Good morning, everybody. A warm welcome to our seventh iteration of the digital German Select Conference. Once again, we have a strong lineup of German companies, 11 of them altogether, ranging from A, like Amadeus FiRe, to V, like Verbio. The format is the same for each company, 30 minutes for each slot, with roughly 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes of Q&A. If you would like to ask questions, please feel free to enter them in the chat box on the lower right-hand corner. I wish you interesting insights. If you do like this sort of format, we have another digital conference coming up next week on Thursday, our Austrian Select, focusing on, not surprisingly, Austrian companies. I will share the link to register for that event shortly in the chat box.
Now let's get the show on the road, and let me introduce our first company presenting, JENOPTIK AG. Andreas Theisen, Head of IR and Sustainability, will share his insights on the company with us. Now, without further ado, Andreas, the floor is yours.
Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks to the organizers too for having us this morning. Yeah, my name is Andreas, and I will run you through Jenoptik and give some insights into what the company does, how it operates, and what the future may hold. Now when we look into Jenoptik, we are listed on the German stock market since more than 25 years now in the meantime, be part of the TecDAX and the MDAX, which we're happy about. Fair to say that the roots of the company date back to the years quite before the foundation in 1991. Jenoptik is a company that considers itself as globally leading in the world of photonics. The term photonics is, I think, sometimes a bit hard to understand.
What we mean with that is we have our core competency in the area of optics mainly, but also in lasers. That means what we are doing is we are using optics and our deep know-how to develop applications for our customers for whatever they ultimately need, and I come to the key applications in a moment. You see all the key data here. We do about a billion in revenue and a little above 18% EBITDA margin last year. Photonics is a platform technology, so the key for us is to deploy our know-how into the markets that are most interesting for us. And those markets are here shown as semicon, medtech, metrology, and smart mobility. And here on the next page, I'd like to give you a bit more color what we ultimately do.
Yeah, with the markets that we are addressing, as I just mentioned, we have picked areas where I think our technology does make a difference, where we can add value to what our customers need. Our principal business model is a OEM business model. I come to that. You rarely find our products right in touch with you as a consumer. It is typically built into someone else's machines. When we say we are enabling the digital age, what does that mean? It does mean that today's modern chip making, and you may know that modern chip making is done via a production process that is called lithography. This would not be possible without our sensors and our solutions inside.
Ultimately, you can easily say that the vast majority of, if not all of high-performing chips, are made via lithography production steps, and here our sensors are a critical component. We are in touch with that. On the right-hand side, in the area of metrology and measurement technologies, most likely, when you look at your smartphone and the backside with whatever two or three cameras, excuse me, that you may have there, most likely this camera has been quality controlled by our technology. Yeah, we are market leading in smartphone camera testing. Further down in the area of life science, for example, what we are offering are very specialized lasers for eye care, eye surgery. Here we find also applications for our know-how. Last but not least, maybe you have been unhappy at the moment that you have been last in touch with us.
If you got a ticket for having been driving too fast or maybe crossing a red light, that's something that we do with our technologies. We are offering systems to municipalities, police stations, and so on and so forth, for traffic control. That's the last aspect here. Now, on the principal value proposition or business model, if you want, that Jenoptik goes after, ultimately what we are banking on is, as I just mentioned beforehand, a very strong know-how in the area of optics, sensors, lenses, all these type of things. We have, over those decades, developed very massive application excellence. We do understand what customers are after. Typically, and that's maybe also important to understand, when we are engaging with a customer, it is not that we are selling something off-shelf. Basically, we don't do that.
What we do is we are engaging on a joint R&D project. We develop the solution for a given customer, and then we are selling this solution over the life cycle of the product that the customer has. These are important aspects and cornerstones of our business model and production capacity. Sometimes it appears to be a bit strange, but this is something in the optics industry that is quite an important aspect to do successful business. On the other hand, deep relationships, that's important. We do generate a little less than 50% of our total group sales or global group sales with our top seven customers. You see that the direct link and the direct connection does play a role. Our customers typically share their R&D roadmaps, their commercial roadmaps, and so on and so forth with us.
We are very much intertwined and linked to our customer and what considerations are around there. That's essentially where we are playing our business model on. Now, if you have followed Jenoptik, you probably have come across the company making substantial changes to the portfolio over the last, I would say, good five years. We have been selling some assets. We have been acquiring some assets. The prime driver behind was that we wanted to get Jenoptik more focused on these indeed core competencies in photonics. That's what we have done, and I think we have been moving quite a bit forward, so that from today's perspective, our main interest and our main goal is to grow the company organically.
In other words, the big M&A tickets and transactions are behind, and now we have a strong portfolio and strong growth platforms which we want to utilize. One aspect that we have been focusing on last year was to reorganize our company. We have been looking at a de-complexing the company while removing a very complex matrix structure, and ultimately wanted to get to a greater accountability of managers and faster decision-making. At the same stage, we increased customer focus even further. I think the third aspect around our reorganization was that we have done last year come out with a new reporting structure, which also gives investors more clarity and more insights into what Jenoptik ultimately does and what the drivers are. Further on to that organic growth, I mentioned that. 2025 has been a bit of an exception, I would say.
We expect to grow going forward, and so we have also been massively investing into our production capacity, which we have now online and which we are able to utilize in the coming years. Here, the four business units that we run and how we have organized the business. We can dissect it, maybe looking first on the left-hand side. These are our OEM businesses. This is where you find our top seven key accounts, as I just mentioned, accounting for a little less than 50% of total group revenue. These OEM businesses are focusing on the one hand on semiconductor equipment industry, and on the other hand, on we call it biopharma. It does essentially entail a medical technology industry as well as life science industry. On the right-hand side, you find our sort of solutions business.
Here we are not selling compounds and modules, but full machines, even including service and these aspects. Here we have built two clusters on the top right-hand side, Metrology & Production Solutions. Here you find, for example, our smartphone camera testing activities, but also metrology devices that are used in the wider optics industry. Last but not least, I mentioned it beforehand, the smart mobility business asset, red light control, and speed control. I'm going to dive into that in a moment. Now step by step, going into Semiconductor & Advanced Manufacturing. As you saw beforehand, this is our biggest business unit, but also our most profitable one. What we are doing in semicon is we are selling specific products in two areas. One is called lithography, so that's the main chip-making process when it is about advanced chips.
Our key customer here can only be ASML, because ASML themselves have something like around, I think, 90% or so market share. The products that we are selling into this account, into this market, as I mentioned beforehand, are absolutely performance critical. They are designed together with ASML, and we are selling those modules and subsystems, as I just said, over the whole life cycle of a given system or machine. If you have some insights into lithography, if you ask yourself, "Okay, is Jenoptik in DUV manufacturing or in EUV manufacturing?" We are indeed present in any of ASML's technologies and any of ASML's lithography machines. It doesn't truly matter whether it's one or the other, just as a background information. The second pillar of the semicon business is what we are doing for customers in the area of semiconductor inspection.
If you know the market, you know that there are only a very few, very large players, and those are our customers as well. We essentially do business here with companies like KLA, as well as Applied Materials. For them, we are selling mostly classical optical compounds that they use in their quality control and metrology machines. Yeah, I think we are well-positioned here in the area of semicon. We had an 11%-12% decline in revenue last year that was largely driven by our main customers adjusting inventories at the beginning of the year. Now, as we are looking into 2026, we have mentioned that in our capital markets communication, we see demand being substantially stronger than it has been at the same point last year, and I think we can discuss that a little later when we talk about the 2025 results.
Second OEM business is Biophotonics, as I just mentioned. Biophotonics is a term that we put on top here. It essentially means, as I just said, life science and medtech OEM customers. Just giving you an example, our biggest application area is in dentistry. We are producing a so-called intraoral scanner for a very big corporation in the U.S. Intraoral scanners have been developed to create a picture of the oral cavity for the artificial tooth creation and generation. That's an important field of application. I mentioned beforehand, we are also providing solutions to the ophthalmology industry, and here we are working with all the leaders that you find in the market. Further on to that, some smaller applications which we think we place a certain bet for future growth here, and I'm talking about the field of microsurgery.
For example, when it's about artificial knee transplants and these type of things. This is something that we also support. Maybe counterintuitively, I have to mention that because the factories allocated to this Biophotonics business do also a nice portfolio of products that are used in the defense segment. Defense, as everyone knows, is an area where there is quite significant demand at this stage. For us, on a total group level, we generate approximately 5%-6% of our total group revenue with defense products. That means something like around, say, EUR 50 million, and this is part of this business unit here. One of the reasons why we saw a very strong performance last year in 2025 with 10% growth.
Normally, we would expect this business to grow more in line with the overall life science and medtech market, mean like mid-single-digit growth. Last year has been extraordinarily supported by accelerating demand for the defense portfolio. As a result of that, also we have been almost doubling our EBITDA margin now to a level of a little above 20%. Our third division, now I'm moving on the right-hand side of the chart that you saw beforehand. That's the solutions business I mentioned to you. We are offering full machines, for example, for the testing of smartphone cameras. We are in this market for quite some time, and it's a stable market. We are also having in the customer base optics producers, maybe like Jenoptik, but there are many more others outside those companies who need our solutions as well.
We do have in this business approximately 50% of revenue that is relating to automotive end markets. Those markets are, as I think everyone knows, are to some extent under pressure. One technology, for example, that we are selling into this market is a tactile measurement technology for combustion engines. As you can imagine that this is not so much of a growth market these days or, in other words, it's under pressure. That's basically the reason why in last year our revenues have been down by 7% year-on-year. We are nurturing our growth opportunities in this field as well. Yeah, we think that with the lineup of products that we have developed, we have a leading position in the still emerging field of AR and VR. The artificial part of it is the one that seems to be starting to evolve.
Yeah, right now it's early days and, in case that those devices will see mass adoption, that is something very relevant for Jenoptik and here we think that we hold some future growth opportunity. Yeah. Last but not least, Smart Mobility Solutions. I think that is a business where I need to explain the least to trying to understand that. I think the important point when it comes to traffic surveillance and traffic control is that we are not just selling a full system that includes a software backbone and the camera and all these sort of things. We are also offering these systems as a, we call it a total solution. That doesn't mean that our customers not necessarily want to buy those systems, but they want us to operate those systems.
We are essentially entering here service contracts and operating them for a certain municipality, the systems for a period of something like five years, for example. This part of the business, as mentioned here on the chart, it's in the meantime representing approximately 40% of revenue, so that's recurring revenue. We operate from a very strong foothold in Germany with double-digit market shares as well as U.K. I think our critical aspect at the moment is to penetrate the U.S. market where we have been building, selling, and service infrastructure over the last few years and where we are now seeing a business to come in in a certain way, and that's the main driver why last year, I think revenues have been up around almost 9%, and margins have also been improving year-on-year quite nicely.
When looking into, say, the near-term developments, that's the sort of headline review for last year, 2025. I think we made good progress on some of our strategic initiatives. I mentioned already the internal reorganization, having now put to the ground a leaner organization, more accountable, more transparent. That's clearly important. I mentioned it beforehand. We have been investing in our capacities in the biggest field that we are operating in, the semiconductor end market. We opened a new factory in Dresden. That was a very significant investment for Jenoptik, totaling approximately EUR 100 million. That's now done. The factory's operating. It's not totally utilized at the moment. That's relatively clear. We do have now a good basis and a good foundation for future growth in this particular market. I will touch the business development aspect on the very next slide.
2025 on overall, somewhat lower demand than the year before, for us has been evolving under the headline of cost containment and cost control. That's what we were focusing on last year. Nonetheless, we are nurturing our growth opportunities. We think that we have a number of fields where we can generate significant additional revenue, besides the classical semiconductor business, or semiconductor demands driven by AI and data center buildup. I talked about defense, where we see a significant further growth opportunity. The expansion of our Smart Mobility business into the U.S., I talked about, and the AR/VR opportunity that we have in our MPS business. We think that there are ample of growth items ahead of us that we're trying to capture and realize. On 2025, in short terms, I think what I mentioned before and now in figures.
Revenues last year have been down by 6%. The prime driver for that was, as I just mentioned, some sort of an inventory correction at our main customer in the area of Semiconductor & Advanced Manufacturing and weak demand in the automotive industry. You see that we have been able to retain our margins at good levels as we think. That's particularly the case if we consider that we have included here about a high single-digit million one-time restructuring cost that is embedded in the 18.4% EBITDA margin that we generated. You see from those numbers that by last year, order intake has been under pressure. It's still down slightly year-over-year. When I talk about the outlook on the next page, we see now quite better dynamics. Nonetheless, despite the operational pressure that we had, we are happy with the free cash flow generation.
As you can see, it's like EUR 50 million incremental free cash flow generated, and that has helped us to further drive down our leverage now to 1.6x. We feel very comfortable with our financial position here. My last slide before we can go into Q&A is the outlook for 2026. I think you saw that from the relative size of the businesses that the semiconductor market is truly important for Jenoptik and its performance. We mentioned already in our releases on the preliminary results, but also on the final results, that right at the start of this year, we are now seeing that demand, particularly in the semiconductor business, is significantly higher than it was last year. We see quite positive momentum. We also see positive momentum in the area of biophotonics.
And based on these trends, I think we feel good with our current guidance that we have, despite the, say, additional and incremental uncertainty that now comes around the Iran conflict and oil price hikes and therefore, I think GDP uncertainty. So I think we feel confident with our guidance staying a single-digit revenue growth. That's what we want to achieve this year. And that does mean, in other words, between 1% and 9% growth. Again, it's early days of the year. Some positive signals are there, but we really need to see how these things are evolving throughout the year. On the profitability side, we will be realizing better margins in this year than last year. Given the sales floor is relatively wide, between 19% and 21%.
Typically for us, we go throughout the year at some point, maybe half year or so, and then we will further specify our expectations here. I mentioned beforehand we went through a very significant investment cycle. For some of those years between 2022 and 2024, I think we had a CapEx ratio of 10%+. Now we are down last year to something like around 7% relative to sales. Again, for this year, we foresee only smaller investments and therefore our overall investments will be somewhat below the last year. With this, I'd like to thank you for your attention, and I'm happy to take any questions that you may have.
Thank you so much, Andreas, for the insights. We do have quite a few questions and very limited time, so I will try to focus in a little bit. We had a lot of questions regarding the guidance for 2026, not surprisingly, after the decline that we've seen in order backlog in 2025. The guidance that you give, single-digit growth, one of the questions is what determines where you end up on the lower or the higher end? Is it self-help or is it macro? In how far do you already see signs, be it on the semiconductor ordering side, on the order intake side that justifies either/or?
A good question. Thank you for that one. I think the criticalities when it comes to guidance are surrounding the area of semiconductor as well as I think also, to some extent, automotive. In semiconductor, as I think everyone knows, cycles can go very fast. The first data point that we have and the interactions that we have with our customers are very positive. I think how strong demand will ultimately unfold, that is one aspect, but also relevant in the semi space is for what technology platform this demand will be relevant. In semis, we have essentially two technology platforms. One is classical optics, the other one is micro-optics. In the classical optics, we are well loaded already from a capacity perspective. In micro-optics, we have quite some spare capacity. All I'm trying to say, it depends a bit on where we see demand coming.
Is it more on the micro-optics side? It's easier for us to realize sales. If it's on the classical optics side, it takes a bit longer. Automotive, yeah. We saw automotive being down last year. We have not assumed that this becomes suddenly a growth market, but on the other hand, we have also not assumed that we will be incrementally down in 2026. These are the moving parts, the essential ones. Oh, I can't hear you anymore.
Sorry. Here I am. You already mentioned that you're done with M&A activities mostly. A quick question on that, however, came. Which progress have you made with strategic alliances, for example, OEM partnership or possible acquisitions to strengthen the portfolio?
Yeah. Good question. I think in our business, we have been making good progress in a way that we are developing further with our key accounts. I don't think that we will be adding a substantial number of key accounts. Why is that? Because when you, for example, look into the semi space, besides ASML, there is essentially not much, and it's probably really hard for us to address Nikon or something like that. That's probably unwise. All I'm trying to say that in the semi space, per se, expanding the key customer base is almost impossible. I think in the area of life science, to be honest, we have to expand our key account base. This is a long-run business. Yeah, long-run, long-cycle, because don't forget that our components are part of a medical device, and this is subject to approval.
Once you are in, you are in over the whole life cycle, but in turn, to get on new things, that, as I just said, takes a while. I think we feel good with our position. For example, in the area of microsurgery where we have been adding key accounts, and this is something, over time, that has to become big. That's kind of the strategy and the progress, yeah.
Great. Understood. It's 10:29 A.M. We are coming to the end of your presentation, and thanks so much for the insights, Andreas. We will continue with Amadeus FiRe. I just posted the link to the next presentation in the chat box. Of course, I'm sure, Andreas, if there are any follow-up questions from the audience, they can contact you directly regarding.
Absolutely
any additional insights.
Thanks very much for having me.
Thanks so much, everybody.
Thank you. Bye-bye.