Good morning, and a warm welcome to Bawat's Q2 and first half presentation, hosted by Arctic. My name is Jeppe, Equity Research Analyst here at Arctic. I will be moderating today's session. With us today we have the CEO, Marcus Hummer, who will present the Q2 highlights. So Marcus, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Jeppe, and thank you very much to the audience listening in today. As Jeppe said, I'd like to take you through the highlights from the Q2, and also some post-quarter events. I have two slides for you today. The first slide, just with bullets on the Q2, and then a separate slide, very much focused on what we call Ballast as a Service, which Bawat is investing heavily in, as we speak. But the first slide is key points from the quarter. We are on sales a little bit higher, close to nine million than the first half, similar to last year.
We are still trailing behind our pro rata for the full year, and the main reasons is that we are having slight delays in converting our backlog with customers late in actually placing the orders in the backlog. But the largest challenge is the final placement of mobile systems new orders. As we see that we are going into the full implementation of the Ballast Water Convention, we can see here on the eighth of September, we can see that we have a steadily well increase in our quotes going out, so we are quite comfortable that it will look much better in the second half. We have post-quarter also dissolved with our American partners, Green Swan, in order to focus a hundred percent alone on our Ballast as a Service.
I'll come back to that. But that, together with the delay in conversion, have an impact on our guidance. SEK 12 million , we are reducing our guidance by, but the most significant part of that, more than SEK 9 million, is coming from the dissolution with our American partners. However, this will be over time fully compensated in earnings on our bottom line, as we are now having full ownership of our service. We also in June, mid-June, in place in Hamburg Port with our BaaS service. We have our partner, Janssen, now trained, and we are fully available to deliver the service in the second-largest port in Europe, which is a record achievement by Bawat. We are very proud of that, and it's a first of its kind in the world.
But much more on what is happening in Hamburg, what is happening with the Ballast as a Service. But it's very much driven by, as we are now approaching less than a week of the full implementation of the Ballast Water Convention. The Ballast as a Service will also drive up our gross profit over time. As the jobs that we have already performed, we can see that they will have a positive influence of our overall long-term guidance of 30%, and we are now considering, and comfortable with, that we are targeting more 40% as a long-term gross profit margin for the company. The gross profit margin for the quarter was lower than anticipated, impacted by delivery of the first two mobile system manufactured by our joint venture partner in manufacturing, Damen.
We have now taken all the learnings into those two units that we have just delivered, and we now have a very nice working relationship where we have taken all those learnings into these units, and with the rest of the year guidance, we will come back to our targeted 30%. So a word on Ballast as a Service, which is a major push for Bawat. Ballast as a Service is the service where we put in reception facilities in ports, and we receive non-compliant ballast water from vessel owners coming to port, not able to discharge ballast water and take on new cargo. This is very much driven by three factors.
The first is that the Ballast Water Convention of 8th of September is now fully in place, and with that, and from international studies, we know that a very large percentage of vessels are still not compliant. This can be due to many things, but the major reasons are, you know, equipment quality, it's different water conditions that are tough for some systems to operate on, and also crew experience and crew training. We also know from Clarksons' research database that more than 20,000 vessels are still not equipped with systems. So in ports, there are a large number of vessels coming in that are non-compliant.
That means that Bawat BaaS, which can put in reception facilities via our mobile systems, have a very large business opportunities, and we are supporting now Port State Control, first in Hamburg, but also in rest of Germany and also in Northern Europe, where we are actually putting in our systems and making Port State Control possible to actually police and make sure that vessels don't discharge non- compliant water. We have post-quarter raised SEK 25 million in new equity because we wanna invest into these systems that goes on our own balance sheet, and this is why we have raised the capital.
We are also now in the process of raising asset-backed debt, so we, together with the equity we raised, we are now putting in a investment program of more than ten new mobile units that we will be deploying starting in Q1, 2025 . This is also part of why we have separated with our U.S. partners at Green Swan, in order to make sure that we are now fully and in control of the implementation system, and also now fully in control of our bottom line. We are parting with our partners in good faith, and there are no consequences going forward from our business other than that we would be operating ourself. We are still negotiating with a large numbers of northern European ports for the next installations and where our new systems will be put in.
And it's primarily here in Northern Europe, where we are on port level, but also on government and authority level, are discussing where and how fast we can implement these Ballast as a Service program for more ports than just beginning here in Hamburg. So, Jeppe, back to you. Thanks for listening today.
Thank you so much for the presentation and the insight into the Q2 figures. Let's move on to the Q&A.
Mm-hmm.
We have a couple of questions here. First one is on the Ballast as a Service. How has the response been on the Ballast as a Service offering in Hamburg Port?
We were in place in Hamburg over the summer, and we have spent the time training our partner and working together with authorities, agents, and vessel owners, learning about our systems. So we have had a very positive response so far, and we expect and have budgeted with that from September and onwards, the system will be utilized. And we are also putting in one more system coming across from the U.S. that we will be using for spot jobs coming up in Northern Europe. But we are very pleased with the acceptance that we have seen in Hamburg Port, but we are looking also forward to that our owners, agents, and authorities get to know the system better.
After 8 of September, the authorities rightfully have said that then there are no other options than to go to our system if you are non-compliant in Hamburg Port. We have also seen that authorities are handing out quite large fines in Hamburg, also in Bremen, in Germany. We are seeing that German authorities, from an environmental point of view, is taking this Ballast Water Convention very seriously.
Very good. Glad to hear. When do you expect these mobile solutions to be delivered, and the contribution on the cash flow to the company?
So we have two systems in play now that we are selling from, delivering cash. And then the investment program here will deliver the first units into Q1 next year and the last units into Q2 next year. We are conservatively planning that it will take approximately two months to phase them in before they will be fully allocated and servicing in order to deliver cash flow. So the full cash flow from all of the units will come in Q3 next year, but the first cash will already come in Q1 next year.
Very good. Can you give some more color on the funding needs going forward? Will the new mobility solution bring you to cash breakeven? And I guess you answered the last of that question.
Yeah. What we are seeing here, with the separation from our partners, is that we are approximately one quarter later than in cash breakeven. So we are planning to be cash breakeven in the first quarter of 2025. And going forward after that, once we have raised the debt to finance this investment program, we are raising approximately 80% debt to match the equity we have already raised. Then the cash flow will be able to support new investments, and we will be cash breakeven going forward from that.
Very good, and we have received a couple of questions on the Ballast as a Service.
Mm-hmm
But I think you have already answered that in your presentation and the Q&A part.
Thank you.
So I guess that concludes our webcast for today. I'll thank everyone who was listening in, and I will also thank Marcus from Bawat.
Thank you very much, Jeppe, and, as always, this webcast can also be found on our investor homepage, after this, after we conclude today. Thank you very much for listening.