Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the PFISTERER Holding SE Q1 2025 Key Figures and Business Performance Conference Call. 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 Johannes Linden, CEO.
Hi there, good morning, everybody. I'm happy to welcome you to the first quarterly conference call of PFISTERER, being meanwhile a proud and happy listed company. If we look at the presentation, some of you had the chance to see me before. Nevertheless, if this is not the case, I am the person on the left that is here illustrated as the management board, together with my colleague, Konstantin Kurfiss. We are in charge of the company, and I personally take care of the functional areas of operations and finance, whereas my colleague is dealing with the sales and technology part of it. If we move on to the context of PFISTERER, some of you have seen this picture on previous presentations that we have given, but I suppose there are also further participants in this call who haven't seen it.
I want to spend a few seconds on the business purpose and the mission of PFISTERER as a company. We are following a mission in which we are the preferred partner. We are striving to be the preferred partner for innovative, reliable, and mission-critical electrical connections and insulation solutions in the electrical infrastructure net. You see on this picture here an illustration of this. There is an overhead line coming from the right into that picture, carrying electricity at a voltage level, for instance, of 110,000 volts. This needs to be connected now to the pole that you see on the left, without the pole being electrified. Therefore, we are providing this insulator, which is mechanically connecting the wire, but electrically insulating this. In many, many other applicational situations of PFISTERER, we are connecting in such a way that the electricity is flowing through the connection.
In this particular example, it is an insulating example. On the next slide, you would see situations where products of PFISTERER can typically be found. Due to our cable agnosticity, we are working with every cable supplier or wire supplier in the world. At the same token, also our solutions are generation agnostic. That means we are connecting electrical grid infrastructure systems regardless of the type of generation of this electricity. You see in dark blue examples on this slide where electricity is being generated onshore or offshore wind parks. You also see in the center a nuclear power plant, which could also be a gas turbine or a solar field. As long as electricity is being generated, it needs to be connected to the grid, and that is what PFISTERER is doing. After the generation in dark blue, electricity needs to be transmitted.
This is illustrated here in white in this slide, for instance, by way of overhead lines or by way of underground cable systems, but also by way of subsea connections. All of this is being dealt with PFISTERER products. Then on the right, in the right boxes, you see examples of the distribution of electricity. Again, this is where PFISTERER products can be found, be it in the area of substations or be it in the area of urban centers, rail and mobility applications, or, for instance, data centers. We are providing these products with quite close proximity to our customer base due to our global distribution network. In concrete terms, we are working with our 17 companies, but also next to that with our technical distributors. In that sense, we can provide products directly into more than 90 countries.
We think this is one of the strong points of PFISTERER. On the left, you see the breakdown of our revenues in quarter one of this year. Namely, you see that we had in the calendar year 2025 in quarter one, a revenue share in the geographical region of Europe and Africa of 59%. We had revenues in the Americas with a share of 16%. In the Middle East, it has been 17%. In Asia-Pacific, 8%. If you look to the bottom left, there is the revenue split as per our product segments, where we had revenues of 40% in the high-voltage accessories, so the connection systems for high-voltage cable systems, 21% in overhead lines, which are typically also high-voltage applications. High voltage represents an overall share of 61%. In the medium voltage, we had 14% and in components 25%.
We will come later in the presentation to the relative comparison of these shares relative to the quarter one of 2024. On the next page, we wanted to share a few market headlines that we thought were interesting to be mentioned here. The first one is dealing with the significant increase in electricity demand in 2024. We believe this is substantiating the trend we've been talking about due to the ever-increasing demand on electricity next to the change in how electricity is being generated and transmitted. We believe this is a very good foundation for the future business development of PFISTERER. In the quarter one of 2025, the data for 2024 was being released. Electricity demand globally grows by 4.3%, which was almost twice as much as it did increase as an average of the 10 years before.
We have seen the adoption of the infrastructure package in Germany at the beginning of 2025. The German parliament and authorities have approved an investment program of EUR 500 billion to be dealt with. There will be obviously opportunities arising out of this program also for PFISTERER. We have seen another example. We have seen the buildup of a huge data center in the Rhine-Main region that was implemented in Q1. We have, unfortunately, we must say, seen the continuation of the destruction of infrastructure, including the electrical grid infrastructure in Ukraine. This destruction is estimated to be in the area of the GDP of Ukraine. This is almost $200 billion—I'm sorry, dollars. At some point, we hope at a very soon point, the war could be ceasing and investment into this infrastructure would be started.
If that would happen, there would be a tremendous push for the components that PFISTERER is supplying. We've seen in quarter one another fatal accident that took place in Heathrow. There was a standstill after a massive power failure in a substation. This is illustrating the mission-criticalness of the components that we are providing. We believe that the damage that was created due to that power failure in relation to equipment that is up to date and not outdated, we believe it is a good business to look upon. Very lastly, I want to share our view on the US offshore wind market because we have also seen in quarter one a pushback from the US presidency towards the offshore wind project in the US.
I wanted to share with you that our today's project, Empire Wind, where PFISTERER is involved, this project is continued and ongoing. We see, despite the pushback in the U.S., we see a very strong and solid momentum in Europe, namely in Poland, in the U.K., but also in the Netherlands. Beyond that, we see significant growth potential arising in the Asian countries, such as the Philippines or South Korea and Japan. This leads me to our strategy house here at PFISTERER that we are following. As the ruling foundation for all of our doing, we look at our teams, which we believe are essential to our business continuation and success. Next to that, we are also leveraging our supplier and logistical network. We want to continue to scale our production footprint.
You will see later that we have all reason to do that. On the left column, which is carrying our strategy, we are intending to continuously grow our core businesses and markets. On the center column, we are going to continue to expand our business boundaries, be it for product development or be it for geographical sales expansion. On the right, PFISTERER is putting a lot of emphasis on future trends in which we invest significant R&D funds. Very soon, we will also be entering the market in this arena on our high-voltage DC products. After this short introduction, I would like to continue and move towards our business results on Q1 in terms of the financial performance. I want to start with some key figures that are giving a good overview about the financial results that we have seen in the first quarter.
As also in our previous communications, we will be talking about IFRS data. These are unaudited, obviously, as we are talking about the Q1 situation. What we see here is that PFISTERER has developed a very solid growth in our order intake and in our earnings, while at the same time, we have also experienced a temporary stretch on our cash flow in connection with our strong business situation on the one hand and the enforced relocation of our production facility from the fire accident that we encountered in September 2024. If we look to the table on the right, you see the order book I was referring to and the order intake.
We had in the quarter one 2025 an order intake of EUR 144.2 million, which represents relative to the order intake of quarter one, which at the time was at 106.5%, an increase of 35.4%. Our order book, comparing Q1 2025 to Q1 2024, is meanwhile at the end of March standing at EUR 285.3 million, which then represents an increase of 44.9% relative to the order book at the end of quarter one in 2024. From a product segment point of view, this increase in the order book and order intake is mainly driven by our high-voltage accessory business and at the same time also very strongly supported through a good order situation in PFISTERER's overhead line business. Both segments have also shown in this period not only a good order intake, but also very solid margins in this order intake.
We see that the revenues have been stable in Q1 2025 relative to Q1 2024. Due to the significantly improved gross margins in our revenues, we see an improved gross result. The gross margin improved by 3.7%. We managed to carry this improved gross margin, gross result, also down to the bottom line data such as EBITDA, EBIT, or adjusted EBITDA. This is despite the burden in Q1 2025 that we have seen due to our one-off costs resulting from the IPO, but also due to further continued burden from the relocation of the production facility from Bünnwedel to Kadan, which was finished by the end of Q1. We see a negative impact on the operating cash flow, which is coming from the working capital.
That is caused by a lower usage of factoring that we have used in previous times, stronger than we recently did, simply for the reason that factoring is an expensive way of cash generation from our point of view. On top of that, we have also seen a certain sales development from a month-over-month-over-month basis. In Q1 2024, we had a very strong January. In Q1 2025, we had a very strong March. This is then causing a certain increase, temporary increase in the accounts receivables at the cutoff date of 31st of March in 2025. That is an element that we see here in the networking capital. Higher net debt is also caused by the networking capital. We have also continued to hire people. This is the bottom line that you see on this table here. This is only 1.6%.
Again, this needs to be explained and seen in the conjunction of our relocation from the factory in Bünnwedel, which caused certain layoffs of employees in Germany and an underproportional hiring in Czech as we have relocated into an existing facility and therefore are reducing workforce, in particular in the indirect areas of the former factory in Bünnwedel. If we move on to the next slide, there comes further details on the development not only from Q1, but also further quarters in the year 2024, now leading to the Q1 in 2025. I want to start with the order backlog that you see in the left of the two graphs on this slide here. The order backlog, and we call it meanwhile order book. If I use the term synonymously, please forgive me. I should be using only order book from now on.
The headline in this graph on the left side should also be named order book. Our order book has shown over the individual quarters a positive development starting from 196 to 199, 232, 234, 285. This has been a continuous move, not in a steady mode as you see. Some months are stronger than others, but it has been, I believe, an intact trend, fair to say, that is showing that this order book is increasing, as said before. This is mainly due to the HVA, but also our overhead line situation. What is inside this data, not to be seen from the outside, but I can share with you that we are also quite happy with the order book situation in the United States regarding the product segment of components in which we are investing from a production point of view, significantly from our point of view.
This increase in the order book in the US in the component segment is really supporting our ambition in increasing this local production footprint there. If you turn to the right there, you see the revenue development over the quarters. This is not a unanimous or homogeneous picture. In quarter one 2024, we had the record revenues of the year in 2024. Revenues were dropping slightly into the mid-year. In quarter three, we see now the starting effect of the fire that we had in Bünnwedel, where, yeah, due to this immediate stop of production and all activities related to invoicing, we see this drop in Q3. Q4 was showing again a good development, which is now in Q1 even further improved.
You see on a like-for-like effect in Q1 2025, we have lost relative to Q1 2024 due to this Bünnwedel not in production yet situation, almost EUR 6 million of revenue. This taking into account and also looking at the average quarter revenues of the past, we are very happy. We are also, I can share with you, above our expectation when it comes to revenues for the quarter one of 2025. If we move to the next page, we can share further insights on the gross margin development. Again, over the individual quarters of last year, if we started with 38.3% in the quarter one 2024, we have seen a slight increase of that margin in Q2. There was a decline in Q3. Again, we have seen the first impact of the fire incident in this quarter.
We see a good development in quarter four, even though that was also impacted by the fire when it comes to the gross margin, which is then lastly also the case for Q1 2025. Nevertheless, we brought the gross margin up because we have seen a higher share in the revenue mix of the high-voltage accessories, which have a higher margin in itself. We have seen a continued reduction in material cost on the input side, which is on a year-over-year comparison Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, which is contributing material savings of 1.5% on an equal basis comparison. Yeah, we have brought this gross margin up despite the fact that we have in the gross margin transfer-related cost from Bünnwedel to Kadan.
The margin in our order book, so the combination of slide number 11 and slide number 12 is quite favorable, which makes us believe that the positive gross margin development that we have seen did come to stay. We move on to page number 13, where we are now sharing the comparison of the business segment relative revenue share from the product segment point of view. On the left pie chart, you see the split of our revenues into the four contributing product segments as of quarter one 2024. On the right, you see this split into the quarter one 2025. Now, if we compare HV, I was referring to this earlier. If the HV portion in 2024 was at 34.8%, we have seen now in Q1 2025 that this portion is at 40.1%.
Just to repeat maybe once more, this is a deliberate strategy of PFISTERER to push our HV revenue shares step by step. Due to the higher margin inside the HV business segment, this is then also offering positive contribution to the overall gross margin and to our overall EBITDA and further profit KPIs. We have seen somewhat lower revenues on the components. It used to be 26.2; now it is 24.6. This is an isolated effect from our company in Argentina. We believe this is not a trend, but this is only a quarterly situation that we will be outgrowing in the course of the year. We see quite a good development on the medium voltage accessories. Their share used to be 10.1%, and it went up to 14.2% in Q1 2025. Lastly, we come to the OHL overhead line business.
That was 28.9% in Q1 2024, and that number went down to 21% on the revenues in Q1 2025. I have mentioned before there is a negative impact due to the stop of the production facility in Q4 and also in Q1 of this year. As that production is picking up again starting April, we will also see the revenue share of the OHL business going to increase again. This is very well substantiated also through the positive order book development on the OHL business that we have already in-house. If we move to the next slide, there comes the breakdown of our revenues relative to the regions. Here we see that there has been quite a strong infrastructure investment situation, including the HVA push we have seen, mainly coming from Europe.
On the left side, the pie chart is illustrating the quarter one 2024 situation, and the right pie chart is then coming to the quarter one situation in 2025. Here we see that the region of Europe and Africa has increased from 53% to 59%. Yeah, this is mostly coming from the HV and the MV business. We see there has been a lower revenue share in the Middle East from 21% to 17%. Middle East is traditionally, in PFISTERER's context, relatively strong in OHL. For the reasons mentioned before, OHL revenues have declined, and this is also what we see here in this Middle East share. We see stable revenues in the Americas with higher sales in North America and slightly lower ones in South America. This is the component element I was talking about earlier.
We see lastly a slight decrease in the Asia-Pacific, where we used to be at 10.2%, and that went down to 8.3% in quarter one of 2025. With this, I would like to come to a brief outlook of PFISTERER. I want to share two events that we believe are going to shape our future also for the quarters and even for years to come. These events happened after the cutoff date, March 31. I want to start with our acquisition. So far, all the revenues we've been talking about, they are all organic revenues. On April 2, we have acquired our long-standing partner, PowerCSL, a company located in the U.K., which is providing protection systems for subsea cable connections. You see on the right such a protection system. The picture does not bring across that these things are quite big. Yeah.
The diameter of this, we call it the yellow submarine, is almost 2 m. If I would be standing next to it, I would be looking quite tiny and small. Yeah, this turnover of PowerCSL last year was EUR 3.5 million. They were highly profitable. We believe that with the technology that we have in-house now and with PFISTERER's Salesforce also being much more international than the local acting PowerCSL company in the U.K. previously was, we believe there will be more sales possible for PFISTERER in the coming quarters than what we have seen from PowerCSL only in the past. We believe this is a good team that is joining or that has joined the PFISTERER group.
On the next page, I believe there is another event that is going to shape us, and that is also one of the reasons why we are talking to you today. That is to be seen in connection with our successful IPO, which took place on May 14, 2025. We had an initial share price of EUR 30, even though the issuer's price was EUR 27. At the time, we had a market capitalization of EUR 490 million. This is the number with the EUR 27 calculated, and we raised the gross proceeds of EUR 95 million, which we will be using efficiently and effectively in order to continue to expand our production in Germany, in particular also in the Czech Republic even more, but also in the US, and to continue to invest in our HVDC technology developments.
Based on the, I believe, very sound order book situation that we have, with the knowledge of the sound margins inside that order book, we believe that we have a very positive development ahead of us. With this being said, we can move on to the very last page of this presentation, which is our financial calendar. Today is May 27th, and we are presenting our Q1 key data. We have shared the quarterly statement of Q1 today. The next moment when we're going to be sharing half-year figures is going to be end of August. The precise date will then be announced approximately one week ahead of it taking place. With this, I appreciate your listening to me, and I would be happy to receive questions, and will do my very best to give you precis
e answers. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we come now to your questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press 9 followed by the star key on your telephone keypad. If you wish to cancel your question, please press 3 followed by the star key. Please press 9 star now to state your question. The first question comes from Adrian Pehl, Oddo BHF. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for having me. A couple of questions, actually. First of all, congrats to listing and strong order intake that you have shown. On the order book, I have a question on when the orders are materializing, i.e., is there already a portion of orders included in your book that is due for shipping in 2026? A question on overhead lines. I got from your presentation, actually, that the relocation has been concluded to Kadan.
Would you be able to share with us some thoughts on how the progress of re-ramping up revenues, if you want so, will happen? Is it still the case that you need some time to fully unfold the business again, i.e., Q3 better than Q2, or how should we see this? A third question before I have some follow-ups, maybe on the comparison base in your com business in the second quarter of last year. Should we assume that this was lower, meaning that you might be able to show also growth in the com segment in Q2 again?
I'll leave it with those three, and then I probably have one or two follow-ups. Yeah. I will try to give the answers in the sequence of the questions. In case I miss anything, please remind me what I missed last time. Yeah.
If you look at the backlog situation, yes, a portion of the backlog obviously is already beyond 2025. A portion of it is reaching into 2026. We see a certain trend in this. Customers appear to be booking a little bit ahead of time more than they did in the past. Yeah. This being said, we believe that at this very moment, the amount of revenues in our backlog that will be reaching beyond 2025 is somewhat below 20% of our backlog. I keep on saying backlog. I should be saying order book. I think that will take some time before I get rid of it. It's somewhat below 20% of our order book. Yeah. That means somewhat about 80% will be materialized this year. That was the first question, I believe.
The second one as well, because you were asking about the revenue development, based on the backlog, we would believe that this year the revenue development will be contrary to the one that you have seen last year over the quarters. Last year, the strongest quarter from a revenue point of view was Q1. This year, we expect Q1 to be the lowest revenue quarter.
Yeah. That was actually another question that I might have on seasonality, but yeah, that definitely helps. You think business is unfolding to the better side in the next couple of quarters, or we should also see sequential growth from here, obviously, for the group?
Yes.
In our prognosis, I do not know if that is a good English term, in our prognosis for the order intake and also for the revenue for the fiscal year 2025, we have said that this is going to grow in double digits. We call this the strong growth. In our financial report, we define strong growth as 9-12%. I am leaning more to the 12 than to the 9. This is definitely repeated by us today, possibly in the course of the year, further improved. At this point, we can confirm this outlook. There was a question regarding the components business.
Yes. Also overhead lines, but you can start with components as well. Yeah. Sure.
We think that the components business, from a nature of the business, is the least cyclical one. It also has the shortest lead times. So yeah.
Then again, also, it has the lowest backlog due to the nature of the business. We believe that the components business is going to be very stable, slowly growing, also in the course of the year. We are adding capacities as we talk in order to do that. Also, at the same time, we are bringing parts of the components production to the US factory. This is happening in parallel to the increasing of capacities I was talking about earlier. Yeah. We have seen a good order intake on components, in particular in the US. This is what we want to serve from the local production. I hope. Then there was a question on OHL business. I believe also there, from the revenue, we have seen a very good order intake in OHL, also good margins.
If you refer to the quarter one statement, you see there is an improvement on the margins in the OHL business in 2025 relative to 2024. We believe this is a trend to stay. This is despite the fact that the Q1 2025, on a gross margin level, OHL is burdened by the relocation. There is an insurance payment, but this is below the gross margin from a profit and loss statement point of view. The gross margin that we see in OHL as we talk is still burdened by this relocation, as we have people in Kadan and the Czech factory that have been hired, that are being trained, that are inside the cost, but not in the business yet, as we did not start the production in Kadan before April. Now we have ramped up the production as we talk now in May.
Production is running quite well. We are in the process now of qualifying these products with our customers as they are demanding a qualification. If you relocate from A to B, you need to invite the customers and convince them of the quality. We believe this is not a problem for PFISTERER, as we are already producing in Kadan, and it is an existing facility. We have already produced insulators with a different technology, different product, but let's say similar products in Kadan before. There is a lot of heritage and tradition and also good reputation in the factory. We are in the process of qualifying with the customers. This will be finished in quarter two as per our planning. As of quarter three, you should not be seeing any more negative influence.
As a matter of fact, positive influence due to the fact that in Kadan, then we have one factory less. We have lower overhead costs in our production arena. We have obviously lower salary costs for the operators in Kadan. This will be, in the long run, yeah, at the end of the story, it will be a positive thing for our profitability. We will start to see that quarter three in OHL. Very clear. A very last question from my side, a bit of housekeeping nature. I saw that your other operating income was up by EUR 1 million versus last year, let's say on comparable sales level. Is there anything we should know about this? Yes. There is an insurance payment of EUR 2.5 million. That was the insurance payment. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Yes. That is the biggest single event in this category.
Got it.
From a profit and loss structural point of view, you see this insurance payment in the other income. The burden that comes from the relocation, transportation costs, depreciation of materials that are destroyed in the fire, and so on, these are things that you see in the gross margin in the COGS. There is a certain, let's say, unchartered element because of that. Right.
Very good. Thank you.
Welcome.
The next question comes from Jasmin Steinen, Berenberg. May we have your question, please?
Okay. Many thanks. First of all, also congrats from my side on the listing and the Q1. Many thanks for the detailed conference call. For the next time, may I recommend that you share the presentation already ahead of the conference call on your homepage? That would be highly appreciated.
I have four questions, if I m ay, and I will take them one by one. My first question is on R&D. The R&D expenses increased as percentage of sales as expected. However, I was a little bit surprised to see R&D rising in common OHL while declined in HVA. Could you elaborate on the disposition and lower spending in HVA, and how should we expect the split going forward? That's my first question.
Yeah. I think you should expect to see relevant activities in HVA and HVDC developments, yeah, regardless of the expression in the profit and loss statement, because there are two elements that are related or that need to be seen when it comes to the distribution of R&D. The portions of the R&D team can be clearly allocated to the product segment because they are specialized working on this segment.
Other teams are not. Because they are then being distributed, let's say, statistically or as per budget allocation, you see a big impact due to the relative revenue development of the segments from a budget point of view relative to the as-is. This was a little bit complicated from an explanation point of view. The R&D costs are being split with a key. The key is related to the budget and the revenues as per budget. Since we have higher sales in HVA relative to the budget and lower ones in OHL, this is then influencing the margin and the quotas.
Okay. Because initially, I just thought this kind of allocation according to budget was only true for the other operating income and the other operating expenses, while I expect that R&D is also for.
No, no.
This is also for the functional costs, as well for admin and for sales.
Okay. That is clear. My second question is on the order intake. Thanks for the insights on the segmental split of the order intake. That is highly appreciated. Is the order intake only driven by volumes, or does it also reflect a pricing component? How should we think about the margin profile of the order intake?
Margin profile is very good, which caused me to say earlier that the gross margin development we have seen in quarter one did come to stay. I'm sorry. What was the second element of the question?
Whether it is just volume or also pricing.
Yeah. It is both. It is also pricing. If you look at the 3.7% as a difference, there is a certain element coming from the material cost. I was referring to that 1.5% of reduced material cost.
The material cost ratio is about 50% to give you just a rough figure. You see that there is a pricing element of approximately 3%, which is helping us also on the gross margin. Yeah. The third element, we talked about that earlier as well, is the shift in our segments as we are growing overproportionally in the higher margin segments. That is obviously helping our gross margin as well.
My question was rather related to the order intake. Is it fair to assume that kind of two-thirds related to volume, maybe around one-third is related to pricing, or is th e price effect lower on the order intake in Q1?
You're talking about the margin of the order intake or the volume?
No, no, no.
I was talking about the order intake or about the volume, or basically about the EUR million amount, what was related to volume growth and what was related to pricing. Sorry.
I would believe that the pricing effect on the growth of the order intake, yeah, is not one-third. This is lower. Yeah. This is maybe 10%-15%. It's really a significant growth in volume at a very satisfactory margin level.
Perfect. Very clear. My third question is on HVDC. During VIP, you mentioned that you have first HVDC joint project draft agreements also under final negotiations in Europe and Saudi Arabia. Could you please provide an update on where you stand there, and when do you expect the first revenues within 2026?
We have a number of agreements signed meanwhile.
Maybe it's too early to make this explicit, but maybe half-year statement could be the right moment. I don't want to take a decision on that yet, but I could put that in the room. That could be a consideration for us. When it comes to revenues, we will see the first revenues in HVDC on cable connection systems in the first quarter of 2027.
Perfect. And then my last question is just the housekeeping regarding the one-off. You mentioned the insurance compensation. Could you also quantify the IPO-related one-off costs, please, or kind of the one-off costs in total what you have booked in the first quarter?
I think this is a small seven-digit number, the one-offs related to the IPO we have seen. Yeah. They will continue in quarter two. Yeah. Maybe from a relative point of view, even a little more.
It's not going to be an eight-digit number. It is going to stay a small seven-digit figure also in quarter two. Afterward, it should be over. Yeah. We do not want to go to the stock exchange again.
Perfect. Thanks. That is all very clear. I will step back into the line.
Thank you. The next question comes from Jean-François Gargand, Oddo BHF. Please state your question.
First question concerns the margin for Q1. We see a pretty high level for the adjusted EBITDA margin, 21% compared to 19.7% for the first quarter last year. This is higher than the full-year level. Are there any specific reasons to explain this level? Do we consider that the margin for the first quarter is higher for seasonality reasons, or should we expect some lower margin for the next quarters? This is my first question. Yeah.
If we compare last year's EBITDA, 19.7 Q1, you would see that the Q1 EBITDA margin in 2024 was higher than the yearly EBITDA margin. It was 16.9. Yeah. Q1, from a structural point of view, had a very good absorption situation as it was the highest revenue quarter of the year. Meanwhile, we have continued to invest into the company, be it systems, be it in production, be it in people. We will be benefiting from this in the course of the year as we expect revenues to continue to develop positively. With this being said, we are, based on the backlog margins that we have booked—I keep on saying backlog—based on the order book margins we have booked, we believe that the gross margin situation of quarter one is going to be a good indication also for future quarters.
Okay. Very good.
Second question regarding the margin for the medium voltage business. We saw a drop for the margin, 17.8% versus 24.3%. We saw a decrease for the—that's right—for the sales for the first quarter. Could you explain more of the reason why we see the decrease and what do you expect for the coming months for these divisions?
You are referring to the EBITDA margin?
Absolutely. For the EBITDA margin.
EBITDA margin. Okay. The EBITDA in this period in MV is 2.558, right? The EBITDA last year was 795.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Not for the—maybe for the components. The components. The components. The components, sorry. Okay. 4.4 million, there's 6.5 million.
Okay. I understand. I was just confused looking at it. If you look at the gross margin in the components segment—hold on. I need to check here.
From a percentage point of view, looking at the gross margin in components, yeah, we have seen quarter one at 39.8% and quarter one 2024 and 2025 at 39.6%. From a gross margin point of view, the business is very stable. Okay. First statement. We see there is a slight decline on the revenues in Q1 2025 relative to Q1 2024. There is a delta of exactly EUR 2 million. I'm surprised to see that now. This is seldomly the case, yeah? Exactly EUR 2 million, which is coming from Argentina. Now, due to lower volumes, we are bringing less absolute gross margin into the house, yeah? This needs to be seen in conjunction with our ramp-up in North America. We are increasing our production footprint in the US that was mentioned earlier. We are adding machines. We have hired people, trained people.
This is, of course, ramping up. It's never a perfect utilization situation. You would see a certain effect there, in particular also on the admin and sales side. On top of that, we also have a similar effect to what we have talked about earlier on OHL. The distribution of our functional cost is based on revenue proportion. If you would be looking into the admin cost, for instance, this is increasing by EUR 400,000 in 2025 on the components relative to 2024. This is then further eating up a little bit of the EBITDA. This is related to the spreading of the admin cost over the different product segments. From the business point of view, I always look at the gross margin. The gross margin is constant. The business in itself is healthy.
It's about distributing costs and ramping up the factory.
Okay. Perfect. My last questions concern the adjusted EBITDA margin for the HVA business. We also see a slight decrease for the margin despite the strong growth for the sales, up by 14%. The reason why we saw a decrease of 300 basis points for the adjusted EBITDA margin for this division, HVA. Could we consider or could we expect an improvement for the margin for the coming qu arters? Thank you.
I refer again to the gross margin. We were talking about HVA, right? High-voltage accessories, I believe. If I look at the gross margin, again, from an intrinsic business value, we see that in Q1 2024, HVA had a gross margin of 43.6%. In Q1 2025, it was 46.2%. We have seen an increase in absolute percentages of 2.6%.
The business is developing favorably. This being said, now underneath gross margin comes the share of marketing costs and research and development and also the admins. This is really where the, yeah, then the additional gross profit is somewhat diluted again, yeah? You see an increase on marketing of EUR 1.4 million, yeah? In the segment of HV, you see a EUR 200,000 increase in R&D, and you see on the admin portion an increase of, again, EUR 1.4 million. This is really where it's coming from. Again, it's the distribution of the functional costs over the product segments rather than the intrinsic value of the business. 46% as a gross margin in HV, we believe, is a very sound and very healthy situation. As the overall revenue will be increasing, you will also see a proportionate decrease on the sales and t he admin positions.
Perfect.
Thank you so much.
Welcome. Welcome. Happy to answer any question if I can.
Right now, we have no more questions. All right.
Maybe I can have a final word here if I may. If I may want to summarize on the quarter one results, I believe we see a very solid and very stable development here at PFISTERER. If we look at our EBITDA margin in quarter one versus the fiscal year 2024, we see an increase of 4%. Yeah? If we had 16.9% adjusted EBITDA margin in 2024, we are showing 20.9% EBITDA margin in Q1 2025. This is despite the situation that we have continued to invest into our structures, into our systems, including IT systems, into the IPO that we have managed to materialize in May, and into that relocation of the factory that was then, as you see, obviously overcompensated.
With all of these elements that I'm mentioning, I believe we have further success factors on the positive side for PFISTERER's business development that should be helping our continued positive development. With this being said, we are very happy to have this super order intake and the very strong, now I say it right, order book on our hands. With this, we believe we will continue to see strong growth in order intake, in revenues. I do not want to give a profit forecast, but we are quite positive on this dimension as well. Thanks for your time and your interest and your support.