Recording in progress.
Welcome to our TAKKT AG, following the publication of the half-year figures of 2024. TAKKT is represented by CEO Maria Zesch, Interim CEO Andreas Weishaar, and CFO Lars Bolscho. So the Management Board will speak shortly and guide us through the presentation. Following the presentation, we will move over to our Q&A session, in which you will be allowed to place your questions via audio line or chat. And having said this, we are looking forward to the results, and I hand over to you, Mrs. Zesch.
Thank you, and welcome to our earnings call for the Q2 results. I'm hosting the call together with our CFO, Lars Bolscho, and I'm glad that Andreas Weishaar, my successor in the CEO position, has also joined the call to introduce himself. Welcome, Andreas.
Thank you, Maria, and also a warm welcome to everyone from my side.
As you know, today's call is a special call for me, since it's the last time that I'm hosting this call and presenting TAKKT to you. Therefore, let me start with a quick recap of TAKKT's transformation and achievements in the last three years. Andreas will introduce himself and share his priorities going forward. Lars will give then an update on the Q2 financials and our outlook that we adjusted end of last week. As I'm sure you have seen, I will step down from the Management Board of TAKKT, effective July the 31st. We have achieved a lot in the last three years, but TAKKT's transformation must be continued. There is another chapter to be started and executed. It is important in this situation to pass the baton on rather sooner than later, to not lose speed and not lose focus.
So I'm glad that I can hand over to Andreas Weishaar, whom I've onboarded the last weeks. Let me give you also a short recap of the achievements in the last three years. So we have developed and established a vision, bringing new worlds of work to life. We have developed a new strategy and successfully starting an extensive transformation process with our three strategic pillars: growth, OneTAKKT, and caring. In each of the pillars, we have achieved progress. Still, there is work to be done. In growth, I am not happy where we are with our status. Still, I know we have set the basis in e-commerce, in pricing, in cross-selling to accelerate growth. In OneTAKKT, we build up four group functions. We harmonize processes, systems, and warehouse structures to be more efficient. And in caring, we won the prestigious German Sustainability Award.
Nowadays, 30% of our assortment is enkelfähig, and we have a high customer NPS. Last but not least, we shaped a new, more diverse company culture. As said, I believe we changed TAKKT for the better, but the transformation is not done yet. Definitely, a new chapter has to be started. There's still a lot we have to do to win the hearts and minds of our customers. This needs full energy and dedication, and therefore, I'm glad that I can hand over to Andreas, whom I got to know as a determined leader with drive and focus. He will continue what we have started.
Before I hand over to Andreas, let me say thank you to the Supervisory Board for the good collaboration and the trust during the last three years, to the management team at TAKKT for their incredible support, and to all employees at TAKKT for caring for our customers 24/7 and always willing to go the extra mile. But I also want to say a big thank you to you for your trust in our company and for your support. I really appreciated our open discussions and your interest and your support. So with that, I hand over to Andreas, who will take over as interim CEO in a few days. Andreas and I, we had a very good transition in the last few weeks, and I am convinced that this will be a seamless transition. So Andreas, over to you.
Maria, thank you again for the introduction and the support during the handover. Thank you also to the Supervisory Board for their trust and support, as well as to the entire TAKKT team for the warm welcome that I received. The past few weeks, I had the opportunity to meet customers, visit sites, speak with many of our great employees, and gain a good understanding of our situation and challenges. I will share my first insights and initial take on priorities later in this call. Before I hand over to Lars for the financials, a few words on my background. I spent most of my professional career in the capital goods industry, one of our customer segments, as well as in the food service industry at one of our largest suppliers.
I held different leadership roles, managing global businesses, improving and digitizing processes and systems, executing strategic programs, and delivering results. I look forward to leading TAKKT with a clear customer focus, setting growth impulses in omni-channel and the more transactional e-commerce, improving our processes and systems, and further developing our culture towards true customer centricity. Today, we have strong customer relations, recognized brands, a leading product offering, and very motivated employees. But as our lack in performance goes, we also have a number of challenges. In addition to a soft market environment, primarily here in Europe, these are resulting from internal issues, but that also means solving them is fully in our own control. So I see a lot of potential for improvement from where we stand today. I will provide, as mentioned, more color on these later in the call.
With that, over to Lars for the financials and the outlook.
Thank you, Andreas. Looking forward to working with you, and thank you, Maria, for your achievements, for your commitment for TAKKT, and also the great collaboration, and all the best for you. Now, let's have a look at key financial developments of the last quarter. When we released our Q1 results end of April, we expected a gradual improvement in the second quarter. As you've seen in our earnings release, we did not achieve this. Two reasons contributed to that, external and internal. Let's talk about the external, the environment first. GDP growth remained weak in Europe and slightly better in the U.S. Especially the weakness in the manufacturing environment in Europe remained an important negative influence on us.
After good improvement in May, the Manufacturing PMI for the Eurozone showed a decline again for June and also July, and with this, remains clearly below the growth level, a challenge for our INP activities. In the US, indicators are stronger. However, Restaurant Performance Index in the US, relevant for our FoodService division, also remained in contraction territory. What we see and hear from competitors in the office furniture space also shows some headwinds for NBF. Coming to the internal reasons. In addition to challenging markets, we also had internal challenges, as we've already shared end of April. Biggest topic here is at FoodService , with challenges due to our ERP migration and around two important sales areas of FoodService . As expected and also talked about in the first quarter, we continue to see a negative impact from the Ratioform migration at INP.
On both sides, we have initiated measures to tackle these challenges. We've already made some progress in Q2, and we'll continue to prioritize these topics in the second half of the year. More on these topics and also more on the measures we have taken when we have a look at the divisions later. So looking at growth in the second quarter, while INP and OF&D performed in line with a weak Q1, the negative development at FoodService resulted in an organic growth rate of -19% for the group in the second quarter. Given the weak top line, we continued our resilience measures to improve gross profit margin, manage costs and FTEs towards a leaner base, and improve cash generation. We've done a good job here, once again, in the second quarter in all three areas.
Gross margin is above prior year, costs are going down, and cash flow is above prior year for the first half. Anyhow, overall, we saw a clear negative impact from the missing sales in our profit development. In addition, one-time expenses increased to EUR 4 million for the quarter. Despite the resilience measures mentioned, the adjusted EBITDA margin in the second quarter was only at a low level of 6.6%. So let's have a closer look at the financials last quarter, starting with the group's top line. Sales in Q2 were at EUR 260.4 million, after EUR 319.4 million last year, and with that, an organic growth of -19%. As said, that's lower than what we had expected and quite disappointing.
So after a Q1 with -16.5%, we saw a continuation of the negative trend. While INP and OF&D were on a similar runway to Q1, we saw a sharp drop at FoodService, which was mainly due to impacts from the system migration. Harmonizing, especially the ERP systems of Central and Hubert, lower outbound sales, and much lower project business. Let's continue with the profit development on the right-hand side of that slide. On reported EBITDA, we saw a drop to EUR 13.2 million, and with it, a decline of 50%. This translates to a reported margin of 5.1% and an adjusted profitability of 6.6%. This is very disappointing, and we are working very hard to deliver better results in the upcoming quarters.
Part of the decline in reported EBITDA is due to higher one-time expenses in connection with the adjustments of our cost structures and personnel changes. If we adjust for those one-time expenses, we see the impact of our resilience measures with an improvement of the gross profit margin by 40 basis points compared to prior year and with cost positions well below prior year. We have decreased sales and marketing costs at a similar rate as the top line has decreased, and also on personnel and other costs, we have continued to decrease those costs with structural measures, both being down double-digit percentage rate versus prior year. Still, the significant decrease in sales is leading to a very unsatisfactory profit in the second quarter. Let's have a look at the division Industrial Packaging, INP, now. On sales, we are at EUR 144.6 million.
Organic growth was -15.4%, and with that, very similar to the -15.0% from the first quarter. This was the last quarter where we saw an impact from closing down Certeo last year. This contributed slightly less than 2 percentage points to the negative growth. As you know, with our focus on equipment, we are correlated to the manufacturing industry in Europe and especially in Germany with INP. Here, PMIs continue to be clearly below 50, with the last reading in June and July showing a negative development after a slight improvement in May. In addition, we saw a negative impact from the Ratioform brand merger in Q2. We are currently not yet providing an attractive offer to our former Ratioform customers who are shopping for packaging products.
This is currently a top priority topic at INP, where we are working on further improving our webshop functionalities. For example, adding additional filter criteria and search options to make it more convenient to find the right packaging product. It also includes improving customer-facing processes, which are currently negatively impacted, starting with managing order entry through the full order process and also in the warehouse and the after-sales process. We are prioritizing solving those processes and system challenges, also with adding resources in those areas. In addition, we are thinking about continuing to use the Ratioform brand, for example, as a product brand under the KAISER+KRAFT umbrella. Over to the profit development, EBITDA at INP was EUR 16.3 million, a reported margin of 11.3%. Adjusted for one-offs, the EBITDA margin came in at 11.9%.
At gross profit margin, we saw a continued good improvement to 43.9%, clearly above prior year, coming from better product margins. Adjusted for one-offs, all cost positions were clearly below previously. Looking at cost ratios, we were able to keep marketing cost ratio pretty much in line with what we had before, while on personnel and others, we reduced absolute costs, but still incurred higher cost ratios due to the very weak top line. Now, let's have a look at the US, starting with our division, Office Furniture and Displays. Sales were at EUR 59.3 million in the second quarter. Organic growth was -17.9%, and once again, not that different to the Q1 run rate of -16.7%. Looking at the two businesses, both were down in the double digits, with D2G performing a bit more stable than NBF.
Drivers for top-line development continue to be non-supportive markets, but also challenges with higher advertising costs and increased competition for generating online leads, as well as the challenges at D2G that we talked about in the last quarters, for example, regarding lower demand for traditional displays. To adjust to this environment, we are tackling this challenge from two directions. First, we have started to follow a broader approach to generate leads and try and reduce the reliability on online marketing and adverts. Second, we are gradually improving our conversion rates for the leads we are generating, and with that, also improving our top line. Looking at the profit, reported EBITDA was EUR 4.1 million. Half of the absolute profit decline versus prior year was due to one-offs.
That means that we actually were able to increase our adjusted EBITDA margin year-over-year slightly from 8.3% to 8.6%. So good compensation here on gross margin. With a 45.0%, we continue to be on a high margin level and above prior year. And we also see good impact out of the cost management, which we already saw in the first quarter. We were able, with that, to keep cost ratios stable in OF&D overall, despite the weakness on top line, and with that, pass on the increase in gross profit margin to our EBITDA margin. Let's continue with our top line and profit. Sales were at EUR 656.5 million. Adjusted for currency impact, this was a drop of -27.8%, and with this, clearly softer than the first quarter, which came in at -20%.
Let me explain what led to this disappointing performance. We are facing three topics at the moment in FoodService , which to some extent, are connected to each other. The first is the impact from the migration of backend systems, the second is a weakness in our outbound sales channel, and the third is a much lower volume of project business. So first, our biggest channel at FoodService , we migrated our backend systems, especially the ERP, from Central to the Hubert platform. The impact on our business is bigger than we initially expected. To be more specific, we have challenges around data migration, and with that, low reliability of data and the newly established processes aren't running as smoothly as they should. We have identified those topics and know what to do. It's not one major obstacle, but rather many different smaller problems.
Solving this takes time, longer time than we had expected, and it slows down sales and fulfillment processes. In addition, it takes focus and resources of our sales teams away from taking care of our customers and selling our products. Secondly, we have lost impact in our most important sales area of the Central brand, which is the outbound sales via telephone, so actively calling restaurants and selling our equipment products. This channel is struggling due to the already mentioned process and system challenges, but also due to some changes and vacancies in the outbound sales team. And thirdly, we had a very good second quarter last year at FoodService, with 15% organic growth. A lot of that growth was driven by project business or the so-called bid contracts. These are larger orders that are often realized over a longer period of time.
This business, under the Central brand, is more volatile, and it's driven by a dedicated team, where we had personnel changes in Q1 and where we are currently rebuilding both team and processes. This led to way lower project business in both order intake and sales in the second quarter. Overall, an aggregation of several challenges leading to a very weak development in the second quarter. For all three of those challenges, we have initiated tools and measures to improve our performance in the coming month. We have brought in a new divisional president with lots of experience in the food service industry, and have made also some changes to the brand leadership team.
We are directly addressing the root of the problem by solving our system and process issues out of the migration with more support, including IT experts from other divisions or group functions working together on these topics. We have done bug fixes out of the data migration with manual review of orders and data. This is something that we now have taken care of. In addition, we are rebuilding and strengthening our sales teams, both in outbound sales and in bid contracts. Over the next few quarters, we expect we will see a negative impact still, even if, thanks to our efforts and measures, the negative impact will decrease gradually. Unfortunately, the challenges clearly affected profit development in the second quarter. EBITDA was negative at -EUR 2.7 million, which is an EBITDA margin of -4.7%.
The main challenge, as already explained, was coming from the very weak sales development. This accounts for approximately 75% of the absolute gross profit decrease versus prior year. Also, gross profit margin was weak in Q2 and decreased to 23.5% after a 27.0% in the second quarter last year. Gross margin was impacted by the same challenges that I already mentioned, the system migration and the rebuilding of the project business. We expect the margin to increase again in the upcoming month. Marketing costs were well below prior year, while on personnel and other costs, we prioritized solving our current challenges versus a more rigid cost cutting, leading to more pronounced increase of cost margins. So clearly, a bad performance on profit.
We need to solve our challenges in the mentioned sales areas and in the system migration to get back to higher sales again. With that, let's review performance for the first six months now. Since a lot of the Q2 topics are also relevant for the first half year, I will keep it rather shorter here. On group level, we generated sales of EUR 529.5 million, with an organic growth rate of -17.7%. Behind that is, again, both challenging market conditions and the internal topics that I've just talked about. On profit, EBITDA was at EUR 29.9 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 7.0%. One-time expenses were significantly higher than last year, with EUR 7.3 million in total.
For the full year, we confirm one-time expenses to be in the range between EUR 10 million and EUR 50 million, probably more on the upper side. Once again, also for the half year, good impact from resilience measures, with gross profit margin improvement to 40.5%, clearly higher than last year, and a significant cost reduction in all of our cost lines. As we are working continuously on our cost structure, you can expect cost reductions, especially in personnel, to show increasing impact over the next month. With that, coming to the development of INP in the first half, sales were at EUR 299.3 million. Organic growth came in at -15.2% and was impacted by around 2 percentage points from the Certeo closure last year.
In addition, we see the impact from the Ratioform brand merger and the already mentioned weak industrial market in Europe. On profit, EBITDA was at EUR 33.1 million, with a margin of 12.2% when we adjust for the one-offs of approximately EUR 3 million. We talked about the nice gross profit margin improvement already, which was mostly due to an increase in product profit here. On cost management, we are also here on track with all cost positions clearly below prior year. Next, we have office furniture and displays in the first half. Looking at top line first, sales were at EUR 119.6 million, with an organic growth rate of -17.3%. Also, for the first six months, both brands, NBF and D2G, were down, with NBF performing slightly weaker than D2G....
On profit, EBITDA amounted to EUR 7.2 million, with an adjusted margin of 7.0%. Here, as in Q2, very good gross profit margin with an increase to 44.9% and successful cost management on marketing, personnel, and other costs. This allowed us to keep profitability relatively stable despite the very weak top line. Then over to FoodService in the first half, where the challenges mentioned for Q2 are impacting the half year one numbers clearly. Sales were only at EUR 110.5 million, which is 24.3% below prior year. Just to repeat the internal key drivers here, the decline is due to the system migration topic, to challenges in our outbound sales activities, and to lower project business. Besides, we are operating in a non-supportive market environment.
On profit, after positive EBITDA in the first quarter, the negative performance in Q2 brings EBITDA for the first half to -EUR 0.9 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of -0.6%. Main reason for the negative absolute profit is the missing sales versus prior year. We are missing EUR 10 million absolute gross profit for the first six months of the year. Gross profit margin was also impacted by the weak Q2, as were cost positions due to the focus on solving the current challenges. So overall, also for the first half year, very unsatisfactory period for FoodService . And our full focus, as explained already, in improving this. Now over to cash, where we continue to do a good job on strengthening our cash generation.
For the first six months, we were able to release EUR 14.1 million of net working capital. Biggest driver here was structural improvements in days payable outstanding, but we also continued to release inventories. So besides the strength of our business model, compensating in weak sales situation cash flow, the work on structural improvements continues to show impact. CapEx was slightly below prior year in the first half, with EUR 5.2 million. Here, we expect to see a slight increase in the second half compared to the first, as we also want to prioritize some improvements we need to make for supporting our situation on the sales side. So we confirm our guidance of a CapEx ratio between 1% and 2% of sales.
Lease liabilities remained similar to last year, and with that, we were able to achieve a slight increase in free cash flow in comparison with last year, despite the much lower EBITDA, an important compensation out of our resilience focus. Finally, let's look at our balance sheet. Due to the dividend payment of EUR 64 million in May and share buybacks of around EUR 4 million in the first six months, we saw an increase in financial liabilities to EUR 154 million. Lease liabilities increased slightly to EUR 60.3 million. This led to our equity ratio to decrease slightly to 58%, still at the upper end of the target range of 30%-60%, so we continue to have a very strong and a very solid balance sheet.
I want to take this opportunity to also give you an update about the increased impairment risk at our cash-generating unit, which includes Hubert and Central. We have highlighted this in our earnings release last week. Currently, we have EUR 140 million of goodwill and EUR 230 million of book value allocated to the cash-generating unit that includes Hubert and Central. The most recent impairment test, end of last year, had shown a coverage that was around 20% excess of value in use compared to book values. We have talked today about our current challenges at Hubert and Central in this call. Due to this situation, we might run into risks concerning our goodwill valuation at this cash-generating unit. Together with potential changes in valuation parameters, this could lead to an impairment.
We will get clarity here in the upcoming quarter, depending on the recovery and the impact of the current situation at FoodService on the long-term valuation. As you all know, a goodwill impairment would not have any impact on cash flow or EBITDA, but would substantially change our P&L lines below that. So as a consequence, we could see significant negative impact on EBIT and also net profit for 2024 later in the year. Looking at the balance sheet, this will remain very strong. Our equity ratio would not be impacted in a relevant way and would stay in the upper range of the target corridor. Before I give you an update about our outlook, I want to summarize the first half. We had expected a difficult start into the year, and this has been confirmed. In Q2, we were not achieving the slight improvement we had anticipated.
We were even hit by additional challenges, for most in our division, FoodService, but also with some internal challenges from the Ratioform brand merger. We work hard on solving these issues, and we are confident that we have the right tools and measures in place to achieve visible improvement in both of these areas in the upcoming months. So even if resilience measures on gross profit, costs, and cash are working and deliver results, the key topic remains the very weak top line performance... So what do we expect going forward? As you've seen, we have adjusted our outlook on Friday last week to reflect the weak top line and also profit development, and we had to take into account the challenges at FoodService, in particular, which we expect to still have an impact in the coming month.
Let's take it step by step and first look at the environment and other important factors that will influence our performance in the second half. Starting with the general economic environment, we continue to see sluggish growth in Europe and a slight slowdown in the US. Significantly more challenging is what we see from industry indicators in our markets, especially in Europe. PMIs for the manufacturing industries are, industry are clearly below the 50 points threshold, both for the Eurozone, with around 45, and especially for Germany, with around 43 points. No support from the market environment, an additional headwind from the internal challenges, FoodService , and the Ratioform migration that will weigh on sales development in the upcoming month. With that being said, we still expect a gradual improvement compared to our run rate in the second quarter.
Order intake in July looked similar to what we saw in the month before, but we will run against a significantly weaker base from August onwards. You might remember last year, we saw good order intake until middle of August and then a significant drop. And most important, we expect first impact of our measures to overcome the internal challenges. For the full year, we now expect an organic sales development between -12% and -17%, whereas at the beginning of the year, we were guiding for a high single to low double-digit decline. Profitability will also be affected by the weaker top line development. This will result in an adjusted EBITDA margin between 7.3% and 8.3%. One-time expenses will be up to EUR 50 million or up to 1.5% of sales.
So that also means that we will still continue to work on implementing a leaner cost base while also solving our channel challenges. You can see that with our updated guidance, we will still expect and go for an improvement in both absolute EBITDA and an adjusted margin in the second half compared to the first, mainly out of the expected improvement in sales development. On cash, we will continue to release net working capital by continuing our successful measures to strengthen free cash flow. At the same time, I've already mentioned that in the last call, that we are now running against a very strong comparison base, as we had a strong second half in terms of cash last year, as we had started at that time to structurally drive down our trade working capital.
We will keep on track with cash and expect a strong free cash flow for the full year, which will decline significantly less than reported EBITDA, but we won't be able to generate free cash flow above prior year in the second half. With that, over to Andreas for a look at our priorities in the second half.
Thank you, Lars. Before I talk about priorities, allow me to say a few words on our performance for the first half of this year. Clearly, this was not a performance we can be satisfied with. We need to do better for our customers, for our employees, and for our investors. We are committed to delivering value to all stakeholders and shareholders by solving our internal challenges and by returning to a path of profitable growth. I talked about it in the beginning, with great building blocks to achieve success, attractive brands, high-quality products, a large customer base, and motivated employees. While we saw soft market conditions, I do not consider them as the only reason for our unsatisfactory performance. The lower top line is also a result of the internal issues highlighted earlier in this call.
These negatively impacted our order intake and fulfillment, our process speed, and our system reliability. We're dealing with internal issues. These will continue to be a challenge for the second half of the year, but I also consider this an opportunity. We have the tools and measures to address our issues the coming months. Thus, improvements are also within our control. Over the past few weeks, the leadership team and I have defined key priorities and initiated our first concrete steps on a strategic and an operational level. On a strategic level, in the FoodService division, we adjusted the Central and Hubert integration and decided to strengthen the Central sales team, both in the outbound sales and the bid contracts team. We onboarded a new divisional president with long-standing food service industry experience.
In industrial and packaging, we're working on the best option to keep the Ratioform brand in the market, for example, as a product brand under the KAISER+KRAFT umbrella. With this, we would avoid the disappearance of this well-known brand and allow for leverage of the brand's recognition and growth potential with all our customers. On an operational level, we're looking to drive order intake and sales by continuing to build on the strength of our omni-channel business with consultative selling and customer support.
... This includes improving and expanding our relationship with larger customers and an increased focus on our e-procurement offering. At the same time, we will also continue the further focused development of our more transactional e-commerce activities we see potentially. Also, we started to address our business process and IT system issues, currently impacting our order intake and fulfillment performance head-on. We refocused and added resources and competencies, now working in cross-functional resolution teams. We do so while continuing to manage our gross profit margin, control costs, and improve our cash conversion cycle. To wrap it up, I'm very confident that we have all the right tools and measures to not only resolve our internal issues and deliver a successful operational and financial turnaround, but eventually become even more customer-centric and better performing.
Based on the progress we see already in certain parts, we're confident to show first progress already in the second half of this year. With that said, we're happy to take your questions. Over to the operator for the Q&A.
Thank you so much for your presentation and the dive into your Q2 and your half-year figures. Dear participants, we will now move over to your questions. For a dynamic conversation, we appreciate it if you would ask your questions in person by audio line. To do so, please click on the virtual Raise Your Hand button. So and if you have joined by phone, you can use the key combination star key nine, followed by pressing star key six to unmute yourself. And if you're not able to speak freely today, you can also submit your questions in our chat box, and we will read them out for you. So, by now, we have one virtual hand by Christian Bruns, so you should be able to speak now.
Yes. Thank you, Sara. Thank you, Maria, Lars, and Andreas. Christian Bruns here. I have two questions. One is, given your performance, I assume that—I mean, you mentioned a lot of problems and sources of problems. But I think typically you could also see this kind of performance also in the net promoter score, of course, of your customers and also the net promoter score of your employees. I mean, I know, I know that you measure these figures, and I would like to see whether there were significant changes in the past, in the recent months, and maybe also connected with this net promoter score question.
Another question, on the integration of your brands, do you think that the integration of the Ratioform and the KAISER+KRAFT brands to a new KAISER+KRAFT brand has been a good idea, or should it be better to leave well-performing units and cultures as they are? What do you think, Andreas?
Yeah. So, Christian, thanks for your questions. I will start, and then, Andreas and Maria might add. So, your first question on that performance, and you, you're right, we referred to challenges we have in the business, in operational processes, and yes, this is impacting customer experience, and we are measuring cNPS in all of our business and activities, and we clearly see the results there. It helps us, of course, to understand where are the biggest pain points. So it's a good tool and good database for us, and we clearly see it there. And, your second point on that was on the eNPS, so Employee Net Promoter Score. And yes, also there, we see impact out of that, which I think is natural, right?
Being not successful, being not able to fulfill the customer's needs as we want to, that is, of course, pressure on the organization. It's not making us internally happy, and we see negative impact on that. I think important is that we now have the measures in place, that we prioritize them in the right way, and with that, then drive up cNPS and eNPS, again. To your question to the integration or brand merge between Ratioform and KAISER+KRAFT. So with all the information we have available today, with the learnings we made, we would probably not have executed the brand merger in the same way we did. So that's a question of the execution. We didn't rush into this process and did a step-by-step approach. You know that, and, and some aspects work, worked well.
Other aspects, we underestimated the complexity and also the consequences of putting the full range of Ratioform products and processes on the KAISER+KRAFT platform. We are now adjusting, and we are both improving customer experience with additional web shop features and also improving and accelerating again our processes, so we will adjust that. And as we explained, and Andreas also explained, we are checking options how to continue using the Ratioform brand, for example, as a product brand under the KAISER+KRAFT umbrella. So that's rather an adjustment instead of asking the question if this was the right overall move to do.
... Really not much to add from my side. As I mentioned earlier, we do have very strong brands that our customers recognize us for, and we will continue to leverage them in our customer interactions to drive top-line sales.
Yeah. So that would also mean, I think, that, that, the integration of Central and Hubert will not touch these brands?
Correct.
Yeah.
We will continue to go to market with two independent and very well-recognized brands in the U.S. and North America.
Yeah. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you, Christian. So, by now, there are no further questions. So dear participants, if there are anything you, yeah, would ask the Management Board, please do not hesitate. And in the meantime, we received another virtual hand by Roland Könen, so you should be able to speak now.
Yes, good afternoon from my side. Thanks for taking my question. Thanks for giving us a very detailed explanation of the problem topics. My first question would be, could you please repeat the book value of Central? I got the EUR 140 million goodwill, but what was the book value? And if you would do the impairment test today, what would be the rough impairment? Could you give there a number? And the second question is on the sales decrease. Could you give a rough, rough split of the decrease of... What is the result of the weak market, and what is the result of your internal issues? Just a rough, rough idea. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, thank you for your question. I would start with your question on the impairment risk we reflect. So, currently, we have a goodwill of EUR 140 million and a book value, which we test again, of around EUR 230 million. Yeah, so that's the numbers we had, like, per end of 2023. And, at that time, end of 2023, we had an excess of our value compared to this book value of 20%. And, now asking, like, for the magnitude, that's of course a difficult one, because for us, it's now important to figure out how much of this current weakness at FoodService impacts the valuation of our cash-generating unit, consisting of Hubert and Central.
Right, and the one—it's related to each other, but it's the lower jump-off point, and then also the potential midterm impact on that, valuation. And depending on this, what we say is that an impairment could follow in the upcoming month. Therefore, I cannot give an estimate of a potential impairment risk, like the numbers today. But to give a bit of a guidance, as you've seen in the last year, as we had the D2G impairment, that this could be a significant amount for us. Deriving a potential range, today's best guess currently would be that this could be in the double-digit EUR million range, and most likely somewhat higher than the impairment of EUR 37 million that we incurred at D2G last year.
Yeah, we will look at what I said, so that's the impact then of our long-term valuation, and as soon as we have more clarity on that, we will then check it, and if there is an impairment need, we will then communicate it. Yeah, so this,
Thanks. Thanks. It's fair enough.
Yeah, on that, first question. Second question was around, the question, yeah, how much of the challenges we see currently is internally and what is externally? Let's start with FoodService . I think this is the clearest one, because we have to say here that most of the current top-line weakness is due to the internal things, the three topics we have explained today. For the other divisions, it's both internal and external factors that play a role. In INP, yes, we have issues and also impact out of the brand merger as an internal topic, but also, if you look at the PMI manufacturing, a very weak environment. And on OF&D, it's a bit a question how you define what's internal and external.
So we are seeing external impact from lower demand for traditional displays and also office furniture. And we also see maybe more relevant, the higher competition for online marketing, where we have not yet been really successful in adapting to these external factors. And we are working on that. We see improvements, but still way to go for us. So that's overall the summary for the group. So FoodService , clearly majority internally. For the other two division, it's a mix of internal and external factors.
So in summary, the market very clearly does not help. But having said that, we have identified very clearly, and also outlined in this call, the internal issue and challenges we face, that we are now committed to addressing during the upcoming months.
Perfect. Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Thank you so much for your questions, Mr. Könen. So we will now move over to the questions from the person who has dialed in via phone, ending three seven seven zero. So you should be able to unmute yourself.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yes, good. Sorry, I was wondering if I was on mute. It's James Ogilvy from Lazard. I just wanted to come back on the assumptions behind your top line guidance, because as you say, the economic situation in Europe should remain weak. Europe, U.S. should get worse, and you are expecting ongoing issues with the two internal problems you've mentioned. So the gradual improvements in top line that you mentioned for the second half, which would be very welcome, but I'm just, I'm not entirely clear where what it's reliant on. Are you expecting possibly some market improvement later on in the year, or some easing of the internal issues, or is it some of those key priorities that Mr. Weishaar mentioned already starting to take effect?
So just what is the main issue that will generate that gradual improvement?
Yeah. Thank you, James, for your question. So in terms of economic environment, we expect the environment to remain challenging also in the second half of year. Yeah, we don't see any indication in the market looking at indicators or other information that this should improve. That also means that the improvement we talk about will come from us solving, first of all, the challenges we are facing. Yeah, so to be more specific, us gradually solving internal topics at FoodService and from Ratioform brand merger. And especially at FoodService , as I explained before, we know that the majority of the weak development is from internal reasons. We see that also looking at sales channels within our business, which are not impacted by the system migration, which are way better. Yeah, so that's the piece, internal improvement. In addition-
Mm-hmm.
We also expect to benefit from a lower comparison base from mid-August onwards, and especially in Q4. You might remember that last year our sales-
Yeah, of course.
significantly, and I would estimate that this could be an impact of 5-6 percentage points in the second half year, comparison base being lower compared to the first half year.
Okay. So the main risk, we could say, is perhaps if the U.S. slowdown is a little more marked than what we could imagine today?
Yes, that would be a risk. We are really focusing on fixing our internal topics and generate impact out of that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Great. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you so much for your questions, James. So we will now come back to Christian, so he has some follow-up questions.
Yes, hello. Christian Bruns again. I thought, when there are not so many questions, I could afford to have another one. So, a question for Andreas Weishaar. You are appointed currently as an interim CEO, and could you a little bit tell us a little bit more about this background? Was the Supervisory Board only cautious in finding a solution, or is there anything which would prevent you from serving the company for a longer period?
Thank you, Christian. I can understand where your question comes from, so let's start with the short versus long term, right?
Yeah.
I think we made it clear that solving our current challenges, specifically with the FoodService migration and the Ratioform brand merger, has very high priority in the coming months.
Yeah.
But that doesn't mean that I won't also drive more long-term improvements regarding systems, processes, and customer focus. The Supervisory Board has tasked me not just to fix short-term problems, but also to further develop TAKKT, long-term strategy, and growth drivers. Looking at my internal impact and being regarded as a quote, unquote, "lame duck," I don't see this being a topic, right? Several reasons for that. First, I have the full support of the Supervisory Board, who I now met multiple times. Second, we have a very professional, experienced, and dedicated leadership team, and they have shown strong support and commitment in the last weeks.
And then third, last but not least, and I think that also plays a role here, the Supervisory Board made it very clear that in the search for a long-term CEO appointment, I will be included as a candidate alongside other candidates, and I am obviously fully committed to serving TAKKT to the best of my abilities today and in the future.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for your questions, Christian. So in the meantime, we have received no further questions, so everything appears to be answered by now. So should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. And having said this, we come to the end of today's earnings call. So thank you everyone for joining, and your shown interest in TAKKT. And a big thank you also to you, Mrs. Zesch, Mr. Weishaar, and Mr. Bolscho, for your detailed presentation and the time you took to answer all the questions. I wish you a successful second half year, and Mrs. Zesch, all the best for you. So to all of you, have a lovely remaining week, and with this, I hand back for some final remarks, which concludes our call for today.
Thank you very much for joining today's call, and also for your questions. I very much enjoyed getting to know you and introducing myself, as well as sharing my first view on TAKKT. We're now focusing on solving our internal challenges, and I'm looking forward to give you an update on what we've achieved and where we stand when we publish our Q3 results on October 24th. Until then, have a great summer. Thank you, everyone.