Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the H1 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I'm Moritz, the call's call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Jan Keppeler. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Moritz, and also a warm welcome from my side to everyone joining us today to our H1 2025 earnings call. With me today are Marcus Wolfinger, CEO of SE, as well as Oliver Albrecht, our CFO at Interim, who will guide you through the presentation and thereafter will be happy to take your questions. This presentation is being webcast live, and you can download the corresponding slides either directly from the webcast or from our website. Lastly, I want to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement, which we have on page two of this presentation. Now I'm happy to hand over to Marcus.
Yeah, thanks, Jan, and good afternoon in Europe and good morning in the United States. Welcome to our H1 presentation. As always, this presentation is split into, let's say, four major segments. First of all, I would like to give you an overview of what happened and particularly highlights. Then Oliver will walk you through the financials. You'll get back to me, and I'll walk you through the outlook. At the end, we'll have a Q&A session. I think it is important to understand that H1 was exactly as planned, with one exception, which is obviously FX. I'll dive into this and Oliver as well. We returned to sales growth thanks to the high development activities. Certainly, we saw stabilization with our Analyzer Systems. I think still we see some volatilities here and there. However, particularly in instrumentation, the overall situation stabilized.
When we returned from one of the most important congresses in this industry, the ADLM at the end of July in the United States, I think we definitely felt the spirit and the change of mood there. Actually, the appetite of driving innovation forward and investing money not only into developing new tests, but developing the infrastructure was clearly transparent at that show. That's why we came back with, let me say, a better mood in terms of resource allocation, particularly in development, as let's say our Analyzer Systems business, as well as our service parts and maintenance parts business, was good since the beginning of the year. Actually, this includes Q4 of 2024 as well. Still, we see some volatilities here and there.
In certain areas of our business, we still have to drive within eyesight, which is for an organization which was used to growth for almost a decade as a stressful situation and a stressful setup. At this moment in time, we are suffering a little bit with consumables, but we are expecting to get back to the historical rates towards the end of the year. We have progressed in the development of partnerships and definitely see this upturn in our deal pipeline, particularly in terms of system development.
It's worth mentioning that things are still fairly fragmented, which means at this moment in time, our partners are still a little bit shying away from investing money into really substantial big developments of the big next generation things and are trying to, first of all, keep their Analyzer Systems and infrastructure young by investments into new software versions, facelifts, upgrades, and so on. I know I'm always using this lousy example of a car.
What we definitely see in terms of the age of the install base is that the same thing happens that if people are in an economically less robust situation and they typically replace their car after 100,000 miles, that they now start to replace their cars only after 150,000 miles, which means they keep the instruments in the field as long as feasible and are investing more into maintenance and not into these new Analyzer Systems. That's exactly what we see these days. This is means to an end. We see this end coming up and we see particularly those customers with high COVID exposure and then going over the cliff after COVID-19 that they start seeing recovery in the field.
The volume of tests is going up and up, not only in those areas which were not affected, neither positively nor negatively during COVID, but those ones which were positively affected and placed a lot of Analyzer Systems during COVID. Thereafter, so less Analyzer Systems that we see that they are emptying their warehouses. We see that new orders are coming in. I'll dive into details when we break down revenue streams in the course of the presentation. It will get you some supplementary information. I think, again, it is important to understand that we had this stable gross margin. We were fairly proud that although we still see increasing input prices, we could keep traction in terms of output prices to a certain degree.
We have a program ongoing in order to continue to improve, on the one hand side, our cost situation, on the other hand side, our gross margin situation. The delta we see, really bottom line, EBIT is almost exclusively caused by FX. If we would exclude the FX situation we had in H1, our EBITDA margin and our EBIT margin would be 200 basis points higher. That actually shows the operational development of the company in the first six months. We can confirm our full year outlook. The developments in H1 were in line with intra-year expectations. That gets me to the point where I would like to hand over to Oliver, leading you through the financials.
Yeah, thanks, Marcus. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Let's start with a quick view on our major KPIs on page five. Sales increased in the first six months by 5.2% to EUR 118.6 million. This increase was mainly driven by a strong first quarter and a strong sales contribution from our development business. In the second quarter, the sales figure decreased slightly by 1% year-on-year to EUR 58.2 million. As Marcus already mentioned, we see a clear upturn in the deal pipeline in the area of system development. Despite a stable gross margin, our adjusted EBIT margin decreased in the first six months by 160 basis points to 7.2%. Regarding the second quarter, the margin decrease was even higher with 640 basis points year-on-year.
Marcus mentioned already this margin decline is primarily attributable to impairment of financial assets in the amount of EUR 400,000 and the negative effect from currency translations in the second quarter, mainly with a net effect of EUR 1.7 million. Without these effects, our margin would be at 8.9%. I will come back to this later on in my presentation when we talk about our P&L in more detail. On the next page, please, on six, I would like briefly to comment on the adjustments to EBIT. By looking on the left-hand side, I would like to explain the effect from the adjustments from PPA amortization and some other one-off effects on our EBIT figure. Unadjusted EBIT amounted to EUR 5.3 million, and adjusted EBIT was EUR 8.5 million. In total, we adjusted EUR 3.2 million.
EUR 1.6 million was for PPA amortization, and the other one-time expenses include consulting fees for M&A and strategy advisory and some additional accruals for audit costs, but also for reorganization measures in the finance department to solve capacity constraints and some severance payments. These provisions for the audit and reorganization of the finance department are also in connection with the change of auditor and the adjustment of the accounting method, as explained in our annual report. Let's move on to the next page, please. Talking about sales development in the first six months, 2025, as said, our sales increased by 5.8%. This is based on constant currency calculation. The first six months show a resilient growth with service parts and consumables and increased recognition of development and service sales. The ramp-up curve for newly launched products is still subdued.
We see a low but stabilizing demand for MDX systems after the pandemic-related decrease. On the next page, I would like to show you a breakdown of our sales by division. Looking on the chart on the left-hand side, you see revenue from system sales decreased slightly by 2.4% to EUR 34.9 million. This is a share of 29.5% of total sales. The revenue from service parts and consumables increased by 2.8% to EUR 53.7 million. This is now the biggest part of total sales with a share of 45.3%. Sales from development and services increased by 20% to EUR 28.8 million and accounts now for 24.2% of total sales. Maybe, Marcus, you would like to comment more on this development?
Yeah, I think here the six-month charts are a little bit misleading. The plots will certainly not be in line with what we'll see at the end of the year. I think it's obvious that at this point, and Oliver elaborated on that already, that at this moment in time, particularly service parts and consumables are higher than after the six-month period in 2024. The same applies for development and services, and we are shorter in Analyzer Systems. On a full year's basis, this picture will definitely change. At this moment in time, revenues with service parts and consumables are very heavy loaded by particularly service parts and maintenance parts and less by consumables. This is about to change. The same thing applies for development activities. I think at the end of 2025, development and services will fall shorter than actually in 2025.
For Analyzer Systems, we'll definitely see higher growth rates as compared to 2024. What I want to get across is that at this moment in time, it looks like growth is driven by service parts, consumables, and developments. However, on a full year's basis, it will definitely be driven by Analyzer Systems. I think that's important to understand that this is going to happen in the second half of the year. A lot of the activities which will lead to sales, particularly like pre-work for manufacturing, have been done already in the first six months. We have additional orders, particularly, and if you want, please bear with me. We talked about that at the end of last year that things were pushed out into 2025, that some of those things will now become effective.
That's why we are expecting, on the one hand side, a reduction of the inventory levels because things are inventory at this point. Secondly, Analyzer Systems is going to accelerate materially. Oliver.
Yeah, okay. Let's move on to the next page, where I would like to comment on our adjusted EBIT and EBIT margins. As you can see here on the left-hand side, the chart here, our EBIT decreased by 14% to EUR 8.5 million, and adjusted EBIT margin decreased by 160 basis points to 7.2% year-on-year. This is attributable to a sharp decline in margins in the second quarter, where we achieved only 5.4% after 8.9% in the first quarter. If you look at the table at the bottom right, you can see how costs have changed year-on-year. R&D and sales-related expenses are slightly better year-on-year. G&A expenses increased by EUR 1.7 million, but these expenses include one-off expenses in the amount of EUR 1.6 million, as I already mentioned, for consulting fees, some auditor fees, and severance payments.
A major negative impact, as said, on profitability comes from the currency translation effects arose in the second quarter. These are booked under other operating expenses, and the net FX effects in the first six months amounted to EUR 1.7 million. Year-on-year, the change in the net balance of other income and expenses is even higher with EUR 2.3 million. If you look here on the table, that's one of the main effects on our EBIT margin decline. In addition, we booked maybe another word regarding our FX effects. I think that's also mentioned. If you look into the future, and if you look on the development of the U.S. dollar exchange rate, just to give you a certain flavor here, regarding our budget, we calculated with an exchange rate of 1.11 euros to U.S. dollars. Now the current exchange rate is around $1.16-$ 1.17. We expect that the U.S.
currency exchange rate will be by the year end between $1.15 and $ 1.20. We have calculated this based on our expected U.S. dollar sales. We expect or we see a certain risk if the dollar is going in the direction of $1.18. We see here maybe another effect of $1 million, but this is in regards to sales, to lower sales, and then this related margin effect. That's maybe regarding the FX, what we expect here. In addition to this FX impact, we booked a EUR 400,000 flat rate allowance for overdue receivables. This is for receivables which are overdue for more than 90 days. In general, we do not have any problems with bad stats. We see here not an increased risk in this area. That's just for cautious reasons here. That's some of the requirements from IFRS where we have to show this now on a singular basis.
The margin decline in the second quarter should not be viewed as an ongoing trend. Our gross margin was stable despite a low sales volume in the second quarter. For the second half of the year, especially in the fourth quarter, we expect much higher revenues from system sales, but also from service parts and consumables and development business, which should have a positive impact on economies of scale and will lead to a significant EBIT and EBIT margin improvement in the remaining six months of 2025. As Marcus mentioned at the beginning, based on these expectations, we confirm our full year sales and margin guidance. Let's move on now to the cash flow development on page 10. Our operating cash flow amounted to -EUR 5.8 million.
The main factors influencing this weak cash flow situation were, on the one side, lower net income of EUR 1.4 million, high tax payments for the Stratec Germany company in the total amount of EUR 6.9 million. These are mainly tax areas for the period 2018- 2022. In consequence, we had also now higher tax prepayments for 2025. We also see here a net increase of inventories by EUR 3.3 million, and we see a decrease in trade payables in the amount of EUR 3.7 million. Our DPO is currently at 60 days. Regarding the increase in inventories, you can see in the balance sheet here an increase from EUR 122 million- EUR 125 million. This initially appears to indicate a further growth. If we look on the raw material, and the raw materials are the biggest part in our inventories, they remained virtually unchanged.
I have to say that inventories of work in progress and finished goods rose slightly. We expect a significant increase in system deliveries in the third and fourth quarter. Just to give you a rough idea, we expect sales from systems, this will increase roughly from EUR 35 million- EUR 57 million in the second half of the year. In order to meet this higher demand, we have to stock some material in new parts. Therefore, despite measures we have taken in our purchasing department, for example, we have significantly reduced our commitments from framework agreements concluded in the previous year. Inventories did not decline overall by the end of June. However, with higher shipments, we expect noticeable improvements by the end of the year with corresponding positive effect on operating cash flow.
Due to the negative operating cash flow, the free cash flow swapped into a negative figure of EUR 14.7 million as well. Our financial indebtedness calculated on net debt to adjusted EBITDA deteriorated from 1.0x- 2.3x. We have enough headroom to be compliant with our financial governance. Another remark here, we are currently in the process to refinance our bridge loan and part of our bank loans by a new syndicated loan in the amount of EUR 125 million with a term of five years plus two years of extensions. We expect the signing and closing of this transaction by the end of August. With that said, I would like now to return to Marcus, who will comment on our outlook and on our guidance. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, thanks, Oliver. Oliver already mentioned that we want to confirm our financial guidance. Oliver mentioned, and I mentioned before, that we still see some volatilities and lumpiness here and there. However, we factored in enough leeway and wiggle room to deal with those factors, even, like as Oliver mentioned, if FX continues to move in the wrong direction. The max risk exposure top line with a dollar exchange rate of $1.18, which is, I think, at this moment in time, consensus by certain banks where we will be at year end. This means an additional applied pressure top line of about $1 million, like I said, already factored in. There is some leeway here and there. Confirming guidance, consolidated sales for 2025. We expect growth, a low to medium high single-digit % range on a constant currency basis. Current forecasts are looking very well. Orders in the books.
Things in production, we actually see some upsides here and there. We are discussing with a number of customers what happens if they increase their forecast between now and end of year, whether or not we are able to supply. I think, again, it's worth mentioning that the times are over where a supplier network, a worldwide supplier network with all those headwinds facing here and there, is able to increase manufacturing materially within weeks or months. At this moment in time, we are planning manufacturing based on actually mentioned demands or actually given in forecasts, which are typically customer contract-independent forecasts that are given covering four quarters. Typically, on a rolling basis, we are covering at least a year in terms of forecast. Adjusted EBIT margin forecasted to be in the area of 10%- 12%.
We had this discussion about what happens with FX applying pressure in the first six months, as mentioned now a couple of times. We would be further up by about 200 basis points if this wouldn't have happened. Does this mean that our guidance tends to the lower end? The answer is no. Like I mentioned already, we already factored in certain wiggle room when we have given this guidance at the time, particularly considering things like tariffs and customer behavior and shipping times and weaknesses of certain markets, uncertainties in China, and so on. We were really trying to err on the safe side. Investments in tangible and intangibles combined in the area of 8%- 10% of sales last year, super cautious, only 7.1%. I think this year, there is a certain catch-up effect.
We'll probably get between this forecasted 8%- 10% probably based upon incoming orders and particularly new development activities, which, like I said before, have been brought in over the past three months and other very promising upcoming, so probably requiring further investments, which will get us into this 8%- 10% ratio. Certainly, talking about our focus for the remainder of the year and beyond. Definitely, maintaining cost discipline is a very important thing for us. We want to keep things under control. Over the past two years, we have initiated two independent earnings improvement programs. We were very cautious with trying to keep motivation up on the one hand side, but on the other hand side, applying a high degree of discipline, not that we certainly wanted to avoid the drainage of know-how and talent, which I think worked out very well.
However, we will continue to keep an eye on that. In certain areas, we are expecting a certain catch-up effect because, like I said, for an organization which was used to growth for almost two decades and now going like over the past two years sideways, now expecting growth to come back. This is a situation we had to learn to live with. I think this worked out very well, but please bear with me. We will certainly maintain a high degree of cost discipline. Executing a deal pipeline, I think it is worth mentioning again that things got very fragmented over the past two years. The really big teams were lacking. The really big deals were lacking. I beg your pardon. However, we see that our customers are now discussing new bigger things. We keep our product portfolio young with the help of our customers.
They are financing their relevant products to keep them young. We have nice promising things ongoing. We are very positive that we can execute on this deal pipeline. With those deals we have executed over the past years, which are now leaving the deal pipeline and will leave the development pipeline over the next two to three years, we will definitely support our operational growth. However, we need to fill up the development pipeline, and that's actually an ongoing process with very promising activities there as well. Certainly, within our strategic development, we have identified areas of growth where we are investing, as in the past, our own money in order to be able to maintain our business model where our customers are stepping in at a certain point.
We are not developing their product, but are using our technologies in order to develop specific products for our customers using our background technology, which helps us in order to be responsible for supply, long-term services, product lifecycle management, and consumable and spare parts supply over the entire product lifecycle. This is definitely a very important part of our business model. Those areas are, amongst others, and we obviously only mention those areas which are well known and where we have already a certain footprint, like high-sensitivity immunoassays, certainly advanced imaging where we have invested a tremendous amount of money over the past years, and particularly as far as liquid handling activities are concerned in cell and gene therapy.
With the acquisition of Natech and with the activities we already had in our smart consumables business, we are now able to show the full value chain, helping our customers to leverage the relevant business models of Natech, Stratec consumables, and Stratec instruments in order to move further away from supplying our customers with the relevant parts like instruments or consumables and stepping closer to actually a full system supplier being responsible for literally everything except the biochemistry coming from our customers over the entire product lifecycle. We have a very well-filled pipeline as far as M&A is concerned, very binary. If you believe in consolidation and we believe in consolidation, this is the time to act. Over the past 10 years, we saw definitely elevated prices, and the quality was not as expected.
What we saw now, the times are there that the quality of potential targets is increasing and prices are getting more and more reasonable. This is the time to act, and that's why we keep our eyes open. We definitely need to improve our cash flow dynamics. Oliver mentioned our activities here and there, definitely, and we discussed it at length over the past 12 months to improve our inventory efficiency. Again, please bear with me, particularly for those Analyzer Systems and consumables which are turning and which are generating our cash flows and revenues. Inventory management is already optimized. When we are sitting on inventory levels or elevated inventory levels, this particularly affects those Analyzer Systems which are unfortunately not churning.
As the product lifecycle of those analyzers is 10, 15 years, and particularly for those ones not churning at this moment in time, they are still at a very early stage of the product lifecycle. This is not a waste. We are just sitting on inventory levels. Our customers are financing that, or we are applying material and substantial pressure on our customers to finance that. We hope we can work that down. As Oliver mentioned, and I think we still stick to that figure, we are expecting a cash release coming from inventory of north of EUR 10 million on a three-year basis. This gets me to the end of the outlook and the focus. I would like to hand back to Moritz, who will explain us how to do Q&A. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchstone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from Jean Koh from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I have three, if I may, and I would like to ask them one by one. The first question is on your Analyzer Systems business. You mentioned an increasing momentum in this business in the second half of the year. Can you provide more details on this? Specifically, which application areas are driving this growth?
Yeah, Jan, thanks for the question. I think it's a smart move to handle those questions step by step. What's happening here? Definitely what we see is that particularly in areas like, I would say at this moment in time, higher throughput Analyzer Systems, driving the trend of centralization is definitely what we see, particularly in areas like immunoassays, particularly in immune hematology, a little bit less in molecular, but return. Again, allow me to mention that we are in a special situation, which is not just related to the tail end of COVID and oversaturation and working down the inventory levels and capacities built during COVID-19 at the end customer side. You probably remember that we are in a generation change for a molecular instrument for one of our most important customers.
It's a smaller instrument, the benchtop Analyzer System, where we are about to change generation, which is going from version one into version two, requiring additional approval schemes. We are in this transition phase. This is not just overcapacities in the field. It's as always that if you announce a new Analyzer System, the demand of the old one shrinks. Nobody wants to buy something which will be outdated soon. That's why we still see a kind of hesitant behavior of end customer and customer. For the Panda franchise, still with a high dominance in the United States and high exposure in the United States with still high degrees of saturation in the centralized lab, we are going sideways.
As far as the TMA solution, if we're looking into the Panda point of, sorry, PCR solution, we still see increasing demands, which is actually nice to see that demands are really coming back. All our other molecular Analyzer Systems always showed good traction. We definitely cannot complain here. That's where we see momentum coming back. Hematology is one of the weak spots at this moment in time. We see a lot of, particularly in commoditized areas, we see a lot of competitive pressure, particularly as far as pricing is concerned. We don't have, in certain areas, we don't see any technological advantages on our end. That's why we are investing a tremendous amount of money here as well to keep our, let me say, the level of innovation up. We'll see what's going on there.
Like I said, very good tailwinds in immune hematology, return of demand in molecular, good traction as far as our advanced sample prep business is going. In other areas, particularly in the smart consumable section, we see that demand is still very volatile. We hope that we will see a recovery towards the end of the year and beginning next year. Hematology is really suffering from competitive setup, particularly coming with instruments, like I said, in the commoditized area coming from Asia. Next question, yeah.
Great. Yeah, thanks. The second question is, you mentioned that some of the recent product launches are less dynamic than expected. Is this a structural issue or just a timing issue? To phrase it differently, do you still believe that these launches could be a meaningful contributor down the road?
Jan, if you allow me, I would like to kind of make a little bit of bigger circles just to make sure that everyone understands the question. During COVID-19 and thereafter, I think it was very obvious that these Analyzer Systems with huge additional demands were driven by COVID-19. I'm mainly referring to molecular instruments, particularly PCR-based instruments. I think it was obvious that this would lead to a certain saturation and that saturation would lead in the years to follow COVID-19 to a kind of lower demand for this very analyzer system. We were trying to explain to the financial market that particularly during COVID-19 and right thereafter, we launched a number of instruments and that we at that time believed that the launches were able to actually offset the declining demand from these instruments with high COVID-19 exposure and therefore oversaturation and therefore lower sales following COVID-19.
This unfortunately didn't happen in the expected manner. We named three different Analyzer Systems which were affected by that, but they had all different stories. In immunoassays, I think the market after COVID-19 was driven by a high degree of centralization and fewer lower instruments. That's why the pickup here was lower. With this next wave in immunoassay systems and decentralization in Europe and the United States, and still higher demands in testing volumes, we expect that these mid-size Analyzer Systems will pick up materially. Our customer is bringing menu on that analyzer system, so we have no doubts that this will pick up. We have a DPCR instrument still suffering. The customer is bringing menu on that analyzer system. Here we expect a certain pickup. I wouldn't say that this is structural.
This is very much driven by the individual focus of the relevant customer and by the relevant situation of our customer. When I say situation, it means the menu available on those Analyzer Systems, the markets our customers are trying to tackle here. Differentiating Asia, the United States, and Europe. Oliver mentioned, we still see, as referred to the initial business cases we had with those instruments and the contracts we have with our customers, particularly talking minimum business guarantees. We see at this moment in time, in all three areas, lower than expected upturn curves. In the communication we have with our customer, we are expecting that with a certain deferred consideration we will get to the point we expected to be already two years ago. Yes and no, Jan, this is partly customer independent, partly structural, but like I said, this business didn't vanish. It's just pushed out.
Hope that helps.
It does. Finally, on your margin guidance, we've seen over the last few years that orders or the realization of development sets were postponed by a few quarters. How do you view the risk that this happens again this year in view of the required implied acceleration?
I think, yeah. That's actually already factored in. We learned from the mistakes of the past. Obviously, for those following us for a long period of time, we were always trying to kind of decouple activities to a certain degree to make sure that our years are not always as back-end loaded as they used to be in the past. However, in 2025, the year will be back-end loaded. We factored that in.
That's why at this moment in time, if we are looking into the KPIs, if we are looking into the inventory levels, if we are looking into how we put our Analyzer Systems into manufacturing, the demands of the customers, the communication we have with the customers, how they are planning to take those instruments, it shows that this guidance is actually in line with the way we are supplying our customers with instrument consumables, software upgrades, and so on. We don't expect any disruptions here.
Okay, great. Thank you.
And you.
The next question comes from Michael Haidinger from Berenberg Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions here. I would also like to go one by one here. The first one is on U.S. tariffs. Relatively unexpectedly for me and also for Switzerland, the U.S. has imposed high import taxes on Switzerland, 39%, I believe. Can you give us an update on your production share in Switzerland and what do you expect, whether these high, now much higher tax tariffs will have an impact on demand or maybe even on your competitive position?
Yeah, Michael, thanks very much and good afternoon. Thanks for bringing that topic up. It was like a 30-second question, which requires probably a 10-minute answer. I'll try to make it brief. First of all, I think it is important to understand where Stratec is standing in the value proposition towards the end customers. If we see a typical setup where we are providing Analyzer Systems and plastic consumables to our customers, which are the life science research companies or the diagnostics companies of the world, and they are selling their products and services with their biochemistry to the end customers, which, let's say, is a laboratory, to make things easy. Our value proposition is only 10% for the Analyzer System, and 90% of that value proposition towards the end customer is coming from our customers.
Those customers are typically, particularly in the United States and in China and in Europe, manufacturing locally, which means if what we provide sees a perceived price increase by, it doesn't matter, 30%, 40%, then we make that 10%- 14%, adding the 90% coming from our customer, which makes the price increase from, say, or the price or the perceived value from 100- 104. I think I did the right math, and I hope you understand what I mean. Long story short, I think short term, this is not meaningful. I can confirm that literally each and every of our customers with U.S. sales exposure is bringing up the discussion about localizing manufacturing. What do we do about tariffs? How can we handle that? We literally have different discussions in different depth levels with literally each and every of our customers.
I'm not super worried about short and mid-term structural changes or behavioral changes of our customer. I'm more worried about that a U.S. customer says, "Why do I continue to work with a European company, even if the quality and the pricing scheme fits and we are a perfect partner?" If we see volatilities in the tariffs here, we have to definitely make sure that our customer perceives our services, particularly in the United States, as being brought from the United States. That's why we are undertaking activities in order to do more in the United States, which is definitely important for our customer. This is, like I said, less a transactional thing, but more a perceived thing. We are working on that.
At this moment in time, particularly on the instrumentation side and on the spare parts side, we are generating between 40% and 50% of our revenues in Switzerland. However, we have the means to split up things that, let me give you like an oversimplified example, that we are shipping Analyzer Systems which are going to the United States from our German manufacturing side and try to serve the rest or the regions of the world out of Switzerland. We have certain levels. Like I said, this is an ongoing discussion. It's not an easy one. It's painful and requires a lot of transactional activities in order to be on the safe side and to make sure that, let me say, the customer doesn't perceive this as a further burden. Hope that helped.
Okay, thanks. Again on the H2 development that you're expecting, did I understand Oliver right that you're expecting EUR 57 million sales in the second half in Analyzer Systems?
Yeah, like I said, I would not confirm. Oliver said definitely the 57, and we are expecting that to happen. On the other side, you know there are things, it very much depends on the perspective of Analyzer Systems, what's factored in. We have, let me say, different metrics on that. However, in the comparison we have on the slides, which are in front of you, the EUR 57 million can be confirmed. Could even be higher. We have certain tenders of certain customers which are not yet fully confirmed. On the other side, particularly if we bring in additional business for those tenders, we still have limitations to be able to supply. However, looking into our financial forecast, the EUR 57 million are factored in at this moment in time.
Right, thanks. The operating cash flow was highly impacted by this tax payment, as you have elaborated related to this. What is your best guess for your tax rate going forward?
At this moment in time, I think we can sustain our existing tax rate. We will definitely move away from historically low tax rates in the area of south of 20%. I mentioned that discussion. Obviously, the earnings generated in certain areas which have lower tax rates in the group are particularly affected by tariffs at this moment in time, which means doing more manufacturing outside those low tax areas means certainly covering the revenue side of things, but not the tax side of things. At this moment in time, I definitely want to shy away from giving you a robust indication. As I've mentioned, we are in a phase where we have to act very agile, and we are intending to do that. Looking into the forecast, I could certainly give you that tax rate, and I actually have it in front of me.
At this moment in time, this is definitely too volatile and too lumpy. I would like to make that point and later on discuss the post-tax KPIs as compared to our indications given at this moment in time.
Okay, you said that you want to maintain it. You maintain it on the level of last full year or on H1?
Last full year. The tax rate will be between roughly 20%- 23%. As I said, this was tax arrears coming from a mutual agreement with the fiscal authorities between Germany and Switzerland. Here we had to, and we have finalized these negotiations and discussions with the tax authorities. Therefore, we had to pay here local and corporate tax in the amount of EUR 3.2 million regarding this mutual agreement. We had also then to increase our prepayments for 2025. This has now had an impact on the cash flow situation. As you can see from the balance sheet, we have reduced also our tax liabilities on the balance sheet.
Michael, was this more a cash flow question or more a tax rate question?
Maybe regarding the profitability or the net income, its impact on net income was my understanding.
Okay. All right. Thank you very much. I jump back into the line.
The next question comes from Oliver Reinberg from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Oh, yeah, thanks very much for taking my question. Marcus, the first one will be on currencies, just getting back on that. If I understood you correctly, you talked about $1.7 million happened in the first half and potentially another $1 million in the second half. I just want to clarify, is this just the impact on the other operating income line, which I guess is down to the revaluation effect at the end of the day? I guess on top, you simply have the impact from the mismatch that you have meaningfully higher sales than cost exposure. The first question would be just, can you clarify, is it just like balance sheet positions? What would be the kind of all-in impact on the margin from currencies for the full year? That would be helpful.
Oliver, more question for you.
Okay. Regarding this $1.7 million, this is the net effect from currency translation. This means evaluation of cash positions in the balance sheet, evaluation of intercompany loans, evaluation of accounts receivable, accounts payable. Here we had a negative impact, which is more or less the other expenses shown in the P&L. We had to counterbalance this by other operating income. This is not only FX gains or gains from this currency translation. There we had also some effect from release of accruals, but the net impact on the currency was $1.7 million. This is all regarding the balance sheet items. Regarding the sensibility of our sales regarding fluctuations in the currency exchange rates, I said that we have calculated, of course, our guidance and our sales forecast based on an exchange rate of EUR 1.11. Now the U.S. dollar is much weaker with about $1.16.
We have done also some forward agreements to secure the exchange rates. They have a positive market value at the moment. We think that if the dollar continues to be weak and will be at $1.18 by year-end, that might be a risk of $1 million coming or a burden regarding lower sales and therefore a little bit lower EBIT margins coming from the lower revenues.
Thanks. Just to clarify, that includes the impact from the mismatch between sales and costs that you have in U.S. dollar?
Excuse me, please. Could you please repeat the question? I had to change.
Yeah, folks, can you hear me? Oliver, can you hear me?
I'm sorry, we might have lost the speaker line. Please hang in. We'll dial the speaker line and join him again.
Oliver, I'm still in the line. I think we postpone.
Actually, Oliver, the question on you, Marcus.
Yeah, just fire.
The question is simply like the $1.7 million plus the $1 million, does this include or exclude the impact from the mismatch from sales and cost in U.S. dollar?
Oliver just stepped into my office, so he can answer himself.
I have to apologize for the package. Maybe you can see also the impact. What I said is these are currency translation effects on balance sheet items, $1.7 million. Of course, in addition, you can see the impact if you look on the sales growth on constant currency levels. The difference here is the growth rate, 5.8%- 5.2%. This is the impact from a lower U.S. dollar in the first half of the year.
What is still not sure to me is whether, if we leave all balance sheet items aside, if the dollar devalues on 40% of the sales and you just have, let's say, 20% of cost in the U.S. dollar, you have an impact on your profitability. Is that already included in the $1.7 million+ $1 million or not?
Yes, I understand that.
It's already included?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, perfect. Sorry. The other follow-up would be on tariffs. In the past, my understanding was that your prices are basically designed on an ex-factory price. Marcus, what you just talked about, like you're shifting around the deliveries, I mean, the increase, the impact of the tariffs, is that paid by yourself now and you're raising prices?
No, no, no.
Oh, no.
Sorry, that was probably a little bit misleading. I was trying to explain things from our customer's perspective and then customer's perspective. We definitely invoice ex works, which means we invoice as soon as, literally, and oversimplifying, if something leaves our factories. Like I said, this applies for 90% of all our shipments. In some cases, we have other regulations, but in no case, we are actually in charge for the tariffs, which means our customers are exporting themselves, and that's why tariffs are applied on them.
Perfect. That's helpful. The last question if I may, just because you were a bit more vocal than M&A, I mean, it was an ongoing topic, I think, for a bit of time now. Are these all smaller deals, or are there also potential deals in the pipeline that would potentially require the help of equity?
Oliver, you know we discussed it a lot. M&A is binary. It's a yes or no thing, very digital. We have, I mean, I can, and allow me to reiterate myself to a certain degree and then put a little bit more meat around the bones. We have an active process. In some cases, we were very close, and it didn't work out due to a variety of factors at the end. At the end of last year, we had a target which was actually a company which was, to a certain degree, on a smaller scale comparable to what actually Stratec Mothership does, with a little bit less exposure to own IP. In other cases, we are looking into early-stage activities. In other cases, we are looking to increase our footprint on U.S. soil. It very much depends. We are going in different directions.
In a direction, one is trying to find that Stratec too. Another direction is innovation. We talked about cell and gene therapy. Obviously, we are lacking certain technologies. M&A may mean in-licensing or finding targets which particularly address those technological demands. Certainly, we are going into different directions as far as consumables and smart consumables are concerned and instrumentation. Obviously, to a certain degree, we keep our eyes open. From that perspective, it is to a certain degree opportunistic. However, we have identified focus areas. We have identified, let me say, ticket sizes, and that's what we actually do. Full bandwidth, let me put it that way.
Understood. Thanks very much.
Very welcome.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one. The next question comes from Alexander Galitsa from Hauck Aufhäuser. Please go ahead. Ms. Galitsa, your line is open.
Yes, hi, apologies. Just the one thing I want to clarify on the tariff, if I understood correctly. Basically, is that across all your customers, this arrangement that the customer is responsible for the export of Analyzer , which practically completely eliminates your direct exposure to tariffs? Could you just confirm that?
Alex, I can confirm your statement, but that doesn't make the problem vanish. As a matter of fact, if a customer is, we have a contract with our customer that the transfer price of a certain good is 100, then we invoice 100, but the customer needs to bring it to the destination, the final destination. Certainly, intercompany transfer pricing of the customer applies then because we are typically shipping to centralized warehouses, which are sitting somewhere. In some cases, we still have them in Europe or on the British Island and so on. Tariffs are applying as soon as those things are getting imported into the United States. This is what is the responsibility of our customer. We are not affected by the fact that we are shipping something, but it increases the price for our customer.
If we think about a reagent rental model where a customer of ours, although we sell the product, so we have it from our books, we send the invoice, the customer gets the title, the customer keeps the product like an Analyzer System on his own books and does a reagent rental agreement with a client. He puts the equation into an Excel sheet of how many diagnostic tests are sold. If the instrument price goes up, the equation in some cases may longer fit and would have fitted if we wouldn't see tariffs. That is definitely something which penalizes everybody in that value stream. Probably us with a lower demand. We don't see that at this point.
Probably our customer has to pay the tariffs and factor it in into a reagent rental model, and the end customer with increased prices and therefore the payers that they have to pay higher prices. At the end, it's a penalization for literally everybody in the value chain. At this moment in time, we are not affected at all. We are just affected by structural behavior of certain customers, like I said, probably changing in focus of areas where the utilization of an instrument goes up and therefore placing less instruments. In other cases, where probably for the next generation instrument, the customer thinks about probably a closer cooperation with U.S. providers rather than European providers. That is actually something where we keep working on.
I mentioned that already a couple of times, not only since tariffs are applied, that we need to increase our exposure in the United States in terms of sourcing, in terms of manufacturing, and in terms of supply towards our customers. That is an important step for the next 10 years.
Understood. Just one follow-up on that topic. This situation, do you see it already trickling down into the, I guess, competitive bidding process when you talk to your customers that they might be preferring to work with suppliers that do have a stronger presence in terms of manufacturing locally, or how do the discussions go?
Not at all at this moment in time, Alex, we are certainly worried about that coming up. That's definitely an important point. Like I said, you don't have to be worried about that. This is one of the actual focus areas we are working on. Don't be worried about that.
Okay. Maybe a few topics, just a more higher level to understand the broader dynamics. In terms of Analyzers , maybe, and you did mention or gave some color in the presentation around that, just wondering whether there is more you can add on the high level. Would you say we are sort of at the end of the bottoming out cycle, if not maybe already past it in our Analyzers , and you should start seeing sustainably more growth coming through?
For the next quarters, not only the H2 uptake that you envision, but also beyond that. That's the first question. The second one is the dynamics within individual franchises. H1 revenues were practically flat at EUR 35 million. Now you expect a substantial uptake. Just to get a sense, what sort of a growth rate dispersion between those individual franchises? Do you continue to lose revenue in molecular? So the molecular diagnostics are still normalizing, or do you see it already at the floor and now about to take off or maybe slightly starting recovering? Any color with more granularity within the mix? What are the revenue growth rates you're achieving with Analyzer , ex-molecular diagnostics, and what molecular diagnostics are doing?
No, Alex, excellent question and thank you for that. Actually, the answer requires a deep dive. Let me try to lean back and try to get you an overview without making the deep dive in each and every section and every franchise. At this moment in time, obviously, if we look into testing volumes, and I'm merely referring to the diagnostic space, however, please bear with me, we see similar dynamics in life sciences.
Definitely, the entire industry at the tail end and particularly thereafter, COVID-19 moved into more of a paralysis mode, being very cautious and trying to keep up the, let me say, the legacy product portfolio, young, applying grandfathering rules and so on, which means at this moment in time, we definitely see an elevated position in terms of spare parts supplies because, let me get you that, again, stupid, lousy example of the cars that you are doing more changing the brakes if the car gets older. That's what, you know, and we are doing the same, the very same things, which means in the field, our customers are keeping their portfolio young by doing maintenance and service works rather than selling new Analyzer Systems, even if selling new Analyzer Systems from a service cost perspective would make economical sense.
I think this is structural behavior and just psychology at this moment in time and probably availability of financial resources as well. This doesn't apply for us, applies for our customers. Let me say with a higher degree of normalization, our customers are getting into a better mood, are getting more appetite to invest more into their own future, buy new markets, new placements, even going into accounts where the economical sense is not present from the get-go, but rather happen downstream. If this gets back, we'll definitely see again elevated Analyzer System sales and a lower contribution in % coming from spares and maintenance parts. That's a given factor. I think at this moment in time, particularly, and I'm not talking consumables, I'm only talking maintenance parts and spares, which are at this moment in time artificially elevated coming from that structural behavior. We'll return back to more normalized.
However, this is overlapped by a number of generation changes we have at this moment in time. Particularly, our best selling immunoassay product will see a generation shift in the next four years with market launch pretty soon. Applying that new instrument sales in certain markets is the role of our customers. That transition will continue to be a four-year endeavor, which is going to happen. This will actually positively overlap demands coming from that structural change I've mentioned before.
On the other side, we definitely see that, and I don't want to say one of the low-hanging fruits, but that was way easier than to apply cost increases on Analyzer Systems, and applying price increases on service parts and consumables supply, is that our customers really have their development budgets, and we can take advantage of this high development budget, which is helping us to roll certain costs like maintenance costs, next-generation software developments, or new process modules within the Analyzer Systems to keep those products young and still keep regulatory approval up. The budget here is there, and you see that in elevated contribution of revenues coming from actual development revenues. I think this is more sustainable than the in % elevated contribution coming from service parts and consumables. I know this was a 30,000-foot perspective, but I'd hope it helps you to assess the situation.
I think, again, it's worth mentioning that instrumentation and therefore from our customers' perspective, CapEx comes at the tail end of investment cycles. We already saw volume coming back into the businesses of our customers in the fourth quarter of 2024. That's why we believe being at that tail end of investment cycle that Analyzer Systems sales will pick up over the next, say, six quarters. Hope that helps.
Yes, thank you. The last one for me is around service parts and consumables. H1, there was only slight growth in revenue. You mentioned that you're still suffering in consumables, but expected to get back towards historical rates soon. If you could maybe separate those two, service parts and consumables, how those individual verticals are performing.
Yeah, Alex, when describing the dynamics in this business, I was actually differentiating. We are not reporting those, let me say, within the franchise of consumables, service parts, and maintenance parts. We are not reporting those isolatedly. What I wanted to make sure is that you understand is that at this moment in time, the growth is driven by service parts and maintenance parts, less by consumables. In the future, it will be driven by consumables. I think that's the message we wanted to get as well.
Could you just explain why consumables, what's happening in consumables? Why are you suffering in this area?
At this moment, yeah, I mean, probably important to understand that when we are talking about consumables, we are always talking of what we call smart consumables. At this moment in time, we saw that some of our customers have taken back their forecasts. Again, I, you know, it is important that I don't want to get you details about our customers and customers' behavior. I cannot. This is the role of our customers. We have CDAs and NDAs, so we cannot share data, which may lead you to the point that you can isolate isolated customers. However, we were talking about that we are suffering, overall in the group with lower than expected ramp-up curves for new Analyzer Systems.
Part of what we expected to happen in our consumables business is definitely a derivative of one of the businesses which at this moment sees a lower than expected ramp-up curve. We can offset that in the instrumentation business with higher demands in other areas and new instruments. Certainly, with the development cycles in smart consumables and the investments taking place here, you definitely see that directly, and that's what we actually described here. Hope that helps.
Okay. Thank you. Yes, thank you.
Very welcome.
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jan Keppeler for any closing remarks.
Thank you, Moritz. This concludes our call today. In case you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us or anyone else from the Investor Relations team. Thank you again for joining, and goodbye.