Yeah, thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining our fiscal year 2023 earnings call, just the day before Easter starts. Together with me, I have Michael Bülter , our CFO, and Julia Hasselbach, responsible for our investor relations contacts. As you've seen this morning, we have published our financial results for the last year, announced the dividend proposals to our shareholders of EUR 2.70, and have also announced our market entry in North America with the acquisition of phase I. Main message today is we have strong financial and balance sheet numbers. We are well, well in line with our guidance for the year for the year, but also well in line with our brackets, especially on the profitability targets, with the EBITDA ratio of 17%-21%.
We were able to show a record gross margins, which I believe is another strong element of underlying our strategic business model. Before we look back, I know that a lot of you will look at our statements for Q1 and the fiscal year 2024. Of course, we'll do that. Just to give you some early thoughts on that, clearly, we are not pessimistic. At the same time, we also see that global markets and also, especially in Europe, political governments are not really helping in the time of high interest. But again, I believe that STEMMER IMAGING is successfully positioned in the market.
When we look at and you compare STEMMER IMAGING to other market players which also announced results this week, we're proud to say that we are really positioned as a value-added company with strong fundamentals, not only in our business model but also in our financial performance. This value-added positioning really is based on clear differentiation, a trusted brand. I can report that we continue to show great project and customer wins, and that we have very positive stakeholder feedback. Just in Q4, we did a customer satisfaction survey and got a good score on loyalty from our customers. Yeah, we have good feedback from our employees on employee satisfaction and also from EcoVadis. We got a renewed EcoVadis silver rating. So we know what we want to do. More importantly, I believe we know how to do it and how we wanna do it.
So we have strengthened our group brand in the last year, STEMMER IMAGING , with the integration of our subsidiaries in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. We have launched a very clear and structured engineering operational service program, which we call MORE, which I will talk about, but shows really good advancements and effects. We are continuing to develop ourselves in the range of digitalization, not only in our offering but also in our own organization. Especially how we organize ourselves, I think, makes then the difference that we're able to deliver this value for customer satisfaction, but also in a good and efficient way. We have talked long about expansion strategy, especially going into the North American market. It took us a while to figure out what the best entry point and how we do that.
I believe that it's we are really hitting the right time to do and announce the acquisition of a well-reputed company, which I will expand a little bit later on. Financial results, Michael will touch on them. But again, record gross and net margins, even in sluggish markets, we clearly saw the second half year not really in our favor, but we and our business model, as you know, is proven on cost scalability. We have a very healthy balance sheet performance with strong cash generation, working capital management. I know a lot of you look at also how we were able to reduce our stock level. And I think that, having reduced that from not only last year but from a high in May by 45%, I think shows that we are also really capable of managing our processes.
I believe today, especially in this environment, we are very attractive for our shareholders, with an earnings per share of EUR 2.42 and a dividend proposal of EUR 2.70. Again, 2023 returned almost EUR 20 million in cash to our shareholders, which I think in this times is really a very strong statement. Our value-added positioning clearly is based on a clear focus on market opportunities. We talked about that. I don't wanna repeat them too much. But clearly, digitalization, electrification, circularity, and gamification is something which we continue to see as strong drivers. We still really see that the industry, machine vision industry, is really changing fundamentally. And I believe that we are really well positioned for this change to new technology ecosystems, which even puts more emphasis on application knowledge. And yeah, that is really playing in our hands.
We see that further consolidation on the component market is playing a big role and that new offerings and new players come into play, based on artificial intelligence, which obviously we all see currently in the market. So our positioning to be present in the industrial and non-industrial market, enabling AI-driven businesses to bring out their offering, is really something which has driven growth and will continue to drive our growth. We see that really as a system-house approach. We are much more than what you see on the left green circle, collection of components. But really on the right side, an engineering house which has components as an offering. But really, the main offering is this high-level engineering expertise which we bring in with operational services, engineering services, really based on innovation.
I know that you are looking at markets and how we perform in these markets. And I want to make the distinction really in three different pockets, let's say. My strong belief is that also if you look at global markets, innovation is the solution to how to get us out of this, let's say, dim market situation, not for Stemmer talking, but in general. So we see basically customers who are driving innovations, innovative applications, especially in sports logistics. We talked about sports entertainment. Somehow the print and packaging business and medical, that we see a lot of requests from these companies driving innovations, and a high demand for subsystems. Obviously what really helps us. We have on the lower side of the sheet, you see customers who struggle with an increasing backlog of innovation.
So, especially in factory automation and automotive, we see that there is delays in projects. They are still, let's say, need to make that step, to really drive innovations where we are busy with them also to, to drive subsystems into the market. So really see that distinction. And that also is when you look back how our order intake and revenue development really worked. In the middle, we have the food and agriculture market. It's what I believe a really fantastic market opportunity. Unfortunately, there we saw that the planning and forecasting of these customers were, was not really that accurate. So we see a high drop in orders due to overstocking effects, whereas this overstocking effects pretty much out of the market. But in food and agriculture, we continue to see that also in still with aftereffects in 2024.
So we have, especially on the upper side of the sheet, worked with a focus on end users, and on value-added subsystems, and on OEMs. Whereas, integrators which play more a role in factory automation and automotive is something where we see that, yeah, we need to bypass some of them in order to get to end users. And we have talked about our propositions, especially for automotive, with the Vision Guided Robotics, for example. So we are getting into this market with subsystems. And to make that a little bit clearer on the next page, you see that, obviously, on the right side, you see that the value proposition becomes much bigger, and you get much more integrated into a customer when you are delivering subsystems and subsystems or are even a producer of a product for the customer.
The value creates or the value pipeline, basically, which the value we can offer, it really has a fantastic opening the higher you get in the pyramid with our MORE services and obviously with our own propositions, the embedded board, our software propositions, and also our 3D, Vision Guided Robotics, solutions. So to shed a little light onto the MORE product, really the idea here is to basically drive up this pyramid in value proposition from just being a component supplier over engineering services to do basically prototyping with our customers, helping our customers to bring in innovations into the market, and then really make them ready for manufacturing to really mature them for our serial production, and then really work with our customers in a very integrated way, to deliver that time over the lifetime of a specific product or project.
When we talk about digitalization, this obviously is something which is around for quite some time. We see two main elements. One of them really in the outside of our offering, new standards emerging, the GigE Vision 3.0, where we are, I would say, very early on to offer a streaming, let's say, stack which is called RoCE v2, to enable next-gen sensor sizes. So sensor sizes becoming bigger and also higher speeds. So digitalization and enabling new software standards remains a strong point for us. At the same time, we all see that cybersecurity and Cybersecurity Act become much more important, software bill of material.
All of that is also something which we have been working over the last year to get us here into, yeah, good position, I would even say pole position, to offer our customers, not only, on the innovation side but also on the safety or security IT security side, a good offering. At the same time, we have launched, and we have talked about that over the last year, our, innovative go-to-market, capabilities, with our e-commerce functionalities and really end-to-end call-to-action processes internally which our customers will benefit not only because they get a tailored, a differentiated user experience with working with Stemmer but really a faster, more efficient, and even higher quality support, during their, customer journey, might it be from an engineering request or, really up to delivery and maintenance processes. We have a clear agenda, on that.
So with 295 employees, we are positioning ourselves in markets with the right applications, with our extensive offering, really on a clear concept of an organizational model, with a high, modern IT backbone, and are able also to deliver delivery performances back over 95% on-time delivery. I think we are also able to deliver quite a volume, compared to a lot of other companies in the same segment. So I think we are really seeing how we organize, that this really helps our customers and at the end also drives our aim to gain market share. ESG is something which we have reported over the last year, so nothing new for you from this side. We again focused on SDGs.
I think there's a lot of, yeah, market opportunities in the defense and space over the last, I would say, two years, obviously developing. We can clearly say that this has not been something which we had been focusing on. We believe that growth opportunities outside the defense market are strong enough to continue to drive our growth. I think on the KPIs, we continue to report and prepare us also for the EU Taxonomy and innovation reporting . I believe very strong here also the women in management positions, something which obviously we strive to get up with 33% our customer loyalty rate. Yeah, again, our commitment to greenhouse gas reduction and renewable energies. EcoVadis Silver recertification, I think also something expected even with a higher, let's say, benchmark towards that.
So something which is well in our processes and will continue to be. When we just focus on the acquisition which we announced this morning, I just wanna give you a little bit background what our rationale for that is. And, yeah, shed a little light on the acquisition itself. We expect closing to be in Q2. Hopefully, we can actually get it already done in April. But as you know, you know, there's some things to be done between signing and closing. So but it's expected to be consolidated already in Q2. The rationale is really clear. I think that we see that the North American market, while we see some companies report that the market is not performing that well, it has a lack of innovation in terms of offering.
We see a big possibility to offer our value-added services in that market. We have a lot of customers gained up now over some time, which are working with us in Europe, which are actually for and specifically for subsystems request us to have a local presence in North America. So we would not necessarily have to acquire a company, but we feel, especially in North America, more acquainted to have an existing organization, well-reputed organization, to leverage that need from European customers onto. And we also believe that there's an underestimated growth rate in America, especially in the United States. We all know what's happening there in politics. The Made in America policy is continuing to be an, yeah, I would say a mid-term phenomenon.
We believe that, especially on the industrial automation, there's a high investment need for Machine Vision. So, and also on the, let's say, innovative part, we believe that especially in California, and some other areas, AI and let's say real innovations, market innovations, are driving, and are then coming over to Europe. So we also see that benefit of taking a lead position in the United States to bring, let's say, home to Europe, some of that technology advancement. We will have a clear focus, not only in markets, but also in terms of customers because it's a big country, obviously, and or continent. You can get lost there quite pretty quick. So we will have a clear focus here.
We see the benefit of leveraging our business in Mexico and Brazil because there's obviously a very tight connection between the United States and Mexico in terms of customers. We believe that this also will support our existing presence in Latin America. We will look at opportunities to further build that platform. So it's really an entry point at this time. But we believe that we have chosen with phase I, and we are really glad to be able to get an agreement with a very highly recognized, I would say, industry veteran, Rusty Ponce de Leon, who's well-reputed, who has a lot of knowledge about the market. We have a high overlap with suppliers. Also, that phase I company is present both in industrial and really high-innovative Artificial Vision applications like commercial drone business.
So we believe that this is a good step forward. Yeah, I'm sure you will have some questions later on. With this, I hand over to Michael.
Thank you, Arne. With this, I go deeper into the financials for 2023 just at a glance. The year 2023 was in line with our expectations. We achieved a revenue of EUR 146.3 million, which is in line with our guidance we published in October 2023, as well as our EBITDA and our guidance is EUR 27 million. With our guidance, we already published in March 2023. So nice profitability of 18.4% here. We show a strong equity ratio increased from the previous year from 69% to 77%, have a strong operating cash flow, based on the good profitability, and the reduction, as Arne already said, in working capital.
have a strong net debt position with -EUR 36.1 million, and reduced significantly our workforce from 327 employees to 295 employees as of the end of the year 2023. Yeah, 2023, in a nutshell, we saw a positive first half year, and a regressive second half year based on high inventory levels at our customers and overall inflation and recessional effects. So that, over the full year, we showed a decline in revenues of 5.8%. We see that our value-added portfolio, and our value creation remains strong. So we were able to show over the full year a record gross margin of 39.7%. For Q4, which was slightly improved by year-end effect, but in Q4, another record gross margin for a quarter, of 41.3%. But also our operational gross margin was above 40%.
As Arne said, we significantly reduced our stock levels to EUR 12.7 million coming from EUR 19.5 million in May 2023, which had a positive effect on our operational cash flow. Our organization is strong and scalable. We have a normalized cost ratio of 20.3% and achieved a further increase in our sales per FTE up to EUR 544,000 per FTE. We show attractive returns to our shareholders with earnings per share of EUR 2.42 per share. And we plan to pay out a dividend of EUR 2.70 per share. For 2024, our outlook is yeah, kind of kind of mixed. We see chances for further growth and also see that it will be possible to grow up to 7.5% to EUR 157 million. But on the downside, we also see the potential of a small further decrease in revenues to EUR 140 million.
But we stay within our midterm guidance guided EBITDA return on sales margin of 17%-21%. What we see over the last couple of years is a strong development in revenues with a slight decline now in 2023. We see that, especially over the years 2015 to 2021, further internationalization of the company, which now over the last couple of years remains quite stable. We see that the artificial vision market, as Arne already indicated, gets more and more important for us so that we are currently at 43% of our revenues in the artificial and also more innovative artificial vision market and 57% of our revenues in the machine vision market. The gross margin developed over the last years really nicely to a record 39.7%, which is mainly driven by our value-added portfolio by a strong price management.
We see that our customers really value our value-added approach, our systems-house approach. This leads to this really nice number. We also see further chances going forward. Strong cost ratio through scalable organization, as said before. Yeah, really thanks to our broad footprint in Europe and our differentiated core markets, we were able to cushion the weaker developments in specific areas. So we see a mixed development in 2023 with strong revenue growth in Iberia and LATAM, as well as the U.K.. And especially the markets where we have a larger footprint in the food and agriculture, which would be France and Benelux, we saw a decline in revenues based on the high inventory levels at customers. Also for the focus markets, we saw a strong development in medical and transport and logistics with really high double-digit growth rates.
Whereas in food and agriculture, automotive, and factory automation, on the other hand, we saw a decline, which, yeah, was on the downside here. Q4 was, as expected, below Q4 2022 in order intake, as well as revenues. We saw the record gross margin and significantly reduced personnel expenses, based on our integration efforts for our subsidiaries in Iberia and Latin America. We had some mixed effects on the operational expenses. These were mainly year-end costs and negative FX effects costs. And we turned out with an EBITDA of EUR 7.1 million, which is still on the upper end of our guidance with 21.2%, and an EBIT of EUR 5.9 million with a margin of 17.6%. Similar picture for 2023 full year.
We see a decline in the order intake, which was mainly based on a sluggish second half year, coming from a strong 2022, stronger first half year 2023, into a downturn in the second half year. As said, revenue development -5.8%, record gross margin of 39.7%. And we see that on the personnel expenses, we have a normalized EUR 22.4 million, which is a reduction of 5.2% versus 2022. And we also will see going forward a sustainable reduction of our personnel expenses due to our scalable organization. In the operational expenses, we have, as in Q4, negative FX effects and some effects that positively influenced 2022. But on the base, we are on a similar cost level than in 2022. This turns out into an EBITDA of EUR 27 million, EBITDA margin of 18.4%, which is normalized by the integration efforts, 19.3%.
I just want to touch short on the cash flow statement. Strong net income, optimization of our working capital. And we paid a dividend of EUR 19.5 million, which we re-earned with our cash flow from operating activities and also our free cash flow. We also show strong balance sheet figures, with significantly reduced working capital. Our working capital ratio, in relation to revenues is 17.3% coming from 19.2%. We still see potential to decrease and will further work on it in 2024. We show strong net debt position with EUR 36.1 million compared to EUR 38.1 million in 2022. As said before, really strong equity ratio at 77.1%. Coming to the outlook for 2024, we see still destocking effects. We still see inflationary effects. And we still see recessional effects in the markets.
But on the other hand, we also see chances for the year 2024, in terms that interest rates over the summer are expected to be reduced, which could turn out into positive effects in the economic activity over the summer months. We see a guidance in the range of EUR 140-155.7 million in revenue and an EBITDA of EUR 24 million-EUR 31 million, which is an EBITDA margin of 17% or between 17%-19.5%. So in line with our midterm guidance of 17%-21%. This is the development in these brackets, between -4% and +7.5%, is strongly dependent on the order intake development. We see in Q1 first signs of recovery in the order intake. And there are different scenarios on how this will develop over the next couple of quarters.
But with an accelerated and strong catch-up over the summer months, we see ourselves well-positioned in order to achieve also the upper range of the sales and EBITDA guidance. Regarding our midterm guidance, this is also strongly dependent on the development in 2024. So, we still see the chances or we still see the expectation of achieving our midterm guidance of EUR 240 million in revenues and an EBITDA margin between 17%-21%, which is based on really a short-term and sustainable return to above-average sales growth, and further inorganic expansions besides our acquisition of phase I. With this, I would like to thank you for your attention and interest in Stemmer. Now we are open for your questions.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone.
You'll hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to move yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to use only handsets as well when asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Lasse Stüben , Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. two questions, if I may. Firstly, on the acquisition, is there anything else you can reveal in terms of rough size of the business, historical growth rates, what you're paying for the company? And the second question will just be on your final comments on the outlook for this year.
If we assume that, you know, Q1 is somewhere broadly in line with Q4, you know, you do need quite a big pickup in the rest of the year. So I'm just wondering, sort of, what visibility do you have, and what are you hearing from your customers, in terms of demand, particularly, you know, for the second half of the year? Thank you.
Thank you, Lasse. Yeah, on the acquisition, the size of the business is in a single—it's a higher single-digit million EUR business. They reported above EUR 7 million last year. On the growth rates, this business has, as I said, very good relationships to supplier, also good customer base, especially on the artificial vision. They could really show nice growth rates.
But our take here is that we will, especially with the offering from our, let's say, system-house approach, be driving growth into that—into that business. It's one of the, let's say, incumbent acquisitions. You can compare it, I would say, to the Stemmer position in some of the European countries. So I believe that we have a good basis for that. On the purchasing price, obviously, we don't reveal any concrete numbers here. We believe that the timing was also right based on the pricing aspects. We saw that multiples came down. I didn't say we waited for that, but it was basically a reasonable approach here. And, for sure, it has some strategic elements to it. But yeah, I would—I would remain with that.
So if you if you would look at what are we trying to achieve, I believe, you know, each of our regional territories, we, we want to get at least a minimum presence of EUR 20 million in sales per year. That company is not there yet. It might sound a small number for the United States market. So the ambitions, for sure, are higher than that. But I think, if you if you want to plan for, let's say, our, growth rates, I believe that we should achieve EUR 20 million in an achievable time. On Q1 and our outlook for the year, I think when you look at, or once you want to have a feeling for, Q1 and, and I think if you compare, it looks different than Q4, because the order entry is much more optimistic, let's say, than Q4.
We saw EUR 25 million order entry in Q4, which obviously had an impact on Q1 in terms of revenue. But with a really good book-to-bill ratio in Q1, we see already some pickup. So I think that's the good news. And that also gives us confidence that Q2 is even better in order intake. So our focus really is on order intake. I think we have a good pipeline on projects. As I said earlier, we're much more focusing obviously in order intake activities at this point of time. And yeah, I think the work we have done, especially working with end users and getting much more integrated in the supply chain of customers, I think our visibility is much better than just being a component supplier.
While we still want to continue that, it depends also on our trading business. The trading business has not done that well in terms of order intake yet. And that's what Michael said. That's especially what we expect to see, let's say, in the later part of Q2 coming up. So from a bigger customer perspective, I think we see some healthy trends already that will continue. We reported already order intakes for some customers of larger than EUR 7 million in the first quarter, which really shows that customers are putting larger orders into the market. But again, on the smaller-sized customer types, we need more momentum, and that we expect to see later this year.
Got it. Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Robert van der Horst, Warburg Research.
Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I would like to follow up, actually, on what my colleague just said on the acquisition. Could you give us an idea where the company is right now in terms of is it more is it a pure distributor? Does it already offer value-add and solutions in line with your strategy over there, or what I assume to be your strategy over there? And would that require a significant, like, integration and really a change of the marketing strategy over there, maybe, you know, kind of, connected to the success you had with your core business in really targeting high-potential customers for solutions? So is there any significant restructuring required in the US?
My second question, just for clarification, would be, I know, you know, EUR 3.5 million, if I look at last year's sales, is not that much. But just to be clear, the acquisition is not yet included in the 2024 targets with regards to both, the positive contribution of sales and possible integration costs. Correct?
Well, let's take the questions in the right order. There's no restructuring necessary for that company, a distribution company. Unfortunately, I'm not able to disclose too much, because we want to wait for closing. But I want to give you the following insight. When you look at the company and obviously, it has a website, and everybody can look at it. It has a very interesting portfolio on the supplier side.
We have been indicating to you that we're not trying to get just the distribution presence but really get a access into what we call embedded markets. For that, the company has a very nice portfolio, strong suppliers, which enrich also from a supplier side Stemmer's current suppliers. These are very strategic suppliers. We believe that this is really a core value of this company. We will give more insights with the closing information. But at this time, we're a little bit shy of doing so. So yes, it is a distribution business.
It has a very nice presence in new markets with a very attractive portfolio, which we believe is very strategic for us, especially in the new markets, which put much more focus on decentralized intelligence, starting from customers who build their own cameras so that we don't need to sell a complete camera but basically modules of a camera. So for us, it's really also a strategic step to leverage our entry into customers with a slightly different portfolio approach, which we hope to carry over to Europe. And that really also is what we find so interesting. But again, no restructuring, no, we don't buy a problem here. We buy a lot of chances.
Okay. Perfect. And maybe just a quick follow-up, how is your M&A pipeline looking right now?
So was this, like, a main thing you already mentioned you've been working on it for quite a while? Or is there more, you're looking at concrete in terms of concrete targets without disclosing any details?
I think it has been a statement that we want to put more focus on this. We think that it is the right timing. Everybody is negative. Everybody's pessimistic. I personally believe that that is the right time to go out hunting. And it's like a little bit when everybody rains, you know? Everybody sits at home in the warm and don't go out. That's where you need to go out. So we're very active on that side, especially on our regional expansion. I think that we show clearly that we also are committed to that.
On the technology side, we see nice expansion opportunities. So for us, this is not the end. Again, we're careful and are not driven by that, also not by the investment community to say, "Yeah. When are you doing acquisitions?" I think this has been a well-thought-through process. We have some more sticks in the fire, which hopefully we can report, also execution.
Perfect. That was very helpful. Thank you so much.
And then on the other question, Michael? On the acquisition, if this is part of the.
Yeah. So, regarding the acquisition, if this is part of our guidance in 2024. So, as said before, we didn't get close, the acquisition.
And, therefore, we think in some kind of scenarios we don't have the full revenue effect factored in our revenue guidance for 2024. And as Arne said before, there is no restructuring needed. So our cost base is also not really influenced by this acquisition. And therefore, this was also not factored in our guidance for 2024.
Okay. Perfect. That was very helpful. Thanks.
The next question comes from the line of Lukas Spang, Tigris Capital. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi. Good morning, gentlemen. I would like to follow on the topic of the change of your location to Munich. You already pointed out last year that this could be a topic for this year, so it materializes. Is there any one-off effect you expect in this year due to this change?
Actually, there's no one-off effect expected for this year.
The move to Munich is planned for the end of this year. Our contracts here in Puchheim are constructed in a way that we don't have to pay double rent or things like that. And the depreciation times of our improvements here also are leveled out with our move out by the end of the year. So no one-off effect expected.
Okay. And then in terms of your guidance, in the last call in November, you told us that your expectation for this year is an upper single-digit growth. So if you now compare this with your guidance you published today, it's the, let's say, best-case scenario. What has changed since November?
I think what has changed is, clearly, that is a change.
I think we have and very close to our customers. What we have seen is that we've seen a strong revenue reporting in Q4. But the order intake clearly was not to the level that we expected, basically. So we start the year with a low, let's say, order entry in order book situation. While it's not bad, but it, you know, we could have been better. And then also Q1, I must say, order entry is good, but also here, short-term revenue booking is not that strong. And so I think, and that I think is something which we see throughout the market, that the global, let's say, market trends and especially the—I would even call it—psychological insecurity in the markets for investments is still there.
I think we all sense that. Every industry association reports these numbers. And, so, the first half year could have been stronger, what we said last year. But today, I think it is, as you said, we have chances to overcome stagnation, and that's what we're aiming for. But I think it's also good at this point of time to basically also say, yeah, what is the downside scenario or the lower scenario, to give everybody a clear picture and transparent picture of what we see right now.
Yeah. And the positive effects due to the Infaimon integration is still valid, right? So I think up to EUR 2 million of earnings improvements?
Yes. So, we see that already in Q1, coming through.
So what Michael said on the personnel cost side, we see the effects. And I think it is; it's a strong sign that we take action also in markets which are difficult, and not wait until we see, you know, the business impacted. So I think the decision last summer, which we made, I think we got some question marks, "Why do you do that in a very well-running company?" We see also in Q1 that Spain is doing very well. And so, but we believe that sometimes moments of market weakness are good opportunities to make these changes so that you're prepared for the takeup and not just organize when the market takeup is there. So I think from the momentum or from the timing was right.
And you would see in Q1, that this also triggers down into our improved cost position, which Michael was referring to earlier.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks.
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Yes. So, thank you to everybody for the interest. Again, it is for us challenging market conditions. I hope you sense that we are very much aware of this. And we're really busy tackling the situation. I think we have, I would say, never been prepared to tackle such a situation, how we organize and what we execute also from the market signals we get. It is a time to be different in terms of the rules of the game are changing in the market.
I think Stemmer Imaging has clearly positioned itself to profit from this changing conditions. And with that, we look positive and optimistic into the year. And yeah, we will update you soon. Don't expect too much on the first half year in the first quarter especially. But again, Stemmer is well-positioned, and for sure, there will be more news coming, especially after the closing of our acquisition. So stay tuned. Happy Easter, everybody. And thank you for dialing in tomorrow this morning. Goodbye.