Hello. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to the next session of our Industrial Technology Online Investor Conference. I'm delighted to introduce Technotrans, a globally active technology and service group with core expertise in application-specific thermal management solutions. It's my pleasure to welcome Mr. Finger, CEO of Technotrans, he will guide us through the presentation and share deeper insight into the company. Before we dive in, a quick housekeeping note. The conference is being recorded, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will move on with the Q&A session. Please submit your questions via the chat box at any time. With that, Mr. Finger, thank you for being with us today. I'll hand it over to you, the stage is all yours.
Thank you very much for the warm welcome. Welcome to Technotrans. Who is Technotrans and why should you invest? This is a big question. With this slide, I will give you, for those who do not know us in detail, a brief overview about the company, our key characteristics, our financial performance segments, verticals, and geographic approach in one slide. What are the key characteristics? We have a leading position in thermal management. We have accelerated growth supported by mega trends like AI, electrification, digitalization, and decarbonization. We are focusing on profitable growth. We are aiming for a revenue level of EUR 350 million+ in 2030 with an attractive margin of 9%-12% EBIT. How are we starting?
The key starting point was our financial year 2025, where we've generated a revenue profile of EUR 244 million, with an EBIT margin of 7.1% and a free cash flow of EUR 16.6 million, which was a record based on a 95% growth rate in 2025. With that, we have generated an earnings per share of EUR 1.66, which is also a growth rate of 57%. We have generated this with two segments, with technology, that means with all we have produced and developed. This is generating 75%-76% of our share of revenue, accomplished by 24%-25% of service business, which is a good ratio for us as a company in the technology segment. We are serving the market with four verticals: print, plastics, health, analytics, and energy management.
As you can see in the split, it's already a very balanced portfolio, this is giving us resilience. We are a global company. We are a global company with dominance in Europe, Middle East, and Africa of a level of 80%, supported by 10% Americas and 10% APAC. What is our key business model and how does Technotrans work? If you look to the big mega trends like, as I said before, electrification, digitalization, decarbonization, or artificial intelligence, all of this is only working with use of technology. If you use technology, heat is associated with it. In most of the cases, heat is not in favor with the entire system. Therefore, you need a thermal management system. This is our core competence, therefore you need Technotrans.
If you look a little bit around, what can we do better than our competition? Of course, one of our key characteristics is our big range in cooling capacity. We can serve very small cooling capacities on a level of 0.1 kW up to very high ones at up to 5 MW in a temperature range from -80 up to 430 degrees Celsius. The most important point, we can do it very precise. We can generate an accuracy, a tolerance between 0.0 Kelvin and 0.01 Kelvin of tolerances, which is very precise. You convert it directly into degrees Celsius to get a feeling of the level of accuracy. That means 0.01 degrees Celsius is the level of preciseness we can generate across all our applications.
Before we dive a little bit deeper in our products and in our growth perspectives for the future, let's understand a little bit where are we coming from and what have we done so far, and where are we want to go in the next five years. Let's have a short look back. Our legacy business is a printing business. Until 2009, we were a pure print company, in which we have developed and stepped up to a global market leading position. After economic crisis and digitalization kicked in, we have diversified our business with a buy and build strategy. We've bought four different companies, got access to different markets, and could diversify our market portfolio significantly. In 2020, we have established a new strategy called Future Ready 2025, where we have focused on stability.
We have generated one group out of the four acquisition I've just named before. We have restructured the business. We have focused the business on our core competence, thermal management, and we are focused on organic growth, which is another important step for us as Technotrans. With that, we have completely restructured our business. We have integrated all the acquisitions, as I said, from the past. We have made our homework, and now we are able to serve future markets in a very structured way. Why do I mention this? All those markets are different, and all those markets have different dynamics, and therefore, we have finally set an organization model in place where every single division is driven by a P&L head who is leading the market dynamics through down to operations.
That makes our operations by far more easier and our market activities are much more focused. Healthcare analytics, energy management, print, and plastics are those markets which I would like to explain a little bit more in detail in the upcoming slides. Starting with healthcare analytics, you can imagine you need stable temperatures for healthcare, medical, and analytical applications for reproductive results. This is one of our key areas. We have a clean room production in our facility in Baden-Baden, where we are producing a lot of products for medical and analytical systems with very tight tolerances. This market is growing pretty well. 46% growth rate last year. Another 3% revenue increase the first quarter of this year. We see further growth as medical progress is one of the key developing areas globally. With that said, I will directly jump to print.
Print is our, as I said, legacy business. In print, we are still market leader since decades. We anticipated a slow start in this year, as mentioned in other calls before, as print is mainly suffering due to the tariffs and taxes from the U.S. There we are faced with a lot of pressure in this market area, and we could anticipate a slowdown in order intake already in Q4 last year, which was the reason for a lower start and lower guidance in this segment for the beginning of this year. As I said, the economic conditions are challenging, particularly in Europe and the U.S. We expect, on the other side, a moderate recovery in the second half of this year. The key growth drivers are still packaging print and digital print areas, where we are serving all customers around the globe.
One highlight we've presented recently was another big win for a Japanese customer, where we could jump into digital print business and win significant market share in Asia. Coming to plastics, another market which is suffering under the weak economic conditions since years now. Our revenue decline was expected as well in this area, as this market is heavily focused on energy costs and the oil price is also reflecting in the plastics environment. We are focusing on energy-efficient solutions with our variotherm systems. We are a full-liner in this segment, are able to supply the complete range of applications in plastics. The order intake, especially in the first quarter, beginning of the second quarter, is turning into positive.
That leads us to the assumption that second half is also relaxing a little bit, which also is very positive for the outlook for the rest of the year. Jumping directly into energy management, as we have just 20 minutes for this presentation. Energy management is the outperformance market since years. We are generating double-digit growth rates since years, and also the first quarter in 2026 was on a level at 12%. We are mainly serving coolant distribution units, so-called CDUs, in these areas, followed by battery thermal management systems. In both areas, we have highlighted with press releases major wins in the first quarter. On one hand, we could show a double-digit million EUR range, big order for battery thermal management systems for the railway market.
On the other area, for the CDU business for data centers, we could show again a high single-digit million EUR range, big order for the data center business. This order momentum is really picking up and provides confidence for further growth in the upcoming years. We also see a strong demand in those both areas, not only for the rest of this year, also for the future. Looking into one example, like data center, how we are positioned and how does the environment look like? This picture explains it very well. If you look to a graphical overview of a data center, you see on one hand the server racks. In this server room, you see the cooling infrastructure with our products, the CDU, the coolant distribution unit. We are serving a very important product which serves cooling capacity to the isolated server racks in detail.
From there, it will be distributed to each processor in the server racks. We are also able to serve the other circuit, which you can see on the top of the roof, where it's all about heat recovery, recoolers, and large refrigeration systems to get use of the waste heat energy and the waste heat utilization of those. This combined gives a perfect solution for new data centers, as it is driven by legislation, that if you have a high use of energy, you also need to offer waste heat utilization systems for the rest of the building. That is also important to highlight that we are offering both.
If it's down to retrofit systems for the first approach, we can also offer RPUs that are so-called retrofit liquid-to-air cooling systems, which you can directly use for one server rack to provide a server rack with liquid cooling on an isolated base. As you probably know, we are coming from the air cooling side. We are still producing air coolers for the traditional and also for the combined approaches of cooling data centers. All in all, we can offer the whole range of cooling applications to data centers, which brings us in a very good position. This is facilitated by a worldwide service network, which is necessary for installing those programs in each data center on a customer base. What does it mean for the future? It does mean that we have set up, based on those opportunities, a new strategy called Ready for Growth 2030.
We have set financial targets in terms of revenue, where we want to generate EUR 350 million + of revenue with an EBIT margin between 9%-12%. How do we get there? If we look to the global market growth for thermal management system, and this is a study from Business Fortune Insights, it shows that we have a global market growth from $63 billion up to $85 billion in the next years. This is a CAGR of 6%. This CAGR is accelerated by mega trends like, as I said at the beginning, artificial intelligence, electrification, and you can read by yourself all those trends who are driving our ambitions for the future. Thermal management, as I said at the beginning, is essential for being successful in those systems in these areas.
This chart explains it pretty well, how do we get to the EUR 350 million? I will talk you a little bit through, I will take energy management as an example how to read this chart. In energy management, the starting point of our strategic approach was 2025, where we have generated around about EUR 65 million. What is driving the market? As I said, many mega trends are driving the market. The very important point is we have already products in place who can serve the market. We don't need to develop new products. We have already developed products, which are ready to serve in our portfolio, like the liquid cooling for data centers, the battery thermal management systems, or charging infrastructure. Therefore, we expect a growth of more than EUR 60 million.
The same methodology is for print, for plastics, and healthcare. Baseline is 2025. If you read the growth until 2030, like EUR 60 million, EUR 15 million, or another EUR 50 million in 2030, you will come to EUR 350 million +. If you convert that into a ratio, this is a CAGR of 7.4%. If you look back to the general global market growth, which was 6%, we are growing faster than the market. That is the rationale behind. The big question now is how do we want to realize this growth? We want to realize this growth by investing in our people, investing in our products and in our technology. We also will invest in our infrastructure. We will add a new factory to our location in Baden-Baden with capacity of 17,600 sq m, with another 17,600 sq m.
Just for your background information, currently, we are running our business at this facility with 15,000 sq m under roof. As I said, another 17,600 sq m we are going to add in the building you can see on the top of the slide. This is mainly for data centers. This is mainly for energy management and battery thermal management. This is a commitment for the location, but also commitment that we believe that this growth is coming, and we need to build this location right away to be ready to ship in two years' time or one and a half years' time, when we expect that the volume is significantly growing. Until that time, we have space to grow on-site internally, but we will come to a point where our capacity and our space is limited, and where we need additional space for the future. Future demands, especially.
How have we started this year and where are we standing? Just a short look into the performance of our first quarter in 2026. As you can see, as I also mentioned at the beginning, we have expected a slow start into this year, driven by the downturn in print and plastics. We could see this, as mentioned, end of Q4 already. Therefore, we have guided a little bit lower and we also projected our business stronger in the second half than in the first half. This also became true. We are faced with a downturn of 8.7% in revenue, which means EUR 5 million less revenue than last quarter, but very important to say, we could increase our EBIT margin. Even with EUR 5 million less revenue, we could increase our EBIT margin to 7%, which is a very strong message from our point of view.
We could show now six quarters in a row of business and an EBIT margin on a level of ±7%, which shows stability and which shows also resilience with those volatilities in revenue. This shows we have made our homework. We have a very robust cost structure in place, and based on that, we can start jumping off into future margin ambitions. Free cash flow is doing well. We could improve from -EUR 5.8 million to -EUR 1.4 million, which is an improvement of EUR 4.4 million in the first quarter. Our free cash flow target is above EUR 10 million, and we will of course, we are confident in getting there. Which leads me finally to our guidance in 2026. As I said, we started a little bit slower in terms of revenue than expected, but with a stronger outlook in the second half.
Positive order intake indicates, also associated with the book-to-bill ratio of 1.1, that we are in a good way. With that said, we can confirm our guidance for this year, we also confirm this for revenue and for EBIT margin and for the free cash flow projection. Having said that leads me over to my last slide, and we are pretty much on time. Why should you invest? As I said, the position in megatrends is very well addressed. We have a unique range of thermal management solutions in place. We have completed our transformation. There is a restructuring process done, so we are future ready. Since last year, the business model is resilient also for further impacts. As you know, we have an attractive dividend policy in place with a 50% payout from our net income.
If you could see on the charts last year, we could outperform the market, with a strong increase in our share price, which is still almost on that level, and we hope we can work on that also in the future. Having said that, thank you very much for now, and I am happy to take your questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you for the presentation. Yeah, we have received a couple of questions already, so let's directly start with the first one. Definitely it looks like that we will talk all about energy management, the segment and prospects. First of all, I would like to ask, what makes Technotrans different in data center cooling, and how does the growth potential look like? Potentially we can also add the question, who are your main competitors?
Yeah, what makes Technotrans different? Can everybody also see the presentation? I move back to one slide.
Sure.
I think this shows it at best what makes us different. We can offer not only the CDUs, which are very important and of course this is a future product for data center cooling. We can also supply all the surrounding cooling products like recoolers, like the large refrigeration systems, which you need for cooling the CDU. We can also provide air cooling, which is in some areas necessary for combined products, the liquid and air cooling products. You may have heard about that liquid to air to liquid. Therefore, you always need air cooling, which is also a core competence of ours. If you go to retrofit solutions, we have also another product in place like the RPU. We have already a very unique product portfolio in place, which brings us in a positive market position. Who are the competitors?
I guess that was the other question. This is something we can't disclose. In some areas, we don't know exactly because this is a secret in the markets. We supply to a big partner company in the U.S., which is an integrator, and this is how the business models are working all over the place. There are a few companies who are serving the market with a full range of products, not only of cooling products, also with cable infrastructure, power supply, fire protection and many more. Those integrators are combining all of those applications, and they are keeping the supply chain as a secret. We know some of our competitors for sure, but we will not disclose.
Thank you for answering this question. Companies offering data center cooling solutions in the U.S. are growing extremely fast, often already generating revenues in the $ hundreds of millions. Why isn't Technotrans securing large contracts in this market more quickly?
Yeah. First of all, you need to differentiate those information. If companies are growing significantly in data center, this is not only down to CDUs in data centers. We are supplying the liquid cooling for data centers. Companies who are growing very fast, mainly doing this with other techniques, mostly with traditional air cooling systems or with surrounded technologies, which they are showing in the data center field. If you just drill it down to CDUs, I think we are in a very good growing position. Also, comparing it to the very well-known players you are referring to. If you really drill it down to the CDU business, then I think we are in number two or number three in terms of strong growth in this area. We are still in the definition phase, and the strong ramp-up hasn't started yet.
Thanks for this answer. What is the biggest bottleneck for growth in energy management?
What is the biggest bottleneck? At the moment, there are no big bottlenecks, despite supply chain space and capacity. That's the reason why we are investing in those areas. We see and anticipate a strong growth. Therefore, we are adding a factory. Therefore, we are working on our supply chain to be ready for strong growth, if it comes down to hard and big orders.
Mm-hmm. Still talking about the energy management, how much of this growth in this segment is driven by data center versus battery thermal management?
If you look back to the chart, I've explained our growth ambitions until 2030. You'll see a growth rate in energy management of EUR 60 million+ . Of course, a significant part of it is down to our traditional battery thermal management systems for rail and road. Let's make it easy. Let's say EUR 20 million-EUR 30 million are down to battery thermal management systems, and the rest is for data center. That means only a small part of it, we have just reflected in here for that one. That means the number EUR 350 million seems to be quite conservative, as we never know we need to reflect the situation where we are coming from, we have decided for a moderate growth approach, and if it comes better, we will adjust our targets.
Perfectly. Two questions left. We start with the first one. What gives you confidence in reaching a target EBIT margin by 2030, and what happens if the CapEx cycle fades?
The confidence in getting to the margin level of 9%-12% is, I think, quite easy and given. At the moment, we have a stable margin plateau of around about 7%, getting to the lower point of the guidance is just 2%. With the increase of volume and revenue, we will easily outperform the break-even point, and we will get to those numbers in many months. As before, we have already seen internal the double-digit margins, and we are quite confident with the increase in revenue, we will also increase our EBIT margin. If CapEx invest fails, I guess it means what if we don't get to the higher volumes for this new building? I would answer it like this. We will also rent logistics here internally. We will in-house the outside logistic areas we have in place.
With it, we can already finance this building in a ground structure. Even with moderate growth rates, this will increase our efficiency. All the business we are seeing a strong growth on top will help us being even more profitable. We need to build this building anyway, based on logistic in-sourcing and modern and efficient production and operation flows, and with that, this is a no-brainer.
Yeah. Maybe just a quick answer on this follow-up question. Is your margin in energy management already above 10%?
We don't disclose margins by divisions, it is in favor for future ambitions.
Perfect. Unfortunately, we have to come to an end, as we are running out of time. Thank you all for the question, thank you, Michael, for the time and sharing the insights. All participants will receive a brief email, please share your feedback with the company so we can continue. Thank you once again for being here today. The next presentation is Nynomic. We have provided the link in the chat box already, feel free to join, I just have to say goodbye from our side.
Thank you very much for joining. Thank you very much. Goodbye.