Good morning and welcome everyone. My name is Bernhard Schweizer, investor relations contact from INFICON. I have the pleasure to host this Microsoft Teams session. Thank you for joining the INFICON web conference on its second quarter and half-year 2021 results. With us today are Lukas Winkler, CEO of INFICON, and Matthias Tröndle, CFO of INFICON. The management team will first present the results and then take questions. During the prepared remarks, participants are kindly asked to turn their microphones and cameras off. You should have received by now a press release on the Q2 and half-year results, together with the links to the accompanying visuals for this web conference, as well as the half-year report. All these documents are also available for download in the investor section of the INFICON website.
As we are in a MS Teams session, you can post written questions during the presentation using the chat function. This should be the second icon in the top right-hand menu. Management will take these questions after their prepared remarks. You can also signal that you would like to ask a question over the microphone. We ask you to use the third icon functionality to raise your hand. Just click on the raise your hand symbol, and you will be added to the queue of people who would like to ask questions. I would also like to inform you that we record this web conference to archive the audio file later on the INFICON website. The oral statements made by INFICON during this MS Teams session may contain forward-looking statements that do not relate solely to historical or current facts.
These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of our management, are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect our current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Having said all that, I would like to hand over now to Lukas Winkler. Lukas, please.
Thank you, Bernhard. [Non-English content] and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today to review our results for the second quarter of 2021. A year ago, I mentioned that the semiconductor market seems to be immune against the COVID-19 virus. We can certainly say, yes, this was true. In the meantime, we also see a nice rebound in all other target markets. In total, with revenues of over $126 million, we reach another new record level after the last one just three months ago, and we grew in all markets and regions compared to the same but low second quarter of last year. Slide number three, please. Here you can see the key figures of the reporting quarter. Sales growth was over 30%, but heavily influenced by foreign exchange rate changes, and therefore, the organic growth was lower and reached slightly over 26%.
With a book-to-bill ratio of above one, our backlog increased to new record levels as well. With the unfortunate consequences of increased product lead times, we currently spend much millions more than originally planned to increase our capacity, mainly in space, logistics, tools, and calibration capacities to catch up with our huge backlog and to reduce our product lead times again. Needless to say that we expanded our workforce as well, and we are now more than 1,300 employees around the world. With record high sales volume, improved gross profit margins, but increased operating expenses, we finished the quarter with operating income of $22.7 million, or 18% of sales, compared to $60 million or 16.6% of sales for the same quarter a year ago. Net income reached $17.5 million or 13.8% of sales. Matthias Tröndle will review the numbers with you in more details later.
I now highlight some important developments in our target markets first. On the next slide, number four, you can see the sales breakdown in our served four key markets, as well as the regional sales trend. The contribution from the RAC and auto market at the expense of a lower contribution from the semi and vacuum coating market could lead to wrong assumptions. This is just a quarterly snapshot, and the percentage changes are compared with the same quarter as of last year, which was a weak quarter overall, with the exception of the semiconductor market. Therefore, the contribution to the sales mix on the semi side decreased, but what you can see is the nice rebound of the RAC and auto market, which now certainly has increasing contribution to the sales mix.
The trend on the right-hand side indicates a continuation of the importance of the Asian customers at almost the same size of the combined Americas and European market. Let's do a quick analysis market by market, starting with the smallest one. In the security and energy market, which is on slide five, sales increased over 100% year-over-year and more than 60% sequentially and reached $6.2 million, which is now much closer to the historic average quarterly business level. The majority of the sales is still coming from the energy, especially from green energy and environmental applications. On the other hand side, on the security market side, sales of our flagship product, the HAPSITE, continued to be low, as expected. We soon launch a new HAPSITE product suite with improved performance and enhanced capabilities.
The first tests were very successful. We expect the first larger order from the U.S. Department of Defense by the end of this year. Sales-wise, looking ahead for the full year of 2021, the full 2021 will remain challenging. We are happy to see further successes with our energy and our environmental monitoring activities. Moving to the refrigeration, air conditioning, and automotive market on slide number six, where sales increased over 58% year-over-year and almost 70% compared to the first quarter of this year. Reached $26.4 million, a new quarterly record. The second quarter last year has been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting at the end of last year, we see a full recovery in the RAC market and a fast-growing business in the lithium-ion battery testing, as well as in the RAC after-sale service market.
While Asia was able to maintain the high business level, Americas and Europe did clearly grow. We expect a continuation of the positive business environment in the second half of the year based on the higher interest for new, fully automatic leak detection systems in the RAC manufacturers market, the growing demand for the lithium-ion battery for both automotive as well as mobile device market, as well as the market share gains with new innovative handheld battery-powered after-sale service products. For the first time, we expect to reach annual sales level of more than $100 million in 2021.
Let's go to the semi and vacuum coating market, which includes solar display optics and, of course, a lot of semiconductor applications on slide number seven, where sales increased over 18% year-over-year and 3.4% sequentially and reached $63.4 million, with Asia again contributing the biggest part of the sales growth. A breakdown into the two main applications shows the same picture as in Q1. A huge increase to the pure semiconductor customers, while sales to vacuum coating customer, primarily OLED display manufacturers and optical coating manufacturers, remain subdued. Equipment manufacturers as well as chip makers continue to invest in the latest state-of-the-art technologies for memory as well as logic chips. The China semi initiatives continues, but the U.S. trade and technology restrictions make doing business with those customers more cumbersome and time-consuming.
Looking ahead long-term, the semiconductor market will remain the most attractive growth opportunity for INFICON, despite the uncertainty of the technology war between the U.S. and China. New chip designs, new material, and manufacturing processes are asking for more accurate process control and monitoring. We continue to work very closely with OEMs and end users to develop new sensors, solutions, and methods to assure high-quality mass production of new chips. The current supply shortages and already announced government programs led to a record high announcement of new semi fab to be built over the next few years. We expect 2021 to be a good semiconductor year. Investments in OLED, flat panel, and optical coating technologies remain challenging.
Finally, we had a solid second quarter 2021 in a general vacuum market on slide number eight, with sales slightly over $30 million, which reflects a year-over-year increase of 30% against a weak second quarter 2020, but an 8% decrease against a strong first quarter of this year. After a strong March rebound at the beginning of the year, we experienced a more normal business pattern in the reporting quarter. As you know, we sell analysis, measurement, and control products for many different industrial applications through private label partners, primarily vacuum pump manufacturers, and via direct sales channels to the industrial OEMs and distributors. With 10,000 of smaller and mid-sized customers, it is hard to see a certain trend in the market. Looking ahead globally for the full year, we expect to have a very successful 2021.
Let me close my part of the presentation with an outlook for this year on slide number nine. Despite the uncertainty of the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic and the China-U.S. issues, we are confident to reach new annual records. The semiconductor market will remain very dynamic and will keep us busy for the near future. The vacuum coating applications are not at record levels. The market itself is solid. The e-car trend will continue, the need for safe energy supply systems offers plenty of growth potential. The same is true for green energy initiatives. Last but not least, we have already launched and will continue to launch more new products in 2021 that will help us to grow our business beyond this year. With that, I'd like to turn over to Matthias Tröndle, who will give you more details about our financial performance. Matthias, please.
Thank you, Lukas, and good morning, everyone. I will start my presentation with the Q2 financial performance, comment the half year results, and close with the guidance for the full fiscal year 2021. As always, let me begin with the revenue segmentation on slide 11. Revenues for the second quarter of 2021 came out at $126.3 million compared to $96.2 million in our second quarter of last year. This represents an increase of 31.3%. Taking into account the positive currency impact, which is driven by the weakening U.S. dollar of 4.8% and a small contribution through acquisitions, we achieved an organic growth of 26.3%. Mr. Winkler has already gone into the details of the developments in the different end markets.
We can highlight that similar to the first quarter, sales in all markets did well, all double-digits, and the security and energy market even more than doubled compared to Q2 previous year. Compared to Q1, all markets except the general vacuum market did grow. With that, the second quarter 2021 was after Q1, another new sales record quarter. Let's take a look to the regional sales performance. Europe reached 26%, North America 27%, and Asia-Pacific ended with 45% of total second quarter sales. Compared to Q2 previous year, we had the highest growth in North America with 36%, followed by Asia with 32%. Both regions, North America and Asia, showed a strong growth in semi and vacuum coating, as well as in the refrigeration, air conditioning, and automotive market. Europe showed also an increase in sales of 25%, mainly driven by two markets.
One is the general vacuum market. Also here we had a strong increase in refrigeration, air conditioning and automotive. Let's go to slide 13. The gross margin for second quarter of 2021 reached 48.3% compared to 47.8% in the same quarter of last year. The margin percentage did slightly increase by 50 basis points. Higher volumes, a good capacity utilization in the market, and product mix could compensate rising material costs, which are partially due to shortages and broker utilization, higher transportation costs and custom costs. What happened on the cost side? We spent $12.6 million on R&D in Q2, an increase of 34%. As a percent of sales, expenses increased slightly to 10% in the second quarter from 9.8% in previous year. Additional headcounts, higher R&D material costs, negative foreign currency impacts, plus higher external costs related to our development efforts did drive this increase.
In SG&A, the expense level showed a $5 million increase. Unfavorable foreign currency impact, which account for about a quarter of that increase, new headcounts and performance related costs in form of commissions and sales performance bonuses did drive this increase. The operating profit as a result for the second quarter was at $22.8 million, or 18.1% of sales, after $16 million or 16.6% in Q2 of last year. This corresponds to an increase of about 43%. The income tax expense for the second quarter was $4.9 million, which represents an average tax rate of 21.8%. The increase is driven by the profit and tax rate mix in our various international entities. The net profit therefore reached $17.6 million or 13.9%. This compares to $12.9 million or 13.4% in the prior year, a 36% increase in absolute numbers. Consequently, we see a similar development in earnings per share.
They went up by 37% and stand at $7.20 in Q2. Let's move on to the balance sheet highlights. Our net cash reached $26.8 million, which is $14 million lower than end of last year, but also $14 million higher than end of Q2 in last year. The operating cash flow, which you can see on the bottom right of this slide, reached a new record level of $29.9 million, representing about 24% of revenue. This is substantially higher than last year and improved by close to $19 million. The inventory turns improved further and reached 3.0 turns. The working capital closed at $142.7 million, clearly higher than end of last year.
The majority of that increase is contributed to a $10 million increase in accounts receivables, which is due to the record high sales in the first two quarters, and about $9 million increase is due to higher inventory levels. The DSO, days sales outstanding ratio, is slightly higher and reached 52.1 days. The balance sheet shows a solid structure and has a 62% equity ratio and no long-term debt. Those were my comments on the balance sheet in Q2. Now I wanted to give some comments regarding the half year performance. The net sales for the first six months of 2021 reached $249 million compared to $188.8 million in the same period of last year. This represents a $60.2 million increase or 31.9%.
This includes a positive impact of $9.5 million or 5 percentage points from changes in currency rates, as well as a slight positive impact from acquisition, the organic growth is 26.8%. In the first half of 2021, sales to all end markets increased. semi and vacuum coating and refrigeration and air conditioning recorded the most significant gains. From a regional point of view, the majority of sales did go to Asia, where we reached $114 million of sales and approximately 46% of worldwide sales. This represents a 46% increase compared to last year first half. This is mainly driven by a high increase in sales to the semi and vacuum coating market, and a sharp increase of 68% in refrigeration and automotive. Second largest region is Europe, where we had a 21% growth. In North America, we had a 22% increase.
We reached operating income in the first half of $47.4 million, or 19%, after $30 million, or 15.9% last year. This is an increase of 310 basis points, or 58%. Higher sales, a stronger gross margin percentage, partially compensated by higher operating expense levels, did drive this higher result. Our balance sheet continues to show a solid structure, no long-term borrowings, and approximately 62% equity ratio. As mentioned earlier, the complete half year report with more details is now available in our investor section of the INFICON website. Finally, I conclude with the outlook. Mr. Winkler has already gone into the details of the end markets and our assessment. The business situation in all end markets looks quite positive.
The current economic situation remains nevertheless somewhat fragile. INFICON assesses the outlook for the current year optimistic. Therefore, we have increased again our guidance for the full year. We expect sales of around $480 million-$500 million, with an operating income margin of 18%-20%. The last slide shows our corporate calendar and the upcoming dates. With that, I would like to close the presentation. We are now ready to take your questions.
Thank you, Matthias. Thank you, Lukas. We have a queue of questions. We will take them in a top-down order. I just ask Jörn to switch on his microphone and camera if he wants to do so and ask your question. Go ahead, please, Jörn.
Thanks, Bernhard, good morning to everybody. Thanks for taking my questions. The first, I would be pleased on the gross profit margin. Can you tell us the path where you see the recovery towards 50%? What are the key things here? What do you think about current pricing power, and by when do we expect to achieve the 50% again? The second question would be, please, a little bit independent on the semi cycle or the macro cycle. You have a couple of new product initiatives.
Can you tell us what you expect here, what the contribution will be in terms of revenues for the second half 2021 and then also for 2022? Would be a ballpark of around $10 million reasonable for 2022? The third question is, just in general, what are you hearing from your sales teams, from your customers when you look into the first half 2022? Are there any signs for an acceleration in semi or a slowdown in China? This would be also interesting. Many thanks.
Thank you, Jörn. Let me go through the same sequence. Starting with the first question regarding the gross profit development. What are the paths back to a, let's say, 50% kind of a threshold? I think there are three things that need to be explained why we are not there yet. First of all, there is a product mix that currently tends toward more the products with a below the average gross profit margin on especially the OEM side. OEM in the equipment manufacturer side, where we usually have a below average gross profit margin, and then usually with a time lag of a couple of months, we see then the semiconductor end users starting to invest even more again, and then selling more of our solutions, which usually carry a higher gross profit margin.
Second element is clearly that our limitation of actually shipping more, so we could not fully use our volume leverage based on some internal capacity limitations, but also based on some supply side limitations. That also leads to the explanation that we currently pay a higher price for a lot of the electronic components. Just to keep our at least current shipment rate stable, we have to pay more for our electronic components, buying them on the gray and black market. Last but not least, with a record backlog and with limited capacity, we sometimes have to use expedited shipments, which does cost more as well compared with normal shipments, which lowers our gross profit margin at the same pace. Then maybe the last element back to maybe closer to 50%, is also similar to the first one on the product mix side.
The more we sell to the end users, we usually sell more software products, and we expect to grow our software product in line with the capacity expansion on the semiconductor end user side. That should help us getting back to the 50% level as well. It's a mixture of product mix limitations on supply side, but also higher cost on the freight side. On second question, new products.
What can you expect from the sales contribution point of view? It will be relatively low, as normal with new products. They need a certain time until they kick really in, especially if they are brand-new products and not replacement product. If you include the replacement products, which the biggest one will be the new HAPSITE family, we will clearly succeed your number of $20 million in 2022. If you exclude the replacement products, we might get close to the $20 million with all the new products, but it's not guaranteed yet. The last question, what do our sales guys say around the world? They are quite positive in China, by the way, not just for 2021, but also going into 2022. Not just in semi.
China is really booming in all levels. They are quite optimistic beyond 2021, and all the others are very optimistic regarding the semiconductor market. What they also share is the need for alternative energies around the world. Of course, which is a hype right now, is really the lithium-ion battery market for both, for autonomous or e-car driving, as well as mobile devices. Which I think it's more obvious in the market that lithium-ion batteries need to be checked for perfect leak tightness before they get built into those wearables and e-cars in order to be safe and not catching a fire because of a unexpected leak. Overall, looking beyond 2021, for the time being, we are quite optimistic.
Thanks a lot, Lukas. Maybe just one follow-up on the gross profit margin, please. By when do you expect to approach the 50% again? If I may ask.
I believe it will not be in 2021. We have to wait until 2022.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Jörn. You may now take your hand down, and we have a next question from Michael Foeth. Can you switch on your microphone and camera, Michael?
Sure.
You may go ahead with your question.
There you go. Hello, everyone, and congratulations on the results. My first question is along the same line as Jörn's, actually, regarding the guidance. Actually, what needs to happen for you to reach the 20% EBIT margin guidance? I assume that operating expenses are unlikely to go down in the second half, and you just said that gross margin is unlikely to reach 50% this year. What needs to happen for you to reach the 20% EBIT margin? That's the first question. Second question is, can you give us an idea, roughly, how much automotive is now of the RAC and auto business and how much that is growing? I assume it's mostly battery-driven. The final question is if you could give a more detailed update on your food packaging business development, please.
Okay. Thank you, Michael. On the guidance side, what needs to happen to reach 20%. Under the current circumstances, assuming that the shortage on the supply side is not going to be eliminated soon, as well as additional or tight situation on the freight and distribution side, what really would help is even higher volume. In order to reach those higher volumes, that's what we currently spend a lot of money on, is really adding capacity. We are now limiting ourselves in terms of what we are able to ship because we are running at full capacity, so we are expanding capacity. We expect the next smaller step will happen in September, where we should have another round of investments being ready to produce, especially on the calibration side. That certainly will help.
You will see on one hand side, a larger capacity, but on the other hand side, also increase the CapEx spending to make it happen. That really helps. Secondly, the product mix, as I mentioned at the beginning, a shift towards a little bit more end user-driven business will clearly help. That's what we expect coming after the first big wave on the equipment manufacturer side with a delay of three-nine months. The product mix together with some better product and volume will help us to get closer to 20%. On the automotive side, you're absolutely right. The majority now goes to the e-car and battery testing market.
I do not have the perfect number in my mind, but I believe if you analyze what we have reached so far, we should be back at the $25 million-$30 million range in the automotive business out of this RAC. About one third probably at the end of the day will go to the automotive market. The majority of the business is coming from battery testing. Of course, nobody invests in a new diesel engine-driven cars. The last question on the growth on the food packaging side, how is business doing? It's doing much better than in 2020. We will probably, I don't know exactly, but not double, but probably 50%-60% bigger than in 2020. It's still single digit. It's still too small to make a big story out of it, but it's growing very nicely.
Now we've got a lot of business from the coffee market side, from an application point of view, and we expand now to the U.S. from a geographical point of view. Finally, we get some business even in the U.S. Also, we are kind of limited in doing demonstrations and seeing customers. In the meantime, we have been able to at least attract those coffee makers, even in the U.S., to use our product.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
You are very welcome.
Thank you, Michael, for your question. You may now also take your hand down. The next question comes from Serge Rotzer. Serge, go ahead, please.
Yes. Good morning, everybody. I hope you can hear me.
Yeah
I can't see me, but okay, let's start. You have increased your outlook by about $20 million. Can you help me? What has driven this increase in outlook? Is it due to the DoD orders in security from the U.S., or is it semi driven, or it's RSE driven? What is your personal feeling where it comes from, the additional $20 million?
Very simple. It's just semi and RSE. No DoD at all. We expect the shipments to the DoD, expect the order this year, but not shipments this year.
Okay.
It's driven by the improved order situation on the semiconductor side as well as on the RSE and automotive side.
Okay, got it. No revenue recognition from security. When I compare this with the semi peers in Q2, I know that you don't comment your peers, but VAT was up by more than 30%, Comet probably close to 50%, and you have 18%. When I compare with the Swiss guys, you look a little bit weak. Can you explain where are you in the total market? Or what will drive acceleration again? Or why it has been a little bit weak compared to your peers or some of your peers?
There are two things that I like to say here. First of all, we have two groups of main customers, and these also are the equipment manufacturers and the end users. We focus more on both sides. We have about a 50/50 mix, whereas our peers have more equipment manufacturer contribution. Second remark is coming from the fact that we do not disclose pure semiconductor figures. It's semiconductor and display, and display and vacuum coating is not that great. Last but not least, we do not disclose order intake numbers. If we would have the capacity, we would have been able to ship more. At least that I can disclose. We are now adding capacity in order to catch up. At the end of the cycle, we will see if it was a good approach or not. We are quite optimistic that we will catch up pretty soon.
Okay, that sounds good and it's very helpful. Thanks. With that, you have touched also the discussion about the launch of a new product. As a former product manager, I always experienced that demand is declining ahead of launching new products. Do you fear that you see now orders declining in the older existing products before you have launched the new product, so that we get a kind of a dip, a short-term dip?
I would say the majority of the new products, I would clearly say no, because those are made for hot markets like semiconductor markets. I can say there is at least a certain truth to that in the security market where we are going to launch a new website, and especially the U.S. Department of Defense knows that because they test those new products. Therefore, they might withhold some of the next orders until we have released the new website product. That's the only exception. In all other applications, like semiconductor products for Mass Spectrometers or Leak Detectors, as well as pressure measurement products, the demand is so high that we do not see any decline in, let's say, the older versions versus the newer versions.
Okay, got it. That's very good. Probably the last one from Matthias. I don't know, I missed something, but short-term financial liabilities increased from about CHF 20 million to close to CHF 50 million. Can you explain me what happened here or where do you use this cash? You basically have cash in your pockets now.
That's a good observation. It's correct. It's increasing by $50 million. There are besides some general increases in liabilities, provisions, and accruals. There is one thing that we have, which basically a short-term liability or short-term borrowing, which we typically need to finance, to do a kind of temporary financing of our dividends. That's the main reason why we see this $50 million increase or big portion of that is due to the increase in short-term borrowing. Which is planned to be paid back within one year, of course, therefore it's short-term.
Yes, you are right. If you take a look to the gross cash, it's a lot with nearly $75 million. I can tell you as a CFO, you always have. The problem, sometimes a problem, or you have associated cost with transferring these cash balances from other countries to Switzerland. Therefore, we use every now and then these measures or these tools.
Okay. It's about the whole story that you can't repatriate cash from your foreign entities.
You can, but it has a certain price, right? Therefore, we try to optimize and do the best we can do.
In that case, you are a lucky guy and don't pay any negative interest somewhere as you have spread it all over the world. Is this then a positive effect?
That's absolutely correct. It's really spread all over the world, and it's never at the right place. That's also what I learned. The advantage is really it's spread, and we basically face nowhere the situation where we have negative interest rates.
Okay, got it. Thank you so much, and [Non-English content].
Thank you.
Thank you for your question, Serge. Who would like to ask a follow-up question now? I don't see any hands up. Any further questions from the audience? Yes. Marta Bruska has another question. Go ahead, Marta, please.
Hey, good morning. It's Marta Bruska from Berenberg here. Congratulations on the very nice Q2. I was just curious if you could let us know a little bit of what's coming in terms of those new product launches with the second half of the year. If you can comment a little bit about collaboration with ASML, with the EUV tools, they are very, very confident for this business. Whether there are any changes on your side with regard to that, how is it developing? Thank you.
Thank you, Marta. I think the best way to learn a lot about the new products will happen, if you visit or if you come to Balzers on our technology day. I think it's somewhere end of November, because then you can actually see what we talk about. Let me maybe just give you two or three indications. There are many new products in line with harsher applications in the semiconductor area. We talk about the harsh sensor that could survive CVD and etch processing for Mass Spectrometers products. We talk about new optical-based measurement principles, again, to be used in harsher applications to get some vacuum quality indicators, which are brand new. We talk about a new Leak Detector coming soon, especially for large vacuum tools, for semiconductors as well as display manufacturers.
We have obviously mentioned the HAPSITE, which is a complete brand-new family with a different concept of how accessories can be used. Last but not least, we also offer a certain type of services to reduce particles, again, in the semiconductor area. Of course, the latest baby, which is already now on the market, just launched, is this dedicated Leak Detector for lithium-ion battery testing that has been now officially launched about two months ago. Those are products that we have. I maybe should also mention a new line of automotive handheld Leak Detectors that we launched at the beginning of the year, especially dedicated for service providers in the car industry. This is just a couple of examples, but again, please come and see those products at the end of November when we have the technology day here.
On the ASML side, there's nothing new to be reported. We are fully integrated in their product roadmap. We work on the next generation, and I believe now we are not the bottleneck. I think the bottleneck is now more on the ASML side. Therefore, we just wait for their next step in order to launch the next generation of a high-performance EUV tool for the next generation of chips. It's now, I think, almost clear for everybody that even in the memory industry, if you really want to go to the high-end version of the next generation memory chips, you have to use the EUV tool, which opens up a new market for us as well. We are fully integrated and fully linked to the ASML roadmap, and we're happy that they see positive, so that's positive for us as well.
Thank you very much. May I have two quick follow-ups?
Sure.
I would like to ask about your CapEx guidance for this year, please, if you could give us some indication. Whether you have the impression that you're gaining more market share this year than the previous year. What I'm just trying to assess is My feeling would have been that you probably could have passed a bit more of the extra cost to the customers if you wanted to. I'm just wondering whether you are gaining a little bit more market share this year than you would have normally. What's your feeling on that side, please?
On the CapEx side, it's certainly more than we have originally planned for. I don't have the pure numbers in my head. I might have to refer to Matthias to give us a little impact, but I think it will be more than CHF 20 million, but I don't have the exact number.
Yeah. Good guess. Last year we had $14 million. To give you a feeling, last year, $14 million, and so far in the first half we had $13 million. We can expect that this will be a number above $20 million for 2021.
The majority of the CapEx really goes to capacity expansion. We are not building a new building, but we are reusing some of the office space to be used as manufacturing space, which requires some investments as well. On the market share gains, I think what I would like to refer to is we get more design wins than last year. If you measure market share by the number of design wins, then I would say yes, we gain market share, but that will not turn immediately into revenue because the design win is at the beginning of a new design, so the revenue will come over the next few of years.
Can we transfer some of the additional costs to the customers? Eventually, we could, but that would put our nice trend in gaining design win market shares at risk. Currently, especially for large OEMs, we stick to our original net pricing policy. Only for new applications we go to a higher price level. Not for the existing design wins with existing products that we have in the market.
It's very clear and sensible. Thank you very much, and I'm absolutely looking forward to the technology there. I would for sure be there. Already doubly vaccinated, so looking forward. Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you, Marta. I see that Serge has another question.
Yes, that's true. Good morning again. Only one thing. Can you help me a little bit to understand the seasonality in the second half? On the one hand, comparable will become much stronger in Q4. You also mentioned that you had capacity constraints, that you will increase capacity now, but this is already ready for Q3. It's a little bit difficult to get a good feeling, what will happen. Also from the past, we know that you had project-related sales, which has been back and loaded. Can you help me to mix this out, of capacity constraints, project-related, and base effects?
Let me try to help you. On the seasonality.
That's so kind.
Market-wise, the only market where we see a certain seasonality is in our after-sales service business for refrigeration and air condition market, which has usually the peak in Q2. That's from the market point of view. It's a relatively small business line, so you usually do not see that. What is more important, and it's now became even more important currently, is the capacity, which is also tightly linked to the number of working days. Traditionally, Q2 and Q3 have a lower number of working days because of holidays in Europe and also vacation time during the summertime. Therefore, the number of average available working days is usually lower in Q2 and Q3. Together with our capacity constraints, that's currently the limiting factor.
Having said that, I hope that we don't see any seasonality this year because we have extra measures in place to even utilize weekends and have planned for extra shifts and pay some incentives so that people actually work at least on Saturday, not always on Sunday, just to utilize our calibration capacity at its best. Therefore, I don't think that we will see significant seasonality in 2021 compared to the usual seasonal pattern. Just because we have extra measures in place, that's also one of the reason why our gross profit margin cannot probably reach 50% this year, because we have to pay more just to use our capacity better. As I mentioned before, as of September, we should get the next step in additional capacity, and then hopefully Q4 will be as traditionally our strongest quarter again, once the capacity is in place.
Any backend orders?
There's always-
Substantial [back handle].
As usually, there's always some extra efforts that we put in place by the end of the year just to make sure that the customer gets what they want. As I mentioned, we have now a record backlog. I think customer would take any shipments that we are ready to ship. So far, I think the focus is now on really make it happen and spend the money to invest in the right capacity and prepare our staff to do even extra shifts just to make sure that customers don't need to wait too long to get our products.
Okay. Got it. At the end, the capacity comes to the stream for Q4, not for Q3, when it comes in end of September.
That's correct. That's why in Q4, we should have more capacity than in Q3. That's why I expect the best quarter will be Q4.
Okay. Got it. Many thanks. Very helpful.
Thanks again, Serge, for your question. Any further questions from the audience, please? If there are no further questions, then I would like to thank you for all the questions that you had and for your interest in INFICON. We had, at the height, some 47 participants in this web conference. Thank you for your attendance. With that, I would like to hand over to Lukas for his closing remark.
Thank you, Bernhard. I just like to thank you as well. Always very interesting discussions. Thank you for your patience. I really looking forward to see you face-to-face, hopefully at our technology day in November. Before then, on October 21st, we will release our Q3 figures. I all wish you, if you haven't had your vacation time, then I wish you a nice vacation time. If you're already back to work, then I wish you a nice weather for the remaining time of the summer. Thank you. See you soon. Bye-bye.