Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first half 2021 results conference call and live webcast. I am Alice, the call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Webcast viewers may submit their questions or comments in writing via the relative field. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Alex Waser, CEO of Bystronic Group. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much, Alice. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you very much for joining our half-year 2021 report of Bystronic. I'm here together with Beat Neukom, our CFO, and we're looking forward to give you an update today. I go to next page. Before I do go into the details, let me remind you of the usual disclaimer statement, as you can see on slide number two. I will refrain from reading it out loud and move quickly into the agenda for today's call. As you can see, we're going to start with the transformation milestones. We have actually accomplished quite a lot of milestones this half of the year. Following with the name change approval by the General Assembly, we actually going to then talk about the 2025 execution, the 2021 highlights, and the financial review. By that moment, I will hand over to Beat.
Following the financial review, I will give an outlook for 2021, then we'll open the Q&A session. Good. Let's go to our first part here. The transformation is concluded. We have really accomplished many milestones in the first half of 2021. Following the name change approval by the General Assembly, Bystronic has been listed on the SIX since May. This was a magic moment for all of us. In terms of discontinued operations, as you probably heard, FoamPartner was closed in Q1 and Mammut in second quarter. Beat will provide you with more detailed view on the discontinued operations in his part, in the financial part. Moving to Bystronic as a standalone company since January this year, we have our regional structure in place, that, by the way, gives us a lot more and direct customer feedback.
We hired great leaders into new important roles and have executed on many strategic priorities. We delivered strong service growth. You can see this great demand for automation. We see progress on the Smart Factory Software Suite. Also, we see great demand coming on the Smart Factory solutions. You will see the numbers of our strategy soon. You will see that they are serving us well. I go to the next page. What you can see here on the next page is for those that are not familiar, you can see the cornerstones of our growth strategy 2025 on the left-hand side, as I said. It's really the core of everything is our customer focus, the regionalization, as we have done. That brings us a lot closer to our customers and gives us the voice of the customer directly into the core of Bystronic.
The top of it, you can see, the portfolio expansion, not only by applications, but also into what we call market segments, is one of the top priorities. Followed on the right-hand side by building up software as a business, and the results you can see actually soon. Then software and solutions on the left-hand side. As you can see, a part of us has become to be a software house and a solutions provider, and I get into this a little bit. On the right-hand side, I would like to highlight maybe only three elements. The Brand Experience Center in Hoffman Estates in the U.S. has really started off very well. It's the first Brand Experience Center that is showing our Smart Factory concept.
Also, we have a local production that gives us additional capacities for production, in this case, for currently 2D lasers as well as automation in the future. In addition to that, we have also done quite a bit around software and Smart Factory Software Suite. We acquired Kurago, as you can see, this year, which is really helping us to accelerate the launch of our Smart Factory solutions. We are really proud also to say that on the service side, we have been able to really make great progress, and we are about halfway through by hiring a significant amount of service technicians in an environment that is quite difficult to get new service technicians because it looks like the whole world is looking for service technicians currently. Before we go into the numbers, let me also highlight some of our major accomplishments in the field of ESG.
We have an aggressive roadmap in place that is not only targeting the reporting aspects, but is also trying to achieve true impact of what we do. In H1, we have conducted our alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals, as you can see. We brushed up our materiality matrix in line with the 2025 agenda or strategy so that we can address future material topics already today. We use the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment as a checklist for a gap analysis, and are on track to define KPIs on all identified topics. In addition, in the second half, we will plan for a leadership meeting to set our targets for the years to come. Based on those, we plan also to link compensation to our ESG execution in the future.
In the first half, we have conducted our carbon footprint for scope one and scope two for all of our operations. For the first time, we have reported the Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP, as Bystronic. Lastly, we are on track to publish our first sustainability report in 2021. It's probably going to be July 2021. I go to the next page, to the numbers. Now let's talk numbers. As you can see from the left to the right, we have made quite a bit of progress in order intake. We have seen this already starting in October, November, December last year, and it continues. Maybe we can talk in one of my last slides on the outlook a little bit what we have seen in July as well. Basically, order intake is up over 60% from last year.
What's even more important, it's actually up against what we call our benchmark 2019. It's really broad-based in all regions. I have a slide prepared to talk about the regions, and you will see the Americas is really leading the pack here. We also see very clearly that the pandemic has been a catalyst for many customers to think about automation and Smart Factory solutions. We see that in our order entry as well. In terms of net sales, we are about 19% above last year. As we said, about 4.4% above 2019. That's really important because we always said that we wanted to take 2019 as our benchmark because the pandemic year is very hard to take as a start point in a way. What we also see is that we still have supply chain constraint, and that's a challenge.
We do have other challenges. Maybe going to talk in the Q&A session a little bit about freight and price increases and things like that. That is really what's going on. We are happy to see where we are right now, and we are even more happy to see a significant backlog that is going well into 2022. On the EBIT side, you see that we are currently at about 6.9%. If we were to adjust that to some of the one-time cost, it would be around 8%. We do see, obviously, higher PACs. That is hitting us, but we wanted to do this. We are investing in that, and that's what we said all the way before. Of course, the higher volume has helped us to get there. We see transportation expenses are obviously not helping in this environment.
All in all, we see that we are on the way. The first six months of our five year plan, of our 60 months, the first six months, we think with these numbers, we are actually on track. I will go to the next page where we talk a little bit about our regions. What we would like to share with you is really the regional growth. As you can see, sales is more or less in line with about 15%-20% everywhere. China was the earliest region to come back again after pandemic, and hence the net sales are a bit higher there. Order intake is strong everywhere, particularly as you can see in EMEA, China, and Americas. We see significant growth of large systems in Americas that are helping us with this order intake number.
Maybe on the right-hand side, interesting for you, we always said we would like to get from about 19% or 90.9% in 2019 of service revenue to about 26% in 2025. Now half year into our execution of our growth strategy, you can see that we are at almost 23%. We're moving in the right direction. However, this also has to do partially that the first half year might be a little bit smaller than the second half of the year. All in all, the trend is very clear. We are growing significantly on the service side, and that makes us happy because that was a very significant plan of ours. With this, I would like to hand over to Beat Neukom, that is going into quite a bit of details on the numbers. Beat, please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you very much, Alex. Ladies and gentlemen, also very good morning from my side. As Alex said, I will walk you through the financial for the first semester. The group numbers are somewhat convoluted because of the transformation that was initiated in December 2019. There is a loss of sales profitability and balance sheet positions from the discontinued businesses. Secondly, there are significant effects on the balance sheet and on the financial statements from the divestments proceeds of those business units. In our consolidated profit and loss statements, we are showing the divested activities in the column discontinued operation, and it includes these two effects. As Alex mentioned, the group's transformation is now completed, and we're operating as a standalone entity as Bystronic. Schmid-Rhyner was sold in February 2020.
Therefore, the 2020 figures include two months of sales and costs as well as the transaction gain. The FoamPartner and Mammut businesses were divested on March 31, 2021, and June 30 respectively. Therefore, for 2020, both these businesses are fully included in the P&L and on the balance sheet. Then for this year, three months of FoamPartner operations is included in the P&L. As a result of the goodwill recycling, as required by Swiss GAAP FER, the FoamPartner transaction created a significant negative non-cash impact on the consolidated results. Mammut was divested on June 30th, and therefore, the H1 2021 numbers include six months of Mammut operations. However, since deconsolidation happened on June 30 this year, the balance sheet positions are no longer included at the end of H1. The Bystronic business unit that was historically called Sheet Metal Processing is now shown on the continuing operations.
The continuing operations also include the transformation cost mentioned already by Alex Waser and certain corporate center and stewardship costs, which historically have been incurred by Conzzeta, and have not been allocated to the business units. Looking at some of the key figures. In the first half of 2021, net sales for the group increased by CHF 48.1 million from CHF 576.2 million -CHF 624.3 million. The net sales from the continuing operations, you heard it from Alex Waser, has increased by 18.3% to CHF 440.7 million. This increase of CHF 68.2 million includes an unfavorable foreign currency translation effect of CHF 3.4 million, which is driven by the weakening of the US dollar versus the Swiss francs, but partially offset mainly by the stronger euro and the Swedish krona.
The operating and the net results for the group on the right-hand side on this chart, have been significantly impacted by the effects of the transformation mentioned before. The operating results of the continuing operations has increased by almost 30% compared to the same period last year. Please note that excluding the transformation cost for the group of CHF 5.1 million, the EBIT margin for H1 2021 would be 8% compared to the reported number of 6.9%. The net result of CHF 23.3 million for the continuing operation increased by 40% compared to H1 2020. The earnings per class A share on a pro forma basis are CHF 11.19 compared to CHF 7.45 last year. As a result of our asset light and efficient business model, the return on net operating assets reached 20% for the first six months this year.
The equity ratio remains very solid at 69% on June 30th, 2021. Looking at the profitability. As I mentioned, the year-over-year consolidated financials are significantly impacted by the transformation of the Group. In 2020, the operating result of CHF 49.9 million includes the transaction gain from the Schmid Rhyner disposal of CHF 48.1 million. The adjusted EBIT figure of CHF 1.8 million can be split in an operating loss for the discontinued operation of CHF 21.6 million and an EBIT of CHF 23.4 million for the Bystronic continuing operations. For H1 2021, a consolidated operating loss for the Group of CHF 55.2 million, at the bottom of this page, is being reported. This is mainly driven by the transaction loss of CHF 78.5 million for FoamPartner, which includes the recycling of the goodwill of CHF 152.2 million. The divestment of Mammut resulted in a small provisional profit.
Excluding the effects for the divestment, an operating profit for the group of CHF 22.8 million has been achieved in H1 2021. A loss of CHF 7.5 million for the discontinued operations, Mammut and FoamPartner, and a profit of CHF 30.3 million for Bystronic's continuing operations. Looking at the continuing operations. For those, the increase in profitability of almost CHF 7 million is driven by volume and product mix of almost CHF 41 million, offset by higher personnel expenses of CHF 14.4 million and operating expenses, other income and depreciation of CHF 18.5 million. Both for the operating expenses, there is a lower base last year as a result of some cost containment measures that have been taken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additional effects in the personal expenses are the investments in the service technicians as part of our 2025 strategy, and a team of around 60 software specialists that came to us with the acquisition of Kurago. The operating expenses also increased because of higher warranty provisions that have been booked in H1, costs for exhibition and fairs that didn't happen last year, higher transportation costs, and the one-time costs associated with the transformation of the group. With regards to our cash flow statement, before we have a look at the balance sheet, I will walk you through the cash flow for the first half of 2021. Compared to a negative CHF 24.4 million last year, in the same period, the continuing operation created a positive free cash flow from operating activities of almost CHF 20 million this year.
The other position of -CHF 10.7 million mainly results from the operating performance of the discontinued operation. After a deduction of the dividends of CHF 124 million and the proceeds from the two divestments, FoamPartner and Mammut, of CHF 323 million, Bystronic closed the first half of 2021 with cash equivalents, and securities of almost CHF 480 million. What are the highlights of our strong balance sheet? The change in cash equivalents, and securities has just been mentioned, but I want to make one additional important comment. The board of directors proposes not to distribute an interim dividend in 2021 and will state its position in the context of the annual report in spring 2022. Now looking at the net operating assets.
With the deconsolidation of the FoamPartner activities on March 31st and the Mammut activities on June 30th, the net operating assets for these two businesses have been taken off our balance sheet. A deferred purchase price payment for FoamPartner of CHF 20.3 million due in January 2022 is recognized in the position other receivables on the balance sheet. With regards to Mammut, the parties have agreed on an interest-bearing vendor loan of CHF 60 million, which will be repaid by the buyer by January 2027 at the latest, and is included in the position financial assets. The transaction with Mammut also includes an earn-out structure of up to CHF 45 million. Due to the current operating results and the estimation of the earn-out relevant impact until December 31st, 2021, no fair value for this earn-out is included in the provisional gain on the sale.
For the continuing operation, the change in net operating assets is minimal. Given the strong order intake, there has been an inventory build-up of CHF 56 million, and trade and other receivables have increased by CHF 22 million. On the other hand, we do have a policy that at the time of the order intake, up to four payments have to be made by our customers, and therefore, we do see an increase in these advance payments from customers by CHF 39 million at the end of June. Trade payables, accrued expenses, and other short-term liabilities have increased by CHF 32 million, and consequently reduce the net operating assets. With this, I am happy to hand back to Alex.
Thank you very much, Beat Neukom. I'm going now to page number 16 to talk about the outlook 2021. To summarize our first half of 2021 results in view of our 2025 financial aspirations, which are mentioned on the right-hand side, that is 5% growth or over 5% growth in net sales. Please keep in mind that that is based on 2019, as well as profitability of over 12% and the capital efficiency of over 25%. Now you have seen actually all of the metrics. We've already talked through those. Being six months out of 60 months of our strategic journey, we feel that we've gotten a good start into that, and we are on track to get to those aspirations. I change now to page 17, and page 17 talks about our outlook for the full year.
As you can see, we expect a sales growth or net sales growth of about 15%, and we continue on the EBIT margin to see 8%-9% for 2021. Obviously, that has to do with certain elements, for instance, the procurement situation or inflation situation and other things that really shouldn't change. But based on what we're seeing now, being in August of 2021, that's currently what we think is a very fair view of what we see for this year. At this point in time, I would like to hand over to the Q&A session to Alice. Alice, please go ahead with the first question.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to use only handsets and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast. Webcast viewers may submit their questions or comments in writing via the relative field. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question from the telephone comes from the line of Charlie Fehrenbach with AWP. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen. I'd like to ask you for a bit more clarity on this, your sales guidance, this plus 15%. I'm not quite sure. Is the assumption correct that this will bring you back to the pre-pandemic level of CHF 935 million, or in the area at least? This is question one. Second question is, could you give us more light about the bottlenecks in the supply chain and how you are affected there? Is this no problem at all, or you don't seem to be too worried? My last question is, the raw material and logistic costs, how easy can you give them to your clients? Thank you.
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Fernrebach. We're very happy to go through those three questions. Well, the first question was in regards to the 15%. That would bring us currently at about CHF 900, 2020, 2021 type of region, which technically is not at 2019 level at the current currency, but it's in that region.
Okay.
That's the first question. The second one, in terms of bottleneck, maybe we should show to be more worried about bottlenecks. I can tell you where our bottlenecks currently are. In the past, we didn't have really bottlenecks in production. We start to see them in two plants at least, and we do have action plans for them. We think we actually work and get capacity in as we need them as to the current increase of order entry. In some of our plants, we have order increases of certain products of over 100%. We are working to get them really done. The capacity increase in terms of plants, I think we can manage that, and that worries us a little bit. I think we have really good people on that.
The second part that's even more important, we think, is we have currently a double effect, if that's the right word, in when you have such a strong increase as we have now, our service technicians not only have to do all of the installations, but we also have a very strong increase on the service side, which basically means the same people have to do two jobs at the same time, that worries us actually more, and we have done a lot of work to get more service technicians on board and find different ways to serve our valuable customers. That would be my, sorry, long answer to the bottlenecks. The third question, I think, was in regard to, I think, freight. Is that correct, Mr. Fehrenbach?
Raw material and freight costs, yeah.
Raw material. Well, I think we see what the whole world is seeing, is that many of our partners or suppliers are trying to hit us with higher material costs, with price increases, obviously, some of it we can fight away, and some of it we can't. We have done a lot of work to see how we're going to either absorb it or work with price increases towards our customers. We have done actually, we have been successful in quite a few of those. We have started that already beginning of the year. We had another round just in Q2. This is obviously a very hard battle to increase prices in this. Our typical strategy in this is, we do that wherever that is possible. We think that's the right thing to do. We have done it.
On the other hand, with an innovation rate of in the high 30%, close to 40%, what we are seeing is the best way to increase your product margin in the mix is actually to introduce new products. We have a lot of new products coming this second half of the year. As you can see, it's a mixed strategy of introduction of new innovative products and solutions and software, obviously. On the other side, find good ways to put freight increases and product increases or cost increases into the customers. Did I answer your question, Mr. Charlie?
Okay. Thanks. Mostly. Summary is you don't have any delays in delivery to your customers.
I wouldn't call it delays right now in products, but due to a high order backlog, we have longer lead times for new products, and that's starting to worry us. That's one end of it, and the other end of it is transportation capacity isn't really favorable right now as well. Even if we have products, often we run into issues to get transportation organized in time. Clearly, an element of worrying us, but we have really excellent teams in working on that.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
The next question comes from the line of Serge Rotzer with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, everybody. Hi, Doris, gentlemen. I have also questions on orders. You already mentioned that the lead times increased. You mentioned that in Americas you have larger machines in your backlog. Can you give us more detail about the lead times and when revenue recognition will take place? What this mean then really for the second half in sales and also for last year, because you are guiding a sales decline also from the momentum, isn't it? You have been growing 20% in the first half or the first six months, and now you guide for +12% for the second half. This is a clear slowdown of the momentum. Can you put this in relation, please?
Yes. Thank you very much. Why don't we divide this question, Beat, for the revenue recognition, maybe I'm going to do it from your side. Why don't I answer the first part of it that is around orders. Just to be clear, when I said longer lead times, I didn't mean this for all product lines. It's actually just for one product line. For most of our standard products, for our laser products and press brake products, we have our standard lead time, and we were able to hold it. That's round about 12 weeks. Where lead time has increased and is sort of against us right now is in larger projects where complex automation has to be being installed.
Usually, the time pressure isn't that large on it because often either a new plant has to be built or a new space has to be getting ready. If there was something in the way of longer lead times, clearly that's with automation and what we call in the gold segment. What we have done just for information to counteract on that is our brand new plant in the U.S., the assembly plant in Hoffman Estates, will actually start to assemble exactly the same products early next year. That will increase the capacity and will reduce also delivery time quite significantly, actually. That's maybe from my side. With that, I think I will hand over to Beat Neukom for revenue recognition.
Yeah. Thank you, Alex. The revenue recognition happens when we deliver a machine, it will be installed, and then there is a training organized. Then at the end, there is a testing. The revenue recognition happens at that moment. Not after installation, but after installation, training, and testing by the customer. When we have a solution where there's more than one machine, automation solution, the revenue recognition happens step by step. Once one machine is installed, tested, and trained.
Okay. Thank you. It's very helpful. Can you give me a share of the larger projects of the existing backlog of CHF 440 million?
Well, yes, we can.
You won't.
Yes and no. I would love to give you this, but it's a question of what do you define as a system in the case. The very large and very complex system are probably from a revenue side, a smaller part of it, but the middle large, very large part, which is over two-thirds of everything, really has to do with systems that are standardized systems. Standardized system means, we use two modules or three modules, a laser module or a press brake module and an automation module. Those tend to be much easier in terms of delivery time and installation and everything else. That's what I would say. If I had to guess, I would need to look it up in exact details, maybe 10%, maybe 60% for standardized. 10% for a very complex system, but 60% for standardized systems, and the rest is really single machines.
Don't hold me accountable for these numbers, but I can look it up if you want to have an exact.
No, that's good enough. It's only like a certain feeling. What about in the margin quality, what you have now in your books? Can you tell us something about that in general, but secondly, also on how much of these awards have a service share? Is this higher, as you have reported, of this 23%?
Okay. Let me try to answer this one as well. Well, the margin quality, to be honest, hasn't really changed from what we have invoiced to the current order book in large terms. What we see is that we have more systems coming, and usually, that has not a negative impact, let's put it that way. In terms of service and service contracts, since the beginning of the year, we have started significant initiatives around maintenance packages, service packages. We have been able to increase the amount of service packages per order up to 80%-90% currently. Actually, it's right now at the higher end of this. This is really driving our journey to go from 19 point something to 26% in 2025. We are quite confident in that, and we see that that's working.
Let's come back again regarding margin. Point one and point two, you are guiding for lower sales growth in second half. I'm a little bit questioned then, further positive impact from volume and product mix in the second half. Is this correct?
Maybe we look at the first half and then to jump into the second half. When we look at the material cost as a percent to net sales compared to 2020, that is a significant increase from 50.6% - 3.6%. A 3% increase, that has mainly to do with the build-up of inventory. If we exclude that effect, there is about a 0.5% increase, and that has mainly to do with increased material cost as we mentioned. That is driven by that. What we also do see is there is more demand on solutions, which have a higher or a healthier margin. Also the gold segment is coming back, which also have a higher margin, especially in the U.S. There is a higher demand on the gold segment.
Okay. Thank you so much. It's very helpful. I'm happy to hand back to you. Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Star followed by one. The next question comes from the line of Daniel Koenig with Mirabaud Securities. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello, everyone. I have two questions. A, I was wondering in terms of personal expenses, you're one of the few companies which have higher personal expenses. Can you elaborate a little bit why that's the case? I was wondering, some companies have lower marketing and travel expenses in their H1. Can you also spend some thoughts on there? Finally, I had one question. You mentioned about sustainability and the work you're doing there. Is there a carbon emission target plan? Like, I want to be carbon neutral by 2030, or is there anything planned like this? Thanks. That's it.
Good morning. Thank you for the question. With regard to personal expenses, I've shown the increase between 2000 and 2020 on the chart. You basically can split it into three main buckets. The first one is an increase in personal expenses due to some cost containment measures in the last year. That counts for about CHF 6 million in the first half. The second one is the investment in the service technicians. The additional hiring, which counts for about CHF 2 million. There is the additional software engineers. The software engineers that came from Kurago, which counts for about CHF 1 million, and then there's some other elements with regards to variable pay, et cetera, and some build-up of capacities, mainly in our D&E plant in China.
Okay, thanks.
With regards to the travel expenses, the travel expenses basically stayed flat. They went up by CHF 200,000. Compared to H1 2020, it is more or less flat. That is not the driver of the additional operating expenses. Does that answer the question with regards to the cost bridge? I would hand over to Alex for the sustainability question.
Yes.
Okay, perfect.
I understood the question around net zero, whether this is what we want to do. I think what we do, we're very early in this journey, and what we said in our communication here is that we have in H2 a target setting, including carbon emission, and that, of course, that target setting will then drive the further steps of it. In case you would like to get more of that, we can give you more detail, but that would be probably the outside of this call with our ESG expert, Michael Praeger. That is basically the short answer to your question, Mr. Koenig.
Okay. Thanks.
Did I answer the question?
Yes, we've answered. I had actually an additional question. I noticed that Amada today came out with results as well. They increased their guidance. I was just wondering in general how the market share between you and Trumpf has developed over H1.
We have just quickly looked at the results this morning. We haven't really analyzed it. I can't really give you a professional answer at this point in time. I'm happy in the next communications to elaborate a little bit about that, if that's okay with you.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Koenig.
The next question comes from the line of Andy Schnyder with zCapital. Please go ahead.
Hi, everybody. Good morning. I would have three questions. First, can you talk about the profitability of the service business in H1? I guess the run rate margins usually here are quite high, probably around 20%-30%, somewhere in there. Now during the ramp-up, was it even a margin drag or where does it stand? I'm trying to get a handle on that. Once the ramp-up is done, how much that could help the margin compared to where we stand today?
Yep.
They also-
I'll take that. Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
You're absolutely right. Good morning, Mr. Schnyder. Usually we would expect a higher contribution margin from the service business. At the moment, it stands exactly at the same level that we have with the machine business as well. That's why the service business did not yet help. This has to do with the recruitment of the additional service technicians.
Usually it's double of that of the machine business or triple or?
I'm not sure we want to say that specific, but for sure this is accretive to, really accretive to our business.
Okay. On wage cost inflation, what can you tell us on that topic? In the different regions, what kind of inflation are you seeing here? Did you have to check up your wage offers for new hires, and how does it compare to the normal situation over the past few years? What can you tell us about that?
Very happy to get into that a little bit. In the region, it has developed somewhat differently, throughout, let's say, the different job levels and the regions itself. What we clearly see is that in the U.S., things are a bit heated or overheated when it comes to service technicians. We have seen examples where service technicians are being offered 50%, 60%, 70% higher salaries. That's an exception. All in all, we see that, for instance, for service technicians, there is a pressure upwards. Clearly, that doesn't be the main element of it. On the sales side, we have seen it less like that because a lot of that has to do with incentives. On average, we see probably on a worldwide basis, we see that service is something that's going up. I see it less in Asia. I see it partially in China, clearly.
The highest element of that probably is in the U.S., where I see that. We do have some elements in Australia, for instance, where we see that or in South Africa, Brazil, for instance. It's not everywhere, but we see the tendency of wage cost in inflation, in a way, clearly, the way you explained it.
That would mean that usually over the past few years, you had probably 2% a year wage inflation, and now we are rather talking with the mix shifting and the pressure in service that it's probably around 3%-4% or even higher. Just to get a simple number on it.
Right. Well, what we have seen in the first half, maybe, Beat, you can talk to that. It's actually in the mix. It isn't that big at all.
For continuing employees, with regards to salary increases and the inflation adjustment, we do see a 0.7% increase compared to H1 2020. It is not significant. We're talking less than CHF 1 million.
Okay
Of cost increase.
You also think that this 1% increase, that will not change going forward, or do you expect more pressure to come when you look into 2H and probably next year?
I think it has to do with the hiring, as Alex has pointed out. When we get new people on board, new service technicians on board, that's going to be, especially in the U.S. where inflation rates are higher than 5%, that there will be a pressure there. It's inflation on the one side, but also, just the competitive situation that everybody wants to hire service technicians, it looks like.
Clearly that's going to go up in the second half. That would be our expectation.
What do you see?
Okay. Last time we were talking, you mentioned that raw materials aren't a big problem right now. There's a de-cost sensation we've seen there, that you fear that it could become a problem for your clients, and they could delay orders and just wait. What do you see here? Is that becoming a problem or is it already less of a problem because prices peaked a few months ago? What do you see here?
Well, it's a little bit of a mixed picture. Higher raw material prices or, for instance, steel price, of course, also hit us to a certain extent. We were more worried what that could do to our customers, and I've had a lot of discussions with customers and what they would do with it. What we see is that different what we thought initially, that this could be sort of a breaking situation. We see that a lot of our customers have been able to get the higher prices towards the customers itself. It was actually quite a positive effect because a lot of our customers have significant stock of steel, for instance, different types of steel. They had also an effect that they had lower cost in stock versus what the market is, versus what they could charge to their customers.
That, of course, only temporary effect. I see less of that worry right now in the horizon, to be honest, and also we see customers that they see more or less the same as you just said, that they said, well, basically, steel price has peaked. We see that's changing again, and most of what we have seen has really not affected our business as we thought it could potentially do.
Okay, great. Great to hear that. The last question on ESG. How do you handle ESG in innovation R&D? Do you have or will you make a new strategy to steer more R&D money to improve the environmental aspects, the environmental footprint of your machines? I guess this environmental footprints could become a major selling criteria rather sooner than we think today.
Absolutely. You have hit a very significant aspect of what we're working on, which is the life cycle assessment for our products. You will see that this is becoming a really important part of us going forward because we think what that means for their carbon footprint. I shouldn't say too much about it. You will see more of that maybe half a year down the road, certainly in the report we're going to do. That's exactly our focus we have. We feel that this is what I mentioned in the ESG slide, we don't see ESG as just a reporting matter itself. We really want to make an impact with that. We think we can, and we have phenomenal.
Please open your mask, your question.
Excuse me, I was on mute. Sorry. Let's talk about cash. If I have correctly in mind, you said that from the sale of Mammut, EBITDA is CHF 230 million. When I make my math, deducting the earn-out and the debt, I get CHF 125 million. In the half-year report on page 20, I see that the net cash flows are CHF 91 million. Can you explain me where this difference is coming from the CHF 125 million - the CHF 91 million you are disclosing now? The same is true for the FoamPartner. I have in mind that you should get CHF 250 million this year and CHF 20 million next year, you disclosed now at CHF 231.5 million. I'm always missing some CHF 20 million-CHF 30 million.
Yeah, I'm happy to take that question. The EBITDA, as you rightly pointed out, was CHF 230 million. It included the earn-out of CHF 45 million. What you need to take into consideration there is that, and I'm taking Mammut now. There was liquid assets at Mammut, and then a financial debt, an intercompany debt financing from the Conzzeta Group. If you net that out, you're getting to about CHF 110 million. You take that out, and then the vendor loan, you take out-
Yeah, of course.
You're getting to about 90.
Okay. Got it.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes sense. I have so many numbers now.
No.
It is quicker to ask you than.
Understand, right?
Okay.
Mainly the debt, the intercompany, the financial debt, and the cash.
Yeah, it's mainly the cash I see here now. I see. Okay.
The same is true then also for the FoamPartner situation.
Yeah. I can see it now here. Of course, yes. You don't get cash for cash or you can net it out.
Yeah.
Well, probably, you don't have any net debt. There's no debt.
Nope.
Net debt or net is net. Last year it was a special dividend. Can you give us some more flavor, or do you even start a share buyback, or what's the plan in general? In what timeframe?
Would expect in the future to hear more about this. Maybe not in the next three months, but in the next 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, you will see what we have been working on. Of course, account is closed, as I'm sorry for that.
Okay. You stick to M&A with this CHF 440 million, huh?
We do look for M&A opportunities. That is correct, yes. As a part of what we could do with that cash. Correct.
And so-
From the webcast. Sorry. I'll hand over to Ms. Ruda Schalze to read out questions from the webcast.
Yes, we actually have couple of questions from Walter Bamert from Zürcher Kantonalbank. I'll start with the first one. It relates to headquarter costs. The question is, does the adjusted EBIT margin of 8% in H1 include all ongoing headquarter costs, or is there an additional charge to be expected in H2?
I will take that. Good morning. The adjusted EBIT margin for H1 does include what we call the transformation costs, and that has all been booked by the end of H1 2021. There's nothing to be expected for the remainder of the year. What is included in the 8% is what we call the stewardship cost, which is going to continue. That will also happen in H2 and going forward in 2022 and 2023. The adjustment only includes the transformational costs. As we have communicated historically, or Conzzeta has communicated historically, these costs have actually been borne by Conzzeta and has not been cross-charged to the business units. It is about CHF 3 million a year. Also for the second half then, it's about CHF 1.5 Million.
That would be the first question from the chat, maybe. Is there another one, Doris?
Yes. There's actually another one related to this question, to the margin guidance. The question is the 8%-9% guidance for reported or adjusted figures?
The margin guidance is for the reported numbers. It includes the CHF 5.1 million that have occurred in the first half of H1 2021. If you were to take those out, you could add about 0.5 percentage points if you wanted to calculate an adjusted EBIT number for the full year 2021. Instead of 8%-9%, it would be 8.5%-9.5%.
Okay. Doris, was that the last one from the chat?
There is actually one more. It relates to the order intake pattern. The question is, how did order intake develop on a monthly basis, and has there been a slowdown at the end of the quarter or in July?
Yeah. Q1 was already very strong. We were reporting over 50% of order intake, actually the second quarter has even accelerated. That's why we have been reporting over 60% of order intake on a year-to-date basis at the end of June. July, Alex, you want to comment on that?
July was actually a really good month for order intake. It was in line with the month we had in before. We would have expected a bit of a slowdown simply because of seasonal effects, vacation effects. We didn't see that. We're probably going to see that a little bit in August for those reasons. Typically September, October are a little bit stronger month after that. That's what I would see. I hope I've answered that question, the third question from the chat. Doris, over to you. Are we done with the questions from the chat?
The remaining questions from the chat have already been answered before.
Okay.
We're done on the chat. Yes. Thank you.
Okay. Well, thank you very much, Doris. Alice, I think we have answered now the questions from the phone as well as from the chat. I would like to hand it over to you, Alice.
Thank you very much. I'll close here the Q&A session and hand over to you if you have some closing remarks.
Yes. Well, thank you very much. It was a great pleasure to talk to you and get your feedbacks and your questions. We are really very happy about what we were able to establish in the first half of the year. We are working very hard to making also the second half of the year a really nice success and looking forward to talk to you in the future about that second half year as well. I wish you a very successful rest of the week. Stay healthy, and thank you very much for your attendance. Have a good day. Thank you.
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