Up next is RATIONAL AG, which is actually very close, situated to our office in Augsburg, in Landsberg am Lech, if I'm correct. Stefan Arnold already joined us on the stage.
Hello, everybody.
Hello.
I'm just trying to share my screen.
[Crosstalk]. Yes, we can see the presentation full screen. That's fantastic. Now we can see you as well, and we can hear you. The stage is yours.
Thank you very much. Can you see the presentation now?
Yes, yes. All works perfectly.
Perfect. Thank you very much, first of all, for the invitation. Of course, thank you for everybody who's participating. It's really an honor for me now to present RATIONAL to you. You see it here on the first slide. We are now for 25 years on the stock exchange. The company is 50 years old. We had the IPO in this 2000 phase. We are one of the, let's say, few ones that survived. With a yield of around 15% that our investors were able to make, we are one of the most successful IPO of that time. Who or what is RATIONAL? Here you see, let's say, everything in a nutshell. This is the most important statement from our mission statement. It shows our focus strategy. You see, we offer people working in commercial kitchens. We focus on commercial kitchens. This is number one. The greatest possible benefits.
Then in thermal food preparation, we focus just on cooking. We are convinced that by using this focus strategy, focusing on the core competence, focusing on what we can do best, we can ensure that we always will be able to provide the greatest possible benefit to our customers. As I said before, we are 50 years old now. We had our anniversary in 2023. Our aim has always been to offer the best tools and solutions for cooking for all these different types of customers you can see here. This means this dedicated target group of people who produce food in commercial kitchens is mainly made up by these four groups that we are having. The biggest groups are the restaurant with service, so classic dine-in business, and community catering.
This is mainly big canteens where a lot of food is served at the same time, with each around 40% share of sales. Our fastest growing segments, this is mainly due to these food trends that we saw in the past years. There is more and more snacking, takeaway business. The restaurant without service, so quick service restaurants, and retail business like supermarkets, they are growing the fastest and are now making up 7% or 13% of our sales. I mentioned a little bit food trends. What does this change of the market conditions that we were seeing in the last years mean for us as a provider of multifunctional and intelligent cooking systems? To be honest, changes are nothing new in this industry because the food service environment changes maybe since the industry is existing.
Of course, the topics and the challenges are really changing over time for our customers. In these days, the major challenges our customers are facing are, on the one hand, these exploding costs for food, for water, for energy, for rent, for personnel, so whatever you can imagine is getting more expensive. We are helping our customers to save money. The other thing is healthy nutrition, food variety. We are trying to get here or to track all these changes to help the customers manage all these changes with these flexible cooking systems we are offering. Everybody knows now these trends. We saw it in the presentation before as well: digitization, automation, sustainability. Also here, we can help our customers because, as I said, it's intelligent. We do automated cooking. With this, with the energy efficiency, with savings in food, we also are contributing to sustainability targets of our customers.
Maybe the most important topic, the most important bottleneck for our customers is labor because there is less and less qualified personnel. With intelligence in the cooking systems, we help them to close the gap so that they can do less. With less people, they can do the same job. They need less people, and they need less qualified people because they can use untrained personnel as well. Another topic: work safety, ergonomy. With a closed system, you have less heat in the kitchen, you have less danger of burning, etc. It is really contributing to also reduce the sick rates for our customers and to make the life for the users easier. As said on the previous slide already, our product portfolio mainly consists of, this is the two major points here: intelligent and multifunctional cooking equipment.
No specialized cooking equipment like pizza ovens or burger grills, and nothing else on the dishwashing, on the cooling side, whatever you can imagine. With this focus strategy, this is really, we cook and we have it intelligent and multifunctional. The major product is the iCombi Pro. This is an intelligent combi steamer, meaning it combines two ways of cooking. This was the invention of Mr. Meister in the early 1970s. It combines cooking in steam and dry heat and a combination of both. With this, for example, if you do a roast, you cook in very high humidity at first to keep the meat juicy. At the end, you take out the steam and cook in hot air to keep it crispy outside or to make it crispy outside. With this way of cooking, it's also the most healthy way of cooking.
With steaming, you keep the vitamins in vegetables, and you do not create any harmful substances in the food. This means what we say in short, we are cooking tasty and healthy food. Our customers are doing this. With the intelligence, it also enables a very straight cooking process. There is a combination of high-level hardware, up-to-date software, and sensor technology. With this, anybody of us could use it in a very professional way. Even untrained personnel can use it. You define a desired end result, or it is even predefined, and you have just a picture on the user interface you can press on. The machine detects what's going on in the food and in the cooking cabinet and decides what to do next in order to come out with your desired end result in the wish time. We call this also autonomous cooking.
The iCombi was about cooking, about indirect cooking in hot air and steam. The complementary product to this is the iVario, the iVario Pro. This is cooking with direct contact heat, meaning you use it like a pan with the bottom of the container, which is heated up. You can cook in liquids, meaning, for example, as a fryer to do french fries or anything else you want to fry. If you use water, you can do huge amounts of pasta at the same time. Also in an intelligent way because the machine also detects if, for example, a pancake would burn and you are not showing up to switch it, then it would shut down immediately the heat so that nothing burns, nothing sticks. When you show up and switch and press the button that you switched, then it continues cooking.
With this, we avoid a lot of food waste because nothing is destroyed. It is very easy to clean with that because you just need a little bit of water. In the end, it is with this very sustainable equipment. In addition, it is very, very fast. It is up to 4x faster compared to comparable equipment you find on the market. With that, it consumes up to 40% less energy and saves a lot of money for the customers as well. In terms of multifunctionality, I mentioned just you can use it with the different ways of cooking, with fat, water, or just with direct contact heat.
You also can subdivide the pan in four zones, so you can cook at the same time different things in these four zones and make it even more multifunctional and increase the utilization for the customers to also save time and energy. Now, here the third family member in our cooking system range, this is the iHexagon. This is brand new. We just launched it in March last year. In addition to hot air and steam, it is now with the added microwave technology able to cook way faster than the iCombi while guaranteeing the same food quality as you have with the iCombi. For this, it is mainly interesting for these customers that are demanding high quality and speed. We are working here now with a lot of key account customers that are interested in this technology. For them, the projects will last quite long.
This can last up to a few years until we will see business with them. We have quite impressive success stories in the meantime with, for example, football stadiums where it is really quite obvious that you need the speed in order to sell as much food as possible in a 15-minute break, for example. If you then have high-quality food, you are able to sell even more and customers are happy in the end. One example we have already is Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. They are making 30% more sales in their halftime breaks. That unit is quite successful for them in terms of generating more sales. One thing is there is a bracket around all these products. This is called Connected Cooking. This is our cloud-based solution for connecting all the units. You see it here on the slide.
You can connect all the units with the software and you can control it remotely via your cell phone, via a tablet, or your PC. You can check the cleaning status. You can change your cooking path if you maybe forgot something to do. You get the option to download software, to update the software on hundreds or thousands of units with just one click of a button. There is a free range that we are offering for the customers with different services, plus in the very early stage as well, subscription-based modules where people pay then a fee depending on their number of outlets or units they are using. For example, hygienic management or energy management or service management. With this, we come here to the share of the sales we are making with a different product. You see the iCombi. That's the oldest product we are having.
The combi steamer technology is making up 60% of sales. The iVario is around 10% of sales. The after-sales business with accessories, service parts, cleaners, and some services like consulting and training is around 30% of sales. The service part that we are offering, much of this is for free. For example, if you have cooking live demonstrations for potentially new customers that we are offering around the world, this is hosted by one of our chefs. You cook together two to three hours and learn about all the advantages of the products. This is for free. Also, some academies that we are offering for existing users that get then more tips and deeper insight into using the product, that's also for free. What you see here is what we charge for.
The most important slide that we have at all is this one because for investors, is there a way to grow in the future as we did it in the past? We say yes. You see this huge potential. The red part of the chart, this is the open potential of the customers that are not using combi steamers yet while they could according to our analysis. You see 75% of the combi users are still open for the one over. In the iVario, it's even more. It's 95%, 96%. Here we are in a quite early stage. When you look at the gray bars, you see we have a market share of around 50%. One out of two combi steamers sold in this world is coming from RATIONAL. We are here the clear market leader. Quick glance on the financial performance.
Here you see the half-year sales development of the last few years. The CAGR, when we look back in the last decades, in a range of 10 - 12 years, if you do the different calculations, you would always come out with 8%, 9% CAGR, which we grew per year, some years a little bit more, some years a little bit less. We are convinced that this is something we can reach again because on the one hand, you saw this huge open potential. On the other hand, after a few years of, let's say, different focus topics with a lot of firefighting in the Corona time, in the supply chain crisis, and in this inflation crisis we had, we are now back on track, building up again the sales organizations in a proper way so that they can have more people, more activities, and with that, more sales.
If we are able to grow the sales organizations or the sales people, the feet on the street by 7%, 8%, 9%, we think we also can go back here to this mid to high single-digit growth path in the future. Regionally, where does this growth come from? Mainly from the overseas markets because here we have the lowest penetration levels with just around 10% - 15% penetration. In the well-penetrated European markets, Germany, you see here -2% . We do expect less growth here. Also, in the other European markets, there is all over lower growth, but this year is quite successful. We are expecting mid-single-digit growth rates here. In the overseas markets, we are expecting low double-digit growth rates. Asia is an exception this year because we had a huge order in 2024, which we delivered then. Here, the comparison is wrong.
All over, this is, depending on the penetration level, a huge growth market for us. On the product side, the iVario, you saw it is a lot smaller but growing quicker because of the lower penetration. There is more growth potential for us here. Of course, it's contributing to the growth path, but you won't see it that much. Step by step, when we look back, maybe 15 years ago, we had a share in the iVario of around 4%- 5%. Now we are at 10%, 11%. This is growing step by step as well. Margin-wise, our target is a level between 25% and 26% that we are striving for. We saw this dip in the COVID time, and we were able to recover from that quicker than expected, to be honest. Now we are here back on track in this range.
This is also, when we come to the next slide, what we expect for fiscal year 2025 now. The margin guidance is at around 26%. We made it a little bit more concrete in Q2 or after Q2 and said that it may be rather the lower part, meaning between 25% and 26%. The sales growth for this year, we are expecting to come out in the mid-single-digit percentage range. We saw before we were at 4%. We are here on track as well. Why do we think RATIONAL will be a good story for the future as well and why we will be successful? You see here a lot of opportunities and strengths. I do not want to go to all of this, but the major points, this is what we see on the left-hand side.
It's the rocketing cost levels for our customers where we think this is one of our strongest arguments for selling combi ovens because you save a lot of money for less food, for less energy costs, for less labor costs. A payback period of six to 12 months is not unusual. The other thing is indeed the increasing shortage of skilled labor, so that we can cover this problem for the customers. There was one example to sum up with. We did a study with AXA Konzern]. They did a renovation, and we made a lot of measurements together with a university before and afterwards. They said seven people were able to do things that before that 10 people needed to do. Saving in personnel of 30%, saving of about 50% in water, and 25% in energy. These are the most important arguments.
Plus, and this is what they were outlining as well, the food quality got better as well. With this, I am at the end and happy to answer some questions.
Thank you so much. Fantastic presentation. We already have two smaller questions in the chat. There is this other company called Circus that is providing self-cooking systems for professional kitchens. Are you aware and what's your take on that?
We are, of course, aware. We think they are in an absolutely different status right now. It's a startup business. They are trying to get the first, or they are working on the first customers. Maybe they sold first units. We see it for a lot of customers that we are serving, very difficult to use Circus units. We got also this feedback from big canteens. If you want to do hundreds of meals in a very, very short time, when people come and want to have food together in the canteen, it's difficult to serve them with these kinds of products. We think there is maybe some applications where it could make sense, but we think in many of our customer groups, it would not make sense in most applications. We will need to monitor for sure.
Do you think it would be possible that RATIONAL will also move in that direction or add a self-cooking system to your product lines?
Yeah, if you just compare it, it's not that different. Our units are self-cooking. You just put in a tray and then you take out the food, or the chef takes out the food and arranges it at the plate. Maybe this is the only or the major part they are substituting, that people do not need to arrange the food because they need to fill the food. The cooking is done automatically, and then it's filled automatically in sort of a bowl. This is also limiting a little bit the scope because you normally have sort of bowl food, for example, Thai curry or something like that. If you think of gastronomy and you want to have the art of cooking, it's not cooking a steak to the point, but it's rather arranging it in a very, very nice way on the plate, mixing it with flavors, etc.
From that point of view, I think we are partly already there.
Yeah, there's a question regarding your customer structure. Are you having many big canteens as customers from universities or medical centers?
This is, let's say, in the catering segment, there is a lot of these big customers. It's in senior citizen homes, it's in schools, it's in canteens, it's in kindergartens, it's in military bases, cruise ships. That's what I said before. Every location where you cook a lot of food at the same time because there is a big number of people who want to have food at the same time. This kind of technology is perfect because you can pre-cook, for example, and then put everything on the plate together. You do the so-called finishing. You put it in a rack and everything is cooked ready in the next day, two, three minutes rest cooking time. You can serve thousands of meals within one, yeah, half an hour or so. Maybe those customers can utilize all the advantages of the units in the best way.
Okay. A question regarding the U.S. You have 20%- 25% of group sales in the U.S. with no local production, whilst some competitors do produce there. How do you offset the tariffs plus steel duties that you have to pay soon?
Yes. We are not yet, or let's say there is not yet a final decision that we communicated. Will we increase prices, yes or no? If yes, by how much? This is really a part of the really tough discussions these days. The U.S. is our biggest growth market. From that point of view, this is important to maybe do not, let's say, overreact here or to do a very quick reaction in the wrong way. One way, of course, would be price increases. We could do partly. The other would be to work on the efficiency. For example, one thing that we already did is before that, we shipped to Canada via the U.S. With this, we paid the tariffs, or we would have now to pay these tariffs. Now we ship directly to Canada. It's just a 20% now that's in the U.S.
We will see how we can cover the rest. Maybe we could sacrifice some margin in order to grow faster and with that then get more efficient and get back to these margin levels later on. This is maybe part of the discussion that has now to be decided. I would assume that with the Q3 figures in November, we could here announce what we will do as well.
Okay. There are some questions regarding M&A. Maybe you can comment broadly on it. There are some questions in detail regarding would it make sense for you to acquire commercial cooking or other kitchen equipment manufacturers. Basically, what would be a timeframe, region, and so on?
We are clear fans of organic growth because of the special culture that we are having with this customer-focused dedication. That's quite special. That's why we are not, let's say, looking after really M&A opportunities. If there would be a very attractive offer in the software business, for example, that would help to improve our cooking intelligence, our connectivity solution, etc., then why not? We would presumably not go after any cooking equipment provider. We had one acquisition in the history. This was FRIMA in France where we now have the iVario from. This was just because it was our exclusive seller in the French market. They sold the business, and we needed to decide whether to acquire or to build up again everything newly.
Stefan, thank you so much. The time is up and our next guest is already here. Fantastic presentation. Maybe you can wrap it up in one or two sentences why RATIONAL is now the time to buy.
Yeah, maybe you followed a little bit the share price. It came down significantly in the first half year. Now it came back a little bit. We think now we are going back to this long-term growth path with investors and analysts are waiting for that we can prove that we go back to this mid to high single-digit growth path. With this, hopefully also the valuation will go up again.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Take care.