarter. EBITDA increased strongly by EUR 14 million to EUR 97 million and the EBITDA margin improved by 0.8 percentage points to 26.4%. This development was once again driven by better service and new machine growth margins and better capacity utilization. Gross profit was significantly higher and overcompensated increased operating costs.
Let's move on to Liquid and Powder Technologies. Order intake increased organically by 2.6% year-over-year. This development was driven by several large orders of in total EUR 147 million, versus 3 large orders totaling EUR 74 million in Q4 2021. These large orders were received from the following customer industries: 3 in dairy processing, 2 in chemical and beverage respectively. As you also receive questions about the healthiness of the order pipeline, let me address this topic proactively. We do see an ongoing good demand in all markets. In chemicals for battery material, in beverage along with a recovery of the brewery sector, and in dairy with an ongoing robust activity level.
New Food showed some small but important pilot projects last year, where we are expecting subsequent larger orders this year. Sales increased organically by 6.7%, mostly driven by strong organic new machine sales growth of 8.4% year-over-year. Because of the strong new machine sales, the service sales shares declined by 1.3 points year-over-year to 21.4 in the quarter. The order backlog is some EUR 150 million higher compensated to last year, which supports well our sales generation in 2023. EBITDA before restructuring expenses increased by EUR 3 million year-over-year to EUR 50 million, but the EBITDA margin declined from 11.0 in Q4 2021 to 10.8%. While gross profit rose due to the higher sales volume, operating costs were impacted from the build-up of the New Food organization. Continuing with Food & Healthcare Technologies.
Order intake was slightly up by 0.2% organically year-over-year. While the Farmer business was growing strongly in the quarter due to a number of large orders in Western Europe, some of the food-related businesses saw the opposite with the large orders in prior year quarter. Organic sales growth was 8.1% year-over-year, driven by both a strong new machine and service sales growth. The service sales share increased by 0.4 points year-over-year to 29.4% in the quarter. Demand remains healthy in both food and pharma, resulting in an order backlog which is 10% above last year's level, indicating further sales growth momentum. EBITDA increased by EUR 6 million year-over-year, and the respective margin improved strongly to 13.5% from 12.4%.
Gross profit increased year-over-year due to healthy organic sales growth, while operating costs were impacted from higher selling and administrative expenses. Moving to Farm Technologies. Q4 has been the fourth quarter in a row with significant year-over-year organic order intake growth. Solid demand for automated milking equipment and services is driving the 11.0 organic order intake growth. We're expecting some farmers to delay decisions for a couple of months as a reaction to the recent rise of interest rates and the slight contraction of milk prices in some regions. The order backlog is substantially up by 35.3% year-over-year to EUR 291 million, which lays a good foundation for sales growth in 2023. Sales increased organically by a stellar 14.2% year-over-year.
This is very satisfactory development was driven by an organic new machine sales being up by 9.4% year-over-year and service sales growth accelerating from 19.6% in Q3 to even 21.0% in Q4. The service sales ratio, while being already on a high level, increased further by 2.2 percentage points to 43.9%. EBITDA increased strongly by EUR 7 million, and the according margin improved to 13.4% from 12.2% in Q4 2021. Gross profit has been significantly above prior year's level due to the strong organic sales growth and better growth margins, which overcompensates the increase in operating costs from higher overheads. Finally, let us turn to Heating & Refrigeration Technologies. Order intake increased organically by 8.9% year-over-year.
Please note that the decline of the reported figure is due to the disposal of the contracting business in Italy, Spain, and France. From a customer industry perspective, beverage, oil and gas, distribution and storage centers, as well as marine, have shown good growth in the quarter. The trading environment remains positive. The decarbonization of processes is a strong growth driver, which is reflected in a high demand for heat pumps. Almost all regions with a good outlook, and the U.S. in particular, looks interesting. Organic sales increased by 6.0% year-over-year and was driven by new machines growing by 7.4%. Service sales grew organically by 4.0% year-over-year, and its sales share declined by 2.6 percentage points to 37.1%.
The absolute EBITDA remained virtually unchanged year-over-year due to the divestments, the EBITDA margin improved from 9.9% in Q4 2021 to 10.8%. Gross profit slightly up year-over-year due to significantly higher gross margin, while operating costs have been flat. Closing the divisional chapter now with the overview, as you can see, all five divisions contributed to the EBITDA improvement. On a reported basis, only the division Heating & Refrigeration Technologies had a year-over-year sales decline, but due to the negative M&A effects. All divisions increased their gross profit by a stronger magnitude than the corresponding operating costs so that the EBITDA of each division improved year-over-year. In total, EBITDA before restructuring increased to EUR 208 million from EUR 180 million. Translational FX has improved our EBITDA by EUR 3 million.
Excluding this ex effect, as we have defined it in our full year guide, our EBITDA would have improved by EUR 25 million - EUR 205 million. Coming now to still one of my favorite topics, net working capital. During the first 9 months of 2022, net working capital has been on upward trajectory due to higher inventories because of the supply chain challenges and higher trade receivables. At the end of September, net working capital stood at 8.9%. I've always told you that the increase in net working capital is not a real concern for me, as it will improve as soon as the supply chain bottlenecks will fade. Now look at Q4. We have managed to bring net working capital down from 8.9% in Q3 to 6.1% at the end of December.
The quarter-on-quarter reduction is driven by reduction in inventories by EUR 71 million and net contract assets of EUR 48 million. Thanks to this achievement in Q4, we are now below the guided corridor of 8%-10% again. Coming now to another important topic, cash generation. Operating cash flow was EUR 288 million, which is slightly above last year's figure of EUR 282 million, driven by a higher EBITDA and stronger net working capital inflow, partly offset by lower contribution from provisions which are mainly related to non-cash accruals. SAP on CapEx related outflow of EUR 26 million year-over-year to EUR 89 million is in line with the fiscal year 2022 guidance of up to EUR 230 million.
In the end, we had EUR 204 million of CapEx this year versus EUR 130 million in fiscal year 2021. As a result, free cash flow is EUR 209 million, only slightly lower than last year's EUR 240 million. Our free cash flow conversion ratio before restructuring, which is calculated over the last four quarters, has been below the target corridor of 55%-65%, with only 47% of EBITDA, which was converted into free cash flow. My reason for the lower cash generation has been the net working capital outflow of EUR 80 million over the course of 2022.
Net cash, including lease liabilities, improved from EUR 235 million at the end of the third quarter to EUR 246 million, driven by strong net cash flow of EUR 190 million, and includes EUR 55 million outflow for our share buyback program in Q4 only. In total, we had a cash outflow of EUR 206 million for the buyback of our own shares in 2022. Let me now talk about our financial headroom. On the left, you see our available cash credit lines as well as their respective utilization and maturity structure as per end of 2022. As per December 31st, EUR 5 million out of the EUR 65 million evergreen credit lines were drawn. The EUR 100 million due this year constitute a fixed rate borrower's note loan, which was repaid on February 27th.
Another fixed rate borrower's note loan will be due in 2025. As part of our sufficient financial leeway, the syndicated loan is an additional undrawn liquidity backup facility for us and was supplemented by defined sustainability KPIs within 2022. Continuing now on the right side of the slide. Equity improved because of the higher net profit, resulting in an equity ratio of 38.5% after 35.3% at the end of last year. The decline in net liquidity is due to the increase in CapEx as well as the share buyback program mentioned earlier. Adjusted for the buyback, the net liquidity, including these liabilities, would amount to EUR 552 million. Coming to the next slide. As we do often receive a question, how much of our order backlog is invoiceable each year, we have prepared this overview for you.
Our order backlog increased by 14.6% year-over-year to EUR 3.2 billion. Of this EUR 3.2 billion, EUR 2.9 billion are to be invoiced in 2023, and only EUR 0.3 billion are to be invoiced after 2023. Compared to the previous two years, there's a significant increase in the invoiceable backlog for the current year. Roughly 74% of our expected new machine sales in 2023 are already secured through the new machine order backlog invoiceable in 2023. In fiscal year 2022, this ratio has been 66%. This is a great basis for the sales development in 2023. With that, I hand over to Johannes, who will give you an update on our operational excellence initiatives.
Thank you, Marcus, welcome from my side. Starting with the input cost increase. In 2022, the global impact of input cost increases was around EUR 170 million. When I talk about input cost increases, I mean cost inflation for direct spend categories like electrical components and steel-related parts, but also for indirect categories like logistics, energy, travel, or IT. Through 2022, inflation was felt across all spend categories. Our procurement team made a tremendous effort to keep the input cost increases as low as possible. For instance, by leveraging frame contracts, shifting volumes across our supplier base, as well as changing specifications with cross-functional teams. Overall, I think we did a great job. While commodities like stainless steel increased significantly, we managed to limit the cost inflation.
While up to and including 2021, input cost increases have been mitigated and digested fully by the procurement organization, this approach has changed in 2022. The input cost increases were minimized to the greatest possible extent by my teams, but then passed on to the sales organization to compensate for it by sales price increases. We had a very strong collaboration with the sales organization during the course of 2022, so that they were able and always aware of the latest cost headwinds in order to properly include in it into their service, product and project price calculations.
At the same time, the procurement organization continued to work on the procurement excellence program, which we have presented to you at the Capital Market Day in 2021. Thanks to the continued renegotiation, supply-based consolidation, demand management, claims management, and more commercial and technical levers, we have managed to generate a remarkable amount of procurement savings out of which EUR 28 million net savings hit our P&L, not even considering budget savings, passthroughs, and cost avoidance. We are very well on track to achieve our target of P&L relevant saving of up to EUR 90 million in 2026.
Local inflation and wage increase are generating significant headwinds in labor-intensive content and services, energy prices being still higher than in 2022, and logistics are still impact across all transportation modes from supply chain challenges, we do expect another roughly up to EUR 140 million in impact cost headwind for 2023. These cost increases will be compensated by sales price increases by our sales organization and obviously by procurement savings. They have been discussed and included as part of the budgeted process in 2023, they are all well aware of this headwind and prepared themselves for further sales price increases accordingly. Let me go to the next slide on production. Let me show you, as you know, we are targeting EUR 60 million of savings from the organization of our manufacturing footprint by 2026.
In 2022, we achieved EUR 8 million. For 2023, we are targeting an accumulated amount of EUR 22 million. All measures are in place to be well on track to achieve our Mission 26 targets. Our first Factory of the Future, Koszalin in Poland, has been set up on time and in budget. Production has started there in quarter two last year. We are currently in the process of shifting production hours from selected sites, including Bodenheim site in Mainz, Germany to Poland. This relocation of production hours and the corresponding site closure in Germany should be done by the end of 2024 as planned. Several other footprint optimization projects have been implemented as planned, leading to a reduction in the number of production sites.
[audio distortion] Are now in the process of consolidating and transforming our Italian production landscape. We have achieved significant volume shift to multipurpose sites through the beforementioned consolidation, but also due to localization. The decarbonization of our own operations is one of our other key priorities under Mission 26, and we are also making progress here. In 2022, 4 production sites have already been CO₂ neutral. Improving productivity in our production is another important pillar of our production excellence program. Program aims to deliver efficiency and savings via unified standardized work processes across all GEA production sites, end-to-end process optimization with strong lean mindset and continuous improvement culture across the workforce. Here we are making good progress with a lot of measures also being implemented towards the EUR 60 million target. With this, I hand over back to Stefan with the outlook.
Thank you very much, Johannes. Let me now come to our outlook for the fiscal year 2023. Our high order backlog is a great foundation for growth in the current fiscal year and indicates further organic sales growth ahead. We guide for an organic sales growth of more than 5%. For EBITDA before restructuring expenses, we expect a range of EUR 730 million-EUR 790 million, exactly EUR 100 million higher than last year. At the same time, we are targeting a further improvement of the corresponding EBITDA margin. That means a value of more than 13.8%. For return on capital employed, we are expecting a figure of at least 29%. Please bear in mind that the guidance for EBITDA and ROCE is based on constant exchange rates.
Let's have a closer look at the EBITDA approach and its key components. Starting from the left, we are expecting further input cost increases. Johannes gave you already our expectation of a headwind of around EUR 140 million in 2023. Against this, we expect further additional procurement savings of around EUR 12 million. Personnel costs will be clearly higher than in the prior years. We forecast an increase of our EUR 1.6 billion personnel cost bill of about 5%. If you look at the rectangle of this chart, you can see that we intend to at least offset the higher costs by own price increases. In order to do so, we need price increases of 3%-4%, we have seen last year that this is possible in our industry.
Next to pricing, we will also benefit from additional production savings in the area of EUR 14 million, as well as positive leverage due to the expected organic sales growth of 5% or more. Summing up, we are expecting a further clear improvement from last year's EBITDA before restructuring expenses of EUR 712 million to a figure ranging between EUR 730 million and EUR 790 million. At the same time, we want to achieve an EBITDA margin of more than 13.8%. For 2023, there is, at the end, only one key priority, our Mission 26. That means also in 2023, we want to achieve further improvements in all seven levers in order to get again a step closer to the targets we have set ourselves for 2026. Finally, our roadmap for 2023.
The next important date will be in less than 2 months, our Annual General Meeting on April 27. It will be once again a virtual AGM. On May 5th, we will be back with our Q1 numbers. That concludes our presentation. I hand back to Oliver for the Q&A.
Yeah, thank you very much, Stefan, Marcus, and Johannes. Sharon, back to you to open up the line for the Q&A session.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to withdraw your question, please press star one and one. We will now go to your first question. One moment, please. Your first question comes from the line of Sven Weier, UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one, starting with the usual question around the order intake environment and obviously asking about your expectations for the current quarter. You know, given that we know there's always some fluctuation with big-ticket orders, I was also wondering, you know, in terms of tendency for the year as a whole, would you see a book-to-bill of one being achievable, or how do you look at the overall environment as well as in the short term? Thank you.
Hi. Hi, Sven. Good to hear you. I take your question. Let's first talk about the order intake environment. We, you know that we are beating against a very strong Q1 from 2022, but we are very optimistic that we will minimum achieve the same number. That means we expect our order intake also this Q1 of more than EUR 1.5 billion. That also brings us to the question, what is the overall sentiment or environment? We also see a good order pipeline, and we remain quite optimistic. We believe and we trust that we also can achieve a book-to-bill ratio 1.x.
Okay. That sounds encouraging. Thank you very much for the details, Stefan. The second question is just, with regards to your organic growth guidance of above 5%. I know above five can mean different things to different people, but I was just wondering, you thankfully outlined the increase in the backlog of EUR 400 million, which is entirely due for 2023, which would be around 8%. Are you still a bit reluctant at this stage because the supply chains have not fully normalized and you just want to cater for the usual uncertainties this early this year? Is that a fair assumption?
Yeah. I think it's fair. I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a much higher order backlog than last year. We will definitely see a very strong Q1 in order intake. Having this, those factors, you know that the sales of 2023 is almost determined by these two factors. Yeah, larger 5 means larger 5. The world is still a volatile one, so you never know. There is some, yeah, some upside potential maybe.
Maybe finally, if I may, just on the use of cash, I noticed the dividend increase was a bit smaller than what you had on net profit, and you haven't announced a new share buyback despite the fact that the cash level is obviously quite impressive. I mean, is that telling us that maybe on the M&A side things are becoming a bit more imminent, or is there still something in terms of another buyback? I think you still have 5% left, that you would see as a possibility this year. Thank you.
Okay. I mean, that might be a very, how should I say? a very surprising interpretation, let's say. There are... You cannot expect any indication for any M&A here. It's simply that we always said we are watching out. We are looking out what could be the right targets. In case it would come, we would be prepared. We would have enough funds. That's how it is. Of... We have no intention here to do anything right now.
On the buyback?
We have not made any additional decision and discussion here.
Thank you, Stefan. That's it.
You're welcome, Sven.
Thank you. We will now go to our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Klas Bergelind from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you. Hi, Stefan and Marcus. Klas at Citi. First on pricing. Looks like you're confident on compensating both the net inflation, the EUR 128 million, and also the wage inflation, EUR 80 million through price increases. That's around 4%. It seems well supported given that order pricing, I think you said before, has been running at 5%-6% last couple of quarters. Can I ask you, Stefan, on incremental price increases, what order pricing did you have for the fourth quarter, and what do you intend to do there for the first quarter? If you can give any indication on incremental price increases. Thank you.
Yeah, there is not one single number. It depends very much on the various busineses. Klaus, you know GEA very, very well. you know that we have a lot of different businesses, it depends on the businesses what kind of increase we do in Q 1. It varies from the business. Sometimes it also it's only 2% or 3%, it also goes up to 6%. It's, in some cases, when it is about special products or spare parts or whatever, it might be even more. There is no clear number. Marcus tells you what we need, and you also made this calculation.
We need 3% - 4% to cover the cost increases, and we are very optimistic that this is at the end what the minimum can achieve.
Yeah. The order pricing, that has been 5%-6% previous quarters. That must have been the same for the fourth quarter then, I assume, Marcus.
Klas, say it again, you are to understand. What's that for the fourth quarter?
The order pricing has been running ahead of the P&L, right? Through 2022, I was wondering whether it's still 5%-6% that will eventually move through the P&L. It seems like the price assumption you have for out of backlog is very well supported.
Well, we say around 5% actually, which is running through the P&L. Perhaps a little bit more when you look at the accumulated price increases we have, because we did at least two price increases per business unit. 5%-6%, as you said, is probably a realistic number. As Stefan mentioned, there's not one number, because we have the machinery equipment business. We have the processing engineering part, which it's not simply just increasing the prices. Around that, in that range, that's probably about right.
Thank you. My second one is on return on capital employed. It's a great level, but I thought there would be a little bit more upside. We met recently, Marcus, you know, talking about bottlenecks easing. You obviously already saw inventories coming down quite a bit here in the fourth quarter, so that's fair. When you say that margin will be at least 13.8% at the higher end of the EBITA range, I can get ROCE to 35%. I'm just... Yeah, your process around thinking about ROCE for 2023, please.
Well, I understand your reasoning here when we say it's gonna be 13.8% at least for this year. There will be certainly upside then also for the ROCE.
Okay. My very final and quick one is coming back to M&A, Stefan. I appreciate I also interpreted similarly to Sven that no buyback, maybe there is something imminent. Can we talk at least a little bit about the sort of potential white spots? Are you still thinking packaging? I know that decanters, there are consolidation opportunities. Just to understand roughly, if you would do M&A, what are you interested in terms of white spots?
I mean, it's also a very difficult question. There are many various white spots, let's say. Of course, packaging is something which would be very complementary to GEA because we are mainly focused on the processing. That could be an area. Also, let's say, areas in, you know, pharmaceutical could be areas where we could grow, which would be a good add-on. Pharmaceutical machinery, let's say. We also could focus on certain countries and growth areas, be it U.S., be it China, be it India, for local players. There are many, many directions we are looking at. But, as I said, as I always said, we are prepared for everything, but we also know that we don't wanna do any stupid things.
Our Mission 26 and the value add story for GEA will work also without any M&A. If it comes on top, it's fine, and that keeps us very relaxed in watching the markets and looking out for the right opportunities. Once it would be the right time, of course, we would come out at the time it is appropriate.
Thank you.
Welcome.
Thank you. We will now go to your next question. Your next question comes from the line of Sebastian Kuenne from RBC. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hi, gentlemen. My first question goes to the direction of the market. You mentioned some delays from the farm tech side, so from the dairy farmers, as we go into 2023, as the milk prices drop. We see a similar development on the dairy prices, actually a steeper drop for dairy prices. Are you at all concerned that the dairy processors and food processors are slowing their CapEx for 2023? That would be my first question.
I mean, you have to see if you look at the numbers of 2022, we had fantastic growth rates in Farm Technologies, which is of course not something which we can repeat every year, with numbers about 17% growth in order intake and in sales. It might be a bit more flattish maybe. On the other hand, we have a lot of new products released here. We have the automatic feeding system. We are very, very well positioned in the digitization technology which we offer to our customers here. We also are now working on that fertilizer thing which I explained to you before, the N2 technology. There are many additional products coming out.
I'm also still quite optimistic that we can also see interesting growth here, even if the milk price is dropping down at the moment a little bit, that doesn't worry me. In the medium and long term, farm technology is still a fantastic business and absolutely interesting growth area.
Regarding food processing, dairy processing, so the further processing like, you know, milk drying and butter and, you know, skim milk, cream cheese, do you see any risk of a slowing there as well since the dairy prices dropped by 30% since December? Is there any indication of slowdown?
Not really, as long as it is conserved with the investment in our machinery and equipment.
My second question would be on the tax loss carryforwards, which really helped the tax rate in Q4 just as it did the prior year. Could you just let us know the scale of sort of the potential activations of tax loss carryforwards from here, especially in North America?
Well, actually, we think we're going to, for our planning purposes, we went back to the 26% tax rate there. We had actually 16% for the last 2 years, that was really because we have increased the midterm planning in the U.S. and therefore we took away some accruals for the deferred tax assets there.
Mm-hmm.
That was the reason why it was only 16%. It really depends on the outcome when we do a new 3-year plan, what it will be there, if we have any further, yeah, reduction of accruals on our deferred tax assets.
What would be the maximum? I mean, how many tax credits could you activate in North America if everything-
No, no, we're not activating. We took a charge.
Yeah.
on the deferred tax assets. We're releasing that charge, basically.
I'll have to read into that. Final question is on the one-off. You guide for pre-restructuring EBITDA. The one-offs were a little bit higher in Q4, but nothing too unusual. I was wondering what you expect for 2023 in terms of anything that is a one-off or considered restructuring that may relate to the footprint reductions and so on. Do you expect more charges, less charges, and why? Thank you.
Okay. We expect actually that there will be some more charges this year for various reasons. It's approximately EUR 60 million of restructuring, and that includes also a good part for our global manufacturing footprint, but not only. There will be also other charges which we are planning for this year. After that, in 2024, it's supposed to drop significantly in the range of 20-ish, EUR 20 million-EUR 25 million then in 2024. This year will be a year which is on the basically on the same level, a little bit higher than it was for last year.
Thank you very much. That's all from my side. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Max Yates from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you. Just my first question would just be around the service growth, which was obviously very strong in Q4, particularly in Separation and Flows. I just wanted to understand what was driving that, whether that was all spare parts, whether there's any catch-up from COVID. Just if you could talk a little bit about sort of why that's been so strong and how sustainable the current level is, that would be great. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks for the question, Max. You know that the service excellence is one of our streams in Mission 26, the team who are working here, they are coming up with a lot of really concrete actions and measurements worldwide. I could give you one example. We established, for instance, meanwhile, 17 local decentralized repair shops for the bowls in a separator, we created a special contract here to deliver a service to our customers to bring the bowl into our local repair shops, which is also a sustainability issue because we can avoid large freight and long freight distances.
We do proactively repair the bowls before they fail. This is something which gives production safety to our customers and which also generates additional turnover for us. This is one of the examples or one example where additional additional sales could be generated here, for instance.
Okay. If I could just follow up on the cost headwind, the EUR 140 million gross. I'm slightly surprised. Obviously, it's excluding wage inflation. I'm slightly sort of surprised that's as high as it is. I mean, we know you've talked about sort of EUR 20 million-EUR 25 million of wage inflation, but I would've thought given sort of steel prices peaked sort of mid-2022, that we'd see some of these leveling off. Maybe if you could talk a little bit about the kind of how we build up to that 140 number across maybe different items. 'Cause clearly other things like freight have gone down significantly. I'd love to get a bit more color around that number.
Yeah, absolutely. We have a simulation for that by each category. One of the major drivers is obviously wage increases in many areas of the material we are buying, but also in the indirect area, we have a significant increase. Just to down double-click on the different components. In travel and fleet, we see a further increase of around 7%, in manufactured parts, which is a big spend of our a big part of our spend. We will see another, [audio distortion]
Sorry, I slightly lost you 'cause the line broke up a bit at the start. Just the first cost you mentioned, did you say travel and fleet was a 7% increase? Was that what you said?
It's still travel basically, although the cost increases for our business travel, for example, are still going up. That is not necessarily our transportation logistics cost, because here we see indeed a kind of relaxation of the market. Traveling costs are going down up after the COVID. That is one block, for example. Also mechanical components, electric components and manufactured parts, which amounts t o more than EUR 1.5 billion, see still a significant increase, majorly because of wage-driven or availability-driven, like in the electric component.
Perfect. Thank you. Just one final one for Marcus. Just on working capital, obviously a good improvement in Q4. We're at 6.1%, as you say, kind of below the guided range. I'm just wondering kind of how to think about 2023. Obviously the supply chains may be getting a bit easier, but you are below your range. I'm just trying to understand kind of if you could help us with how to think about that sort of working capital to sales, and if you do think you'll go back into the range or this is the kind of right kind of level where you think you can hold things.
Yeah. I understand your question. We're not changing the range for now, but we do not expect to reach it again there. We will try actually to keep it at a lower level. The first half year, we're gonna take a look if that's gonna be achievable, especially considering that the supply chain challenges might get lighter and lighter. Do not expect that we will go into the guided corridor soon, but, hey, you never know. We do our utmost actually to keep net working capital as efficient as possible.
Okay. Understood. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now go to your next question. One moment, please. Your next question comes from the line of Sebastian Growe, BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. Hi, Stefan, Marcus, and Johannes. My first question would be around the margin trajectory, and primarily that is for APT and FHT. If we leave Farm Tech aside, then especially LPT and FHT have seen quite a remarkable pickup in their margin in the second half of 2022. Considering that both have seen an improved order backlog, there's much better visibility obviously, and also at least a bit of an easing in supply chains. I also want to think about the margin trajectory going into fiscal 23, because I think these are the ones that stand out in the sense that they are only flatlining compared to fiscal year 2021. If you could start there, please.
Well, yeah. They are. Well, when you take a look at FHT, they are not exactly flatlining, right? They are increasing if you look at the EBITDA margin, and we expect to increase the EBITDA margin further.
Into this into 2023. When you look at LPT, yes, you're right, but we expect further growth actually in the EBITDA margin for 2023. We do not expect actually that we will be on that level, but we will go through the 10% mark. That's the expectation.
The reason why I'm asking that question is obviously that we had seen a pretty soft H1, that was, I think, A, related to a lower coverage, simply lower visibility on the one side. Then we also had some exogenous headwinds related to supply chain. Obviously the question is the H2 margin the kind of better exit rate to think of when it comes to modeling 2023 or what is your thoughts around it?
Well, we're not really guiding that quite frankly. I expect actually to see for FHT and LPT an increase in margin. At FHT, probably more significant than at LPT. When we look at peers, then actually we see that there's a lot of potential upside at FHT. At LPT we already came actually a good way ahead. There's more upside on the FHT side than on the LPT side. As I said, LPT, we expect to see them go through the 10% margin mark.
Okay. That's helpful color. If we can then switch gears to free cash flow. At your Capital Market Day, you guided to disciplined capital expenditure of about EUR 200 million per annum until 2026. For 2023, you guide CapEx of EUR 240. My question is, how should we think about the structural CapEx needs of the business, and what is really driving this quite significant step up in fiscal 2023 in particular?
The You mean the just could hear the last sentence not. It's it's about the CapEx, why is that why that is that that high? We are considerably investing into our own company right into the company right now. That's mainly it. We said it's gonna go up to like 4.5% for a few years, we're gonna go back again to like more range of 2.5%-3.5%. We also had here the new factory in Koszalin in there. We have other investments in there for the manufacturing.
It's mainly we're investing a lot into our manufacturing sites right now, but as I said, it's not gonna go over more a year, more years. It's gonna be this year, and it's gonna be also next year. It's gonna come down again to more like 2.5%-3.5% instead of 3.5%-4.5%.
Okay, that's helpful. For the free cash flow overall, if I just may take a more bird's-eye view on the matter. You also guided to EUR 2 billion total free cash generation in the years 2022 to 2026. After 2022 is now done, that would imply more than EUR 400 million per annum as of fiscal 2023. The target is, I guess very much on still. Is there any sort of change in the thinking process, or are you kind of finding the EUR 2 billion even now too conservative after what you hinted to, I think, around especially working capital part?
Well, I would say for this year, we might not reach the EUR 400 million, but expect to see that we're gonna do EUR 400 in the high EUR 400s actually for the year after in 2024. Even a much stronger increase after that because CapEx is coming down considerably in 2025 there. We'll see a higher CapEx still in 2023. It's gonna be lower expectation 2024. It's gonna be even lower in 2025 there. It's gonna be a bit backloaded to reach the EUR 2 billion you are mentioning. I would not actually. We could reach the point this year, but it would be a little bit more conservative than that for this year.
Okay, great. If I may, just very quickly, just on the special effects or non-recurring items. I think your guidance at the Capital Market Day was EUR 130 million-EUR 150 million over the period 2020 to 2026. Can you just share with us what you have budgeted for 2023 and just remind us of what is really behind it?
Yeah. The sort of restructuring cost for this year is like between EUR 60 million and EUR 70 million there. That's the line actually with the guidance we gave you till the year 2026 with EUR 130 million-EUR 150 million. We might be actually at the lower end from current perspective, but you never know what happens there.
Just to get it for the restructuring, that is mostly then because of the manufacturing footprint that you are kind of optimizing and that you then need to take these charges, or what is behind it?
Yeah. Well, it's definitely, restructuring. We are also doing at Farm Technologies, for example, an efficiency program which is going on. And also looking at our portfolio, we do some restructuring, there. These are the main components actually which we're doing.
Okay, great. Thank you so much.
Thank you. We will now go to the next question. One moment please. The next question comes from the line of Akash Gupta from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. My first question is on gross inflation. On page 30, you say you had EUR 170 million in 2022, and you are expecting EUR 140 million in 2023. If I add the two, I get to around 6% of revenues in 2023. For some reason, that looks too low to me against general inflation and what we hear from companies, where companies saw more than 6% of headwind alone in 2022. So maybe if you can help us understand, is that at 410... Sorry, not 410, EUR 310 million of gross CapEx, gross and cost inflation, does that include everything or are there different components that are not part of it? That's question number one.
Akash, thank you for the question. I think what you need to consider, first of all, yes, it includes everything. We're looking to the entire spend, what we're spending for the company for last year, that has been roughly EUR 3 billion in the different categories. You need to consider this is already the managed spend, so the managed headwind. Just to give you an idea, last year our procurement people were not only incentivized to get savings from other categories, they were also incentivized financially to keep the headwind low. What we did was we went to different categories, we went to different specifications, we went to different suppliers, we also negotiated long-term contracts, and that was the fight. The demand for the price increase was much higher.
We can't show them as savings, obviously, it avoided costs. The net-net headwind which came then to the bottom line of the company was the spelled out EUR 169 million, and as a projection this year, EUR 140 million. That's what we have as realized headwind. It's the, it's the managed headwind, if you call like this, and it is including everything. A big part of our procurement organization was focusing on avoiding further cost increases rather than seeking for other areas to net-net save money. Hopefully, that answers the question.
No, I think that answers. Thank you for detail elaboration on the topic. The second one I have is on phasing of backlog. You say that 75% of new machine sales have already been secured in backlog and services are generally more stable. Therefore we would have vast majority of 2023 revenues already kind of good visibility in backlog or through services. Can you talk about phasing of backlog, like how this more than 5% organic growth that you target for the full year will split between first half and second half, also considering the comps we had in 2022, where we had higher growth in H2 as in H1s?
Yeah. We're starting quite well in 2023. My expectation is actually that we also see a higher growth rate, perhaps in the range of 5%, what we guided for also already in Q1, Q2. It's a good start into the new year.
Thank you. My final question is on working capital. I mean, if I look at here net contract liabilities, then at the end of 2022, you were at EUR 466 million, which looks a new record, looking at last 2- year numbers. You are quite positive on demand outlook and Q1 orders are expected to be more than EUR 1.5 billion. Shall we expect further increase in net contract liabilities in 2023? That's the final question.
Well, that's a very specific item. What you can expect that we manage the net working capital overall. As I said, we thrive for actually staying below the guideline in this year.
Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now go to our next question. One moment please. Your next question comes to the line of Christoph Dolleschal from HSBC. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. I've got two follow-up questions, if I may. The first one is on, once again, on the sales guidance, of 5%. Basically, you're targeting price increases of nearly in the same magnitude. Obviously, the question is what do you think about volumes, and how does that compare to your current capacity utilization? I mean, how much open space is there? Could you bring up capacity utilization if you would want to?
I mean, we guide for growth, large of 5%, and, as I indicated before, there might be a certain cautiousness in that number if everything is going smoothly this year. We are living in a very volatile world. We saw pandemics, we saw wars coming up, we saw supply chain issues coming up, that's the reason why we guide, why we do a guidance which we can definitely keep. There is also, let's say, room for improvement here or deliver a higher growth than 5%. This is what we actually guided.
Okay. Could you kindly comment on where your capacity utilization roughly is?
When you talk of capacities, Johannes speaking, when you talk about capacity utilization, I think you talk about the manufacturing capacity. Here, we have a lot of productivity measures on the way, which is not limit ourselves peak time in the output. There is headroom because of a lot of activities we are doing the productivity measures. Especially when it comes to our factories in APAC, in China, for example, we are further investing into further increases. Give you one example, our Vadodara factory in India has kind of doubled the output compared to last year with a lot of measures we are taking. As you have seen, we are also expanding our capacities through our manufacturing footprint in Poland. That's a big factory ramping up.
There is another area, we could grow into. Capacities will not be limiting our growth.
Okay, good to know. The next question is also a follow-up regarding obviously supply chain constraints and everything surrounding that. You've already commented in various questions on the input cost increase and how that complies with the supply chain. Could you just provide some more color there, i.e., what are the biggest issues still in the supply chain? I suppose it's electronic components. Where do you see some easing? Also you commented on the cost impact of that and said that all the materials, especially all the half-finished goods, semi-finished goods are rising in prices. How do you see that across, let's say, the supply chain? If you could break that down into electronic components and others.
As you rightly said, it's category-driven. Some categories are having less problems than others. Many categories are coming back to normal. Like for example, logistics and warehousing. We see here an overcapacity which is soon coming to a decrease in prices, and we are not limited by its capacity. When it comes to mechanical components, for example, here it's more labor-driven and the prices are labor-driven, but not the availability is the problem any longer. Here, the area where we still suffer most, and I think what everybody else does, is the electrical components. Because here, especially in the area of PLCs and drives where industrial semiconductor are used. The backlog recovery, and we have a lot of discussions with the major suppliers like ABB, Siemens, Rockwell and so on.
The backlog recovery is going to happen in the second part of this year. On the other side, as we have been living in that area of supply chain crisis for 1 year now, many of the orders are placed already, and therefore the order lead time is increased. We adapted to it, and therefore our output indeed is less and less limited by those constraints we are still seeing in that industry. Our flexibility to respond on very sudden high peak demands is then still kind of an issue potentially, but the long-term growth is not jeopardized to that large extent.
Also here we see more and more a recovery also in the industrial area of the semiconductor industry where to certain extent, on the one side, the demand in automotive and photovoltaic is further growing, but other industries are also going down. It's a neutralizing, normalizing effect, where I think it's not a normal year, 2023, but much better than 2022.
Okay. And you said recovery rather happening in H2, that you think, the component-.
For some of the major gating items when it comes to drives, when it comes to PLCs, because the order when you talk to the Rockwells and Siemens and Schneiders of the world, they are still claiming that their order books are pretty filled and they do not see order cancellations at the moment, which potentially could come in the latter part of this quarter or the next quarter. Currently their lead times are really very high. That's also the good news, in the last two years, the teams in GEA has worked around a lot of alternatives. We have established second sources for the same.
It also helps us to convince our engineers to try something new, and therefore our flexibility in that area has gained a lot of momentum, which is also helping us to be flexible on the market. Still in some areas, there are some constraints. I would say the last backlogs will be released in the third quarter this year, to hopefully get back to normal completely in the fourth quarter, potentially only quarter 1 next year.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Thank you. We will now take our last question of the day. One moment, please. The last question for today comes from the line of Uma Samlin from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, Stefan, Marcus, and Johannes. Thank you so much for taking my question. My first question is on the procurement savings. In 2022 you achieved EUR 28 million savings on procurement despite your supply chain was experiencing a lot of constraints. How should we think about the EUR 14 billion savings plan for 2023? Does that include the effect of the supply chain easing or is it purely from like operational perspective?
It is including everything, so it's the net number what we are targeting for. You need to understand that those net savings what we are posting here is already considering the deduction of passthroughs and is not mentioning and not considering also cost avoidances. It's really net-net what we call effect is to the P&L, and that is the contribution. Our pipelines for savings is well-built because we have still categories where we can consolidate suppliers, where we can go to alternative sources. The EUR 40 million is cumulative. To that, what you see basically is EUR 20 million, EUR 28 million last year. It's now EUR 12 million, which might be a little bit on the conservative side when I look to our savings pipeline.
That's the cumulative target towards, again, to that target what we laid out in the, in the, Capital Market Day, leading to this, to the EUR 90 million, for 2029. 2026, sorry.
No, it's really helpful.
It's again, the net savings, not considering all those areas where we are doing additional work for the company. It's just net-net profit to the company on EBITDA level.
Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank Thank you very much. My second one is just following up on the pricing, question from before. In your bridge that the pricing component is like the biggest component to offset any input cost increases, given the large backlog to be delivered in 2023, I guess you already commented that, you know, around 5%-6% of price increases in the backlog. How should we think about like any further price increases? I mean, can we Do you think that the 5%-6% increase in the backlog is already covering for price increases that you are looking at to offset the cost increases in 2023?
I'm not sure if I got your question right. Of course, we are doing further price increases. It's very clear as long as the inflation goes on, as long as we get the headwind from the supply chain and from wage, we have to increase prices continuously. This is also what we do. I think we started very, very early already last year. This is what you can see. I think we handle it much better than a lot of other companies, and we have created the culture and the awareness in all our business units that they do it in the right way.
We are also optimistic that, and sure that the backlog and the calculation of the backlog is covering the necessary costs we will see when we execute this these orders.
All right. That's really clear. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you. I will now hand the call back to Stefan Klebert for closing remarks.
Well, thank you. Thank you all for participating in our call, for listening, and for your great questions. I would like to summarize the today's call as follows. First of all, 2022 was another successful year for GEA. We are continuously growing and improving our profitability in absolute numbers as well as in margin. We had a very good start into the year 2023. We expect also a very good Q1 with a solid order intake here. We also have a very optimistic view on the pipeline for the remainder of the year. All in all, I can summarize that the good journey of GEA will continue in 2023, you will see another year of growth and profitability increase. Profitable growth is continue to increase. Let's summarize it like that.
With that, I thank you for participating again, and goodbye and see you next time.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.