Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Jenoptik conference call regarding the results of the first nine months, 2023. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Dr. Stefan Traeger.
Yeah, thank you very much, and a very warm welcome also from our end here in Jena to our nine-month earnings call. With me today, as always, is our CFO, Prisca Havranek-Kosicek, and Prisca is going to guide us through the numbers in a lot of details. Prior to that, though, let me take the opportunity and just point on some highlights of the first nine months of this fiscal year. So if you would follow me, please, to page number 4 of our presentation. I think the first nine months, and in particular, the last three months, this actual quarter, has been characterized by this deteriorating macroeconomic environment.
Nevertheless, despite that deteriorating macroeconomic environment, we are happy to report, again, I believe, a strong set of numbers actually, showing further growth and margin expansion for the group. All mega trends remain intact for Jenoptik. The digitization of our world goes on. Healthcare systems around the globe do need more effective and more efficient systems, and we all need more smarter ways to get from A to B, so smart mobility is a mega trend that helps us. For us, in particular, and in particular in the last couple of months, important, is that we do continue to see good demand in the semiconductor equipment area, as well as in core biophotonics arenas for us here at Jenoptik. The result of that, as I said earlier, we can actually report a positive business development, and that's a continuing theme throughout the year.
We do see double-digit revenue and margin growth. Our order intake in the isolated quarter, Q3, versus the same quarter last year, actually grew by +4.3%, and sales are up +5.2%. Again, that's Quarter three this year versus Quarter three last year. As a result of that, our order backlog is actually still growing at a very high level, and book-to-bill, despite the fact that we grow significantly, is above one. So we still build backlog even of the first nine months of this year. I'm particularly pleased to see that our operating profit expands and continues to expand. Our operating profit margin or EBITDA margin, again, in the isolated quarter, is up by 30 basis points versus the same quarter last year. For the year, after the first nine months, it's up by 170 basis points.
As a result of that ongoing margin expansion, we raise our EBITDA margin guidance to now around 19.5% of sales for the fiscal year. With that said, I'll hand over to Prisca, and Prisca is going to take us through the numbers in much more detail. Prisca?
Thank you, Stefan. Good morning, everyone. So let me give you some more color on our financial performance in Q3. First of all, however, let me reiterate what Stefan had said earlier. Overall, if we look at the world economy today, it is clear that the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated over the course of the fiscal year. However, in spite of this, at our company, we've seen continued positive business development throughout the first three quarters, with a healthy double-digit revenue growth and yet again, over proportionate profit expansion, which has also enabled us to raise our margin guidance for this year. Now, let's look into our performance on group level, starting with market demand on page six. Order intake in the first nine months came in at EUR 835 million.
This denotes a solid level, although it's down 6% compared to the strong prior year period. In the third quarter, order intake was up by around 5%, thanks to a big order received by our non-photonic portfolio company. As you can see here, also, book-to-bill ratio on group level remains at the same level compared to H1 2023, but has reduced somewhat over the prior year. Looking across our businesses, you can see that each of our segments reports a book-to-bill ratio above one. As Stefan has mentioned earlier, our order backlog continued to grow and thus remains on a very high level. It was up by around 8% compared to the end of last year, which again, provides us with a strong basis for the coming quarters, especially since order backlog has increased in each of our segments year-over-year.
Now, we expect to convert roughly 37% or in absolute terms, EUR 290 million-EUR 300 million of this backlog into revenue within this fiscal year. Now, turning to revenue and profit development on page 17. Looking at the left graph, you see that for the first three quarters, we saw a strong top-line development with revenue up by about 10%. We had no effect from portfolio changes, so this growth is purely organic. FX had a minor negative impact on top-line development. The main growth drivers in this period were both our Advanced Photonic Solutions division, which posted low double-digit growth, and our Smart Mobility Solutions division, which posted higher single-digit growth, whereas our Non-Photonic Portfolio Companies grew mid-single digits.
From a regional perspective, each of our regions reported higher revenues, most notable Europe, with plus 15%, and Asia Pacific, up 12%. Our share of revenue outside of Germany remained stable at around three quarters of our total revenue. Moving on to profitability on the right side of the slide. As you can see, we have improved our profitability, and the strong top-line growth converted into a substantial profit and margin improvement. Group EBITDA, in the first nine months of 2023, came in at EUR 143 million. EBITDA margin, Stefan mentioned it already earlier, was up markedly by 170 basis points, driven by both mix and scale effect. Looking at profits from a divisional perspective, the main contributor in absolute terms was our APS division, and also the turnaround of our non-photonic portfolio companies contributed significantly.
As you know, Stefan will go into our divisional performance in greater detail a bit later in this call. Now, moving on to the P&L, on page 8. Here, I would like to give you a little bit more detail on the drivers behind this margin growth. First of all, we saw gross margin expands around 60 basis points year-over-year, driven by strong top-line development growth at APS, at broadly stable margin, as well as gross margins improvement at our NPC. Looking into functional costs, as you can see here, we remain disciplined in our OpEx, despite our continuous investment into R&D. As a consequence, functional costs are growing at a rate that is significantly lower than our revenue. Now, let me briefly explain what's going on into our other operating results.
Here we are down by EUR 6 million year-over-year for two main reasons. We recognized some losses relating to FX compared to a small positive effect last year. And secondly, as you already know from H2, we took an impairment charge of EUR 4 million in connection with the sale of our 33% stake in Templesa , which we've already reported at half year. Our EBIT came in at EUR 88 million for the first nine months, up considerably by 29% year-over-year. For the first nine months, financial results stands at -EUR 11.5 million. This primarily reflects the substantial rise in interest rates. However, let me use this opportunity to remind you that our exposure here is limited, as approximately two-thirds of our debt is a fixed rate.
Finally, earnings per share of EUR 0.94 are up 32% versus 5 years ago. So overall, we reported solid earnings for the set, for the first 9 months of 2023. Turning to page 9. Looking at cash flow, we made good progress versus last year. Operating cash flow pre-tax is growing at similar dynamics as EBITDA, despite some investment into working capital, where for sure, we have some more work to do. We are continuing to invest, to invest into our capacities, and accounting CapEx was up by EUR 12 million year-over-year. However, it may be, counterintuitive maybe to, to see investment cash flow to be somewhat down year-over-year. So let me explain that. There are two aspects to that. Firstly, of course, not all of our accounting CapEx per se, is cash relevant due to our lease agreements, for example.
And secondly, some of the interior fittings and installations related to the CapEx for our new facility in Berlin have been transferred to our landlord in accordance with our lease agreement, which has led to a one-time inflow in our cash flow statement. Net debt slightly increased versus end of last year, due to dividend payments in June and tax payments, which are not included in the free cash flow. Our leverage now stands at 2.3 times compared to 2.6 times at the end of 2022. With this, let me turn back to Stefan to cover our divisions.
Yeah, thank you, Prisca. And as always, let's get started with our APS or Advanced Photonic Solutions business on page number nine of our deck. As you can see in the presentation, revenue has grown again, and Prisca pointed this out already earlier, low double digits. So we have 11.1% revenue growth after nine months in this business, and I think it goes without saying that we're really proud of that result, in particular, in light of the fact that our factories have to run pretty hard actually, to produce almost EUR 600 million in sales in the first nine months this year. Despite that strong sales growth, our book-to-bill ratio is still above one.
Order intake is down by -8.9% after the first 9 months, but again, down from a very high prior year level. So the comparator here is really, really, really challenging. I think it's fair to say that overall, with EUR 622 million order intake after 9 months, we can report a continuous and ongoing strong demand in most of those businesses that are grouped together under APS. And in particular, and I know that's most interesting to most of you, in particular, in our semiconductor equipment business. As a result of top-line growth and more volume, and of course, also a better mix, we do see margins again going up, operating margins.
There is a one-time effect in this EBITDA number, but overall, it's really just the volume and mix effect that drives up the margins in EBITDA. The growth of at least the profit in the business. Margin in percent of sales is down somewhat from a very high level of last year. But again, overall, we're very happy with the performance of APS in the first nine months. We go to Smart Mobility Solutions. Here, revenue is up as well by not quite, but almost 10%, 9.1% in precise terms. But order intake is down, but please let me remind you on the fact that this is a project-driven business, so you have lumpy order intakes.
We don't see an underlying trend of any kind to sort of to see reduced demands or anything like that. It's just an unevenness in that business. Here as well, book-to-bill is still above one, so our backlog again grew also in the Smart Mobility division. I think what's maybe a bit surprising that we see EBITDA going down in Smart Mobility. In Smart Mobility, we do have actually two effects going on. One effect is a mix effect. We make more sales currently with projects that come in at lower margin, and that's to do with a particular project that we have going on down under and some other smaller items.
And at the same time, we do continue to invest into our sales force in a strategic, very important, strategically very important market. In other words, we continue to invest in building up our sales force in North America, which, of course, in the future, should lead to not only just higher sales, but also higher margins, because then we would be able to actually capture the service business also in North America, which we can't do at the moment. With that, let's go to Non-Photonic Portfolio Companies. It's actually nice to report those numbers here. You know, we all were a bit nervous about those businesses in NPC, but it's nice to see the numbers going up.
It's nice to see strong order intake growth, in the first nine months of, of this fiscal year. In particular, they were driven by a one-time large project that we booked just recently in this quarter for, Prodomax. Now, to manage expectations, at least somewhat, let me remind you that in quarter four of last year, we also booked a large order for Prodomax. So, you know, if you build your models, don't, don't assume that, the order intake here will continue to go with almost 30%, but do assume that we have a strong market recovery, in particular for Prodomax, but also for, for Hommel. Revenue is up, mid-single digits, 4.5% to now almost EUR 90 million from, granted, relatively low basis of last year. Nevertheless, you do see that results into a strong margin expansion.
So margins are really up, and EBITDA is at EUR 12.2 million the first nine months, again, driven by more volume, but also by the fact that we actually stopped the bleeding or closed the loopholes, if you want, in with INTEROB. Again, let's not forget that last year we had significant downward sort of drag from INTEROB and a particular project to do with electromobility in for a factory near Berlin. And that's gone, and so those margin draggers are out of the business, and we can now actually do see the underlying strengths of both Hommel and Prodomax. With that said, let's have a quick look into sort of the remainder of the year.
As we pointed out earlier, we do raise our margin guidance, based on the strong margin expansion that we have seen, thus far year to date. We are now expecting EBITDA margins to come in around 19.5% of sales. Sales, we maintain our guidance. We do still believe that, in forecast, that we come in somewhere between EUR 1.05 billion-EUR 1.1 billion. And we do want to point out that capital expenditure will be higher than prior year, and prior year was at EUR 106 million. So overall, we do invest into our organic growth, in particular for our APS businesses, and that does cost money.
However, we're trying to manage that as carefully as possible to also make sure that we sort of have a very close look on our ROCE. We do understand that ROCE is very important, but we also need to invest and want to invest into growth in our core businesses, and in particular in Semiconductor. We all know that there is a discussion out there to what extent, you know, Semiconductor in 2024 might be sort of somewhat flat, and in 2025 it will grow again for the business overall, and for the market overall. For us, and some of us have discussed that in the past, for us, we do see continued good demand from our customers. We do not sell to semicon producers.
We sell to a large machine builders that build semicon machine or semicon production equipment. I think we can discuss that in more detail in the Q&A session. Most importantly, again, we maintain our sales target for the year, and our revenue guidance for the year, and we raise our margin guidance to now an EBITDA margin of around 19.5% of sales. That said, let's pause here. Thank you very much for your attention, and we look forward to your questions.
So ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question now, please press nine, followed by the star key on your telephone keypad. If you wish to cancel your question. The first question comes from Adrian Pehl, Stifel. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. So I hope you can hear me well. First of all, on the, APS segment, actually, on the CapEx side of things, I mean, I would have expected you to spend a little more, until, the end of the nine-month period. So I'm just wondering if you could say a few words on what we should expect, obviously, then, for the fourth quarter, and are some CapEx portions just spilling over into, into the next year? And then a second question, obviously, given that the order intake situation has been, quite solid in the quarter. I know you're not guiding quarterly order intakes, but is there anything that should make us believe that there will be a different momentum in the fourth quarter on APS order intake?
Maybe we'll take these two, and then I might have some follow-ups.
Yeah. Thanks very much for your questions, Adrian. On the CapEx one, I'm looking at Prisca, but I think we do see some, some delays in our CapEx here, and, and I would expect, or I wouldn't be surprised if you see some spillovers into next year, but Prisca.
Yes, so fully agree with you. So, thank you, Adrian. I fully concur. When we build, you know, when you build big projects like we do in Dresden, for example, it's always hard to exactly forecast in which quarter, you know, which amount goes. That's partially natural. I want to reiterate, we are fully on the time plan, so there's no delays from that. But there is some volatility, of course, from, you know, our CapEx estimates for this year versus next year. So I agree with Jeff, on some of it, we will see potentially move into the first half of next year.
On the order intake, and again, let me point out that Prodomax issue. We did post a very large order for Prodomax just a couple of weeks ago. So in this quarter, quarter three, and last year, we had a very large order at Prodomax in quarter four. So I would expect some normalization effects quarter-over-quarter for NPC segment. On APS, I don't see any particular sort of changes. We are still in discussion with our partners on the ARVR front. Still discussions, no solid order intake this quarter, and whether that is something is going to come next quarter or next year, nobody knows at the moment.
It's hard to tell, but in most other segments, basically no significant change versus the last couple of months, I'd say.
And then, a quick question of understanding. Prisca, I think you said you expect to turn all of that backlog that you have, EUR 290-300 million into revenues in Q4. So I'm not sure if we should see this as kind of narrowing the guidance on top line a bit, but on the other hand, you should have some business, obviously, that you take in Q4 and you ship in Q4 to some degree. So how should we see it is actually the revenue more than EUR 300 million that we should expect for the fourth quarter?
Yeah.
The second question. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead, please.
No, please. Sorry, I just wanted... So I think you shouldn't read more into that than that we roughly want to convert this 37%. And if you do the math, you'll see it more or less goes to the midpoint of our current revenue guidance, right? And we are not narrowing the guidance. Today, as Stefan has reiterated, we keep our revenue guidance intact, so I wouldn't, you know, wordsmith more, more into that, other than, than we are confident that we convert 37% roughly into revenue this year or this quarter.
All right. Okay, got it. And on the APS margin, you also said that the margin obviously is a bit down versus last year. I was just wondering, is that because there will probably be more question on TRIOPTICS later on in the conference call, is that something solely attributable to TRIOPTICS, basically, and the other parts of the APS business are doing just fine or even better, or how should we think of it?
... Let me get started, and maybe, Prisca, if you can support me here. Air traffic is an issue because they're not at the same sales level as anticipated, and we did dial in costs to prepare for the growth we're expecting, and the orders we're expecting, in particular in AR/VR. The underlying base business of TRIOPTICS is strong and intact, and it's fine. But it is taking margins down if we dial in more OpEx, obviously, and more cost. So TRIOPTICS is in effect. We also have effects in the other businesses, predominantly, or namely, the biophotonics arena, I think, is in some parts under pressure.
In particular, those aesthetic procedures we talked about in the past, they come in lower end, since this has a yeah, fairly steep function of sales to cost, we, we do see the margins under pressure in that area as well, I believe. But I d- do you have any-
Yeah.
Sort of addition to that?
Maybe only two more data points to add. If you look at isolated margins for Q2, Q3 last year, they were fairly high. You know, so take a high comp into account, which is about 23%. And then I would say, secondly, reiterating what Stefan just said, the other businesses were broadly in line with our expectations. We do have, mainly driven because of the sales top-line development, the development at TRIOPTICS below our expectations, and that has an impact as well.
All right. And then, very last question from my side before I jump back into the queue. A bit more strategic one in thinking about your portfolio. So given, you know, nice performance, good order intake of Prodomax, is that not the right time to sell the asset? While at the same time, probably businesses which might be complementary to APS have a good price tag, so to use the money for, for M&A to complement the segment, is that something you're thinking about, or is that not the case at the moment? Thank you.
Adrian, thank you for your question. At this moment, we're not going to discuss that Prodomax future anymore in any detail, and please do understand that.
All right. Thanks.
The next question comes from Craig Abbott, Kepler Cheuvreux.
Hi, good morning. Thanks. Most of my questions, obviously, were just in the meantime, answered. Two follow-ups, I guess. Okay, just following up on that, that very last one. You said you're not going to talk about Prodomax, but, I mean, any, any, any general thoughts, beyond that? I mean, you also have Hommel, you, you know, you have the safety business you might have to rethink about. I mean, I appreciate you have the Capital Markets Day coming up in a couple of weeks. Maybe you want to simply refer to that, but some general thoughts, on what you're thinking strategically at the moment would be appreciated.
And the second question is just simply, you've said a number of things on TRIOPTICS, but I'd like if we could just be a little bit more specific with regards to the base underlying business. I appreciate the AR/VR business has not yet come through, but on the basic smartphone-related business, we've seen more positive industry news flow here in the last few months. And if you could at least give us some indication, have you seen the stabilization now in that that order intake? If you could give us some light there, that would be appreciated. Thank you.
Sure, Craig. And, let's start with the TRIOPTICS question. The underlying base business continues to be intact, like before, or flat, shall we say. Like always before, actually, the strong growth in TRIOPTICS last year and the year before stemmed from AR/VR, actually. At that time, we booked large engineering orders and engineering revenues for AR/VR. The underlying base business, as you point out, with cellphone, but also with, like, just classical optical metrology, is a stable business and will be. We don't expect that to grow like crazy, nor do we expect that to decline a big time. It's a fairly stable business. I mean, TRIOPTICS is not a new startup. You know, TRIOPTICS is in business since 1991. We all have TRIOPTICS machines in our optics factories.
We do, our competitors do. That's a stable business, and that stable business continues to be a good business with good margins. The growth in the last two years were driven by engineering orders for AR/VR, which are not in our books this year, but we fully expect them to come in in the years to come, or in the quarters to come, just be more careful here. But baseline business is fully intact. On the other issue, I mean, we did point out in our last Capital Markets Day and our strategy for 2025, that we have the intention to reduce our dependence on automotive business, in particular on automotive business that are non-optical, and we have the intention to focus our investments-...
on growth in our optics and our core optics businesses. We still have that intention and we still want to do that, and yeah, I'm not going to comment any more on Prodomax. Hommel is a mixed bag. As some of you know, in Hommel, we have a certain part that is actually optics. We have combined Hommel by now already with obviously a part of the Hommel product line with OTTO Vision, just got an award for an electronic business that we have there. So you know, our strategy remains intact.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
The next question comes from Martin Jungfleisch, BNP Paribas.
Yeah, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Two, please. From the orders in APS, I mean, can you provide some color on the order composition by region and by industry in APS in Q3? Was the decline mainly driven by Semi and TRIOPTICS in Asia, or was there anything else? And can you highlight some changes that you have seen quarter-over-quarter on the composition, if there was anything meaningful? And then secondly, adding to that, ASML as your main customer were quite soft in Q3, while they also expect 2024 revenues to be flat now.
Can you comment a bit if the softer orders at ASML have already led to a bit of softer order intake on your side in Q3, or would this come at a time lag of a few months, given different lead times? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for your questions. We're not commenting on sort of details in individual product lines. I think please do understand that. I think we give you as much color as we can between the divisions and sort of at least qualitatively, I'd say we don't see a major shift quarter-over-quarter. That was one of the questions. But please understand, we will not go into the details quantitatively, but qualitatively, I think we could say that we don't see a major shift in the pattern quarter-over-quarter at the moment. Obviously, we cannot comment on the ASML, that you can ask ASML these questions.
We can comment on what we see with major customers in the semiconductor manufacturing area, which is, you know, some of them. One of them you may have mentioned, and we have others that's important, such as ASML. There's also other customers there. But yes, it's our main customer. Nevertheless, the effect that we have, I always compare our customers or our customers to, like, sort of a bit of a reservoir, if you want. If they see order intake fluctuations, that doesn't mean that it results into them ordering more or less from us, because they also need to know that they have long lead times, we have long lead times. We have frame contracts over years.
You know, if they're preparing for growth in 2025, see a flat 2024 and growth in 2025, basically that means they have, and they do, continue to order from us, because they need to continue to build their machines, to prepare themselves for a huge growth in 2025. So this is basically the effect that we have. Fluctuations in the demand for machines itself do not automatically correlate with fluctuations in our order intake. And those are big tankers, basically, big reservoirs, that can filter out the demand fluctuations on their end, simply because of their size. And I hope that does explain a bit... It's a question that we get fairly regularly, actually, and I know it's a bit sort of counterintuitive and not easy to sort of understand in the first place.
But, yeah, essentially, fluctuations in the demand of our large customers, whether up or down, doesn't translate into one-on-one fluctuations on our end.
Okay, thank you.
The next question comes from Michael Kundert.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking the question. Essentially, one last, and you already commented on it during the presentation. Quite a substantial margin decline in SMS in the third quarter, and you mentioned project mix and also the buildup of your distribution organization in the US. Could you quantify both effects and maybe let us know what amount of fixed cost you have added for building up the US sales force? And maybe also give us an update on where you stand, how much of this implementation has been done, and from which date onwards you would expect bigger order wins again in the US and that business to pick up and also improve the profitability. Thank you.
I mean, obviously, the total effect you can see on page 12 of our presentation. That's sort of the effect of both or the total of both effects. We cannot disclose or don't want to disclose the sort of the composition of that. But the total effect you can see on page 12 of the presentation. When it comes to this effect in North America, we are making good progress there. We do start to take orders in, smaller ones, though, at the moment. And we're actually okay with that, 'cause we do want to start with smaller orders first.
We want to make sure that we are not sort of fumble the ball here by trying to take big, big, big projects on ourselves, on ourselves, all right from the get-go. So at the moment, we, in particular in the U.S., go for more smaller orders, smaller projects, more local projects, so that we can, in a way, learn to run that business ourselves in this organization. Now, just to be clear, we do that type of business in lots of other parts of the world, but not in the U.S. So for our U.S. organization, it's new, new colleagues, and we want to make sure they're, you know, they as I say, we do not fumble the ball on, on that one. Yeah, Patricia?
Maybe, maybe I have something. Thank you. Maybe I can add to that. Maybe that to drive it on a little bit higher level view. You know, yes, you are right. We have, we have seen, you know, a margin decline. However, keep in mind that margin variability by quarter in SMS is very high, which is if you look at, the table 2, 3 numbers this year, last year, right? So that's one data point. Stefan already mentioned that we are, you know, revenue-wise, maybe slightly lower than last year. On the other hand, we also see the mix effects that Stefan has mentioned, which we will always see quarter by quarter, and they can have positive and negative effects.
So I would lead you to look into year to date or LTM numbers for this business. We think this is more accurate than looking into the quarter by quarter basis. And then I won't comment again on US, because Stefan has already covered that. But maybe that gives you some flavor. And obviously, we expect this effect to be temporary, but we cannot give you, you know, a quarter by quarter, you know, future view on this business.
Thank you. Then maybe as a follow-up, as you mentioned, this Australian contractor diluting the margin, is that, let's say, a contract that was signed in the expectation of a lower margin, or is this contract underperforming due to some reason?
We're looking at each other, if we even should answer the question. It's a bit underperforming. I'll put it that way.
I think maybe to add to that, but don't read too much into it. You know, we have a broad business across a lot of regions-
Yeah.
-right? And I think this is more meant as one example of mixed changes that we do see. So,
Yeah
... please, take it, in that context.
Excellent, thank you. And then just one more on APS. During your presentation, you briefly mentioned a one-off effect. Is that something from the nine-month number? Is it something from the previous quarter, or was there any new one-off included in the third quarter?
No, it was already in the second quarter, and low- to mid-single-digit EUR million number.
Understood. Thank you.
The next question comes from Nastub.
Hi, good morning. Sorry, last question on the APS order, I promise. You mentioned the framework contracts that you have with your customers. I suppose you have, you know, good visibility on the volume within that contract over the time period. So I'm just wondering, sort of, you know, what visibility do you have now based on your APS order backlog, that kind of stretching until, you know, the end of H1 next year? And how consistent is, you know, the cadence of the call-offs within the framework contracts usually? I mean, is there quite a big fluctuation on a quarterly basis, or is it tends to be quite evenly staggered within the structure of the contract? Thanks.
I guess the best way to answer is we do not see any significant changes here. It's the same pattern that we had in the last years in plural. We have full stop, I guess. Same pattern, we have the same amount of visibility that we actually always had. So our large customers in this area did not change their ordering behavior towards us. And I'll say that one more time. They did not change their ordering pattern towards us recently.
Okay, good.
Yeah, I hope that answered your... I actually hope that answered the question. If not, please, I mean, please do follow up, but,
That's fine. Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
The next question comes from Meta Sherman, Warburg Research.
Yeah. Hi, not much left. Maybe follow up on, TRIOPTICS again. Do you already see headwind and earnings levels from an underutilization, or is that something you expect to become more severe during the coming quarters and should be kind of expected?
No, I think the headwind comes more from us having dialed in more resources for the expected growth. I think that's a better way of saying it, but, yeah, you can turn it around, of course, if you want, then that you can also call that underutilization if you want. But we have raised the amount of headcounts there and invested into growth. And that's where that's what drags down margins.
... Yeah. Okay. So that situation should not become much different than in the next few quarters?
I would agree to that. Yes.
Yeah. Okay. And then maybe also on APS orders or order dynamics. I mean, obviously, I think Q3 had been the first quarter with the book-to-bill ratio of below one. And that segment, I think, which is understandable, given the growth you have on the strong order backlog you build up, and then seeing some weaknesses here and there. I mean, is that something that one should expect for the next few quarters as well? And probably, as you, as, as you said, the trends, patterns are not really changing at the moment, so we can give a qualitative comment when you could, might expect to order dynamics to change more positively again.
That's a fair observation. There's a part of me saying, I hope that that continues because that means we continue to sell as much as we do, and our factories are continuing to be productive as much as they are at the moment. Of course, we do want to see growth, but in orders as well. But so I, it's a bit hard to say because it depends on the development of order intake in the next few quarters, which we do see, let's say, in a stable manner, you know, and obviously we hope that we can continue to grow sales. That would mean book-to-bill below one. So hard to tell because we're sort of on the edge here. It's not a clear...
It's not as if this is much below one, but, yeah, I hope that answers the question. It's-- Again, not a significant change in any order intake pattern, pushing sales out of the door as fast and as hard as we possibly can, and to what extent that balances out over the next few quarters, we have to see.
Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Thanks.
At the moment, there are no further questions. If you would still like to raise a question at this point, please press nine, followed by the star key on your telephone keypad. There is a follow-up question coming from Adrian Hale, Stifel.
Yes, thanks for having me again. Just a very quick follow-up question. On the order backlog, would you share with us the portion in there which is signed for delivery in 2025? Is there already a sizable number included there? Thank you.
No, I don't think we specify that at this level, Adrian.
I would say that-
That's all right.
You can assume that, you know, our order backlog is faced in a way that the majority of the orders are, you know, closer to home, right? Without giving you-
Sure.
- specifics. But no, we cannot sort of, unfortunately, sort of give you the specifics on a quarter or this year, to be basic.
Right. Okay. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this point, and I'd like to hand it back to the speakers for some closing remarks.
Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks for being with us today. Let me remind you of the Capital Markets Day that we are going to have in a few weeks. Looking forward to see many of you in Berlin, and I guess we will have more time to dive deeper into our businesses and to our growth expectations, into our margin expectations, midterm during the Capital Markets Day. Thank you very much.