Good morning, everyone. As Kalina mentioned today, very happy to welcome you to the conference this morning. Going to go ahead and put the slides up on the screen. Thank you. We have quite a good agenda lined up this morning. We're going to talk to you about the results of the first half of 2026, and I'm going to go through some first highlights. I will hand it over to Kalina, who will go into details behind the financials. I will come back for a bit of a strategic update. We'll give the confirming the outlook and the guidance for the year, then we will open it up, as Kalina mentioned, for questions and answers. Let's go ahead and jump right into the highlights for 2026 first half. I know you've already seen the press release, let's get right into the details.
We continue to see really the structural demand drivers, I would say, pulling the market in every market we're in. In these markets, governments are really trying to rein in the cost on healthcare, in particular to drive productivity, but also to offset staff shortages. Really as a result, what they're doing is they're taking their investments and they're really focusing them on digitization, which is our sweet spot. I'll go through this region by region in a moment. That market pull is what's driving for us, what you're going to see in a solid growth on orders and growth on revenue as well, constant currency in every region that we are in. Our focus is really how do we capture our unfair share of that growth and doing that without needing to scale our cost at the same rate as that growth.
You see that also in the improved EBITDA and the EBITDA margin if you compare that to 2025. As a result, we are confirming our guidance for full-y ear for 2026, and I'll come back to that specifically in a moment. If you look at really the where, if I go into the financials a little bit deeper, incoming orders, very solid, 15% up at constant currency over half one, 2025. An increased order backlog, that includes some frame agreements or some multi-year contracts. What we see is a lot of our customers are, as they drive some of the consolidation in their markets, they're trying to really standardize on certain solutions and then roll those out across their systems. From a revenue perspective, I know we said at the full- year 2025 results conference that we would likely be flattish first half.
We're actually up 3% at constant currency, again, positive revenue growth in each of the three regions. As mentioned before, in part thanks to the synergies that we're starting to see now from this regional model that was deployed last year, and of course, at a real drive and focus on cost discipline, what we're seeing is we can scale that revenue faster than the cost, and that's what's contributing also to the improved EBITDA and EBITDA margin. From a market perspective, as already mentioned, the demand is really there, that demand represents different opportunities for Ascom in three of our markets. We'll talk about that in a moment. Our strategy of really leading with workflow orchestration and integration into different existing systems, Ascom or other, is really resonating, both with customers as well as with our partners who we continue to build out.
For 2026, we confirm that guidance of low to mid-single digit revenue growth at constant currencies with an EBITDA margin of between 10% and 12%. I mentioned some of the drivers are different for the demand in each of the region. I wanted to go just a moment into that because it is a little bit different depending on which region that you are looking at, even if the demand drivers behind it are quite similar. If I start with the U.S.A., for us, it is really a share capture play because what we see is as that healthcare consolidation continues, it is really driving our customers to look for scalable platforms.
What they are trying to do is reduce their cost, but to do that, they know they need to digitize, they know they need to move into smart hospitals enabled by this digitization, and so they are really channeling the investments in that area. Something in the U.S. called concept of virtual nursing is gaining significant traction, and we are serving as a communications platform in many instances for that. If you look at the overall market, that pull is really in the area where Ascom plays, and given the size of Ascom in the U.S. today versus the size of the market, that is really for us an opportunity to take share and take the market demand pull there.
Even on the enterprise side, also the critical infrastructure organizations we see, they are also really prioritizing these kind of platform investments that they can scale across their systems as well, and they are really looking for this resilience, and our arguments, our selling point in this area is really around lone worker safety, and that really resonates with them. If you go to Region North and the European part of Region South, it is really more about, from an Ascom perspective, leveraging the installed base, the customer base that we have to upgrade and expand their relationships. Pretty much across the region, you have hospital modernization projects going on, you have government-funded digitization projects, healthcare programs being pulled out, and the customers are really pushing
For that platform approach to be able to de-complexify their own IT landscape. They are looking for someone who can provide them that complete solution, which Ascom does. We really have an offering in each of the areas that they are looking for in terms of clinical workflow around the patient bedside. When we can bring that to them in one solution that we can integrate into their platform, that also helps them de-complexify their own IT landscape. Both in Region North and in the European part of Region South, we have a pretty strong customer base in most of the markets on which we can play. It is a lot about upselling our potential. We have already landed, how do we take that land and expand now out into other categories?
If I look at the Middle East, Asia part of Region South, it's really more around capturing a lot of that investment that's going in. They're doing actually quite a bit of hospital builds, modernization of the infrastructure, expansion of their infrastructure. We tend to partner up there, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. Together we can bring in a real solution that resonates with them across the breadth of the Ascom offering.
I would just, again, different dynamics in each of the regions. From an Ascom perspective, the demand, and that's what I find. The structural demand is really pulling the Ascom solutions, and we're able to play a lot in that space. I'm going to hand it over to Kalina, and she's going to walk you through the financial results a little bit more detail in first half, and then I'll come back and talk a little bit more about strategy. Kalina.
Many thanks, David. I will take you through the financials, starting with the highlights that we had in the first half of 2026. Most importantly, our incoming orders have increased by 14.6% at constant currencies. This brings our order backlog to CHF 345 million, which is a very healthy book-to-bill ratio of 1.25x . Revenue increased by 2.6% versus H1 of 2025 at constant currencies, and after translation to the Swiss franc, it has remained flat. We've continued our focus on cost discipline and also on efficiency. This has led to the fact that we have yet again increased EBITDA margin and also EBITDA in terms of Swiss francs. We had good cash conversion. We returned CHF 13.3 million to shareholders in the first half of 2026, which is substantially more than what we did in the past, and this through a combination of dividend and the share buyback.
Despite this, we have strong cash position, which is making us resilient towards some supply chain bottlenecks that we observe at the moment. Let's start with a review of the incoming orders. These increased by 14.6% at constant currencies. As you can see, they increased predominantly in projects, products, and services, which is good news, because this means that these projects in the future are also going to pull more maintenance and support contracts. This is a very good development that we saw in the first half. In terms of regions, we see that all regions grew order intake. Most strongly, the orders grew in Region North, especially in the Nordics countries, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. In Region South, the orders grew by 11%. Sorry, by 22% in Region South. In Region North, by 11%.
In Region South, we saw the strongest growth in Germany, Switzerland, as well as in Asia. In the U.S. and Canada, we saw growth at constant currency of 3%, but given the substantial devaluation of the dollar to CHF, this converted to a negative number in CHF. We see that the backlog increased by 11.8% at constant currencies. We also see that approximately 67% is converting to revenue beyond 2026. This is normal for Ascom. We have quite a lot of multi-year contracts, but nevertheless it gives us also good visibility for the second half of 2026, as well as a good backing for the coming years. In terms of split, we see that the backlog has grown both in products, projects, and services, as well as in maintenance and support contracts.
Net revenue increased at constant currencies by 2.6%, as you can see on the graph. Unfortunately, as you are well aware, we had quite some headwinds, especially from the US dollar devaluating almost 9% compared to the CHF as well as the EUR. In the end, this resulted in actual currency in a flat revenue development. When we look at the net revenue split, we see that it increased, in constant currency, both in maintenance and support, as well as in project, product, and services. Here we see a balanced development. Similarly, when we look at the regional split, we see that every region grew in constant currency. In the region North, it was predominantly driven by Sweden and Denmark. In the region South, by Germany, and also Central and Eastern Europe.
The U.S.A. delivered a revenue growth of 4% in US dollar, and after conversion, it resulted in -5%. Maybe just a side comment on this is that sometimes we comment on the development of software. Software grew half year on half year from 13.1% in the previous half year to 14.4%, and you can see it in all regions and also as part of maintenance and support, and as part of projects, products and services. Going towards the profit and loss statement. We already commented on net revenue. Going over to gross profit. Here you see a small decline in terms of gross margin compared to the first half year of 2025, which is due to a product mix with less mobility and more project work. For us, this is not a matter of concern.
Going down towards the cost items, which is reflected in the profit and loss statement, is really our cost discipline. You see that the marketing and sales costs have reduced substantially, as well as the general and administration costs have reduced also. This is also substantially due to the reorganization which we did in 2025, in order to become more efficient in these areas. On the other hand, the costs for research and development have grown as we see the necessity to invest in product and in innovation.
As a result, our EBITDA increased by 11.6% or 1.1 percentage points, and also our net profit demonstrated a very positive development. Looking towards the cash flow. Our operating cash flow was quite good, with CHF 14 million. This represents 104% cash conversion. I think this is a healthy level for Ascom. You see that this year, the result of the dividend and the share buyback is CHF 13.3 million, which was returned to shareholders. This led to a slightly lower cash position at the 30th of June. But I think this is still a very strong net cash position, and gives us good confidence in the financial stability of the company.
A few other comments on the balance sheet. In terms of net working capital, the net working capital has reduced from December, which is typical. We have this kind of seasonality in our business. It has increased slightly compared to June 2025. This is due to two reasons. On the one hand, we had higher trade receivables, and this is in fact just a reason because we had quite a lot more revenue in the months of May and June. We had CHF 5 million more revenue in these two months.
This development in the trade receivables is not a reason for concern. And we also have approximately CHF 2 million more inventory. This is something that we do deliberately in order to secure the material that we need for sales, because we do observe some supply chain bottlenecks, especially for semiconductors. The other topic I need to mention is the equity. You see a reduction in equity, and this is due to the fact that we have bought back three million shares as part of the share buyback program. Moving over directly to this point, the three million shares have been repurchased at an average share price of CHF 4.47. Over the entire period of the share buyback, which started in May 2025, we have paid CHF 13.4 million for these shares. And the intention is to cancel these shares through a capital reduction by using Ascom's capital band.
Just an overview of the main key metrics that we follow for 2026 compared to 2025. You see the very strong development of incoming orders, 15% in constant currencies, 11% in Swiss francs. A very good situation with the backlog, 12% higher in constant currencies and 11% in Swiss francs. Net revenue with 2.6% increase in constant currency. EBITDA 12% higher than the prior year period. Net working capital has increased, just as I mentioned before, but not an area for concern. And capital expenditure is at the moment lower than it was in the first half of 2025. However, for the full- year, we expect to be on a similar level compared to 2025. I hand over back to David.
Thank you, Kalina. I wanted to come back and give a brief update on the strategy from Ascom perspective. I think first of all, a couple of key messages before we dive in. One, as Kalina already mentioned, software as a proportion of the revenue is continuing to grow, and that is a key part of the drive that we have ongoing right now, really to move from a software-enabled services provider more to a services-enabled software provider. Vendor-neutral integration and really our open app platform is proving to be a real differentiator that is resonating with our customers. And sometimes I get the question, is vendor neutrality really a differentiator? Is that really important? It is, because customers do not want to be locked into closed systems.
Our open platform connects alarms, devices, sensors, workflows across different ecosystems, be them Ascom or not Ascom. That gives customers flexibility, and it really supports our partner collaboration effort. If you think about nurse call in particular, you remember these systems run for 10- 15 years. When a hospital decides to implement a modern clinical workflow solution, they can't just change out all of their nurse call systems overnight. The fact that we integrate both with ours, but also with the competitors, for them is a huge advantage from a transition perspective. It gives them control over the timing and the deployment cycle. On the medical device side, where we do the integration of all the clinical data, you will rarely come across a customer that has chosen one supplier for their bedside medical devices.
They typically have quite a few of those. They're always wanting somebody who can integrate with each one of those. That's something that Ascom does very well and is recognized by the customers, and it makes a differentiation in our offering. Finally, mobility. Mobility remains strategic in that because it's part of our way of being able to enable and deliver some of these clinical workflows to the clinicians or to the caregivers or to the workers in our enterprise segment. Very important from a part of the total portfolio purview. If you look at that, again, what our solutions are really addressing today is that productivity and workflow efficiency that customers are trying to drive, be that healthcare or enterprise. In healthcare, it happens to be one of the areas that is the most strained, and then you compound that by workforce shortages.
I'm in Asia this week traveling with customers, and they're all talking about how do we move from, in the ICU, a ratio of one to one nurse, one patient, to one to two or one to three, not just from a productivity perspective, but from a workforce shortage perspective. That really gives us a play in this, what we call mission-critical communication niche. This vendor-neutral platform in an environment that is highly regulated gives the opportunity to that customer to have that real workflow drive, as well as a roadmap for where they're going to go. We talked earlier about the importance of the healthcare consolidation. When they're doing that, they're not buying a product that they can just install and forget.
They're buying a solution that they want to be able to then roll out across their system, and that rolling out takes time, and they want a company that's going to come with them on that journey, that has a vision and a view of how their platform and solutions will develop and has the capabilities from a regulatory perspective also to follow. A company the size of Ascom with our global footprint, that brings credibility to that offering. We also sit at the crossroads of quite a bit of data, and again, tied back to the vendor neutrality, that's quite important for the customers that we can leverage that data, that we see all of that data that's coming in, and together with the customer, can turn that data into actual insights that they can use to drive better outcomes.
That open platform approach is really what is helping drive that. We have an open API, we have integration of third-party algorithms and solutions. We reduce for the customer their risk of being locked into a closed system, which they're really counting on. Our strategy, I would say, hasn't really changed. It's really about how do we help these organizations respond faster and consistently, and improve their outcomes really when every second counts. We kind of break that into four categories. Integrate, whether it's acute care, long-term care, enterprise, how do we integrate all that data? Take the data that's coming in, orchestrate the workflow, communicate it back out to the proper person so that they can then be enabled to make the right decisions.
That communicate is really a key part of that offering, and that's where that mobility platform plays a key role for us. On the integration side, if you think about it, we're connecting, integrating alarms, medical devices, sensors across a variety of IT systems and even IT ecosystems. That vendor-neutral platform, the fact that we can integrate across different systems based on standards, is something that gives the customer an opportunity to decomplexify their own IT infrastructure, which is what they're looking to do. From an orchestration perspective, you take that data, and you can unify the operational and the clinical workflow layer with alert management, with workflow orchestration. I can prioritize. I can define an escalation logic.
From a customer perspective, they have this one shared data model, and a hospital in country one is not the same as a hospital in country two, is not the same as a hospital in country three. We can provide them a standardized solution, but that then they can configure to their own workflows. Then on top of that, they can build with us an analytics foundation, AI ready, that architecture's actually ready for them to start building out some of the AI capabilities. Then from a communication perspective, communicating that to the right caregivers, be that actually directly the alert, dashboards, control panels that they can use then to be able to choose where they interact and when, and that allows them really from a decision support perspective to provide the right outcome to the right person at the right time.
That's really the objective we're trying to enable our customers to be able to do. As you know, we're in three areas, and we've really started to get more focused and disciplined around what we want to do in each of those three areas. In acute care, it's really about how do we strengthen our development and our go-to-market partners. We work very closely with many of the key medical device manufacturers, thus the vendor-neutral platform, and also with healthcare infrastructure, large project partners, because in many of our markets, in particular in the growth markets, Middle East and Asia, we have a lot of large system integrators or infrastructure builders where we're able to provide a complete solution that they can then bring to the customer as a part of that overall build proposal. In the more mature markets, the electronic medical record integration is absolutely key.
Epic is one of the leading players in that area. We have seamless integration with Epic, certified by Epic, and that for our customers is a big plus. In long-term care, we've really kind of narrowed down and said where our play is going to be is when we can provide software as a service, kind of a cloud-based solution. It's easier, it's less complex deployment for the customers and for Ascom. This is a market that is not necessarily used to investing in IT and IT infrastructure, and so when you can bring to them something that optimizes their workflow that doesn't require a large amount of complexity on their side from an IT perspective, that's really what they're willing to value and pay for.
When we work with partners, then we either bring that to SaaS providers that are already providing a bunch of solutions to these customers, or we'll work with principally large private chains that have a real clinical IT focus. On the enterprise side, we've narrowed it down to three areas that we're going to be focusing on going forward. One is secure establishments, one is critical infrastructure, and then the third one is manufacturing. That's where really our value proposition of lone worker safety, mission-critical communication, that really resonates. I know historically we've tried and dabbled and played around in a couple of other areas, but if you look at the Ascom value proposition and the problem that the customer is trying to solve, it is really those three areas that fit best with what we bring to the table.
Underpinning each of those three areas, there's some kind of core business fundamentals that we're going to be reinforcing, our marketing muscle, our project cost management, project deployment, and then as we move towards this platform and platform deployment, making sure that also on our side, we're able to support a customer from cloud operations and readiness perspective. Just on the note of the marketing muscle, if you will, I'm happy to announce that we will have a new person joining the executive committee of Ascom, starting September 1st. Her name is Lisa Reck, and she's going to be Head of all of marketing. She'll be based in our Gothenburg office and comes with quite an extensive background in marketing across a couple of healthcare sectors with quite a bit of experience, both in the European and the U.S. markets, which for us was extremely important in looking for that.
Moving in the right direction on the marketing side. Finally, just wanted to share a couple of, to come back to this, the importance of partners and building out these partners, some wins that we've been able to drive over the first half that really exemplify what we're looking for as we go forward. One has been HSE, which is the Southeastern Health Authority in Norway. It's actually one of the largest healthcare organizations in the Nordics. They have about 40 hospitals across 70 sites with a patient and catchment area of a little bit more than three million people. This is exactly what I was mentioning before. They want to standardize and roll out across their health systems one framework. So we were able to win a multimillion framework agreement. It's a seven-year agreement.
It covers the existing facilities as well as two new hospital projects that they're going to build. It's the integrated healthcare platform from our side, so nurse call, critical alarms, staff safety. What really pulled that over the finish line and convinced them was our ability to really deliver that on a fully integrated healthcare communication and safety platform. That is exactly what they were looking for because they want to de-complexify and standardize what they're rolling out. We did that in partnership with an IT partner in this case, so a Sykehuspartner, which is the partner of Helse Sør-Øst RHF for all of their IT solutions. A second example would be the Eastern General Hospital in Singapore. This is one of Singapore's leading healthcare institutions. It's about 1,400 beds. This includes, again, a large part of the Ascom solution.
We have our nurse call system intelligence, we have our Unite platform, our mobility solutions, and here we work together with a prime contractor, Honeywell. This was where I was talking to you before about a contractor that gets the entire build They also want to simplify their life. When they have one provider that can provide a substantial part of the clinical information system that they're looking for, in this case, that was Ascom, that gives us a chance to win there as well. Third one is, again, on the healthcare side, and again, in our growing markets, so in Saudi this time. This is in the ICU space, so back to this medical device integration. It also includes, in this case, tele-ICU remote patient monitoring. The first phase is covering around 300 ICU beds, around about 60 of their hospitals.
This is going to serve then as a blueprint, as the foundation for what they want to roll out across the kingdom of a tele-ICU program. Again, partnership here critical. We've been partnering with GE HealthCare all the way back to 2013. Our medical device integration platform, Digistat, complements the GE HealthCare portfolio. Together, that gives us really a differentiated offering that we were able to propose together to the Saudi Ministry of Health. The fourth one is in the U.K. This is with one of our SaaS partners, so with Nourish. Nourish is providing software services to multiple long-term care facilities across the U.K. I think they have more than 300,000 beds actually that they're providing, which is about one-third of all the care homes that they're providing services to. Ascom is Nourish's exclusive alarm management partner for the long-term care market.
Again, we work with them to bring that part of the offering to the table as a part of their bigger offering that they want to take to their customers. Then finally, in the enterprise segment, we talked about secure establishments just a moment ago. We were able to also win the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, a long-standing customer relationship. This goes back to what we talked about in the Region North and Region South Europe part, being able to leverage our customer relationship where we're already in there to expand the offering that we have with them. In this case, again, working with a system integrator, so ISG, which is a big Swedish technology company that's focused on security surveillance systems. Our solution from Ascom really covered one of the key areas that they were looking for.
This is important for us because this is one new correctional facility, but Sweden actually has a government program running right now to build almost 17 new correctional facilities over the next five to seven years. Now, with this as a blueprint, we're in a really good position to bring that to the Swedish enterprise secure establishments. I just wanted to give you an update on where we're headed. Again, I don't think you'll see, we're not changing the strategy. What we're doing is focusing and really setting out to execute on that strategy as we go forward. If I move to the outlook for the year, guidance 2026 that we already brought you at the full- year results, we confirm. Low to mid-single digit revenue growth at constant currency and the EBITDA margin of 10%-12%.
As mentioned, we have a strong order backlog. We think that's a good start to the second half of 2026, and we're confident about that guidance and really think we are well positioned now to capitalize on these opportunities because, again, the market is really pulling in that direction and in a direction that is very aligned with where Ascom's solution and product portfolio. Yes, there's challenges in the market. Geopolitical tensions will probably remain through the second half of the year. We think we are really quite well set right now to finish the second half of the year as we move into and start to get ready following that then for 2027. That's what we had for you today. I'm going to hand it back over to Kalina, and we're going to open up the question and answer session.
Just as a friendly reminder, you all are currently on mute, if my memory serves me correctly. If you want to ask a question, please take yourself off mute so that we can hear you. Kalina, you're also on mute.
That would not be helpful. We will now begin the Q&A session. As a reminder, questions may be asked using the raise hand function, and you can also submit them via the Teams Q&A function. If you're asking a live question, please unmute yourself, state your name and the organization that you represent before asking the questions. We will answer first the questions from the raised hand and then the questions from the chat. I see that we already have a couple of questions. First one coming from Joern Iffert. Joern, please go ahead.
Maybe while he's unmuting. I don't hear the question. Do you?
No.
No. Maybe while he's unmuting, we do have two questions that had been asked also in the chat. Maybe we can go ahead and start with those. From Christophe. Thank you, Christophe. You had two questions in the chat. One was around supply chain constraints for semiconductors. How will that impact further business, and what measures have you taken to counter this problem? The main thing that we're seeing right now is from a semiconductor perspective, that the boom around AI is really increasing dramatically the demand for semiconductors. That has two outcomes for us. The first one is that we have worked with our suppliers, and as Kalina mentioned, to secure some stock of critical components in advance to make sure that we have some stock to get through this, and you saw a little bit of that reflected in the inventory increase.
Then the second one, just in terms of how that will impact the further business, we have also, as you can imagine, high demand equals challenging prices. We have, together with, I think, almost everyone in the industry, been actively managing our prices vis-a-vis our end customers to take those things into account. The second question you had asked was, you said you expect a further increase in the share of software revenue. What are your midterm goals here? We haven't actually stated, and I don't think we would be ready quite today to state an ultimate goal for software as a percentage of revenue.
Our goal is though to continue increasing that and again, moving Today, we're more a software-enabled services business, we have projects that are heavy on the project side, relatively speaking, and light on the software side. By moving to these common components, and to a platform offering, that's going to allow us to really transition more towards a software company that's enabled by services where that software will take on a larger percentage of the revenue. That's also part of the way that we will continue to improve the margin as we go forward. I don't have today a midterm goal that I'm not quite comfortable sharing just yet. I don't know if you wanted to add anything, Kalina.
No, nothing to add from my side.
I see Joern is here now. Just needs to come off mute.
So.
There we go.
Thank you. Yeah, now it's working. I'm not sure I was blocked before. Many thanks for taking my questions. It's Joern from UBS.
Hey, Joern.
The first question would be, please can you give us the update what your organic sales in the healthcare segment was in the first half? Second question, please. Your gross profit margin was down due to mix. At the same time, software sales seems to improve. What can you really actually do that the rising share of software sales also becomes gross profit margin accretive, as this should be a key driver for the midterm profitability expansion. The third question, please, on your order intake, which was pretty strong, how would have the order intake would look like in terms of organic growth if just the orders for the next 12 months would have been reflected year-over-year? Thank you very much for this.
Can I start with the last question? It's a little bit easier. It's not easier. Easier and complicated at the same time. On these multi-year agreements, what they are is they're frame agreements that a customer calls down. By calling down, I mean they give you a frame agreement that says, We're going to build, I don't know, five hospitals over the next seven years, or, We're going to roll out these mobility devices over the next seven years. What they don't tell you is, or seven, three to five, generally. What they don't tell you is, We're going to do 100 in year one and 100 in year two and 100 in year three. Depending on the market, Germany is one area where we have quite a bit of these frame agreements that run three years.
Typically, they tend to call them down a little bit faster than they would have said at the beginning. I'd be hesitant to say if it's three-year, it's one-third, one-third, one-third to be fully transparent. It really depends a little bit on the market. The second thing that you need to recognize in there is that in that order, if it's a multi-year agreement, you have the software, you have the project revenue that's in there, and you have the customer service, the service agreement revenue that's in there.
The service agreement revenue has the advantage of being multi-year and will continue on long after the project keeps going. That's a part of that order number as well. It's not the most significant part typically, because service is, as I'm sure you know, a percentage of the total value of the deal that you've done, but it's still in that number. Now I forgot the second and the first question, but I see Kalina's jumping in.
One of the questions, so the other question was on the development of the gross profit margin.
Software
In the gross profit, we have material costs and personnel costs, most broadly, right? It depends a bit on the mix of what we have sold during this half year. Sometimes it is going to be more hours that relate to projects, and it also depends on the stage of the project, because very often we sell first the hours, and then in the end, we deliver the mobility. Right? Here we have varying levels of gross profit on these topics.
Obviously, mobility has higher gross profit as it does not contain any hours of work. It is just being delivered. It is basically then just the margin minus material. That's why what we see now in H1, I would not say that this is some kind of negative trend. This is not the case. It is just the situation that we see now with the product mix in H1 between projects and mobility.
The first question was back around healthcare versus the other segments, if I remember correctly. Kalina, maybe you want to comment on that one?
Yes. In the first half year, we grew predominantly in healthcare, so more strongly in healthcare, and basically flat on enterprise. Whereby we need to consider that enterprise also includes, in our definition, OEM. Last year we had a very high base on OEM because we had unusually high demand from our OEM customers, where this year it was normalized. Healthcare grew stronger. I think this is what we see.
Okay. Thank you for this. I can go back in the queue, I would have one follow-up. We can also touch on this later. On the gross profit margin question, the strategy to better commercialize the rising software share. What do you need to do that this becomes more visible, that the gross profit margin can really trend towards 50% again? You can also take this later. I can go back in the queue to take the other questions, if you prefer.
That's okay. I can answer it pretty quickly, and then we can move on. There's two parts to that. The first one is to have a solution that is, I don't want to talk too technically, but we would call it containerized and deployable on a cloud. Why? When you can do a managed deployment, basically you are going to sit down and say, Here's my solution, and this customer needs this, this, and this. I'm oversimplifying now, but you can put a check in the box by the things they need, and then the configuration capability that you have a configuration script that basically deploys exactly those things together in a cloud-managed services environment. There was one thing to have that. We start to have that now on the long-term care side. We're moving towards that also on the acute-term care solution.
The second is that your customer has to be in a position to catch. I can pitch, but if I'm pitching it to a customer who's still sitting on Windows servers with an on-prem solution, then the catching part doesn't work. It's really an evolution of both us and them. From a market perspective, we already have our first deployments of that solution on the long-term care side, and that I mentioned earlier. It's helpful for us and helpful for the customer because IT is not the biggest part of their budget generally in long-term care. We're going to have that on the acute care side. If you look at the markets, U.S.A. is quite ready for that.
They have a lot of the bigger healthcare providers in the U.S. that are already on either their own private cloud, actually, or they're using AWS, or they're using Microsoft Azure, they're already in a cloud-based environment, and they're actually asking us, Hey, when can you decomplexify your stuff and put it there? In Europe, not quite as fast.
You have a little bit more GDPR, data privacy, data sovereignty questions that each of the countries are kind of asking themselves, some people say you can't deploy anything that has patient data on a server that sits outside of country X. In Asia, it really depends on the market. When you go to someplace like Australia or Singapore, I would say in some cases, Singapore is actually ahead of the rest of the world on some of these things. It's kind of a market-dependent thing, but it's two things that have to move together.
Thank you for this.
Thank you.
Thanks, Joern. We have the next question from Reto Huber. Reto, would you like to speak? Otherwise, I see that also you have written the question in the chat.
Can I answer this one?
Yes, please.
There's two questions in there. R&D is growing again. You said that's a good sign, and I would actually state it as we're investing in R&D, and that is a good thing. The best investment opportunities for us right now in R&D on the healthcare side are in two spaces in particular. One is that platform and cloud capability investment, because it is actually something the customers are also moving more towards. Just because we re-platform, that's uninteresting for a customer. The fact that we're re-platforming, and by doing that, we're decomplexifying the customer's own IT environment, that is the value to them and that they are interested in doing. That's the number one opportunity.
The second opportunity is really around this medical device integration and, in particular, one of the areas that we are pushing quite strongly now with some of our clinical partners is everything that is around how do I optimize the alarms, and the alarm management, and even the alarm sounds, to be very honest. How do I get rid of some of the alarm sounds to be able to provide a better environment for the patients and also a better environment for the caregivers? I don't know if you've ever walked into an ICU, when you walk through an ICU, literally every machine in the room is beeping on a regular basis, and it's even beeping for totally normal stuff.
What we're working on with some of the medical device providers, and there is now a standard that has been established for how to communicate around this between the different devices, is how do we better manage those alarms so that when it's an alarm, it's real. When it's not, it's just a normal process. Those are two areas that are absolutely interesting. Vendor neutrality is nothing new. Why hasn't this led to stronger growth so far, in your opinion? Where vendor neutrality is interesting in most case is around this medical device integration. If you go into a hospital around the patient bed, you will have devices from Dräger, you'll have devices from GE you'll have devices from Hamilton you'll have devices from Becton Dickinson. You have infusion pumps. You have ventilators.
Again, it's really, really rare to go into a hospital that it's a total GE house, or it's a total Dräger house. It almost doesn't exist. Why now and why not before is because before, it was actually difficult to get to integrate with these devices because the standards were not very clear. The standards are becoming quite clear now, even the medical devices are providing what I would call open APIs to be able to integrate with them. We have an integration library, is what we call it now, of more than 400 devices that Ascom can integrate with around the bedside. Now that the devices and Ascom are getting better about talking to each other around those devices, that creates that growth that you may not have seen in the past. Why it's interesting also is because each of these vendors also provides medical device integration for their devices. What happens is if you go that route, you lock yourself in to that company and their devices, and very few healthcare providers are willing or wanting to do that. I hope that helped answer your question, Reto .
Does that answer your question? If you want to follow up, I think you can unmute yourself. This seems not to be the case. Looking whether there are any more questions in the chat. I think we have answered all of them so far. Yes, I see there is one more raised hand. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes. Good morning.
Yeah. Hi, this is uncertain . Congrats for the good results. Just thinking, can you remind us of the seasonality of your profitability? We've seen your first half figures at the bottom line, and we've seen your targets for the full-y ear, which might now look a little bit conservative. Can you just help us understand what seasonality is there, and below the EBITDA, what do we have to take off to get to the bottom line?
Yes, happy to do so. We do have a typical seasonality skew towards the second half, in that usually the second half is stronger than the first half. Of course, there could be exceptions when there are some big projects. Typically, we will have more projects being closed in the months of November and December than we would have throughout the year. This also has to do with the desire of the customer to finish projects by year-end. This results in the fact that normally in the second half, we have better profitability, just due to the operational leverage of the cost. Therefore, maybe I can add to that, therefore, despite being below our EBITDA range of the 10%-12% that we've given in the guidance, we are confident that we will be in this range by year-end for the full- year.
Great. Thank you. Just if I can add on a second question. I heard you talking in your presentation about the electronic medical records, et cetera. David, you arriving at the company afresh, and looking at the product suite that Ascom is supplying to hospital clients particularly, do you see the product range being focused as it should be, or do you see opportunities to expand it in adding on functionalities?
Right now, I would say we're where we need to be, and we need to execute and deliver on what we have. I think the integrations we have right now with the EMR are excellent. We integrate with Epic, we integrate with Cerner, and we can build the integrations, and we have done to other local EMR or HIS systems. One of the spaces that I get a lot of questions about is sensors and wearables, because that, in long-term care, but even also in acute care, is quite an interesting, up-and-coming topic. My view on that one right now is that it's still an extremely immature market. What we see is there's been very few, I would even struggle to name one, other than maybe the Apple Watch, and that's really something different, that have really penetrated on a global scale and have lasted more than 12 months.
The strategy that we have on that one right now is when we go to a long-term care provider or when we go to an enterprise customer, what we say to them is, Tell us what wearables or sensors you have, and we will integrate them. I don't think the market is mature enough where Ascom should be today saying, Hey, that's going to be the wearable, that's going to be the sensor, and therefore we're going to try to pull them literally into the platform. I think that's going to take a little bit more time. As you watch that, maybe you watch that space as well, but as I watch that space, what I see a little bit the flavor of the year. Even with our customers.
We have customers who start a project and say, Can you integrate this? We do, a year later, they've found something even more amazing and something else, or that wearable or sensor provider actually is no longer in business, they need to go to something else. For me, not yet mature enough to be integrating those, but definitely a space we are watching.
Great. Thank you.
If you have any further questions, please raise your hand or post your question in the chat. There seem to be no more questions.
Sure.
Of course, please feel free to reach out to me, either directly or also through our investor relations email anytime if you have questions in the future. I think we can close this session. Thank you very much for your questions. Thank you for your participation. This concludes our half-year results conference. The presentation as well as the press release and the half-year report are available on our website. Thank you very much, and have a good day.
Thank you.