Okay, yes, I got the call. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Full Year Results 2024. I'm here with our CFO, Beat Neukom, and we are pleased to walk you through our performance of last year, and of course, I would like to highly welcome Heinz Baumgartner, our Chairman of the Board of Directors. Before we start with our full year results, I would like to ask you to shortly read the disclaimer, so this is our agenda for today. I will kick off with a business update, giving you an update of our business and some more insights of our reorganization and restructuring, which we have announced in September last year, then Beat will explain to you our financial performance much more in detail.
To wrap up, I will elaborate on our outlook, and we will then take your questions from the conference here on site as well as from the call. So, with that, let me start with our key figures 2024. 2024 was characterized by a challenging market environment, economic uncertainties, and a persistently weak economy, and of course, even internal challenges, particularly in the implementation of our full solutions. Overall, we reported a decline in demand in a negative annual result. Order intake was CHF 625 million, which is 21% lower than last year. On a constant exchange rate, this would be 19%. Our net sales were down to CHF 648 million, which means a decline of 30%, 28% at constant exchange rates. However, a strong base effect must be taken into account.
The previous year's sales were positively impacted by a high order backlog at the beginning of 2023, something we were missing, of course, at the start of 2024. For 2024, we are reporting an operating loss of CHF 84 million. This was due to overcapacities and a high level of fixed costs. In September, we launched a restructuring program that would result in annual structural savings of more than CHF 60 million. The reported EBIT includes restructuring expenses and impairment losses of CHF 37 million, which are attributable to this program and had a negative impact on earnings. The adjusted operating result was minus CHF 47 million. Despite the negative result, we achieved a slightly positive operating free cash flow of CHF 1.2 million due to optimization of the net working capital.
Our liquid assets as of December 31, 2024, amounted to over CHF 320 million and continue to be on a very high level. Taking into account the liquidity situation of Bystronic, the Board of Directors proposes a dividend of CHF 4 per Class A share. This, to our numbers, as mentioned before, Beat will elaborate much more on this one later on. Let me say a few words to the market dynamics. I mean, the market environment was challenging and the overall economic environment difficult. The decline in global production activity continued. The purchasing managers' index, the so-called PMI, in major industrial markets has been under 50 since the fourth quarter of 2022. Reflecting an ongoing contraction of economic activity, our customers were correspondingly very cautious.
We estimate that many customers are exposed to the agriculture sector, especially in the Americas and mainly in the US. We also hear from smaller customers in the US, so-called job shops, that larger producers increasingly insource parts of the production as they have spare capacities. This is, of course, the disadvantage of smaller job shops who are our largest customer group. So, looking at the sequential development of order intake, we believe having reached the bottom. The second half of 2024, with 321 million CHF of order intake, has shown a slight improvement of 3% versus the first half, with only 305 million CHF order intake. Bystronic generates about half of its sales in the EMEA regions, which, for us, it's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Due to the economic uncertainty and the structural weakness in key markets in the Eurozone, customers remained cautious, which led to delays in numerous project orders. Order intake declined 17% in this region to 299 million CHF. The Americas region is a very attractive market with high potential and good growth opportunities for us, thanks to the continued investments in automation and smart factories. Nevertheless, even here, 2024 was a challenging year in the U.S. The uncertainty surrounding the U.S. presidential election resulted in an extended decision-making process by our customers. Continued high interest rates also contributed to cautious capital allocation. As mentioned, in the U.S.A., Bystronic is disproportionately active in the agriculture market, with OEMs as well as their suppliers. Lower prices for agricultural products led to a decline in farmers' willingness to invest, resulting in a lower demand for agricultural machineries.
Due to the restrained market development, order intake declined in the Americas by 21% to 222 million CHF. The Chinese economy performed weakly in 2024 due to global economic conditions and geopolitical tensions. Overcapacities, competitive pressures, and subdued economic growth all significantly impaired the Chinese market. Investments in capital goods were extremely limited over the entire year, especially in the sheet metal processing industry. There was an intensive competition in local markets. Many Chinese competitors significantly reduced their prices to remain competitive. Order intake declined 9%, which here in this case is 9% at constant exchange rates as well, to CHF 57 million . Having said that, sequentially, we did see some improvements in the second half of the first half of 2024. In the APEC region, order intake fell by 28% to CHF 48 million in 2024.
At the beginning of 2024, customers were cautious due to the economic uncertainties. The second half of the year, however, development was more positive, and thanks to targeted customer events, order intake increased by more than 60% compared to the first half of the year. Overall, the challenges in project executions and customer satisfaction impacted our market position. Customers were reserved about Bystronic's full solutions offerings, which negatively impacted our order intake as well. Nevertheless, I would like even to show some highlights so not everything was dark in 2024. Despite our internal challenges and difficult market environments in 2024, we scored some great wins and made progress on our strategic priorities. While we are restructuring and taking structural costs out of our organization, our focus on new products and development and customer centricity remains our top priorities. Let me share some of our highlights.
They might look small, but for us, very important. We launched a new midsize bending cell that helped our customer automate the bending process for parts up to 30 kg. I think with this one, we were able to close a very important puzzle, in our product portfolio. Thanks to the modular design, the cell integrates the latest generation of robots and provides customers with a lot of flexibility to adapt the cell to their production processes. The cell operates our proprietary BySoft CAM software, enabling also less experienced operators to program operations easily in just a few minutes. For our customers and our employees, our participation at EuroBLECH and FABTECH, the leading trade shows for the sheet metal industry in North America and Europe, certainly were annual highlights.
I personally visited these fairs, and I have to admit that I was positively surprised by the attendance and the interest in our brand. The fairs are an important opportunity for us to showcase our technologies, launch new products while building and nurturing the relationship with our existing customers and prospects. We generated many leads for our business and are very satisfied with the order book from these two events. In Australia, we installed our first smart factory at our customer Novon Lighting. Novon installs environmentally friendly LED lighting solutions in public schools and needed an automated solution to produce hundreds of thousands of lights. Our solution uses BySoft Suite as well to digitalize the business and operation processes while ensuring on-site local service in Sydney.
Before I'm going to the next slide, which is as well an important one for me, I would like to emphasize that for Bystronic, innovation stays key. Sometimes in bad years, we don't see it. On the other hand, we still heavily invest in R&D, and we do believe that we can still make the difference to the competition. Last highlight, which I would like to present and on which we are very proud, is that we won the Swiss Technology Award for our new intelligent cutting process. With this technology, we can optimize and automate the cutting process using artificial intelligence. Our customers benefit from reduced production costs as we minimize raw material use, waste, and post-processing steps. In addition, the automation of the cutting process reduces the personnel costs and bridges the shortage of skilled workforce, which in our business is still given on the operator side.
The award is a testament to Bystronic's innovation power that we need to fully maximize during our journey towards a full solution provider. I will come now to our ESG performance. Before I elaborate on our restructuring and reorganization program, let me share these insights to ESG. At Bystronic, we have integrated ESG into our business strategy and decentralized the execution into each function and location. We are very happy with our progress that it's in line with our ESG targets. We reduced our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 4% and our Scope 3, which accounts for the majority of our total emissions by 9%. At the same time, we reduced overall waste and improved our circularity performance by 38%.
While we recognize the structural improvements of our decarbonization strategy, it's fair to say that improvements mainly in Scope 3 are mainly influenced by our lower sales volume. In order to tackle the ever-tightening requirements of various ESG rating organizations, at Bystronic, we are managing these requirements with our rating index, which improved 14 basis points year over year. For me, it's important and our duty to keep ESG on the agenda of Bystronic, even in difficult times. We are focusing and doing the right things, and we will continue to do so. I think I will come now to most probably one of the most important topics of today, and, please let me elaborate on this one, huh? Reorganization and restructuring. Now, I would like to give you a status update on where we are with our reorganization and restructuring program that we launched in September.
Let me provide you some more details about the root cause of our internal challenges. On our journey from a single machine manufacturer towards becoming a full solution provider for our customers, we clearly demonstrated the lack of customer focus and insufficient attention to customer needs. While the complexity of our projects increased, our execution and operational excellence deteriorated. During the weak market situation, we faced overcapacity due to our regional setup. All of those factors contributed to our loss of market shares, especially in some of our home turfs. In addition, we are missing market opportunities as an example, even with our not or a little bit diluted dual-brand strategy. What we did? We increased our resilience and strengthened the brand with following actions. We implemented a divisional structure, which are the two divisions: Systems and Service. With that one, we have a strong market focus.
We have a simplified organization and extremely clear responsibilities. And of course, we pay into the end-to-end process, which in my eyes was missing if you want to become a solution provider. Innovation, I said it before, without innovation, no future. Without innovation, we are only a follower. That's why we dedicated R&D into the divisions, because I truly believe that R&D has to be close to the customers and to the market that cannot be taken apart from the real life. Clear product development priorities increase the level of automation, which will be a key. Automation will make the difference in the near future and even on a mid-term. And of course, we would like to expand our smart factory functionalities, which we already have today. Efficiency is a key as well. Concentrated global product production know-how, bundled competencies in subsidiaries.
And of course, what hit us a lot in 2024 was we had a lot of parallelisms, and this is something we would like to eliminate. And then, of course, we have to catch our market opportunities. We are a Swiss brand. If we deliver something, it has to have the Swiss quality, which every customer expects. Market-focused product designs. It's nice to develop something which the market doesn't want. It looks nice, but it doesn't make money. And here we have to be much more focused on what is required on the market. We will give a chance even further to our tube business. We build an organization around tube, to let this small flower grow. And then, last but not least, we will have a very clear dual-brand strategy to cover the different markets we are in.
So the next one, a very important one as well. It's how we drive profitability over the economic cycle. With our restructuring and especially our reorganization program, we consolidated most of our group functions and optimized our global footprint. We reduced our number of executive board members and reduced our manufacturing overcapacities. I have to mention it. We are talking about overcapacities, which were a big burden for the company. So here, a big improvement, and of course, we improved all our production processes and we made a great vertical integration. All these efforts are contributing to more than CHF 60 million savings annualized. Very important, and here we are talking about a reduction of more than 600 FTEs, compared to the past. Good thing is, we were able to do everything in 2024.
So basically, from the announcement late September 2024 till the end of the year, we were able to execute all of them, and two-thirds of all these savings will already be effective in 2025. Following our restructuring and with our new organization, we believe that our EBIT margin will be in a corridor of 5%-7%, on our organic net sales. And when I'm talking about an organic net sales, it's without acquisitions, of around CHF 800 million. I want to emphasize on this one. This is not our new MTP planning, CHF 800 million. We just say that over the cycles, we can reach 5%-7%. If there is an upside because the market picks up for whatever reason, we can do more, huh? But we want to be resilient over the cycles. So now, this was my part.
We will have the chance later with the Q&A to elaborate on most of these topics. I'm happy to hand over to Beat for the full year results and financial review.
So thank you very much, Domenico, and also warm welcome from my side. Domenico talked about the order intake, so I'm not going to go into this, but I'll dive right into the P&L. For better comparability, this P&L that I'm showing here is adjusted for the restructuring and impairment cost of CHF 37 million that Domenico was alluding to before. Please refer back to the appendix section. I think it's page 23 for a reconciliation between the adjusted P&L and the reported P&L.
Net sales were CHF 640 million, a decline of CHF 282 million from the same period last year, of which CHF 21 million, or about 2.0, about 2.3%, is related to the strength of the Swiss franc. Please note that net sales over CHF 900 million in 2023 were positively impacted by the backlog at the beginning of 2023 of over CHF 400 million, whereas we started the year 2024 with CHF 253 million. In 2024, our service business represented about a third of net sales compared to 26% in 2023. This was the main driver for the positive development of the gross margin, which declined by 1.2 percentage points to 42.3%. At the same time, we have been able to partially compensate for some price concessions on the machine business, especially in the second half of 2024, due to better sourcing conditions.
Personnel expenses reduced by 8.3% or CHF 21 million, respectively, in line with the average number of FTE reductions from 2023 to 2024, which also included short-term work that we have been doing here at our facilities in Netherlands, Switzerland. The measures taken were gradually implemented throughout 2024 and sequentially, so second half versus first half. The personnel expenses were CHF 108 million in the second half of 2024 compared to CHF 123 million in the first half of 2024. Our operating expenses reduced by 13% to CHF 176 million. Overall, however, due to the overcapacity and the high fixed costs, we reported a loss of CHF 47 million for the year 2024. Despite the cost reduction measures, we could not compensate the drop in sales and hence could not achieve a positive operating result. The cost reduction measures introduced at the beginning of 2024 were insufficient and required more far-reaching actions.
This resulting program resulted in the one-time cost of CHF 36.6 million. This can be split into CHF 14 million impairments and CHF 23 million restructuring costs, of which CHF 16 million of these CHF 23 million restructuring costs, CHF 16 million will have a cash outflow in 2025. The reported operating loss is CHF 84 million. The applicable tax rate for Bystronic is between 22%-23%, depending on the country mix. In 2024, the effective tax rate was 18.4%, mainly because of the changes in the deferred taxes. Our net result for the year totals -CHF 67.6 million compared to the net profit of CHF 41.9 million last year. Looking at our balance sheet, we continue to have a very solid balance sheet. Last year and the year before, we have been actively managing our net working capital.
In 2024, the net working capital reduced by 36% disproportionately compared to the reduction of net sales of 30%. Our liquid assets total CHF 323 million at the end of 2024, and the reduction of CHF 26 million versus December 31st, 2023, is mainly attributed to the dividend payment in April last year. We closed the year with an equity of CHF 637 million, which represents a solid equity ratio of 69%. Now, our optimized working capital management is therefore also visible on our cash flow. Despite the net loss, we have generated a slightly positive operating free cash flow of CHF 1.2 million. Starting with the net loss of CHF 67.6 million, we added back the CHF 26 million of depreciation and amortization. This number includes CHF 6.1 million additional impairments from the restructuring and reorganization program.
And then the reduction of net working capital of CHF 61 million, CHF 64 million result both from focused cash collection and inventory management. We have also been very disciplined in the spending of CapEx in the last two years, where we consider they were considerably lower than in the previous years. So despite, you know, the challenging environment we're in over the last five years, we have been able to generate over CHF 100 million of operating free cash flow. And this concludes the financial review, and I'm happy to hand back to Domenico for the 2025 outlook.
So before we move on to the Q&A, let's take a look at the specific outlook for 2025. I know it looks quite conservative, but we rather prefer to be on the safe side. 2025 will definitively be a transition year for Bystronic, transition and consolidation year.
We don't expect a recovery of the market. We expect that the market environment will remain challenging, so we will see the sideways move. Nevertheless, we expect an order intake increase in the third and in the fourth quarter, which will positively impact net sales in 2026. Someone of you might ask, where is the order intake increase coming from? When we do not expect the market to recover, it is coming from gaining back some of the market shares, which we truly believe this is possible. So we will not wait for the market to come to improve. We will do it by our own. Nevertheless, 2025 as well as 2026 is still impacted by a strong Swiss francs against all major currencies.
We, as already mentioned before, we will have two-thirds of our cost savings, which will be recognized throughout 2025, and one-third of the already realized savings will one-to-one already impact into 2026. Only a low single digit amount from restructuring is still to be incurred in 2025. So we were able to absorb most of the one-off costs and restructuring costs in 2024 already. Due to the lower order backlog at the beginning of 2025 and the strong Swiss francs, Bystronic expects slightly a lower net sales and still a negative operating profit for the full year 2025. The group anticipates a weak start to the year with an improvement as the year progresses. This is our outlook with this. Let's move on to the Q&A session. We'll first take the questions from the room here. Thank you. And then we will move over to the Operator.
But let's start with the questions in the room here.
Please say your name and the company you work for.
[Thierbach, AWP. I have two questions. May I ask it? The CHF 37 million costs you had this year, will you have further costs you can concretize for this year? And the second question is, once the order intake increases again, won't you miss these 600 people then? Thank you.
Good questions. I mean, I think Beat can answer very precisely on how much we will still have from these restructuring costs in 2025. I can anticipate it's a very low number. So we are talking about peanuts, openly speaking. I think I can mention it, Beat. I think it's between one and two million CHF, which we expect will still be there in 2025. About the 600 FTEs and more, honestly speaking, no, we will not miss them.
We had overcapacities. We had too many parallelisms, and we eliminated this. Honestly speaking, we have an upside potential. The restructuring, if you might remember from some of the conferences we had back in last September, we are positioned to do more than even much more than the 625. And we can do it with the setup we have today. We defined our setup based on what we expect in the future. So, clearly, no.
Remo Rosenau, Helvetische Bank. Again, on these 600 people, this is you go from 3,600 roughly to roughly 3,000. This is, I mean, it's a major, you know, reduction, almost 20%. This shakes up the whole organization. Then on top of that, you change everything else as well. I mean, you know, from regional to divisional, left, right, up and down.
So even people who stay with you have to, you know, reshape themselves. So which poses the risk that you lose people you do not want to lose, you know. So how do you manage this whole process that you keep the ones you want to keep and that the motivation is still there?
It's a very good point. We did change a lot, honestly speaking. Yes, it was a 180-degree turnaround. We are coming from around about 3,400 FTE to 2,800 FTE people, just to be precise this. But we have to go through a cultural change and we are working on this. I mean, accountability, clear strategy, and communication is the key in this whole process.
I think we started with a great communication into the company to explain why it was necessary, why it's needed to do this change, and where the future is. We even implemented new processes where we let, let's say, everybody share. Everybody knows basically how our strategy looks like and which direction we want to go. At the end, what is it? We have to come back to success, which is profitability, and the motivation will be there. Far, we are not facing the situation that we are losing key personnel. I would even somehow state that the change was well received by the organization and even asked by the organization. From this point of view, we have a great support out of the organization.
I can even take this as a chance to say thanks to the whole organization because it was not a little change I asked. So from this point of view, I do believe that there is a big motivation to bring Bystronic back. And I have to say, you know, we are talking about bad things, but there are even good things in Bystronic. And the loyalty of the employees at Bystronic is on a very, very high level.
Okay. Thank you for that. And then again, I'm sorry for that, but on the 600, in which countries are these 600 people being let go? And how far is the process execution already?
So we are basically in all regions. We talked a lot about Switzerland because it's clear it's our headquarters. So we had round about 80 FTEs. I'm talking about FTEs.
It's not always equivalent to the headcount, but let's stay with the numbers. We have round about 80 FTEs in Switzerland. I would say round about 150 alone in Italy because we closed the facility there. Then we have I would say round about 100 in China and the rest mainly in Europe overall. That's, and maybe, round about 20 to 30 in the US. So you see it's an overall adjustment of our total operating costs. I like to use this word because we are really taking out structural costs. So we are not talking about reducing material costs or whatever, which is floating. So that's why we are confident that if there is a recovery, we can get the leverage out of it,
and how much is executed already?
Executed, I would say it's 100%.
Okay.
which doesn't mean that all the 100% are already out of the company. If you refer to the 600, I would say around about 50% are going out by the end or went out already by the end of last year. And I would say all the other 50% are completely out by the first quarter of this year. So basically by next month, everything is executed. And that's the reason why we don't have the full-year effect of this plus CHF 60 million in 2025.
Okay. Thank you.
Walter Bamert, Zürcher Kantonalbank. Could you explain us the dual brand strategy? Is that now with the DNE Laser, an Asian and Chinese situation with dual brands?
It's you know what it is. I'm in favor, we are in favor of a very strong dual brand strategy. We have two fantastic brands.
They play in completely different fields, right? And to emphasize this, you have to live it. It's not about China or US or whatever. It's if you are a buyer of a BMW or Mercedes, you will not buy a Chinese car. But you, if you are ready to buy a Chinese car, you will buy a Chinese car, right? And not saying that they are bad, right? But that's completely different markets, completely different customers. And that's why we have to keep this dual brand strategy, which I honestly speaking believe it's a fantastic one. We just have to execute it properly. I don't know, Walter, what you want to hear on this one. Again, we will emphasize this strategy and we will go global with two brands. I think this is the key.
They will definitely not jeopardize each other. And this is what is important. But you know it from the OEMs. They have different brands. They have different customer targets. And you have to target these customers in a different way.
Tommaso Poletto, UBS, I have two follow-up questions, if I may, and then one new one on market shares. But firstly, so just on the dual-brand strategy, I mean, you mentioned the focus, you know, on Swiss brand, Swissness, high-quality providers. So do you stick to the production in China, for instance? And how does that kind of, you know, fit together with the dual-brand?
It's a fantastic question. I just want to emphasize something maybe on the dual-brand, right? You have different expectations. You get two different products.
Just to make it very, very clear, whether it is on the quality side, whether it is on the performance side, whether it is on the UI, UX, user interface, user experience side. So there are two different worlds. You don't get the same product from the two brands. And I think this is what was a little bit diluted in the past. This just to clarify and maybe even to add a little bit of content to answer this question. And coming back, China is still important for us. And I would not give up China at all at the moment. It's still a good market, not for our China domestic market to be very clear. But we should not forget that we are doing a quite good business in APAC.
So Southeast Asia, even reaching out to Australia with delivery of basically everything out of China. So it is maybe not a fantastic domestic market where we are doing a low volume, but it's a fantastic export market for both brands. Just to make it clear. That's why we still stay in China. And you know, even taking consideration what's ongoing right now with the geopolitical situation, it might be wise to not decide for left or right today.
Thanks. And then I think you alluded to it already, but I think I missed it. With those 2,800 FTEs, how much top line do you think you can reach with the current cost structure?
So let me answer this one. So you know, from a production capacity perspective, you know, we can do significantly more.
We can go over the CHF 800 million because the labor component that we have is very, very limited and very small. So we're basically assembling, you know, and, you know, more and more, rather than doing everything by ourselves. So that's why there is, you know, with 2,800 employees, there might be small increases here or there, but overall we should be able to generate, you know, over the CHF 800 million with 2,800 employees.
Maybe Beat, to bring it to the point, I would say 30% more top line with more or less the same setup. And of course, you will have always a little bit, increase of a few FTEs and so on and whatever is needed. But more or less, this is the range,
and one question on market share.
So you mentioned, you know, growth in H2 is you don't expect it to come from the market. It's really market share gains. So maybe two questions in that regard. Firstly, what does it mean for pricing, and margins accordingly? And then, secondly, regionally, can you kind of, you know, elaborate on where you think those market share gains are really coming from?
Thanks.
Very good question. I think on the pricing side, we still have quite good margins. It's not that we are on the pricing side extremely under pressure. Of course, there is always a pressure. Of course, there is always a need to increase our efficiency and work on our operational excellence, you know, to reduce manufacturing costs. But it's not the price what is killing us, especially with the Bystronic brand.
The market shares, I mentioned it during my presentation, is mainly in the home turfs, right? Everybody would talk about, you know, are the Chinese taking over the market shares? In this case, no. We lost market shares in our home turfs, which is clearly Europe, followed a little bit by the US, but clearly in Europe. And I think these are the two regions where we can gain back some market shares, which we lost over the years. But these are the, the two, I would say mainly Europe, followed by, by US.
Thomas Burri, [VVAG]. In the last year, we all always referred to your service package, which you sold to your customer, the gold, the silver, and the bronze service. I haven't heard today anything because last time you said that the gold was not so much asked.
Is there a change in the service package you offer?
First of all, we don't talk anymore about gold, silver, and bronze segment, right? We have the Bystronic brand, and we talk about packages. Even on the machines, you get the machines and you can select your options. I think this was a big change to what you know from one year ago. And the same is on the service packages. You can just choose your options. And I have to say on the service package, this so-called ByCare, we are quite on track. We see, even though you have maybe seen that we have a little bit of decline in certain business, but the service business, especially when it comes to these care packages is still increasing and on good track.
Okay. Thank you.
So no more questions in the room. Yes, there's one.
Yeah, thank you. The CapEx on our CHF 14 million. I mean, you stressed that you made a very good free cash flow the last five years despite difficult environment, but isn't 14 million a bit low?
So if you look at, if you were to look at the, you know, the reinvestment rate of one, it would be around CHF 17 million. So we have a, you know, we, you know, especially on the IT investment, there's more and more now going into OpEx, where it in the past it was capitalized, right? So now with the cloud strategy, a lot of it is in the OpEx. So that's why you have a reduction there.
But with a reinvestment rate of one, if you were at CHF 17 million, you know, that's, and again, you know, because we more and more, you know, assembly and rather than do, you know, doing everything by ourselves, we also don't need to invest into, you know, the large machines.
Okay. Because the production depth reduces, CapEx goes down.
Exactly.
So with 17, you would be well equipped. Okay. Thank you.
There's another question.
Thanks, Thomas Buri. So you can clearly grow with the current cost structure, but net working capital was very much optimized last year. And I mean, could you maybe kind of touch on how much additional net working capital you would need for your growth ambitions? What would the effect on cash flows be from that side?
So we do have a rather strict policy with regards to upfront payment or advance payments from our customers. So with an order, we usually expect, you know, an upfront between 20%-40%. And that's why when we get into the growth mode, we actually can finance, you know, a lot of our net working capital because of that strict policy. So when there is a growth, you know, you get the upfront payment before and then you buy the inventory. Just maybe to simplify, usually in our business, if there is a growth coming, it will have a positive impact just due to the payments, right?
I would say it shows a little bit that even though we had a stark or a very strong decline in order intake year over year, if you look a little bit over the years, we have quite a resilient cash flow, honestly speaking. So there would be rather an upside potential if the order intake picks up. But as mentioned by Beat during his presentation, of course, we will have a kind of an impact next year because we were able to accrue all our costs in 2024, but cash out for the severance payment, whatever it is, you know, they are coming into effect in 2025. This will have a negative impact. Of course, we have a negative result, right? This will have an impact, as well.
But if there is an order increase, order intake increase more than expected, usually we will have a positive impact. This is what we recognize usually in our business. I go on. That's just maybe to quickly touch on the dividend also. I mean, you clearly have quite a solid cash balance still. What was the thinking behind the cutting the dividend quite drastically all the same? Is it kind of because you're seeing some M&A opportunities around the corner or yeah?
Thanks.
So now you get the CEO answer, right? And which is my answer. So it was a tough discussion. You could find arguments to pay a full dividend like we did last year. You could find arguments to say we don't pay any dividend. And I think this is a very good compromise, which I can live with.
I'm the CEO saying, hey, somehow we, everybody has to feel it if the result was bad, and unfortunately, we are talking about a dark red result, so it's a dark day today, and it's a very dark result, and that's in my eyes, it should somehow reflect into the dividend, and if we would go only with the result, which I would say would even be appropriate to say we don't pay any dividend, on the other side, why should we punish our investors twice by a bad result and even by not paying a dividend, and on the other hand, I think it's a very strong sign of the shareholders and the board of directors, that, hey, we believe into the future. That's why we pay a dividend.
Now you can philosophize why four, five, six, three, or two. I think this is the, the business rationale behind of, of this number, which I personally fully, fully support. Of course, I cannot anticipate anything, but a CEO would like always to buy, right? So if there are M&A opportunities, we will definitely take a look on it and we are proactively trying to do it.
What is your strategy when it comes to M&A? Do you say currently you don't look at any potential targets or do you say at first we want to bring our house in order and want to get back to profitability? What is here the strategy?
I, I clearly do both. That's why I tried today to talk about organic growth that's without M&A. So I always think you have to bring your house in a proper situation.
You have to clean up your own house, and that's why I go with these numbers and I give this outlook. M&A should always come on top. At the end, the reality is, and that's what I believe is we have to grow, unorganic as well, so I would say a healthy rate would be 50-50, 50% organic and 50% unorganic, and, of course, we are following a very active M&A strategy, but we don't buy to clean up our own mess. Sorry for being straightforward. We clean it up and everything what comes has to come on top, and I would like to emphasize on this one once again on the order intake. If the market comes back for whatever reason, Trump and Xi Jinping getting the best friends or whatever, we will take it. We don't count on it. We do whatever we can do by our own.
That's very important. That's to the order intake. So that's why we calculate like, or we estimate these numbers. But M&A, very clear, there are two paths we are following. We definitely don't want to make a vertical acquisition. Doesn't make sense, you know, acquiring suppliers. I'm definitely looking at adjacent business. So what could bring us a kind of a diversification so that we could maybe in the future be an anti-cycle, right? Today we live with the cycles. PMI goes down, we go down, PMI goes up, we go up. I think this would be very helpful. Of course, in our home market metals, there are still some additional, let's say, specialties which we still don't have in our house. These would be opportunities as well.
We have received two questions by the chat from Daniel Beksa of Diethelm Keller Group. The first one is about U.S. tariffs. So do you see any potential risk from the U.S. tariffs that may have an impact on the results of Bystronic? If so, what would be a very high level implication on results?
This is, this is a crystal ball question. Sorry for being straight, straightforward. Yes, there are risks, but there are always chances, honestly speaking, right? We have a quite good, fantastic setup. We have a good setup in the U.S. We have a good setup in Europe. We talked about we have a setup in China. Yes, maybe we have to shift something from A to B, but I do believe that we can mitigate the risks.
Tariffs are always bad for the industry and are always bad for the markets because they will create uncertainty. People will wait for investments, but this will not hit only Bystronic. This will hit everybody. At the end, the market will regulate whether these tariffs can be kept. I just want to remind you, now we talk about because somehow hits Europe and because yesterday somebody told at the media that there might be 25% import tariffs coming for Europe, for the European Union. The reality is, I think it was four years ago or six years ago when Trump introduced the 25% tariffs for Chinese products to the US, which we still have. When we import machines from China to US, we pay 25% import taxes. So we have just to take it and act.
I think Bystronic is well positioned to mitigate the risks. The overall risks for further market slowdown, it's given for the whole environment due to these tariffs discussions.
The second question is about service share. Do you see a potential to increase the service share in the total revenue about 30% in the mid-term horizon ?
Of course, if we look at the very low volume we have today, I think we are more or less about 33%. We are already above this year. I think this is now a healthy level which we achieved. We have to find the right balance between machine order intake and service, you know, it goes somehow hand in hand as more you sell, more service agreements you can make, you know, so it will grow in parallel.
So, but we need more volume and then we can even increase service volume. But I think a ratio of 33%, which we have today, is quite on the high level already.
So there are no more questions from remote, huh? Let's call it like this. One last chance in the room. If not, I would like to thank you, Operator. That's very impersonal, but thank you, Operator. So there are no more questions and even no more questions in the webcast as well as in the room. We close today's conference, and I wish you a successful afternoon. I know that there are many, many closings ongoing these days, so you are quite busy, but from our side, thank you very much for joining us at the Marriott. We are offering a standing lunch just outside of this conference room.
It would be nice to welcome everybody, but whoever has to leave, thanks for coming. The other ones, I will say goodbye during our small lunch. Thank you very much.