Hello, everyone. Welcome to Sabancı Holding's second quarter webcast. Please refer to our disclaimer before we begin our presentation. Today, I have our Group CEO, Cenk Alper, and Group CFO, Orhun Köstem with me. I now would like to leave the floor to our CEO for opening remarks. Orhun and I will be talking about our financial performance more in detail in the remainder of the call. Cenk Alper?
Thank you, Kerem. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter webcast. I'm Cenk Alper, Sabancı Holding CEO. I'll start by talking about the major events that affected our group in the first six months of the year. Orhun and Kerem will provide more details on our financial performance. The first half of the year was exceptionally challenging, resulting from the devastating earthquake, high volatility in local macro environment, together with uncertainties around elections, as well as difficulties in the global markets due to the recession in major economies.
Although eased in the beginning of the second half, global recessionary environment in the first half had made a slight impact on the volume performance of our export-oriented portfolio companies, such as cement, tire, composites, and tire reinforcement businesses.
Those companies benefited from robust demand in the domestic market and offset the slowdown in the export markets and maintained their earnings growth momentum. In terms of local macro environment, high inflation continues to affect our businesses, especially on the wages, as well as sharp price increases on local materials and services. In addition to inflationary pressures, demand volatility in different businesses was another important fact that was experienced in the first six months. Rapid changes in the regulations had a major effect on our group companies.
We managed to act proactively and in an agile manner to better position our group against such challenges, owing to our close monitoring of the regulatory landscape. Thanks to these efforts, we managed to sustain our port profitability to further maximize shareholder value.
All these macro challenges that I mentioned got even more stretched up until May, as the country was under the influence of long-awaited elections. We, as a group, continued to remain cautious in this extremely volatile period, but stick to our investment plans and capital allocation strategies that we have been addressing since mid-2021, which we define as the new economy.
We have reviewed multiple options and investment opportunities, both in Türkiye and abroad, that fit our capital allocation criteria, to continue to deliver on our group purpose that we have been highlighting at the very beginning of our strategy house. We unite Türkiye and the world for a sustainable life with leading enterprises.
In this volatile and challenging local and global macroeconomic backdrop, I'm happy to see that we have managed to improve our numbers at every level, and even performed better than last year's numbers, which was a period that had marked by hyperinflation. Our earnings quality prevailed in the first six months, as our 50% year-over-year net income growth comfortably exceeded 42% EBITDA growth in the same periods. Our operational cash flow surged eight times compared to previous year.
Our ROE in the first six months reached 38%, driven by both bank and non-bank businesses. The group's balance sheet remains strong, and our favorable FX position benefits any currency volatility and reinforces our healthy balance sheet, as evidences at the first half.
Our liquidity, especially at the holding level, continued to be solid even after adjusting for the dividend payment, which has more than doubled compared to a year ago. I'm confident that we'll continue to reap the benefits of having a diversified portfolio of companies that is enabling solid and sustainable financial performance, despite local and global economic volatility. This, I believe, will continue to be a major competitive advantage for Sabancı Holding.
Aside from strong financial performance, we continue to bank our building and ecosystem within Sabancı Group. In addition to investments in core and new businesses, we are also aiming to sustain our building a sustainable ecosystem team with our venture capital investments as well.
In that respect, Sabancı Ventures has completed two new deals in the first half of the year, including first APAC-based investment in a green hydrogen equipment company, and reached a total of nine investments and a total investment amount of $10 million. These are all separate from our other venture investments in energy and climate technologies. Corporate venture capital investments are an essential component of our growth strategy, as well as an instrumental tool to foster innovation and create value in our existing businesses, as it helps us build synergies and commercial collaborations across Sabancı Group.
We are also increasing our global footprint with four of our last five investments being headquartered abroad. While concentrating on strategic priorities and financial performance, we also kept our focus on ESG, as it is an integral part of our group strategy.
We have been prioritizing sustainability in all our investments, not only for the future of Sabancı Holding, but also for the future of the world. Let me talk about our successful implementation and execution of on ESG principles. With the aim of being pioneer in sustainability as a business, we continue to accelerate our investments in the areas that support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
With our projects and new economy-oriented businesses, we aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050 as our ultimate target. In that respect, we have already defined our interim Scope 1 and Scope 2 emission reduction targets in line with the Science Based Targets initiative, a major step towards our net zero goal.
According to these science-based targets, we will be decreasing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 42% as of 2030, with 2021 base year. As of 31 December 2022, last year, we have already reduced our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 11% comparing to 2021, with group efforts and sustainable to dedicated projects. Specifically, our building materials and energy group companies played a vital role in reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
We aim to attain a 15% reduction, not later than end of 2025. Let me give you some additional facts and figures about our ESG performance. We reduced our energy consumption by 12%. We increased our renewable electricity consumption 3.3 times compared to 2021.
On the other hand, we produced 31% more renewable electricity in 2022. We reduced our water consumption by 9% comparing to 2021. We increased our water recycling rate from 23% to 31%. To sum up, 2022 has marked the reversal of a business as usual trend, in which companies are expected to increase their footprint while growing their businesses. This was not the case at Sabancı in 2022.
Moving forward, in the next four years, energy continues to be the major driver of our low carbon growth strategy, as one out of three wind and solar power plant investments in Turkey will be made by us, Sabancı Group. This also means adding 10% in Turkey's existing installed wind power capacity.
Through our businesses, through our business strategy and ESG integration into our capital allocation decisions, we manage our new investments on the axis of sustainability related areas. In this regard, we project our CapEx and OpEx in the activities associated with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to reach $5 billion among 2020-to-2027-year end. I try to give you a color on our investments, financial performance, and ESG initiatives. Let me hand over to Orhun to speak on our financial performance more in detail. Orhun?
Thank you, Cenk. Hi, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. This is Orhun Köstem speaking. I'm happy to report we had a great set of results at the end of the first half of 2023. Especially, I'm sure you must have seen that our second quarter results have been much better than what we have reported on the first quarter, and I would be more than happy to touch base some of the details around that.
I won't go into any detail in this page, except for the fact that we're looking at, in summary, a NAV growth of 43%, if still a NAV discount of about 29%, and our CapEx to sales ratio have been gradually improving, and this has come to 8.6% from 7.4%, compared to the first half of 2022.
On the next page, as far as the macro backdrop is concerned, before we move into the details of the financials, we're looking at a relatively better environment when it comes to commodity and energy prices. Compared to last year, let me take reference of Bloomberg indexes. We've seen an easing on the cost of commodities and energy in general.
In Turkey, obviously, one of the things that we have been following, and I'm sure you must be looking at, is how the minimum wage have been has been increasing with a recent increase after the reporting date of our first half results. Obviously, from the first half of 2022 to first half of 2023, if you take the end of 2021 as an index, we're looking at about 280 compared to a 100 index at the end of 2021. Now, the consumer price index at the end of June has been recorded at 38%. That's, you know, roughly half of what it was a year back. Still high, but nevertheless came down.
If you look at the basket, how the basket has changed in the first six months, it's 36%, pretty much in line with the top line inflation. As I'm sure going forward, we still look at a lot of volatilities, and again, I'm sure you must have noted, in the month of July, the inflation has started to pick up again. Now, in this macro backdrop and a relatively still volatile environment, I'm happy to say that we have grown our top line by 59%, our EBITDA by 42% and our net income by about 50%.
I'm also quite happy to say that our net income growth has been contributed both by the bank and the non-bank businesses. I'm going to talk about the bank, but later, when I talk about the details in the quarter.
As you see, the return profile of the bank is normalizing, as is in the general banking sector. I'm pretty sure you must see that Akbank did announce a great set of results compared to its peers and the sector in general. However, I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that in the non-bank business, we have been able to deliver what we call a quality growth. What we mean by that is, as the top line grows, in this case by 44%, we've seen our bottom line growing faster by about 51%, which suggests a more profitable growth on a year-on-year basis. This is also reflected in our return metrics.
If you look at our return on equity, we're quite happy with the trends where we've seen, on a, you know, the basis increase by 33.6 to 37.8 at the end of the six months in 2023, so, about a 420 basis point improvement. Again, in non-bank case, there's a 60 basis per point improvement where the bank's return metrics are, as I said, normalizing.
What's quite interesting, again, on the non-bank side, if you only look at the second quarter, our non-bank businesses have delivered a return on equity of about 48%, compared to 30% in the second quarter of 2022. That base have been gradually improving and now stands at 48% in our non-bank business.
We have seen a whopping 8x growth in our operating cash flow to TL 16.6 billion, from a TL 3 billion back in 2022. In all fairness, if you have listened to us last year as well, actually, the TL 2 billion was out of ordinary, the base of 2022. This was driven by the fact that the price equalization mechanism for our retail electricity business have only normalized towards the end of 2022 and actually created this anomaly within the period. Strong operating cash flow generation, we are quite happy with. 8x is great, but again, we need to be careful about the base of last year in that sense.
Nevertheless, if you look at our balance sheet details, you know, we still held about TL 4.5 billion of net cash. That's roughly about $176 million. That's only, you know, holding company cash we're having. Our Net Debt to EBITDA have come down from 1.3 times to 0.5 times compared to end of the first six months of 2022, more or less at the same level when you compare it with the end of 2022.
In the meantime, as I said, but let me underline again, we continue our investments and our CapEx to you know, revenues on our non-bank businesses have grown from 7.4%, this is 2022, to 8.6%, which is the first half of 2023. In spite of the fact that we continue growing our CapEx, as we have communicated, we still manage a fairly healthy balance sheet, and we still believe we have enough ammunition to continue investing for growth.
On the next page, if you look at the second quarter results, first of all, if you look at our second quarter, revenue growth has been 45%. That is a 75% growth on the bank side and 30% growth on our non-bank businesses.
On the bank side, in this period, obviously, the fundamental banking returns were positive, you know, from trading income to portfolio returns, et cetera. However, what I would like to draw your attention specifically, is how the digital customer acquisition has been moving forward in the bank. You remember last year, we reported that the bank has acquired some 2.3 million new customers digitally. On top of that base now, it has grown another 1.3 million customers.
Within one, one and a half years, that base have grown by a whopping 42%. Of course, that growth results in, you know, market share expansion, cross-sell opportunities, and obviously a very healthy and strong contribution to the performance of our bank, which we're happy with.
On the non, you know, bank side, as I said, the revenue growth was 30%. You're going to see this is actually mostly driven by the fact that in our generation business, this year, the business is mainly driven by renewable energy generation contribution together with hydros, where you're going to see what I mean in the next few pages, where we have a very strong profit generation. However, the top line growth has been somewhat subdued in this quarter, due to the mix, especially coming from generation business.
Having said that, we're quite happy how our building materials business's top line is growing, how our digital segment or financial segment has been growing, all of which are contributing to our overall non-bank top line growth.
If you get to the EBITDA, here again, we see a 51% growth of EBITDA in the quarter, faster than our revenue growth. On the bank side, this is a 44% growth. On the non-bank businesses, this is 69% growth. There, again, the EBITDA growth has more than doubled compared to the top line growth. As I said, the profitability, it corrects itself.
On the energy side, again, now this time in generation, the share of the renewables have been increasing, which is making us happy. It's, you know, positive margin and profit contribution. Hydrology in the second quarter after April became much better than what the output was in the first quarter.
Again, therefore, adding for the profitability, despite the fact that the electricity prices are low and the output of our natural gas plants in Bandırma have been limited due to two stoppages of generation in the period. Other than that, again, if you look at our building materials business, the EBITDA growth has been 99%, digital side, 71.
Financial services, EBITDA has been growing quite significantly, but again, you remember the base last year was low, especially for our non-life insurance business. This year, obviously, its premium generation of our insurance businesses, as well as the EBITDA contribution, has been much, much better. If you get to the net income for the quarter, here, the growth is 73%.
Now, again, much, much faster than how the top line has been growing. The bank's net income growth in the quarter was about 55, whereas the non-bank business's net income growth, if you exclude for the, of course, one-off items in the period, is 108%.
Now, the energy business contributes the fastest, 137% growth, building materials, 174% growth, and financial services, over 300% growth. The industrials business net income is not growing in this quarter. It was not growing in the first quarter either. You remember that was due to the fact that in Kordsa's global footprint and global markets, there's a very serious demand and price competition. Because of the economies either slowing down or contracting, impacting the overall demand.
Secondly, of course, given China has slowed down considerably, there is now a lot of Chinese products in the market, which creates a lot of pricing tension. You'll see a decent cash flow from Kordsa, and, you know, results pretty much in line with our plans for the year. However, compared to last year, we see some slowing down in the overall industrials, although resource business continued to be, you know, doing quite well.
With that, I'll move on to the next page and talk about our NAV growth, which was at 43% on dollar basis, compared to the same quarter of last year. Again, compared to the same quarter of last year, we have some 6% reduction in our NAV discount. If you look at the last three to five-year averages, obviously, we're looking at, you know, 40% to 42%. We have now stabilized our NAV discount in a much healthier level.
If you look at the contribution to our NAV, where you see on the graph on the right-hand side of this page, obviously, it seems that the banking and financial services has the highest contribution, with some 36%, followed by our materials businesses, mostly industrial and building materials, is 29%, and then followed by energy, which is 22%. If you look at this page, and if you turn to the next page, you'll see the pre- pretty much the same breakdown on your pie chart on the left-hand side. However, as you will all...
I'm sure you must have all noted and seen. If you haven't noted and seen, we must have reached out to you and told you, that, given our initiative around merging our subsidiary, Exsa, with Sabancı Holding Anonim Şirketi, to simplify our structure, basically, so there is much clarity on businesses like Sabancı Skoda, a joint venture that produces electric buses, which we're hopefully going to have a direct ownership now and not through Exsa. Through that process, we have by regulation, we have had to produce an independent evaluation report, which was produced by EY at the time.
If you look at some of the evaluations for our non-listed companies, in particular, Enerjisa Üretim, on the right-hand side of this page, you see a much more balanced breakdown of NAV, where the energy businesses now account for about 40% banking and financial services from 27, advanced materials technologies from 21, and digital is up and coming. It's quite small. We started last year. As you see, the top line has been growing quite satisfactory.
However, it's still coming off a small base. Even though NAV growth was quite nice, and we have been able to grow, still over the... this thirty in the last 12 months, or if you look at since the start of the year, we're pretty much in line or maybe slightly above this thirty.
This is hardly reflected on our, you know, price earnings ratios, especially if you compare to our historical levels. There is slight improvement, however, it seems there is much, much more opportunity for us to move forward. With that, I will leave the floor to Kerem, so that he could take us through the details of our business segments, and then I'll talk about our midterm guidance again. Thank you.
Thank you, Orhun. Let's start segment discussion with energy. As for the generation business, as a result of lower spot prices and lower natural gas volume due to stoppages in natural gas plants, revenues dropped by 55% compared to last year. Despite low natural gas profitability, because of production stoppages and low spot prices, EBITDA was up by 65% compared to last year, with positive contribution from renewable assets, thanks to higher water inflow, higher dark spreads at coal plants, and positive asset-wide contribution on higher trading activities of energy commodities.
In addition to positive EBITDA performance, higher FX income supported bottom line and net income more than doubled in second quarter. With regards to Enerjisa Energy, operational earnings driven mainly by strong growth from distribution business as well as retail and customer solution segments.
Distribution business generated growth both from its return on assets and investment activities, as financial income increased on the back of higher inflation and investments, as well as the IFRIC financial income calculation methodology change, which has been incorporated in third quarter last year. Further on, please note that the negative impacts stemming from the TL 780 million OpEx booked in first quarter related to the earthquake, have now been classified as pass-through, non-controllable, controllable OpEx.
CapEx increased massively on higher inflation, as well as low activity level at the first half of 2022. In retail segment, gross profit margin recovered on the back of higher energy costs and increased cost coverage for higher inflation and doubtful receivables.
Our customer solutions, operational performance increased significantly, driven by new solar projects, where we install solar panels on customers' facilities, providing them with access to green energy as well as positive impact from FX gains. Moving on to bank. The bank has ended the quarter with a TL 20.3 billion net income, up an eye-catching 90% quarter-on-quarter, resulting in solid 5.8% return on assets and 50.3% return on equity. Buffers remain both on ROA and ROE, as the bank used 40% for CPI-linked inflation. Our bank added a solid 1.3 million net active customers year to date.
This is on top of net TL 2.3 million acquired last year, taking its active customer base to 20 million, up by 42% in the last 1.5 years. This customer acquisition has resulted in record high market share gains across the board in consumer loans, loan-based deposits base, and demand deposits. More importantly, customer acquisition continued with higher cross-sell ratios. All these lead to fee income market share among private banks to surge by 250 basis points in the first half of 2023, according to the BRSA monthly data.
Also, worth to underline that while growing due to prudent risk management, the profitability of default of the portfolio didn't increase. With the agility and balance sheet management, timely hedges, and strong customer-related business, Akbank once again delivered its exquisite treasury management, further boosting net income.
Akbank proactively complies with regulations while focusing on maturity mismatch. In addition to this, the bank keeps its leading position in capital with a robust figure of 17.1, which will continue to provide the bank significant competitive advantage going forwards. Please keep in mind that in July, Tier 2 issuance, capital adequacy ratio would have been higher at 17.8%. For the financial services segments, it is another quarter with a robust performance as top-line growth reached 94% year-on-year, driven by life and non-life businesses.
Segments EBITDA more than tripled with the contribution from both businesses. In the life business, EBITDA was up by 10% year-on-year, thanks to the growth in pension assets under management, higher profitability in return premium products driven by TL depreciation and positive impact of cumulative liability profitability.
Net income has more than doubled, thanks to higher technical profitability, as well as strong financial income, owing to favorable interest rate environment and higher FX gains on weak TL. In non-life business, despite the company's conservative approach in motor third-party liability, top-line growth reached 96% compared to last year, thanks to favorable trends in non-motor segments.
Underlying net income performance remains somewhat under pressure because of additional provisions related to the Constitutional Court decision on motor third-party liability and impact of minimum wage increase on technical provisions. Despite weakness in underlying net income, EBITDA performance significantly improved compared to last year, thanks to big TL and profitable trading transactions during the second quarter. Because of a strong EBITDA pass-through, net income sharply recovered from a loss last year.
Moving on to building materials, segments top line increased by 45% as local demand, especially in the Marmara region, remained strong. This strong top line growth is achieved by focusing on sales mix optimization, despite lower volumes compared to last year, due to Çimsa's Kayseri and Niğde plants sale on July 2022, as a part of its network optimization strategy. In addition to better sales mix, higher energy margin and fuel mix optimization led to stronger EBITDA growth and margin.
The authentic fuel usage in both companies is standing at 25%, which is well above Turkey's 10% average. The segment's net income almost tripled compared to last year, thanks to positive impact of declining net financial debts and higher FX income.
For industrial segment, compared revenue growth of 21% year-on-year in second quarter, due to the continuing weakness in global tire reinforcement market, leading to a lower sales volume. This weakness offset by strong demand in tire business, driven by original equipment markets. EBITDA growth of tire business remained strong in the quarter, owing to favorable pricing and sales mix, industrial segments EBITDA margin deteriorated due to the weakness in tire enforcement business on high price raw material inventories.
Net profit declined by 16%, led by higher net financial expenses due to increasing debt position related with the financing of Microtex acquisition and increase in financing costs. Moving on to digital segments. The segment's top line growth more than doubled with a higher contribution from electronics retail business, driven especially by strong demand and market share gains.
In addition to physical store sales, which are the major driver of basket growth, e-commerce sales positively contributed to the segment's top line growth as gross merchandise value almost 3x. Our new digital marketing and cybersecurity companies also contributed strongly to the top line growth on higher sales in cloud technology and architecture services in Sabanci DX, and higher sales in advanced analytics and product business line in Oportun, formerly known as SAM.
Segments EBITDA has almost 2x, thanks to strong top line growth, despite higher fixed cost to sales ratio, due to ongoing integration process in new digital marketing and cybersecurity companies, and adverse impact of minimum wage hike in electronics retail business. Higher FX losses and higher financial expenses because of higher borrowing costs pressures net income growth.
On retail, segments revenues increased by 87% year-on-year, remaining well above the inflation, driven by higher average basket size and organic growth in physical stores. While EBITDA growth remained at 60%, EBITDA margin declined 100 pips due to negative impact of minimum wage increase. The adverse impact of high financial expenses continued to affect the bottom-line growth. Now, I would like to leave the floor to our CFO, Orhun Köstem, to speak about the guidance.
Thank you, Kerem. As, as you remember, our midterm guidance i s to grow our top line, 8% better than the top line CPI, and our EBITDA to be 10% better than the top line CPI. Just to give a brief color on this, we've looked at the past two years, after we've announced our midterm guidance, and we've seen that our combined net sales have grown 23% and 49% above the top line CPI. Our EBITDA has grown 36% and 100% above the top line CPI for the past two years. We're, you know, comfortably ahead of our midterm guidance.
Obviously, we're going through quite volatile periods moving into hyperinflation, and then expect that to potentially come down in the coming years. We will continue looking at our midterm guidance going forward. For the time being, it is maintained.
You will also remember that we had one addition to this, where we added our 2030, you know, guidelines on sustainability, where we have said we're looking a 42% reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 2030.
That's the that has been the recent addition to our midterm guideline. With that, I think, as we've gone over to the top line, as Cenk has given us the highlights for the first half, in general, we are happy to report a strong set of results with a healthy balance sheet, and our acquisitions performing actually better than our expectations. Again, just to give you a color before we move into the Q&A, I'll just...
You remember Arvento acquired by Brisa last year, Microtex acquired by Kordsa, and of course, our Buñol acquisition. We have been acquisitions by our subsidiaries. By the end of the first half, for example, Arvento has been doing, you know, about 20% better in terms of our EBITDA performance compared to our initial anticipation. This is about 40% for Buñol and about 10% for Microtex. These, again, going forward, we expect to be positive contributors to our operations as well as to our profit and value performance. With that, we'd be happy to move forward to take your questions.
Thank you, Orhun. For the questions, you can either raise your hand to ask your question or type at the Q&A section of the Zoom. The first question from Anzade: Thank you for the presentation. A few questions on subsidiaries and Sahil itself. Do you think more than 40% of EBITDA margin in the generation business is sustainable in the remainder of the year? What is the general guidance shared by the industrial companies for the rest of the year?
The third question, do you see any Scope for higher dividend income from non-bank companies in 2024? Maybe I should rephrase, as it was in Scope to improve dividend payout ratios. If so, which company would you particularly mention? Thank you.
Let me, let me take this. This is Orhun speaking. Anzade, many thanks for the questions. On generation business, provided that A, we're looking at, you know, reasonably a good hydrology for the remainder of the year.
There is no, you know, difference in terms of the pricing matrix or, you know, pricing dynamics in the market. Yes, there is no reason why we should think of a much lower EBITDA margin for the rest of the year. What we have done so far, as I said, was a relatively lower contribution from, you know, dark spreads and spark spreads. And that was met in general by renewable and hydrology.
Again, our trading business in general provided, you know, positive outcome. As long as these conditions continue, yes, you know, we shouldn't expect any serious changes there. For the industrial companies, obviously, we're not looking at a year. I haven't seen their guidances per se.
For us, as we discussed, you know, Brisa's holding on to their, you know, profits and their cash flows, maybe not growing significantly year on year, you know, compared to last year. Nevertheless, we believe so far they have done a good job, basically, given the conditions. More or less, let's say, flattish, given the relatively difficult circumstances. I would say the same for Kordsa as well. Again, as I said, we're not looking at the year of growth for our industrial businesses. Having said that, we're looking at, you know, holding on to profits, basically.
We're expecting to see good cash flow performance, in general, which we feel to be quite important in a year like this, where we see, you know, demand pressure in the market. Going forward, yes, higher dividend income could be. I mean, in my mind, these are two different questions, you know. The dividend payout ratios could change, but more importantly, some of our dividend contributors have been changing.
What I mean is, Enerjisa Üretim, for example, has been a quite strong dividend contributor over the past two years. You know, distributing something to the tune of $150 million, basically. We see that, flat to positive, on, on the side that you don't see as, as, as public, companies. The answer, in general, is yes.
In my mind, not because there will be major changes in dividend payout ratios, but the absolute growth, profit growth of the non-bank businesses, can continue to perform quite well. Especially the energy business has the dividend potential to match our bank business, which has been, as you know, the largest dividend contributor historically. I hope, I hope that helps, Anzade. Thank you.
Sashank, you may proceed asking your question. Hello, Sashank, are you there?
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah. I think my question was already answered on the industrials business. I just want to understand the outlook, given, you know, this was probably the only segment that kind of underperformed relative to others. I think the question was answered. Thank you.
Thank you, Shashank. As I said, it's for both of those businesses, if you look at even the global peers, there's a similar picture this year. We're quite happy that we have been able to maintain the profit levels of the businesses together with strong cash flow generation, which have been our priorities in a year like this.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
If you have any further questions, either raise your hand, please, or type them in Zoom section, Q&A section of Zoom. Once again, if you have any questions, either raise your hands or type. Thank you. It seems we have no further questions. Thanks, all, for joining the webcast. Hope to see you in next quarter earnings. Thank you.
Thank you very much, and bye for now.
Thank you. Thank you very much for participating in our webcast. Thank you.