Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today at Zurich or in the live web stream. Welcome to Datwyler's Annual Results 2024 Investors and Media Conference. My name is Volker Cwielong. I'm CEO of Datwyler, and with me today are Judith van Walsum, CFO, and Guido Unternährer, Head of Investor Relations. I wanted to start by thanking our global team for the commitment to Datwyler and to highlight how important last year was, not only financially, but a foundational and transformational year for our teams. Today's agenda: we will cover our Business Review 2024. Judith will take you through the 2024 financial review, and in the third part, I'd like to share our market expectations, to touch on an overview of why we believe we are well positioned in key areas, and share some details about our recently announced transformation program Forward Now.
We plan to run the presentation about 45 minutes. After that, we want to leave ample time for your questions so we can end the session around 3:00 Central European Time. Let me now turn to our Business Review 2024. Datwyler is reporting CHF 1.108 million in revenue for the full year 2024, which is 3.8% lower than 2023, resulting from restrained demands in four out of five of our end markets, and adjusted by currency impacts, our business experienced a decline of 1.4%. Despite these weak markets, we managed to keep our operational margins stable, and this is due to active pricing and cost management in almost all regions, and therefore, we could secure an adjusted EBIT margin of 10.7% versus last year's 10.5%, and as well a robust free cash flow.
We've leveraged this challenging phase in our markets and stayed laser-focused to consistently pursue the important projects in our business optimization, our automation of processes, and also our future innovation. We've also managed to collect new business wins in the sectors Healthcare and Automotive, with a major share in high-value categories. In December, Datwyler has started a transformation journey called Forward Now to prepare for market recovery and to sustainably accelerate our revenue and profitability growth. Through this program, we will enhance our solid foundation from a position of strength. The associated one-time costs amount to CHF 37.9 million. As you can see, all of them were fully charged in the 2024 financial results. Datwyler's business is diversified across several end markets and regions. This is why we do not depend so much on short-term impacts in single markets.
2024 was a challenge in that respect as the demand was weak in four out of five of our end markets. Under normal conditions, our low cyclical Healthcare and the Food & Beverage industries, with an overall share of almost 60% of our revenues, would stabilize economic fluctuations well in our portfolio. However, our largest market segment, Healthcare, experienced continued destocking at our customers. Although we already saw first signs of recovery in incoming orders towards the end of last year, the destocking still had a substantial impact on our volume demands in 2024. The global production volumes for the passenger cars market, they had a slight decline last year. This growth of battery electric vehicles was also slower than most of us would have expected. This has clearly limited our opportunities in 2024.
But let me add that given our positioning in the market and the wide range of our applications of our products, we do not directly depend on the business performance of single car makers. The Oil & Gas market was characterized by uncertainty and low activity during the election year in the U.S., which had a significant impact on our revenues in that particular segment. The market for single-serve coffee capsules performed well in the reporting year, with a growth in the low- to mid-single-digit % range. And due to our positioning primarily in aluminum, we were able to outperform this growth clearly. The other industries we do address with our product portfolio experienced, in some countries, a quite hesitating sentiment, low investments. And this is also why we could not increase our sales in these segments.
But generally, we took the opportunity to optimize our production infrastructure already last year and also reallocate product lines within existing plants during this 2024 moderate utilization in some of our sites. Can we go to the next slide, please? Thank you so much. Our teams showed an impressive momentum in business development and won attractive new customer projects in almost all segments. This is particularly important regarding the accelerated transition into high-value segments. That's one of our prominent goals. In Healthcare, we've increased the share of projected revenues from high-value projects in our pipeline to above 60%. And we could further intensify our collaboration with leading drug manufacturers worldwide and line up projects towards serial supply.
In the first quarter of 2025, we plan to start and gradually scale up serial production of high-quality plungers from the Datwyler FirstLine standard for GLP-1 receptor agonists, the so-called weight loss drugs. For Automotive, we have significantly increased our share of new business wins for electrified applications to above 50%. A third of our new business wins for connectors refer to the attractive segment of high-voltage applications. We have shaped substantial progress in our sustainability activities by reducing our CO2 emissions of the global plant network by 30%. Datwyler committed as well to work towards binding greenhouse gas reduction targets by joining the Science-Based Targets Initiative. EcoVadis has granted us the highest sustainability rating, which positions us among the top 1% of more than 150,000 rated companies.
Our teams achieved important progress in our innovation projects, including SoftPulse, and could successfully line up our pilot production line on an industrial scale for electroactive polymers. Judith, I'll turn the presentation over to you for the financial review.
Thank you very much, Volker. I will start with giving you an overview of the P&L statement, and then we will go into the detailed lines. When you look at the P&L, Volker already indicated this. Net revenues went down by -3.8%. Currency adjusted, the revenues amounted to -1.4%.
Could you go to the next slide, please? Our remote control does not work.
Our gross profit, however, was only impacted by minus 0.8% thanks to comparably lower cost of goods sold. As a consequence, gross profit margin increased from 20.9% in 2023 to 21.5% in 2024. Operating expenses increased, and that is where you see the impact of the CHF 38 million transformation-related cost, consisting of CHF 9 million in impairments and CHF 29 million in extraordinary provision built in December. As a consequence, our reported EBIT went down to CHF 80 million. If you, however, correct the EBIT for this extraordinary spend, then you would end up at CHF 118 million, which is broadly in line with the prior year. Our EBIT margin adjusted. So prior to these transformation expenses, it increased from 10.46% in 2023 to 10.7% in 2024. Overall net finance results went down. There are some movements behind that, which I will explain later on.
Income tax expenses went also down in absolute terms. This then results in a net result of CHF 31 million reported and again adjusted to a number that is higher than the CHF 67 million of last year, namely CHF 69 million. Let's have a quick look at, I'll try the, yeah, it works. Thank you very much. The next slide. This gives you an overview of the bridge in our revenues between 2023 and 2024. As you can see, over 60% of the revenue development was due to unfavorable currency impacts. When we look purely at the currency-adjusted results, the minus 1.4%, then you can see that we had a negative volume impact of CHF 17 million, partially offset by price increases of CHF 8 million. The CHF 17 million volume reduction reflects the challenges faced in our end markets, both in industrial solutions as well as in Healthcare.
In addition to that, I would like to point out that in 2023, we still had CHF 7.5 million in sales related to high-margin components for COVID vaccines. This will be the last year that I will mention COVID in this sense. When we look then at the, I'm one slide too far, I believe. Can you go one slide? Yeah, thank you. When I look at the bridge for EBIT, then naturally the lower demand that we have experienced in the different markets also has led to a lower gross profit, which naturally then has an unfavorable impact on our EBIT. However, our comparatively lower cost of goods sold has been able to compensate and largely offset that impact. Three factors play to that. One is a logical consequence of lower demand. You have lower volumes to produce.
Secondly, we experienced lower prices for raw materials and other cost of goods sold. And last but not least, we have introduced several cost-saving and optimization measures already over the course of 2024. The big ticket item in this bridge is naturally the posting of CHF 38 million in transformation-related cost on the other operating expenses line. For us, a very, very important step forward to help us safeguard and also grow our and accelerate the growth of our revenues as well as our profit margins. Volker will explain in greater detail what is behind that and what we seek to accomplish. Normalized, so correcting for the transformation costs. As mentioned before, our EBIT is at CHF 118 million, which is broadly in line with last year's CHF 120 million. I will go to the next slide. Healthcare faced a reduction in net revenues of 4.9%.
Over half of that, or about half of that, is due to a negative foreign currency impact of around CHF 11 million. The resulting minus 2.5% currency-adjusted sales are due to continuing destocking in the industry. We've seen an uptake in our orders in the last quarter of 2024 compared to similar or to the order patterns the year before. Those, however, will benefit us in 2025 and have less of an impact in the year 2024 itself. Now, as a logical consequence then of the reduced volumes and as well a lesser favorable profit mix than what we had in 2023, when we still had these COVID sales, we basically see that this has a negative impact on the gross profit and therefore on EBIT. In contrast to industrial, we were not able to fully compensate for that through lower cost of goods sold.
As you may be aware, we have invested quite materially over the last years in building up our global presence and also our capabilities in FirstLine in this industry segment. We have made a conscious choice to maintain this and to continue building this up so that we are ready for the uptake that we are foreseeing in the markets 2025 onwards. The end result is that we have an EBIT adjusted, so prior to transformation cost of CHF 62 million and an EBIT margin, a corresponding EBIT margin of 13.9%. Healthcare carries around 50 million of the 38 million in transformation-related cost, which naturally then lower the reported EBIT and EBIT margin. When we go to the next slide, you will be able to see the bridge for industrial solutions.
Also here, we have been impacted quite materially by unfavorable headcount or unfavorable effects developments, totally amounting to CHF 16 million. When we take these out, the currency-adjusted growth was at minus 1%. In contrast to Healthcare, however, you can see that this negative impact of a declining top line was fully offset by lower cost of goods sold, leading into the end to an improvement of our adjusted EBIT of 22% and a total EBIT of CHF 56 million, which is well above prior year's CHF 46 million. The corresponding EBIT margin amounted to 8.5%. The industrial solutions segment carries CHF 23 million of the overall CHF 38 million in transformation, and therefore you see that reflected again in the reported EBIT and reported EBIT margins.
If we go to the next slide, if we complete the P&L, then I would like to speak shortly to the net financial results as well as the tax expenses. When we look at the total interest expenses, they have gone down thanks to the repayments that we've made of our loans, particularly the debts that we're holding towards third-party banks. When we look, however, at the expenses that are linked to finance and particularly the costs linked to hedging our foreign currency transactions, then you can see that we incurred fair value losses on our forward contracts. We hedge up to 80% of our transactional exposure. And so there's a net negative impact of CHF 4 million. When we add these two together, however, overall net financing cost went improved in absolute terms by CHF 1 million.
When we look at our tax expenses, then you can see that these went down in absolute terms to CHF 21 million, reflecting also the lower earnings before tax. I move on to the balance sheet, and I would like to highlight three points. The first one is our net working capital development. Overall, in absolute terms, it stayed stable at CHF 311 million or 28% of sales, and what you can see in particular is an improvement in our trade accounts receivables. Partly, this is a consequence naturally of the lower revenues that we incurred over the year 2024. It is also, however, due to a more strict management of our accounts receivables, as you can see also in the aging table.
Our accounts payables were impacted also by lower volumes, but in addition to that, two-thirds of the, call it, deterioration in accounts payables is actually due to discounted prepayments that we made towards one of our vendors. Inventory went slightly up. This is due to changes in our freight routes, particularly between India and Europe, which led to more goods in transit and also slightly increased stock. We had to change the trade routes due to political issues in the Red Sea area. I move to the next slide, where we can see basically the development of the net debt. As you can see, we have paid off a material amount. In fact, we have paid off CHF 52 million. So all our debts with banks, third-party banks, both short-term as well as long-term.
We also have paid out the CHF 150 million bond we had and replaced that with a newly issued CHF 120 million bond, in addition to the CHF 240 million bond which we left unchanged. We extended the loan with Pema as our anchor investor with CHF 17 million. However, overall, net debt went down. EBITDA stayed stable. We adjusted EBITDA. Prior to any transformation-related impacts, it stayed stable at around CHF 200 million. Therefore, we see a clear continued deleveraging and an improvement of our net debt to EBITDA ratio to 2.2. The third point I would like to highlight is the equity ratio. As you're aware, we're striving for an equity ratio of 40%. Very important here is that we are offsetting goodwill against equity. It is in that sense more depressed.
Equity stayed at 32% versus 32.2% last year, despite the fact that we include here a CHF 29 million provision linked to the transformation. If you would take that out, we would be at around 35%. This brings me then to the free cash flow. The overall free cash flow at CHF 128 million stayed strong in absolute terms. It reflects, on the one hand, the net cash from operating activities. There you do see a decline. This is particularly due to actually a baseline effect, so in 2023, we had an extraordinary impact in the sense that we liquidated CHF 30 million or nearly CHF 30 million in COVID-related inventories. And that, of course, does not come back in the year 2024. Our net cash used from investing activities went further down, so our CapEx spend over the year 2024 amounted to CHF 46 million, and that is around 4% of sales.
From a historical perspective, this is not so much an issue because three years of high investments between 2020 and 2022 have been offset by the last two years, yeah, 2023 and 2024, where depreciation by far outweighed further investments, so from a historical perspective, depreciation and capital expenditures are more or less equating each other. Moving forward, however, we do expect that to change, and we do expect our CapEx as a percentage to go up to the range of 5%-7%. When we look at the free cash flow itself, it gave us enough financial flexibility to repay our debts, as just shared, as well as pay out a CHF 54 million dividend payment for the year 2023.
So on that note, I would like to ask Volker to come back and really outline his expectations towards the market as well as our outlook for our performance for 2025 onwards.
Yeah, thank you very much, Judith, for that insight on our financial situation. Now let me summarize our market evaluation on the one hand and our positioning for 2025 and beyond, referring to our end markets that we have already shown in the introduction. In Healthcare, the destocking bottom appears to be behind. We expect the end of the destocking in our commodity by mid of 2025 and a return to the long-term growth trend in injectables. And as Judith mentioned, during 2024, we've maintained important and required capacities and expertise to be well prepared for the expected market rebound.
In Automotive, most of the experts expect a forecast in terms of a slight growth for 2025 for light vehicles in a realistic scenario. However, battery electric vehicles and vehicles with electrified powertrains are expected to grow significantly above average, primarily in China as being the main growth driver in that segment, and remember, more than half of our 2024 new customer project wins came from China. We assume that the positioning of the recently elected U.S. government will most likely have a positive impact on one of our core segments, which is Oil & Gas, and this segment, we do address with certified components as leading player in North America. For Food & Beverages, we expect our relevant market to grow further, particularly in aluminum capsules, which helps us to capture further value in the years to come.
And despite the restrained sentiment in other industries, we are cautiously optimistic because on recent new business wins for some outperforming applications such as HVAC, water, and connectivity, we are well positioned. And this is why we strongly believe that Datwyler has lined up the right product portfolio in both Healthcare industrial solutions to benefit from the expected development in our target markets. For instance, the long-term growth trend for prefilled syringes with annual growth rates of more than 10% is still intact, such as for vehicles with electrified powertrains with an annual growth of more than 50% until 2030. Demands on materials, components, and solutions are changing constantly, and this has opened up great opportunities for our innovation teams. Compared to most of our existing products and applications, the majority of our innovation projects are targeting platform technologies, which we can seamlessly adapt to multiple industries and applications.
The integration of sensors and electronics into elastomeric components will turn the traditional component into a smart responsive solution provider that integrates various functionalities. On smart components, for instance, they can enable and capture and do analysis of real-time performance data so our customers can optimize their equipment downtimes. They can learn more about efficiency and improve their efficiency and optimize their operations. In the area of wearables and medical devices, we offer solutions for biofeedback monitoring in bioelectrical stimulation. As you know, Datwyler SoftPulse already made it to various small-scale serial applications. Our teams also leverage AI to accelerate the development of new materials, optimize functionalities and our formulations of the material, and predict the material behavior under various conditions, especially for harsh application environments.
Some amazing outcomes of this are thermally and electrically conductive materials, shielding materials for high-voltage batteries, for instance, or sustainable materials with enhanced environmental footprint. In summary, our innovations will empower Datwyler to unlock greater value along and throughout the whole value chain in the future. Some of our markets have changed significantly during the last five years. Over its 110-year history, Datwyler has continually reinvented itself.
As a part of our annual strategy process in 2024, this fall, we have outlined seven key priorities that will enable us to, first, increase the share of co-developed products to boost our high-value offering, to enhance efficiency and to commercialize our innovations faster into products, to deliver premium customer value and with well-positioned value pricing, standardize our processes across now 27 sites in 11 countries to support scalable and profitable growth, and to focus on value for customers and investors through sustainability initiatives. Datwyler will promote leadership rooted in our company values, emphasizing responsibility and entrepreneurial attitude and mindset. These priorities aim to drive growth, innovation, and long-term value creation. We will ensure the full alignment of our whole organization to these priorities with our transformation program Forward Now.
The program focuses on the four key areas: production network, commercial excellence, product portfolio, and target operating model. We are fully convinced that this is the right way to unlock significant synergies to enhance our competitiveness and, first of all, to better position Datwyler for the future. Datwyler will be aligned better to the challenges in our target markets and regions, which will respond much faster with higher transparency across the entire organization and consistently eliminate non-value-adding activities from our agenda. The target operating model establishes clear and efficient structures and will enable scalable growth in the future, both organically or inorganically. Until the end of 2027, we expect cumulative profit improvements of CHF 52 million from 10 work streams in these four key areas, which will be orchestrated during that period of three years.
Forward Now is established with an internal transformation office that will provide full transparency to the management and also ensure that the organization is not distracted in their day-to-day activities and operations. The successful completion of these work streams should enable Datwyler 24 million CHF annual uplift starting from 2028. Please note, Forward Now is not a simple cost-cutting program, but it's a set of interlinked initiatives to realign the company for accelerated profitable growth. The reported 37.9 million CHF, one-time effect from Forward Now, have been fully charged to the 2024 financial statements, and they allocate 61% to industrial solutions and 39% to the business area Healthcare solutions. The full amount is structured in 25% impairments, 28% enabler costs, which also include expert support for particular initiatives, and approximately 47% personnel costs, including upskilling and workforce right-sizing.
It is common for new insights to emerge during such a program, and therefore, we will also consider further strategic decisions with regard to that along the way. Following our market evaluation, we expect a mid-term annual organic growth in the higher single-digit percentage range and an EBIT margin of 17% plus under normal operating market conditions, and based on a solid free cash flow and our strong position in our markets, Datwyler will propose a dividend of CHF 3.20 per bearer share to the annual general meeting. Before I finish the session, let me introduce two highly qualified individuals who will strengthen Datwyler's board and as well the executive committee. Britt Henriksen will be proposed for election as a new additional director and as a representative of the public shareholders at the next annual general meeting on 18 March 2025.
Britt brings more than 20 years of experience in global Healthcare management positions with her. And in her last role as group CFO of Unilabs, she supported development and the implementation of a growth strategy throughout organic expansion and acquisitions. Michael Höller has been appointed as an additional member to our executive committee. Michael Höller is also here with us at Zurich, if you're interested in having an exchange with him. He has started on 1 February and is our new COO and head of the division or business area industrial solutions and brings more than 30 years of experience primarily in operational excellence and quality. I had previously been in charge of this business area besides my role as CEO. Let me emphasize that Datwyler has demonstrated a solid performance in 2024, facing various headwinds and unfavorable business climate in most of our end markets.
However, we believe that we are well prepared for an expected recovery in some of our end markets on the short and midterm and well positioned for long-term growth. Forward Now will help the organization to accelerate this development and the company to create more value. I'll now hand over to the session to Guido Unternährer and to move to our Q&A session. Thank you very much.
So we will start with the Q&A session with questions from this room, and please wait until you have the microphone so our guests in the live web stream can also understand your question and then the following answers. So who would like to start? Charlie Fehrenbach.
Charlie Fehrenbach, AWP. I've got two questions. The extra costs of CHF 38 million you mentioned for 2024, why do you expect them to be in 2025 comparable? And also the split between Healthcare and industrial solutions, will this be more or less the same? And the second question is, given the uncertainties on political uncertainties, watching all these announcements from the U.S. government, may you give a little comment if you see more risks, more chances there, what do you expect there? Thank you.
Thank you very much for that question. As we've shown before, 61% of the CHF 37.9 million are accounting to industrial solutions and the rest to Healthcare solutions. Regarding the payback, and that's how I understood your question, over the period of three years and how we set up this cost more or less over that period is the CHF 52 million that will gradually be cumulative over this period of three years.
And it surely depends on how we orchestrate these 10 initiatives out of these four key areas over the course of these three years. So it's naturally that in the first years, we will have less impact or positive impact because the activities will be starting, or some of them have already started now, and more of these impacts will then happen in the year 2026 and 2027. Costs are already in the financial statement of 2024, but the benefits will evolve over the three years period of Forward Now.
So there is typically a cash outflow against the provision, and that's how we manage it. So you can expect that we're front-loaded in terms of that cash outflow in 2025 and that the benefits come through 2026 and 2027 onwards. So 2026 should already be net positive in terms of benefits outweighing the costs.
But this is handled via the balance sheet, not via the P&L. Okay. Maybe I can follow through on the second topic. We're living in interesting times, to your point. We have done naturally, in anticipation of the Trump administration coming in, a full assessment of our import and export flows between our different affiliates. We have also worked closely with our vendors as well as our customers. We have reviewed our contractual conditions. And based on that, depending on the scenario, there will naturally be impacts. Having said that, given the fact that we have a big presence in the three key regions, in China, in the Americas, in Europe, and have a local-for-local strategy, we are to a large extent able to mitigate that impact. So I can't say that we will be absolutely free from impacts.
It depends really on the scenario that the Trump administration will actually hold on to. For the rest, we are continuing monitoring the situation closely. As you're aware, it's changing daily at the moment.
Thank you. Michael Foeth, Bank Vontobel. A question on your production footprint. Could you maybe comment on what adjustments you're making to your production footprint and what effect that has on your capacities overall? Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for that question. I would refer first to industrial solutions. So as you can see, we have quite a wide portfolio of products, and we've acquired recently, over the last five years, also a large amount of business that is yet to be combined in terms of synergies. So in fact, some of the processes are similar, and some of the plants do have a lot of technology.
Each single plant has a lot of broad variety of technologies and processes. So now the first step is to see, do I need every technology and with that also high fixed cost level in each of these plants, or can I establish kind of a combination of production steps or allocation of certain products to plant one and others to plant two in order to create higher synergies? That's more or less a technical approach to it. The other approach basically is in terms of the target operating model that also asks the question, which activities a production plant has to cover? If you buy a company from a, for instance, family-owned structure, usually the plants have a full-fledged management with full-fledged finance and everything around and sales. So this is not what we need.
So we have to address and allocate the, let's say, an adequate setup for a production plant versus a regional and a global organization that can provide services to these plants. And this is also yet to be completed. And the third point I want to mention, as some of the plants have quite a long history and have been acquired over the last 15, 20 years partially, the products have changed. The product portfolio has changed as well. The technologies that our customers are asking for. For some of the products that I still have today may have been acquired 15 years ago, I'm not the right supplier because times have changed. Our product focus has changed.
And this is also where we want to gradually replace commodity products with high-margin products in these plants, also thus changing the technology footprint and as well the plant footprint in order to accommodate these new products in our infrastructure.
Martin Betschart, Albin Kistler. I have a question to Industrial Solutions. Could you give us more color on the adjusted margin expansion? How much was related to lower raw material costs and how much was related to operational improvements?
Yeah.
100 points.
I don't know if we have that split in detail. However, I can give you kind of a glimpse. In fact, we have three key areas that we were addressing. First of all, COGS means the management of incoming goods versus the sales. That's, I think, quite a no-brainer to adapt that. I think we did a very good job on that.
Second part is the waste of raw material in terms of processes. So rubber waste, we call it rubber waste. There is one part that's a technical waste that is more or less inherent to a certain process, and the second is to inefficiencies in the process. So this was our focus because, first of all, material waste is something that's very expensive, and second, it's not very much playing into our sustainability journey. And the third area is the production scheduling in single plants means the order processing, which amounts and which lot sizes do we produce in what sequence? And so setting up machines and changing tooling in our machinery is downtime, it's planned downtime or even unplanned downtime if you do not schedule your plant in the right way.
What we could see is also a substantial progress to that extent, which will then also be implemented in a more sustainable way through this target operating model where we also have kind of a benchmark in comparison what is the ideal way to run a production plant and to run a production sequence in very similar processes.
Johannes Bohn is underneath. I have a question on the CapEx side. You were mentioning that CapEx might go up if I understood you right. Do you have a target ratio maybe? And can you talk about the big blocks you might invest in? So where is the big chunk you're going to invest more? Because it looks like you made a lot of investments and kind of constant investments you have to do, obviously, which is reflected in depreciation. So I'm wondering whether there are some new projects you have to invest in.
Thank you for that question. First of all, as Judith has mentioned, we do believe that an adequate run rate over, let's say, a three-year period will be more or less in the region between 5%-7% of sales. Why do we have this fluctuation right now? I mean, first of all, we've invested heavily in plant infrastructure in particular to set up in each region a FirstLine production facility. I mean, this has been a really important decision and also gives us a huge access to our customers in terms of new orders and new business. However, some of the plants still have overcapacity, underutilized. And in order to fill these plants with products, we need to buy equipment.
So some of the process steps will be gradually extended in terms of number of machines and extension of kind of an equipment in the process step. And that will be, yeah, I think the major amount for ramping up and closing the gaps in terms of underutilization in our factories.
Bernd Laux, ZKB. The first question would be regarding your comment on the GLP-1 related products. Is that comment related to a first customer going now into full serial production where you have captured a second source contract? And in addition to that, do you expect to go also into production with other customers next year or the year after? And the second topic would be your remark on the magnetic active and electroactive polymer developments. Can you shed some more light on the potential applications where you're developing with your partners and on the potential timeline when these products will really go into the market? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Bernd, for that question. Let me refer to the GLP-1 plant ramp-up for Q1. I mean, we cannot share with you details on customers. I think that's clear and understood. We are working with both established customers who already sell products in the market and as well with customers that are yet to go in serial production with their products. So we are working on many products or projects with these bandwidth of customers. The ramp-up will be a second source, which will be then starting in Q1 and gradually ramping up over the next months and years. I mean, the second part of your question has been answered that as well.
When the other customers will go into serial production with their products is subject to approvals, for instance, of FDA or EMA. So this is something I cannot really share. I mean, this is not up to us and nor up to our customers. So for sure, we hope to be in serial production sooner than later. However, that's not up to our decision. On the magnetic active polymers, what we see as applications is pressure sensing in many possible applications such as robotics, robotic arms, as well pressure control and flow control in piping installations, which will allow as well our customers to monitor the conditioning of a sealing without disassembling it, and with looking at preventive maintenance, which is a huge cost block, especially in regulated industries and safety installations, this has the potential of gaining traction quickly.
However, it is very difficult to predict when these products go into a mass application. Currently, with some of our partners, we do proof of concept currently. We have very, very good results in these testing and validation activities, and we are very confident that we can line up a small-scale production facility in due time.
Sebastian Vogel from UBS, I have three questions. I would ask them one by one if possible. The first one is with regard to the medium-term margin guidance. So the lower threshold compared to the previous margin guidance was set one percentage point lower, if I'm not mistaken. Just to get your thoughts in that regard, what was driving this sort of lower threshold? What were the key points that have changed from the last time when you were initially putting out the initial guidance that was applicable beforehand? That would be the first question. I would ask the others.
So we have naturally the original guidance of the 18%-21% that you're referring to dates from Capital Markets Day 2021. Since then, we have seen major changes in our markets, in how our customers and what they are demanding. And we felt it was essential that when we go in with a midterm guidance, that we take the realities of the markets into account. It also needs to take into account our performance over the last years because clearly the last two years, as you can see from our results, have set us back, and we need to ramp that up again. The third factor is that we have relooked at our strategy. We've had a major strategic review where we have identified what we prioritize, but also what we are not prioritizing moving forward. And that leads then to an updated guidance for the midterm of 17%.
Hello. Yep. Great. Many thanks for that. Second question, I guess I can combine it with the third one because it's kind of short ones. The second one is with regard to the reporting structure. Within Industrial Solutions, I saw from the slide deck that you have shown the sort of the percentage share of the revenue that we're allocating to gas, to auto instead of mobility and industrial solutions. What was it? General Industries here. So the question is just like, what's the plan going forward? Are we sort of, can we use or can we get used to having this sort of split that will be provided also going forward? So that's the first question. The other one that I will just plug in there as well.
With regard to Healthcare, can you sort of give us an indication what's the sort of revenue exposure that at the moment you have to high-value products and how you see that number developing over the next 12, 24 months to have a bit of a sense there?
Thank you, Sebastian, for that question. On our reporting structure, as you can see, I mean, previously the reporting structure was more or less driven by an acquisition that we did and with regard to end markets, this does not really capture the point, right? So also in terms of communication towards the investor community, and I do understand it's very important for you, very difficult for you to see what is the percentage of Connectors business unit going into different markets, right?
From that point, we've decided to allocate the part of Connectors business unit into the Automotive market that belongs into that market segment and to allocate the rest into other industries, respective other applications that would then also reflect the dynamics in that particular end market. Going forward, also, I mean, taking Forward Now, we will also, along with this target operating model, assess a structure that reflects better markets versus the reporting units that we have previously taken. Yeah. Your second question on Healthcare, and I do understand: how do we expect the share of high-margin or high-value products to evolve? I mean, currently, more than 60% of the projected revenues out of the leads that we are working in different phases are in the segment of high-value.
High-value, just to recap that, we do define with all the products coming out of our FirstLine facilities and products that include some additional packaging services, for instance, RTU and RTP. So from that definition, we see that everything that comes in is to a much higher share, high-value allocated than before due to the fact that we have really gained traction with global drug makers getting accepted on certain development phases or for certain applications much better than before. And that also leads clearly to our focus and our priorities in terms of taking leads together with customers.
Carla Baenziger from Vontobel. I have two questions actually on the Industrial Solutions side, following on Sebastian's question. Can you maybe give us a bit more flavor to which business segments grew? So which was the strongest growing business segment and which was the poorest? And then the second, I will follow up later.
Thank you, Carla, for the question. I mean, first of all, as mentioned, the Food & Beverage segment was a really good year, 2024. So we could gain additional volume. We could also extend our capacities since we are almost fully utilized in our current production facilities together with one of our customers. And that was clearly the best single market we could address this year among the Industrial Solutions. In the Automotive market and that part of Connectors market, we experienced a decline due to some stock reductions at customers, especially for those customers who have a fiscal year ending in October. So that's why as well our second half was a bit weaker. We see traction coming back.
But the good point in that is despite these reduced top lines, we have really managed to improve our margins and also our run rates. So really our sustainable operational margins in the plants. And the energy industry, yeah. It's clearly the Oil & Gas segment that was extremely weak with two-digit decline in terms of top line due to the fact that, I mean, we all know that it's a cyclical industry. However, also with having a couple of years' experience in that industry as well, it was quite unusual that orders were not picking up in Q3. They started now to pick up after the election only. However, normally you would say it doesn't so much matter which decision will be taken, but that a decision will be taken.
So that was, I think, particularly different from the usual cycle in the last election years. However, what we can see is that, as said, orders are picking up, and we hope that this year is then having really an attractive cycle in terms of this end market.
Okay. And then my second question is related to Healthcare and the 60% high-value products that you see in your orders. How quickly should we expect those to get into your sales numbers? I mean, is this a one-year game or is this something that takes maybe five years?
The point is at the end, I mean, when we talk about leads, you talk about activities in different phases at our customers. Some of them are about to be in serial production in two years from now.
Some of them are in serial production maybe in five years and maybe not at all because the drug of our customer is not going to be successful or not being validated by the authorities, right? And so it's very difficult to say. However, we do assume that on average or the average amount of high-value in our leads leads also to the fact that everything that comes in has a higher share of high-value category than ever before. So currently, we really look at, yeah, more than double of our serial sales today is in the leads in terms of high-value. And from that point of view, everything that comes in will be on a good distribution between mid and high-value, and it should increase our share of high-value in any case. How fast?
I'd really like to know that in detail, Carla, but we all know that there are some uncertainties around, right? Since we're almost reaching the scheduled end of the event, I suggest to add some questions from the chat. So one question is that while it has made progress on deleveraging, what is the medium-term target for further deleveraging, and what is the level we can expect at the end of 2025 regarding deleveraging our balance sheet? Yeah.
So maybe I take that question. So ultimately, we would like to get to 1% to 1.5% ratio net debt to EBITDA over the midterm. It will take us naturally a few years to get there. As to the 25 number, I would like to withhold any comment.
What we see happening in 2025 is naturally that we will have our free cash flow will be impacted by cash outflow linked to the transformation program. So please take that into account that I do expect that the free cash flow will go down, assuming that we carry a higher part of the burden of that group transformation program. We will, however, continue our deleveraging efforts, however, it may not be at the size of the magnitude as we did this year.
Okay. There's another question from another participant. He is wondering about the GLP-1 serial production. How will this impact our revenues in 2025? Yeah. Thank you for the question. I mean, the GLP-1 ramp-up is planned to start from Q1, end of Q1, and then gradually improving or increasing in terms of volumes over the course of this year.
I mean, a total revenue and a total share of revenue among our total revenues in Healthcare, I don't want to disclose at that point in time. However, we expect to be in a two-digit million level on an annual basis in 18 months or over the course of 18 months. There are two additional questions regarding the headwinds due to the U.S. administration. One is with regards to the tariffs, how this will affect Datwyler. And the other one is about having Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and being an anti-vaccine activist, if this could have any potential impact on our Healthcare business in the U.S.
I think we need to be mindful not to give comments on political appointees. Having said that, we do expect that in particular, some of the health needs and the needs of patients worldwide will not change. And therefore, I do believe, and we know from independent market research that the vaccine market will continue to grow, as will be the prefilled syringes, which are probably arguably more important for us. That's the first topic. What was the specific question around the tariff?
The potential impact of the tariffs. Yeah.
So I hope that I already indicated that before. We are operating in an uncertain environment. So one of the things that is really important for us is that we closely monitor our exposure. We do so right now on a daily basis. And clearly, we have already put mitigating measures in place where we do see exposure coming through, both on the side in terms of what suppliers we are leveraging as well as in terms of our contractual terms towards our customers. Having said that, our local-for-local strategy helps mitigate a good part of the impacts that we see in the markets with the additional tariffs on China and potentially on Canada, Mexico, and potentially on the EU.
Maybe I can add that as a component manufacturer and supplier, we do not have this imminent interlinkage between different regions in our end product. I mean, it's the first point. So we do produce local-for-local primarily. Most of our supply chains are also local-for-local, which is, as Judith said, not giving us that exposure compared to other companies. However, we want to avoid any exposure of that, although it wouldn't be a material exposure on the current outlook. But as said as well, to underline what Judith said again, this exposure or this whatever information, they currently change daily.
That's why it's very difficult to give some comments on the economy right now, how we would assess this going further. I'm a little bit concerned about that, and that's why I also go a little bit into a cautiously optimistic outlook for the total market or for all of our markets, is that these activities at a glance at history always led to a bad economic development overall, right? That's my biggest concern rather than who is putting tariffs on whom, right? There's one last question from the chat. You've mentioned the streamlining of the product portfolio. Have you already identified the revenue level associated with the commodity products mentioned that you will discontinue in the midterm? Currently, it's always the question where you put that kind of threshold, what is interesting and what is not.
I mean, the first step that we will address, and we are addressing already, is everything that is really allocated to low-volume amounts of parts where we just from our size of our corporation are not capable to do that in a competitive level. And this is less than 5% of our sales in Industrial Solutions. So most of that topic is relevant for Industrial Solutions, less than for Healthcare. And due to that, we expect an improvement of the complexity in our manufacturing operations, which also then leads to a more streamlined product portfolio and to more streamlined processes. Are there any more questions in the room at this point in time? If not, I would hand back to you, Volker, to finish off.
Yeah, thank you, Guido. And at that point in time, I'd like to thank you for your attention, for your questions. So, we will still be here at Zurich for a couple of minutes to have a potential exchange. So if there are some more questions from your side, feel free to ask them. And yeah, hope to see all of you soon. Thanks also to the participants in the live web stream. Hope we could give you viable and valuable information. And yeah, thank you very much. Have a good day, a good afternoon, and a good evening.