Earnings Call: Q3 2025

Nov 12, 2025

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of Knaus Tabbert AG following the publication of the Q3 financial figures of 2025. We are delighted to welcome the CFO, Radim Sevcik, who will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly to the management. We are looking forward to the results, and having said this, Mr. Sevcik, the stage is yours. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our third quarter results and recent development. Over the past months, we have continued to work through the realignment of Knaus Tabbert, addressing the operational and structural challenges while strengthening our foundations for the next phase. Today, I will start with a brief overview of our progress and the current market environment before we discuss the financial results and outlook. Let me first give you an update on our strategic realignment and start by recalling where we stood a year ago, which I consider the necessary context to then discuss where we have landed and where we are going. When Wim de Pundert and I stepped into our roles, soon to be 12 months ago, the company was in an altogether worrying situation across its business and its balance sheet. Overdue receivables, part of which we would ultimately never be able to convert into cash. Excess inventories on our balance sheet, but also balance sheets of our dealers, part of which we would ultimately have to take back and remarket, carrying some of the related losses. Uncertainty about speed and commercial conditions at which we can place all of the old products across our and the dealers' balance sheets in the then oversaturated market. A distribution channel under severe strain with dealer insolvencies piling up, driven partially by own business decisions of the respective business owners, but exacerbated by the overproduction of the OEMs. An order intake that showed very modest movement for months, with some dealers unable and some unwilling to commit to Knaus Tabbert. Legal and compliance topics with the police and public prosecutor activity having put a spotlight on us, and together with commercial worries, made many external and internal parties uncomfortable overall, resulting in a very heavy load on our organization to convince all stakeholders that we have the situation under control with internal forensic audits, reviews by external advisors for the benefit of the banks, separate audits by suppliers, and ultimately an audit by KPMG and as our auditor. Last but certainly not least, a bloated cost structure, partially due to managerial excesses but also scaled to deliver volumes the market was no longer able to absorb. This framed the situation in which the Knaus Tabbert team was putting together a plan to bring the company into calmer waters. I will now not go through the steps that we took, as that has been discussed many times. Let me at least highlight more the approach that we have been taking since. We have, in the past 12 months, taken great care to ensure that our disclosure represents a fair picture of our situation, as painful as it sometimes was, as we would certainly all be happier if our announcements to the market were predominantly of a positive nature. We endeavored to communicate with the market, but also the press and other stakeholders as openly as we felt we could, which in the context of a restructuring of a publicly listed company is a challenge, especially if one is managing this company through a complex and very uncertain environment I described earlier. We are gradually ticking off the list of issues that form the original black box of problems that we were carrying with us, as outlined earlier. As we cannot control the economic uncertainty, which is a natural part of any business, we are at least working hard to proactively address topics we have on our radar while reacting quickly but with consideration to developments that were not. As we discussed on our last call in early August, the summer marked the point at which we could report tangible progress with the initial cleanup. We highlighted our successes in adjusting the cost base, improving working capital, and generating liquidity, moving towards normalized inventory levels, both within Knaus Tabbert and across the dealer network, and introducing a restructured product range. We also acknowledged that not everything was going fully to plan. The market remained saturated, not only with our own products, but also overall. While we factored this partially into our planning, the full extent of the oversupply was not known, and the resulting continued price pressure necessitating sales promotion measures was higher than we forecast. Cost measures have overperformed in some areas but underperformed in others. Personnel costs, for instance, remain above plan due also to lower productivity and higher illness rates, which limited our possibility to use short-term work. Dealer prudence is still high. After several turbulent years, many remain cautious. This is not supportive of planning stability of our production. Combined with our commitment not to produce on stock, this has made our supply chain tighter than we would prefer. Following the Düsseldorf trade fair, when orders accelerated, supplier readiness lagged, requiring us to review our production assumptions for Q4 despite a reasonable order book. Our ambition to accelerate production late in Q4 has then hit another roadblock earlier this week when we were informed of more delays, prompting us to take initial steps to replan our production further and correspondingly inform the market. Last, we also highlighted the impact of operating leverage, where even modest revenue deviations, like due to the production replanning I referred to above, have an outsized impact on annual profitability due to limited short-term flexibility and the heavy Q4 weighting of our annual earnings. As expected, the Düsseldorf Fair acted as a catalyst for the situation and a test of our assumptions. It confirmed that end customer demand remains strong, validating also our product strategy and pricing repositioning. Our cost-cutting measures in areas like marketing had little, if any, negative impact on sales momentum, which was very positive. While stock levels of our products are approaching normalization, the market still suffers from a residual oversupply, leading to continued pricing pressure in both the Premium and the Luxury segments. Dealers are cautious in forward commitments. They prefer deliveries in Q1 rather than Q4, meaning we had to actively manage order intake to maintain our production run rate through year-end. As a result of the above-mentioned factors, and taking into account the impact of the fluid situation also in our supply chain, we have now once again replanned our production for the remainder of the year and updated, and now also further refined our full year guidance. Operationally, we are working with our dealers to position them well for next season, focusing on both our strong domestic markets, as well as supporting our international presence to gradually diversify our revenue base. We're advancing developments for Model Year 2027, which we will launch next summer, the key to our mid-term competitiveness. We're preparing next year's budget plan, reviewing all assumptions in light of healthy demand, but persistent margin pressure and a strongly competitive environment. We're driving productivity improvements, which will take several quarters and some a couple of years, require targeted investments, but are essential for sustainable efficiency. Throughout, the backbone of our strategy remains the strength of end customer demand, which provides stability as the broader industry gradually rebalances and as we are running our restructuring efforts. This backbone is a topic we address on the next slide. The most important conclusion from this slide is there has really been no fundamental change from our earlier presentations. Let me first explain the slides to you just to orient you around. We are talking about both the European and German registrations. We are using September till August, September 24 to August 25, which is the full Model Year. As you can see, when it comes to our motorized units, and that's the dark blue, that market has remained very much stable both in Europe and in Germany. When it comes to the caravanning segment, which is the light blue color, that market has shrunk by around 10%, and is currently moving towards more stabilization, but still slightly declining. When it comes to our market shares, these have also not changed significantly since we last presented to in August. Being relatively stable, our market share in motorized vehicles decreasing slightly, while our market share in caravans increasing. Moving on to the next slide. Just a very brief insight into the Caravan Salon. I will not go into details here, but it was a show that also from our discussions with our partners and other competitors indicates that it has been positive for the industry overall, not only for Knaus Tabbert. We have been represented with a amended strategy. We cut down our expenses, moved all of our brands into one hall, rationalized our costs, simplified in the product offer that we're showing on a limited space. Overall, it has not resulted in any negative impact on our numbers. We achieved more than 10% higher end customer sales at the show, and our dealers have been very satisfied with the way the show has run, also with follow on business that followed the show. On the next slide, we then dive directly into the financial results for the first nine months of 2025. First, let me speak to about the order book, which has climbed to EUR 476 million, which is still not high, but it is up from EUR 294 million that you will have seen at the end of the second quarter, and it does provide a certain level of stability for our production, obviously subject to our supply chain being able to keep up with us, which, as you will have seen yesterday, has been difficult. When it comes to revenues, the first nine months of the year allowed us to bring in EUR 762 million, and with that we generated an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 19.8 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 2.6%. Our free cash flow in the first nine months of the year has amounted to EUR 60 million. When we look at the segment split, the revenue in the Premium segment reached EUR 637.3 million, which is down almost 20% of 2024. Again, we probably don't have to walk through the specifics of the prior year, and gave us an EBITDA of EUR 11.3 million. The Luxury segment revenue amounted to EUR 124 million, up 11%. The profitability, and I hinted at that earlier in my presentation, has been impacted by a very strong competitive environment and reached EUR 5.4 million in the first nine months of the year. Moving on to the balance sheet indicators, let me start with net working capital, where you do see a further improvement, that comes from a slight improvement in our inventories. A relatively strong improvement in our trade receivables and a stable situation in our trade payables. Overall, the effects of Q3 have clearly been less material than what you will have seen in Q2, which is also given by the specifics of that period and also the seasonality of the end customer market. Looking at net debt, that has increased to the level of EUR 289.7 million. Just to proactively address what could be seen as a discrepancy between an improvement in working capital and the increase in net debt, let me just address the Q3 in a way for you to understand that Q3 is also a time where we do settle our tax liabilities. We also settle our dealer bonuses, and we also there are also certain liabilities that we've accumulated towards our employees, not the least for holidays, which are also settled, and that has an impact on the cash situation of the company outside of its regular operations. Now moving on to the last slide, our outlook for 2025, where on the basis of the decision that was taken yesterday to replan our production, we have informed the market that we expect to achieve around EUR 1 billion in revenue, and that number is not or has not changed. An adjusted EBITDA margin at the bottom of the range that we've indicated in our release in September, of 3.2%-4.2%. With that, I would conclude the presentation, and I would like to open up to questions. Yes. Thank you for your presentation and the insights, Mr. Sevcik. Now it's your turn, ladies and gentlemen, as we move on to our Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation, we kindly ask you to ask questions in person via audio line. To do so, click on the Raise Your Hand button. We already have one hand up. If you have dialed in by phone, please use the key combination star 9 followed by star 6. If you do not have the opportunity to speak freely today, you can also place your questions in our chat box, and I will read them out for you. We will go on to Ellis Acklin. The stage is yours. Hi. Good morning, Radim Ševčík. Thanks for jumping on a call with us and taking some questions. Two from my side to start off with. You hinted a little bit about the profitability of Morelo. It would be great if maybe you could elaborate a little bit more about what's going on there. Obviously, the trend in profitability this year has not been great. Just some more insight of that if how's your capacity utilization there going? Just give us a more clear picture of what's going on with that particular segment. Just a bit of a curiosity about the ad hoc release last night. I mean, you guys are still within your previously communicated guidance. I'm just wondering what the urgency was to get the news out last night. Just pointing out that ad hocs of late have been coupled with a bit of an anxiety from the investor side. Just curious about the transparency on that, if there's anything else in there we should be worried about. I'll leave it there for now. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let me maybe start with the second question, and that's the ad hoc. You're right, we are within our guidance range. Under disclosure rules, we also must release price-sensitive information as soon as it arises. The reality is we did have an ad hoc committee yesterday also with support of external counsel. We received a very strong advice that it is in the interests of or within the market disclosure rules and the interests of the market for us to release the information immediately. The ad hoc as such has to be issued right away, it doesn't matter whether the results then follow shortly thereafter or not. The, the decision about the replanning was driven by the information that we've received, and we're literally talking hours. You know, 24 hours prior, we received the information, we confirmed the information, we tried to work with that information. We then built several cases of what we can do with that information, and ultimately yesterday afternoon we took a decision to, to replan the production. It's still a, a developing situation, but at the same time, I think we're relatively comfortable now with the decision that we've taken. The moment that that decision was taken, we called the committee and were strongly advised and also ourselves within the overall ambition to be open with the investor community, we simply decided to release the information immediately. That's on the ad hoc. When it comes to Morelo, I have to be relatively careful there because ultimately it's a small market. There are only a few players, so whatever comments I make, I'm implicitly making comments also about our direct competitors, which I would like to avoid. Let me just speak mostly about Morelo as such. Morelo is actually performing relatively well. The products are very well accepted. They are working to make sure that they hold their market share, which as you know is relatively high in that particular segment. I would say the capacity utilization has been adjusted already earlier this year. Right now we're simply waiting. That's, that's the, that's the view of the market that we have right now, that we need to wait for the market to digest the overall volumes of inventories in the market, most of which are not ours, to then be able to generate the margins that we would expect of Morelo. As such, I'm a little bit less worried about Morelo per se. I would rather say we simply need to be patient with the market to then ultimately be able to bring Morelo back to the levels of profitability that you would expect and we would expect. I hope that addresses your two questions, but happy to take follow-ups. The profitability, I mean, the sales have been good, but the profitability, is that because of lower capacity utilization? Can you be a bit more specific on why that's just declined so much? Is it discounting? It's a yeah, no, it's a combination of factors. Let's say pricing pressure is one of them, definitely. The cost structure partially as well, but that is not unlike the situation that we have where certain suppliers have been difficult for Morelo and that has caused some of the unfinished goods to go up and then you need to work on those products afterwards to finish them, which creates inefficiencies in production and higher costs. I think these would probably be the two main effects that have led to this profitability in the Luxury segment. Okay, that's great. Thanks. I will jump back in the queue and let someone else have the floor. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Acklin. With this we will move on to Alessandro Crugliola. You should be able to speak now. Yes. Hi. Hi, Radim. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes, I can hear you. Okay, great. Could you just come back on the production delays, I mean, the supply chain issues you're seeing? Can you be more specific on that? I think you already mentioned that earlier, but what's happening exactly in the supply chain? Understood. I will do. The situation actually spreads across a couple more suppliers. It's not one single supplier. The decisive element for us has been one chassis supplier. I don't want to speculate on the situation with that particular supplier. My understanding overall is such that many of our suppliers have downsized their capacities and have not been willing or, in the short run, not able to then ramp them up again to a gradually normalizing market. When after the Düsseldorf fair show, not only Knaus Tabbert as per our information, and again, you know, this is indirect information that we're receiving, but also other of our competitors have gone back to a higher level of ordering of chassis for a more normalized production level. Certain suppliers, and again this is not limited only to chassis suppliers but also a couple others, have had difficulties ramping up their production which has been limited alongside the whole industry in the first part of the year. That has led to a certain bottleneck, which we would hope could normalize relatively quickly. It has certainly had an impact on our planning for Q4, which, you know, is immediately after the Düsseldorf show, where we expect to be able to really produce at speed and instead, we have to be a bit more prudent with our production. That was effectively the result. Okay, thank you. It's more a short-term bottlenecks instead of more a pronounced issue. I mean, you're expecting this to resolve quite fast. I mean, we are expecting it to resolve quite fast. That is true. At the same time, in our, in our risk management, we still have increased the level of that risk from very unlikely to unlikely. We still consider it unlikely that this will be something that will be with us for a long time. Itself, we, let's say we were surprised by the magnitude of the effect we're impact we're seeing right now. We want to be relatively careful assuming that this will normalize immediately and we will not see any more, you know, impacts in the coming quarters. Right now we don't find them as likely. Okay. Okay, great. Very clear. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for your questions, Mr. Crugliola. If there are any questions left, ladies and gentlemen, this is your room. Yes. Oh, the hand was raised and gone again. Ladies and gentlemen, I will hold the room for another moment. Yes. Peter, you should be able to speak now. Please unmute yourself in the left corner of your window. Okay, I will move on. Can you hear me? Yes. Now we can. Yes, we can hear you now. Good morning Radim. On the Q3 figures. Yes. Hi On a 1 to 10 scale, how disappointed are you in the Q3 figures? You can use for me the same scale for how much impact this Q3 and your press release of yesterday has on 2026. You're talking about 2025. How much impact does it have on 2026? Understood. I'm trying to stay away from qualitative assessments on a live recorded line. You know, frankly speaking, no, I don't think Q3 was a success, to be clear. We would have hoped for more. Some of it was driven by outside factors. But some of it is something that, you know, it's down to the performance of our business. You know, I would certainly not be considering myself happy with the Q3 results. Maybe let me put it this way. I don't want to assign a number to it, but, I think you understand the direction of my answer. When it comes to 2026, we're currently in the process of budgeting. I will stay away from judgments on 2026. We tried to also express it in the message that we sent out to the market yesterday that, also in the context of what we see in the market and also Q3 numbers, et cetera, et cetera, we are going forward with reassessing the situation we see in the market, and making sure that we also take appropriate measures to adapt the organization and our strategy to the market that we see coming to us next year. Does that answer your question, Peter? Your microphone is still on. Okay. Well, the question is to look through 2025 is a restructuring year. And has some exceptional elements in it. 2026 should be, well, the first normal year after what happened, Q4 2024. Are you saying that the environment is more challenging, and that it's gonna take more to get to a good normal year, that you have to take extra restructuring measures? What I'm saying is the market is more challenging than we foresaw in December 2024. In December 2024, the expectation was a certain normalization across the industry, not only within our balance sheet and the balance sheets of our dealers, to take place in the first half of the year and then a certain level of then normal production, normal profitability, starting after the summer. That was also the basis of our planning and hence also the guidance towards the market, back early 2025. You can see in our numbers that. You know, it's with regret that I have to say that we have not achieved the initially indicated guidance for 2025. That has certain objective reasons, many of which are related to the overall pressure that there is in the market coming from, let's say, the competitive situation, but also the still lingering overdue or, you know, oversupply that there is in the market. As a result, we are now considering what we can expect from 2026. But I think it would be reasonable to expect that we do not believe it would be fair towards our investors and general stakeholders, and that concerns also our employees and everybody else, if we were simply sitting here and saying, "Well, that was our plan. Let's just wait until that plan comes true, even if it takes longer." Right? I mean, we need to steer the company. We're responsible for the company. That also means that if we believe that further adjustments are required, then we will simply need to deploy them as soon as possible or whenever that becomes practicable. That's exactly what we're going through right now in the budgeting process. Does that answer your questions, Peter? Do you have more? It did. It's. In general, I understand it. It's not extremely specific. I read in the report that there's an increased risk of not meeting the criteria of the banks. Especially in terms of profitability. Further in the report, it says that there's no expectation of the banks terminating their loans. What's the situation there? When it comes to the covenants, as of Q3, we are in compliance with all of our covenants. You're right, we highlighted in our risk section that there are risks associated with the profitability outlook, which I guess is relatively clear also from the announcement we made to the market. At this point, we are in a constructive dialogue with our banks. When it comes to the likelihoods or not likelihood, I wouldn't want to comment in detail about the context of these discussions with the banks. Certainly the current indications that we have make us consider that the let's call them adverse risks to the stability of our capital structure is unlikely. Okay. You're within the confidence in Q3? In Q3, yeah. Okay. Thank you very much for the answer. Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much, Peter, for your questions. We will move on once again to Ellis Acklin. You should be able to speak now. Okay, thanks. Clean? Yeah. Hi. Just two quick follow-ups. I wanna make sure I fully understand your comments about the beginning of next year and the comments also in the ad hoc last night about potential production suspensions or postponements. Are you talking about certain vehicles here? Is it something that might be on the same magnitude of the stoppage we saw at the beginning of this year? I appreciate that's just a precautionary statement at this moment, but I'm just trying to understand the magnitude of that. Also, just to be clear, you talked about the uptick in the order book, which is great to see. Was any of that particularly traced to production planning adjustments or is that just a positive sales development for you guys? I think that'll be it for me today. Thank you. Sure. Thanks for the questions. When it comes to the order book, no, it's a sales effort. I think you're probably referring to the order book being effectively a result of the orders that we have minus what we've produced, right? I wouldn't think that there's any, certainly no artificial effect from us, let's say working on the side of the production in order to impact the order book, no. It is a result of a healthy sales effort which brings us the orders. We would certainly. You know, to be sitting here comfortably, I would have a preference to have the order book even stronger. At the same time, you know, we are moving ahead in a reasonable way. When it comes to the magnitude of the impact of the production stops or movements or reallocations that we've indicated, no, the magnitude of this should not be to the level of what you've seen in the winter last year. In reality, what I think from your perspective as an analyst or from an investor perspective, on the back of that decision, we have indicated to the market where or refined where we believe we should end with our profitability for the year. This particular reallocation of production is also supportive of a more reasonable ramp up of production in 2026. You know, it gives you effectively both sides of the equation. It gives you our current best estimates of our profitability landing until the end of the year. At the same time, this particular reallocation is actually positive, or should be positive for 2026 compared to what it would have been had we not taken this step. But no, the magnitude, just to address the most boring part of your question, the magnitude would not be the same as the stoppage of production that we had last year between mid-November and effectively the end of January. Okay, Radim. Thank you very much for that. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. We move on to Mr. or Miss Joop. Please unmute yourself. Good morning. Good morning. Just a few questions about the guidance for 2025. I'm curious what you mean with around or what around EUR 1 billion. What is sort of the definition of around? Is it plus or minus 1, plus or minus 5%? In combination, if there are some stops or delays in production, then I was surprised that you stick to your revenue guidance but lower your EBITDA guidance. If you look at the, let's say, take the bottom of 3.2%, that means EUR 32 million, EUR 12 million in Q4 after a loss in Q3. What are the, what's happening in Q4 that you have a much better result than in Q3? Thank you. Sure, thanks. When it comes to the EUR 1 billion, you know, I think I would now dive into legal analysis of what one means in a guidance. Certainly, the advice that we've been getting is that, you know, there is a certain bandwidth around that number that you can be comfortable with. At the beginning of the year, we were very comfortable with that number and we felt like there is some space for us to go when it comes to lower revenue than we necessarily planned for to still be within that guidance. Despite the changes that you've seen right now, we still feel very comfortable with that number. What I think is where I guess your question also comes from is the much heavier impact on our profitability. That's related to the fact that, as I mentioned earlier when we were planning our budget, our year or our full year profitability was very much back-ended towards the normalized production and also normalized profitability September until December. That also indicates to you that the heaviest part of that healthy production and profitability period actually lies in Q4. With Q3 having been less than stellar, let me put it very mildly. Q4 still needs to deliver on what we were planning. That planning has now been adjusted due to the reallocation of production. Despite that, we our planning currently indicates that we should be able to reach the levels that you've mentioned. I do understand your question. Again, please rest assured when it comes to that EUR 1 billion, we, you know, we have I think we're relatively comfortable there. Also if you look at our revenues for the first 9 months of the year, we are we've achieved the EUR 762 million. you know, in a relatively strong production quarter. 'Cause let's not forget, Q3 is also 4 weeks of close production. A relatively strong quarter Q4, reaching one or, you know, even less than one-fourth of the overall year expectation should be, you know, achievable. When it comes to the profitability, you're right. We require October, November, and with the re-planning, only part of December, to deliver the numbers that we expect. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Joop. We will move on to our last hand up for now, George Farmiloe. You should be able to speak now. Hello. Yes, George from Jefferies now. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi, George. Hiya. Just one quick question on the ad hoc yesterday. I think it says there was a delay by one supplier. Am I right in thinking you just said earlier that it's a sort of a wider issue on your supplier base? Are you able to elaborate on particularly which suppliers it is, and if you know it could, if it could be an issue just for your industry or if you think it's sort of a wider autos theme. Thank you. Sure. I did mention it's more suppliers, but in that, what I meant by that is, in general, there have been several suppliers that have had issues with the ramp-up. That has resulted partially also, for example, our Q3 numbers have been impacted by relatively higher unfinished goods, some of which were down to certain suppliers outside of the chassis not being able to provide us with parts. Those parts have in the meantime been provided. You know, overall, our supply chain is catching up with, let's say the normalization in our industry and that can result in certain volatility. This particular impact is driven truly only by one supplier, because, I mean, no other ones would probably have the magnitude that would force us to replan our whole production. I would prefer to refrain from naming that supplier, but there are only extremely few that could have such an impact on us. I don't want to speculate on whether that's a general issue. I don't know. It has been. Obviously we're speaking to that supplier very regularly and with a lot of intensity at this point. The representations that we're getting is that it's simply a bottleneck in terms of digesting the volumes of orders that have suddenly come from our industry in their production facilities, which have been slightly driven down in terms of their capacity over the past quarters to match the lower demand from our industry. Obviously when we ramp it up, they also need to ramp up and it might take a little bit of time. That is the explanation we're getting right now. Thank you very much. Sure. Thanks. Thank you for your questions, George. With this, and no further questions, we come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you everyone for joining and your interest in the Knaus Tabbert AG. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. Afterwards, you will find the recording of this call on the AIRTIME platform. A big thank you also to you, Mr. Sevcik, for your transparency. I wish you all a successful business, a healthy autumn time, and with this, I hand over again to Mr. Sevcik for some final remarks. Thank you. I'd like to thank the entire Knaus Tabbert team for their continued hard work during what remains a demanding phase of our realignment. It is this commitment that has been essential in keeping this business moving forward. I'd like to thank all of you as well for your time, your questions, and continued interest in Knaus Tabbert, and we look forward to updating you again with our next results. Thank you