Thank you very much. A very good morning from our headquarters here at Neu-Isenburg, and a warm welcome to our Q2 investor and analysts conference. We will present to you the highlights of Q2, the details of our Q2 performance, and we will give you an outlook for the remainder of the year. After that, we're happy to take your questions. Let's come to the highlights. JOST increased sales by 18% to a record of EUR 322 million in Q2, with a very strong growth in transport with 14% and in agriculture with 29%. Our adjusted EBIT margin also remains strong at 10% despite rising costs and disruptions in supply chain, with an adjusted EBIT growing by 7% to EUR 32 million in the second quarter.
Our high operational flexibility and the wide global footprint were the key success factors to manage the regional shifts in a volatile market environment. Visibility remains low due to the war in Ukraine, potential energy and supply chain constraints, as well as ongoing lockdowns in China. However, JOST confirms the outlook for the financial year 2022 despite this challenging market environment. Let's take a brief look at the market development in Q2 and in the comparison to Q2, 2021. The truck market in Europe was actually weaker, mainly due to supply chain disruptions due to the war in Ukraine. Wiring harnesses, semiconductors were the key components that were missing, and that affected, obviously, our sales to the truck OEMs since they were producing less.
The trailer markets were stronger by +6% and were less impacted by the supply chain issues. The trailer manufacturers are typically more flexible than the truck manufacturers in their production. Tractor market was at -6%. Also there, we had some uncertainties because of the war in Ukraine, but also some issues with semiconductors. Our JOST performance in Europe with 16% is offsetting the decline in trucks with a strong trailer and tractor business, and also includes some pricing effects since we have raised our prices beginning of the year. North America, very strong region. 7% growth in the production of Class 8 trucks and also 12% in the trailer production. Very strong underlying business, very strong demand in the transport segment.
In the tractor, agricultural tractor segment, more or less even, with compact tractors declining, but higher sales in higher horsepower tractors, which benefited us, because these are the more valuable and also the more profitable, products in our agricultural lineup. The JOST performance with 52%, outperformed this market. There is certainly some pricing effect and also some FX effects that Christian will explain a little later. Overall, a very strong performance, outperforming the market also with market share gains. Looking at APA, Asia-Pacific Africa, you see here in the official numbers a -56% that is impacted, by China.
Especially in the comparison between Q2 of last year, 2021, there was a huge decline in China because in China, the emission regulation changed July 1, 2021, and we had a pre-buy, and therefore a pre-production effect in Q1 and Q2. That drop comes mainly from China. In trailers, we see a growing market actually with 11% growing in the total region. The JOST performance in this, we were also impacted by China, but we only went down 20%. That is because our other regions or other countries in that region more than offset a big portion of that China impact.
Also, if you look at the profitability that Christian will explain in detail, you see that even at this level, we have a very healthy business in that region. Having that said, let's come to the details, and I hand over to Christian.
Yes, Joachim. Thank you very much and also a very warm welcome from my side. Good to be back here in the JOST studios after one session outside. Let's quickly go through the financials for Q2. As Joachim already pointed out, quite successful Q2 in our opinion. Starting with the region Europe, you see that our sales grew by about 16%, reported organically, actually a growth of 17%, for H1, even 17.6%. You do see here some negative FX effects, headwinds, both in sales but also on the profitability. I'll come to that in a second.
Overall, sales grew, as Joachim pointed out, 16% in Q2, despite significant supply chain disruptions. Especially due to the Ukraine war. Those were not only visible within Europe exactly because there are also a significant impact of the war on transportation. Overall, the production of trailers and tractors was less affected as we said, and the demand remained very strong. Revenues were supported by previous sales price adjustments. However, the increase in input factors, input costs remained very high also in Q2, and that will require future price increases, especially in the region Europe, in order to fight those price increases. Overall, the FX headwinds in Q2 amounted to roughly minus 1.3 percentage points, and those were resulting mostly from the Swedish krona.
The Swedish krona, it's worth to talk about that a little bit more specifically, because we see several effects here. First of all, the Swedish krona deteriorated against all major currencies that affect our business on the agricultural side. Versus the euro, it deteriorated by roughly 4%, versus the U.S. dollar by 13%, and versus the RMB in China, about 7%. Overall, very negative impacts and unfortunately all to the detriment of JOST. The good thing is that the vast majority of those negative impacts, and you'll see that also in the result, is non-realized. Speaking about the result, we were able to grow our EBIT in Europe from 12.4%.
We were not able to grow our EBIT in this quarter nor in the H1 numbers. You see a slight decline of 3% for H1, and therefore, this is basically accompanied by a lower margin of 8.2% in H1 or 6.8% in Q2. Main reason for that, obviously, what I already said, the increase in input factors. Especially material costs went up, but also transportation costs. However, and that is very important to understand, the foreign exchange rate effect that I was just pointing out of the Swedish krona had an overall negative impact of EUR 4.3 million.
If you were to add the EUR 4.3 million to the EUR 12.4 million in Q2, you would see that our margin would be right on the same level as it was in Q2 2021. If we take that into consideration, I would say it was a quite decent quarter where we were able to pass on most of the price increases that we saw on the purchasing side also to our customers. Needless to say that foreign exchange changes are always part of the game, and therefore our EBIT slightly deteriorated in Q2, and thus also in H1. With that, I would like to go over to the next region, North America. Here we see a different foreign exchange rate effect.
You see that our organic growth in Q2 was 35%, and our reported growth was 52%. That is even stronger on the H1 results, where we were able to organically grow by 44% and reportedly even by 60%. Overall, a very positive development there, significantly outperforming the market, as Joachim already said. Certainly also supported by very strong FX tailwinds, in this case 17 percentage points, in Q2. That's quite significant. We all know that the euro overall, as our reporting currency, deteriorated against most currencies, but not the Swedish krona. I would like to point out that our aftermarket sales in all regions remained very stable throughout Q2, but also throughout H1 compared to prior years.
We are still in a growth rate, more growth on the OEM side and less growth on the aftermarket side. Also pointing to future potential, if there should ever be a downturn. Aftermarket year to date in North America, about 25%, 28% in Europe. Adjusted EBIT also grew even stronger than our sales, H1 74% growth. Now up to an EBIT margin of 9.2%. Q2, you see the 62%, and the margin went up by about 0.6 percentage points, now at 9.7%, making North America once again the second strongest region in the group.
We obviously with more sales, we were benefiting from higher capacity utilization and better operating leverage, and that all combined with positive foreign exchange rate effects really made up this very, very positive result in North America. Last region, Asia-Pacific-Africa, again, a totally mixed picture. On the one side, China, on the other side, the rest of Asia-Pacific. The rest of Asia-Pacific really needs some praise here because they were really picking up what was sort of left behind in China. You know that, looking back into the past of JOST, China, the Chinese market roughly accounted for somewhere between 50%-55% of the overall sales. I would say roughly 50% on average. That portion dropped dramatically.
It basically dropped down to roughly 30% in H1, and this is just all attributable to the overall decline in the Chinese truck market. The Chinese truck market has been very, very weak ever since we came into Q3 2021 when we had the change of emissions regulation, and ever since then the market was very weak, and we have yet to see a strong recovery. There are certain positive signs. We were watching them carefully, but it's still, I would say, somewhat disappointing what's happening in China with the overall economy, what's especially happening with lockdowns. Lockdowns in China affect us in multiple ways.
When the port of Shanghai gets closed, it will affect our ability to transport products, be it finished, semi-finished, or raw material from China to Europe or North America. On the other hand, such port closures also affect our ability to deliver parts within China. As you know, it's not only the port of Shanghai that was closed down, it was overall Shanghai that was closed down, and so were other major cities, especially some major cities where our customers sit. Once again, China, rather weak development. I would say, given the unusual circumstances, our teams in China did the best they could, and they achieved a positive result, which is still good and also a growing result. It cannot be compared to what happened in Q2, 2021.
Back to the rest of Asia, Pacific, Africa, and I would like to specifically point to India, to Australia, to New Zealand, and to South Africa, and last but not least, to our Southeast Asian business in Singapore. They all performed very well, picked up what was left behind in China, and you can see it there, especially in the margin development. The margin in H1 increased from 17.6% to 19.5% in H1 2022, and this is all due to the fact that we were able to compensate some of the missed sales in China through sales in the other regions. How is that?
Basically, the main factor is that we see a lot more off-highway heavy duty business in those countries that I just mentioned, while specifically China is a more on-road market for us. As you may know, if you've been following us for a while, heavy duty off-highway business is much more profitable than on-road business. This is exactly visible here in the numbers for the Asia Pacific region. The better product mix really helped to improve the situation in this region. I need to point out that overall, we still see a small decline of 7.5 percentage points because China is just so big that there was no way to fully compensate the missed sales.
Bearing in mind that H1 2021, and especially Q2 2021, were unusually strong quarters in China due to the already before mentioned pre-buy effects due to the change in emissions regulation. Let's move over to the group. Joachim has already pointed it out. Organically, we were able in H1 to grow by about 16%, reportedly by 19%. Good split between transport and agriculture. Agriculture up 37% and transport 14%. In Q2, sorry, similar development, + 29% on agriculture and + 14% on transport. Adjusted EBIT margin remained in Q2, stable at 10%. I believe that was a challenge. It was, but it was a good result.
If you bear in mind how many headwinds we were seeing operationally. We had the lockdowns in China, so that caused supply chain disruptions. We had the war in Europe. That caused some of our customers, especially in Europe, not to be able to produce because they were missing parts. Overall, everything was inflated. We saw inflation on material, energy, logistics, and alloys, and all of that was coming our way. On the other hand, we needed to react and go to our customers. I must say that there will be a time lag when we will see the positive effects from price increases with customers compared to the negative effects that we are seeing from our suppliers.
Keeping in mind that we achieved the 10%, plus if you added the EUR 4.3 million foreign exchange rate effect that were there, we would have even ended up at a better margin in Q2 2022 compared to Q2 2021. Again, I'm not debating that the FX foreign exchange rate effects are there. Therefore, we have to say that, yes, we grew our adjusted EBIT by 7.2% in Q2 to EUR 32.1 or 11.4% in H1 to EUR 66.5. There were some negative effects coming our way.
I would like to point out that this is now the second consecutive quarter where we recorded not only record sales of EUR 300 million, above EUR 300 million per quarter, but we also recorded another second quarter in a row with EUR 30 million in profit. This is something that we have never achieved in the past. That brings me now to some more financial numbers driven by balance sheet and other developments. First of all, our typical walk through the adjustments plus the taxes and finance results. You see here a net income in H1 of EUR 38 million. That is double what we had in Q1 this year.
Taxes grew quite strongly to EUR 10 million, and then the finance result remained stable at roughly 1.5, one point some million, and therefore now amounting to EUR 3 million overall year to date. Here you can actually see that we also had an increase in our net debt. EBIT for H1, the non-adjusted EBIT amounts to EUR 51 million. Then you see the typical development of the depreciation and amortization of our purchase price allocations. That is now double compared to Q1 with EUR 14 million. Other exceptionals, very small ones, only with EUR 2 million. Also this is a number that's absolutely in line with what we were expecting, nothing unusual there.
That overall brings us to an adjusted EBIT of roughly EUR 66 million, a record result for a first half year at JOST ever. Now we do the walk backwards down to the adjusted net income minus EUR 3 million finance result, and a pro forma tax rate of 30% brings us to an adjusted net income of EUR 44 million. That is not only doubled from Q1, but it's also significantly higher, about 10% higher than it was in Q1 in H1 2021. One word on reported earnings per share and adjusted earnings per share. Reported earnings per share grew significantly from 1.61 EUR to 2.53 EUR.
The main reason why the growth was so strong and by the way, the adjusted EPS didn't grow as much, but the main reason was that the reported result last year, we had negative impacts because of the disposal of our subsidiary, JOST GB Ltd. Now we did adjust them, and therefore you see that the adjusted EPS rose from 2.69 EUR per share to 2.99 EUR per share. Still a EUR 0.30 Growth is remarkable if you ask me. Now I would like to go to the next slide, where we speak about ROCE, equity ratio, and net debt. ROCE basically stable at 16%-16.5%. It was 16.6% end of December, now 16.4%.
Basically driven by a minor in increase in net debt, but overall quite stable. 16% ROCE is in line with our expectations. Equity ratio, happy to report that we're now above 33%. As I've already mentioned several times, the 30% is basically the threshold where we would like to stay at. And now with 33.3%, we're significantly above that number. Net debt, I mentioned that small increase from the leverage increase from 1.45x to 1.53x, but still very much within our target range of somewhere between 1x and 2x. You see the total number here, slight growth from EUR 194 million to EUR 260 million. Overall, okay if you ask me.
Cash flow. If you look at cash flow, you see here that the free cash flow is once again positive. The cash conversion rate is also positive with +0.4, better than last year and also better than in Q1. We did work on our working capital. We will continue to work on our working capital. Overall it's a cash conversion rate that we are okay with. We're below the one times target or one target, but this is just the middle of the year, and we continue to work on those numbers. CapEx, also, positive in a sense that we are not behind our CapEx plan.
With EUR 6.4 million, significantly more than we did in the last year, at the same time, and therefore we are at 2%. However, we need to be realistic. With the strong inflation in sales, it is uncertain whether we will end up at 2.5% or it will remain around the 2% mark that we're currently seeing. But I can assure you, we are continuing to invest and make the right moves, but we will not just make investments because we wanna achieve a certain CapEx ratio. We will invest in euros the exact same amount that we had planned, and that's basically what you're seeing here.
Net Working Capital, we have a slight increase from 20.3% in Q2 last year to 21.2% this year. The main drivers are certainly our inventory numbers. You see here an increase of roughly EUR 60 million compared to one year ago. You know the reasons. Those are the same that we've already communicated in Q1 and also in Q4 last year. We needed to improve or increase our inventory numbers because of all of those supply chain disruptions. Last year, end of Q2 last year, we were still not affected by any kind of war.
We did have certain Corona effects, but they were kind of going away, and now we see a significant increase. It is necessary in order to deliver our parts to our customers. As you know, the history has shown that it was always beneficial when we were able to deliver. Therefore, there needs to be a compromise between inventory levels and the ability to deliver to the customers. This is something that you're seeing here. We do not see a very significant increase in inventory days. It's roughly nine days going up, so it's not as severe, and we will continue to manage those numbers.
This was it from my side on the different financial KPIs, the different regions, and I hope those gave you a good insight on what was happening in this good quarter two, 2022. I would like to hand it over back to Joachim.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Christian, for the detailed analysis of the results. I would like to present to you on how we expect the remainder of the year to continue. These are the official numbers that you see from the external consultants, LMC, CLEAR Consulting, FTR. They are for Europe unchanged to what we presented last time. They see a contraction in Europe on truck and also on trailers. A slight growth on agricultural tractors. Our outlook is that you know, on top of that, you can account a certain price effect. We expect a slight growth for the full year in Europe.
North America, here, if you compare it to the previous expectations, they have reduced the expectations somewhat. It used to be 10%-15% growth in North America for trucks, for example. There is a slight reduction in the outlook. They see it a bit more conservative and have reduced the expectations for North America and also for China. You've seen the performance already in the first half year and also in the second quarter, where we've been up 50% in North America and 30-something percent excluding the FX effect. We also expect to outperform this over the course of the year in North America.
APAC, they have further reduced, as I already mentioned, their expectations, and that is mainly driven by China. Mind you, this is the full year 2022 that we see here. In China, we have to consider that we had, if you do a full year comparison, very strong first half year of 2021. Now if you compare Q3 and Q4, we will be able to compare to a lower base because we already had much reduced volumes in China in Q3 and Q4. I don't expect for the upcoming quarters to see the same decline versus last year than we have seen in the first two quarters, just because we have a different base to compare it to.
Our numbers will not reflect the negative numbers that you see here in April for the total year. If you look at the remainder of the year, it should probably not be negative at all. That's the outlook from the market. Based on that, we can confirm our guidance that remains at a mid-single-digit growth year-over-year in sales. As a comparison, in 2021, we had EUR 1.049 billion sales. Also our adjusted EBIT will grow mid-single digits, so that we are counting on a stable EBIT margin. CapEx, Christian already explained, we are focusing to do the necessary CapEx according to our CapEx plan, but we're focusing on the absolute values.
If sales due to pricing and inflation effects grow beyond that, then that may lead to a smaller ratio because we're focusing on the absolute investments. With that, I would like to come to the summary. We can summarize that we had another successful quarter with sales exceeding EUR 300 million in one quarter and adjusted EBIT exceeding the EUR 30 million mark for the second consecutive quarter in JOST history. I think that's especially in the current market environment and with the current uncertainty a very positive result. Both business lines, transport and agriculture, continue to drive the growth momentum, and we are benefiting in both from a good order intake. North America was our strongest growth region once again, supported by growing demand for our products in transport, but also in agriculture.
Given the current macroeconomic uncertainty and the rising inflation worldwide, it's hard to predict, and the visibility remains low, but our underlying fundamentals are still strong. Transport and agriculture are things that are needed even in this uncertain world. Therefore, we confirm our guidance for the financial year 2022, and we're confident that we will achieve this based on the results that you've seen so far and also on our ability to limit the negative impacts that we see with rising costs and supply shortages. We are doing that with our operational flexibility, but also with our product portfolio, which is very balanced between truck, trailer, and agricultural tractors.
With that, I would like to thank you for your attention and for your interest, and we are looking forward to your questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question- and- answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may click the Q&A button on the left side of your screen and then raise your hand. If you're connected via phone, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two or please lower your hand. For written questions, please click the Q&A button on the Write a Question button. One moment for the first question, please. The first question is from Jorge Gonzalez from Hauck & Aufhäuser Investment Banking. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes. We can hear you and see you, Jorge.
Hello, Christian and Joachim. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I have two questions, mainly. The first one is regarding the guidance for this year. After this strong set of results, you are in a very good position to beat the guidance, especially with taking into account that you might enjoy currently windfall profits in the last part of the year because of this pass through mechanism. I was wondering if you can comment to us on what you need to see.
Before updating your guidance, no? Because I imagine that you want still to be conservative here. What needs to happen between this point and Q3 to have more confidence to raise the guidance. The second question is for next year. I know that it's very difficult to obviously foresee the market next year, but I'm especially interested if you see the trailer market to be as resilient as the truck market looks like because of the AM. What are your view on this? Thank you.
Yeah, Jorge, first of all, thank you for your questions. I will start with the question concerning next year, and so then I will give a few comments on the guidance and then hand over to Christian for more details to the guidance. I think it's a very good question for next year. And as you said, all predictions are uncertain, especially when they affect the future. That's clear.
The question is very good because I think the certainty on truck is higher than on trailer because overall, the truck industry claims that they have not been producing the required amount of trucks in 2020 because of COVID, in 2021 because of semiconductors, and in 2022, they're still not at the levels that the demand is at because they have issues with the supply chain from Ukraine, continued issues with semiconductors. They say there's a lot of pent-up demand. You're right, the trailer industry has been more capable to follow the demand than the truck industry. In terms of pent-up demand, you probably see a stronger order book and a stronger pent-up demand in trucks than you see on trailers.
It's also true that even on trailers, the trailer aging is quite high. Talking to customers in North America and also in Europe, they are running quite old trailers because especially the rental fleets have not replaced at the speeds that they typically replace. Also there, even though it's probably less strong, I see that there is also a certain pent-up demand because the aging of the fleet is still relatively high. That's a positive outlook for 2022. Concerning our guidance, you're certainly right that we're running very well on the sales side. You also have to consider that we typically have seasonal effects, where Q1 and Q2 are much stronger than Q3 and Q4.
With the uncertainty in the market, yeah, we like to remain a bit conservative. You're certainly right on the sales side with the pricing effect that we're probably getting very close to the guidance. I think Christian can give a bit more detail of what we would have to see in order to adjust that.
Jorge, I also believe that sales is probably the one component of the guidance that might be slightly understated. Still, we are in a very volatile market environment and we don't know exactly what would happen to our customers. If our customers continue to produce, we will be able to deliver. I think I pointed that out several times. The other thing is really on the profitability. I mean, just looking at what happened last year, we were stronger last year than we were in terms of percentage-wise. Not absolute numbers, but percentage-wise, our margin was stronger last year. You remember what happened in Q3 and Q4.
At the end of 2021, we ended up at a 10% margin. We're still above with 10.5%, but it's not going to be a walk in the park. This is yes, we are also. I agree, we are also seeing some positive developments on the material side in terms of steel pricing. On the other hand, all the other factors remain very high, be it energy, be it personnel that is now starting to kick in. Everyone wants more money because of the inflation overall. Alloys are very expensive. Plus, we are still seeing growth on the transport side prices.
Overall, it's a mixed bag, and it's difficult to say where we'll end up at. You know, we have a history. We typically like to see what will happen to our customers and to the markets once they return from their summer breaks, and then we will reevaluate the situation. Rest assured we're doing that very closely. As soon as we feel enough confidence that we can adjust our guidance, we will do so, and we would hope it's that we can do that. We need to remain cautious, and I think we've proven also at the beginning of the year that we always try to be conservative but stable.
We don't like big jumps and ups and downs, and therefore we keep it low. We are watching the situation.
One follow-up, please, Christian. When you're referring to seasonality, it's because of the agriculture business, isn't it?
No, it's both.
Stronger in the fall.
It's both divisions. It's transport and agriculture. Agriculture obviously has a very weak Q3 because that's typically when the farmers are harvesting and they have no time to purchase new products. Then Q4 should be better, but the best quarters in both business lines are mostly
Q1 and Q2, and especially transport, where we also are very much impacted by a typical calendar year seasonality with a lot more holidays in Q4 and then Q3 impacted by summer shutdowns of the bigger OEMs. That's why we typically have the weaker quarters in the two quarters to come. This is now with the one exception of 2020, where we had Corona in the first half and then a lot of pent-up demand in the second half of the year. But with this only exceptional year, you can see it if you go back decades in history of JOST.
Romy is just showing those numbers, and you can really see that, if you look at the right side of the slide, you see also the margins where they are always starting high in Q1, Q2, and then they go down in Q3 and Q4.
2018 and 2019 was without agriculture. Even in transport, we have the same seasonality.
It's what needs to be expected. 2021 was a typical year, and right now we have no reason to believe 2022 will be any different.
That's very useful. Is there any update on the plans to expand agriculture to other geographies?
Mm.
What is your vision for the agriculture business next year, if you have any special view on that?
Yeah. We continue to plan to expand our agricultural business and there's always questions about M&A. We are looking for M&A in both business lines, agriculture and transport, but we see overall more opportunity to grow in agriculture. We are preparing and already executing some steps to increase our footprint in Asia. We're also thinking about doing something in Brazil. This will be the main areas where you will see something, especially in Asia, you will see something very soon.
Yeah. Thank you very much. That's all from my side. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Jorge.
Thank you, Jorge.
Good to see you again.
Same.
The next question is coming from Nicolai Kempf from Deutsche Bank.
Good morning. It's Nicolai Kempf from Deutsche Bank speaking. My first question would be on the cash generation. Since you had a bit working capital build-up in the first half of the year, do you expect this to be released in the second half of the year and to which part?
You said that's the first question. Maybe you wanna give us your questions first, and then we can answer.
Okay. The second one would be actually on China. I understand that it's still kind of impacted by the lockdowns, but if you see other markets in China, for example, the auto market, they recover pretty fast once the market's reopened. Would you expect something similar for China for maybe the end of the year or then next year?
Okay. I will try to do both questions and then if needed, you can go and say something more about the cash generation. Christian already pointed out in his presentation that we have actively decided to increase the safety stocks inbound and outbound to fight the logistics challenges that we have worldwide and to ensure that we can produce very well to the needs of our customers and deliver to our customers. We will certainly reduce those safety stocks once we see the opportunity to do that. Right now we will continue with that safety stock just because we want to make sure that we can deliver to our customers and make the sales.
We want to do the sales, but more than that even, we want to be a reliable supplier to our customers. Therefore, this will certainly go down, but I wouldn't promise that it goes down next quarter because it's still a very uncertain situation. When we see more stability in the supply chains, you will see that number drop. Then that money will come out in form of cash out of the working capital. Concerning China, I must say that the Prognosis Institute and also our people in China, they are more conservative now than they have been three months ago. Three months ago, everybody was saying, "This is just the effect of the pre-buy, and this should come back very soon.
You know, once all this chaos about COVID is reduced, then it will come back very soon. Everybody is now a bit more conservative because the China policy is changing. They are less focused on exporting to the Western world. And therefore, the overall expectation to China is a bit more dimmed than it was three or six months ago. I personally said already that don't expect this number that we've seen from the Prognosis Institute to reflect in our numbers just because we have a lower base. I would say that we can probably expect numbers similar to what we've seen in the last half year of last year.
I would also be cautious to expect a growth beyond that. China is always good for a surprise, so maybe that changes very quickly. We are hoping for that, but we are not planning for that at the time.
Okay. Maybe to add to the working capital, you were just talking about inventories. Inventory levels are certainly the one position within working capital mostly affected by our decision to be able to deliver. I would also like to point out that the growth in Days Sales Outstanding is absolutely in line with our sales development. There is no surprise. We have a strong increase in receivables, but that is in line with the sales growth. We are very constantly monitoring our Aging Profile. The Aging Profile does not deteriorate. Until the end of H1, it was basically on a very good level with overall receivables very low being overdue.
The other portion, of course, is payables. Payables is something that is also impacted by the past. We have several smaller suppliers. We don't have the big. The majority of our suppliers is not very big. We typically have shorter payment terms with our suppliers than we have with our customers. Customers, we're talking to the big OEMs. They typically pay on average about 60 days after they receive the invoice. Our payables towards our suppliers are typically lower in terms of days. That's why we have this imbalance, and that is also something we're currently working on.
Like Joachim said, we will most likely see some positive development, but it's too early to say how positive and how what kind of magnitude this development will have. In the end, we have a very long-term approach, and that long-term approach means we are not sacrificing short-term KPIs over long-term profitability and of the company. That is certainly something that you can only have a successful and healthy and long-standing relationship with your customers if you can support them also in difficult and challenging times like these, and that's our approach.
Understood. Thank you. Congrats to good results.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nicolai.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please click the Q&A button and raise your hand or press star followed by one at this time. Please wait for the next question. There are no further questions at this time. I hand back to Joachim Dürr for closing comments.
Okay. Well, thank you very much for your interest and for your questions. As I said, I think we are quite happy with the results that we were able to achieve in this challenging environment. It's not just us, I think the whole team at JOST is happy to present this performance to our shareholders and to our customers. Therefore, thank you very much for your interest, and we're looking forward to report to you the Q3 results then in three months.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.