Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. With me is Martin Regnet, our head of communications and investor relations. We cordially welcome you to our half year result presentation, and we are glad that we have so many participants. I hand now over to Martin Regnet for the introduction.
Thank you very much, Heinz. I would like to give you a brief overview on how the group is developing in the H1 year. First of all, I would like to start with giving you an overview on the internal logistics solutions market, as well as the material handling equipment manufacturing market. We have a very promising development here with an estimated CAGR of 4%-7% for the next three years ahead. This is our estimation. We estimate the material handling equipment market overall as CHF 200 billion, roughly. For the internal logistics solutions, which are part of this huge market, we estimate a revenue market volume of CHF 6-8 billion worldwide.
We estimate across all our product groups that we are in a range of 8%-11% of market share worldwide. Interroll has developed in the last 18 months. We have a little bit more employees than in the previous year with 2,635 employees. Meanwhile, our latest addition is the Center of Excellence in Linz, where we have our activities on software and electronics bundle, and we have 16 plants worldwide. We're still headquartered in Switzerland and continue to have around 28,000 customers. When we talk about customers, we talk about system integrators, 90% and 10% are OEMs, and those are our partners in the delivery to the end users. Now when we go into the growth markets, we had some interesting developments in the H1 of the year.
We saw, for example, that food and beverage is quite a sophisticated and a robust market, which has more decentralized supply chains, more regional integration. It's a very robust market that has been affected by a development in the supply chain, a little bit less than other markets. Nonetheless, we also see that the Ukraine crisis here has a bit of an effect in this industry. Nonetheless, the demand for material handling solution is developing well in this industry, and I introduce you later our latest technologies that we introduced specifically for this industry. Our outlook is positive on food and beverage. When we talk about airports, we see this is a bit of a slow recovery after the pandemic had some effects on this industry.
Nonetheless, our Modular Conveyor Platform, in particular our Belt Curves, continue to be in demand in airport projects when we talk about baggage handling, baggage scanning, Interroll is well-positioned. The warehousing and distribution as well as the e-commerce is now a bit of the industry that has some impact on our H1 year figures. We saw that a heterogeneous development here, we saw that larger e-commerce projects did not materialize in the same way as in the same period of the last year. Nonetheless, we also see positive momentum for third-party logistics projects, and they are getting stronger. We also see that the retail sector, I come to that later, is kind of also catching up in some areas after the COVID slow down a little bit.
We have a positive continued outlook on this particular field, but we see that the order intake in that particular area was weaker in the H1 year of 2022. The pipeline, however, remains good. We didn't have any substantial cancellation so far. We see that the pipeline has a good development. What we see, and Heinz Hössli will elaborate on that a little bit further, is that we have postponements on the end user side, on the customer side for a number of reasons, but not substantial cancellation so far. When we go to the tire and automotive industry, it's still robust. The automotive industry overall is a bit in a slower mode. However, mainly, we are active in the tire industry here, and this continues to be an interesting field.
When we look at courier express and parcel here, we see a continued positive momentum. We also see that for the future outlook. We have positive estimations in that particular industry. Supermarket solutions remained robust. In the H1 of the year, and as mentioned before, the retail sector proves to be very robust and with interesting new developments when we talk, for example, about micro hubs, when we talk about new structures in the supply chain, in the store concepts that those retailers have. That provides also additional and new opportunities. Industrial manufacturing is doing well. It's stable, it's robust.
Nonetheless, we also have to say at this point that our new solutions, such as the SPM and the MPP, are in a somewhat slower mode than we initially anticipated the market entry. That doesn't really worry us because we are very convinced about the product and we saw that material handling in the past took a while, usually, when we came up with new innovations. We still have a positive outlook long-term on this one. Nonetheless, we also see that we need to be patient here and there and look at the long-term development. When we talk about our platform strategy, we continue to pursue that modular, scalable, flexible solutions. We have our four product groups, Rollers, Drives & Controls, Conveyors & Sorters, as well as Pallet Handling.
Our ultimate target is to create maximum customer value by offering faster installation, maintenance, shorter delivery times, and highest product quality. Most of that we fulfilled also in 2022 in the H1 year. However, we are still not at the full delivery times that we saw pre-pandemic in our performance. We are doing much better partially than in the year 2021, which was difficult with a lot of supply chain impact. We're definitely doing better. However, we also need to see how the Ukraine conflict and how the Chinese lockdowns are continuing to impact global supply chains. We track that with a task force. We have a very capable task force that is monitoring issues and initiates quick reactions to mitigate any supply chain risks. So far, this is having a positive effect.
Nonetheless, we remain cautious for the remainder of the year. When we talk about the highlights, what we had in H1 2022, we saw that our innovation pipeline was good. We introduced quite a number of new solutions in the last 12-18 months. We have our Smart Pallet Mover in the market. We have our sorter platform completed, which is very important when we talk about customers of different industries, when we talk about offering different performance levels in the sortation process. Our Food Conveyor Platform was completed. I will show you more details soon. We extended our controls family. That means we are capable of offering our own sorter control solutions, whereas in previous years, we had to acquire that from third parties.
Our new Center of Excellence in Linz will play a key role in the software and electronics development. It already is, and we are very confident to upgrade our controls and that this will bring also new opportunities for us. We plan some extensions in Germany in 2023. We are currently expanding the Baar site in order to upgrade our Center of Excellence for food where we have the new Food Conveyor Platform. This is currently ongoing according to schedule, and we are very much looking forward to that. The plant digitalization is ongoing. This is something we generally do in the good times, in the bad times. We always look for productivity opportunities. Here we also identified further opportunities and are currently in the rollout of using these advantages.
We also use more automation in our plants, be it cobots, be it AGVs. There's more automated solutions within our production. Americas. Here the e-commerce is temporarily slower. I mentioned it in the beginning. This is a bit of a different trend than we saw in the 2021 financial year. Nonetheless, as said, our pipeline is good. It is more about installation, about confirmation, about finding the right time to really roll out the projects rather than canceling projects. We upgraded our local assembly in Brazil and see some good productivity progress here as well. In Mexico, we have a new sales team in place with a lot of expertise in the automotive industry, in the machine building industry in particular. We are also confident to see some development over there.
Asia Pacific, the Chinese factory is complete now. We are currently in the full ramp up phase. This is completed successfully and on track, more or less despite some pandemic effects. We could do a very good project management and this is going very well. We'll hear more about that in Q3. We have the focus markets, Vietnam and Philippines, which continue to provide opportunities as well as Australia and New Zealand. When we talk about the service business, we had a new service organization that we rolled out last year already, and we see the good positive results from that. There is a number of attractive retrofit opportunities that we see our service can play a vital role. This is also a positive development.
In general, we think retrofit opportunities will increase over the next year, so our service is preparing for that. When we talk about the Food Conveyor Platform, we have three elements of that. We see that we have a poultry processing focus with the Ultra Hygienic Transfer. This is a particularly interesting solution because with that we can improve shelf life, we can decrease the bacterial contamination. Due to its design, it's much more suitable to the wash down process in food processing that you see typically in meat processing, for example. This also brings opportunities for the manufacturer to have a lower bacterial contamination, which in turn will lead to an improved shelf life along the rest of the supply chain.
We think this is besides just the economic factor, this is also vital contribution to an industry to societies that are somewhat endangered by food safety, but also by food supply. We think this is a positive contribution to avoid food waste in the future, and we think this will also be an increased focus of regulators in the future. The Special Hygienic Conveyor is something that is being used for packed food. We have a bit of a broader range of usage. We can imagine this in distribution centers. We can imagine this as a goods receiving area in supermarket areas, for example. This is an interesting product that is also capable to be hygienic at the highest standards, and this also brings additional opportunities for the food distribution.
In the future, we already work on the Ultra Hygienic Conveyor. This is a conveyor that we can use for non-packed foods. We see this also very suitable for the wash down process, and we will inform you about this in more detail in 2023. As you can see, this is a very thorough platform that we are developing, and this also means that our footprint in the food industry is planned to be increased over the next year. We think it's a promising industry for material handling and Interroll continues to be in a leading role here. The Global Lifetime Service next steps. Currently we already achieved spare parts and refurbishment, spare parts logistics and distribution, where we made significant steps.
Meanwhile, we enlarged our service team to more than 100 Interroll employees, but we also use external partners, partially from our Interroll partner network. This is also increasing in terms of exposure. We have currently about 10% of our turnover is attributed to service. In the longer term future, we are striving to generate up to 20% of our turnover with Global Lifetime Service. In future, we also see opportunities to have a scale-up in installation activities, service level agreements, as well as preventive maintenance. To be very precise, we always need to be very sensible in how we deal with this with our system integrators. They're our main stakeholder. They're our main customer.
We offer this in a way to really convince them this is a value add for their own activities, and Interroll is not in direct competition with its own customers for the end user. That being said, is something that we are really doing very carefully. We also see opportunities in consulting, training and retrofit. Our academy already started to roll out an increased number of customer trainings. This is going well. Retrofit, as mentioned before, is one of our main focuses, what we can really increase in future using our Global Lifetime Service organization. Corporate responsibility and also the reporting on it is in the focus over the next months.
We plan to have a full ESG report on the financial year 2022 ready by March 2023. We are focusing on using the GRI standards, Global Reporting Initiative, as a standard that we are going to use. You can expect more transparency and an increased detail on our activities, on our sustainability performance. Certainly the first report will also be a baseline for us. From there, we can manage to improve over time in the coming years. At this point, I would like to hand over to Heinz Hössli again, who will introduce you to the financial highlights.
Thank you, Martin. I will continue with the financial highlights. We had a good start into the financial year 2022, and we assumed a further recovery trend in the markets and in an increasingly improved availability of components. However, with the conflict in Ukraine and the various COVID-19 lockdowns in China, the situation in the supply chain has deteriorated once again. We also noted significantly more project postponements by customers and end users in the Q2 of 2022. This is due to their compromised supply chains, postponements in installation, and short-term adjustments in their investment activities. The order intake fell significantly by 27.8% compared to the extraordinary H1 year, 2021. The decrease in local currency is 24.8%. All regions show a decrease in order intake.
On the other hand, sales increased by 14.3%, and in local currency, even 18.5%. The picture in the region is diverse. While EMEA and America show an increase in sales, Asia-Pacific suffered a decrease. The EBIT decreased by 9.2% to CHF 40.8 million compared to CHF 45.0 million a year ago. This result mainly from the time lag to get material price increases into the market and the backlog sold at all price levels. The operating cash flow is CHF 1.2 million compared to CHF 25.3 million a year ago, as the inventory level further increased. On this slide, you see the details on the order intake. It shows a significant decrease to CHF 304.4 million compared to the absolute record prior year period.
Our product group Rollers declined by 23.9% and Drives by 11.8%. The biggest decrease is in the product group Conveyors & Sorters due to the absence of major projects compared with the prior year period. To a lower extent, this is also the case in the product group Pallet Handling, where the order intake decreased by 22.4%. The book-to-bill ratio is 0.98 compared to 1.55 a year ago. Despite the book-to-bill rate below one, we still have a big order backlog from last year. The highlight of the H1 year are the sales. All product groups have been growing. Sales of the products business, such as the product group Rollers and the product group Drives, did well. Even better did the project business Pallet Handling.
Conveyors & Sorters have the lowest growth rate, but the highest order backlog as those projects have much longer lead times. Looking at the sales development by region, it shows a diverse picture. Americas, with a growth of 36.4%, again outperformed. EMEA also shows a solid growth of 12.3%, but the sales in Asia-Pacific declined by 23.0%. Asia-Pacific struggled already in the H2 of 2021 with project orders, and it did not improve in the H1 of 2022. In addition, the various lockdowns in China further negatively impacted the sales in the region. As a result of the sales development, the shares of the three regions changed considerably compared to last year.
EMEA lost 2 percentage points and now represents 58%, followed by Americas with 33%, gaining 6 percentage points, and Asia-Pacific with 9%, losing 4 percentage points. The long-term target ratio of Interroll remains unchanged, with 50% of sales from EMEA and 50% from Americas and Asia-Pacific. Now we come to the EBIT. You can see the EBIT decreased by 9.2% to CHF 40.8 million. This is mainly due to material price increases and supply chain issues. On the positive side is the high cost discipline we still have in place. In percent or in margin, we decreased from 20.7% to 16.9%. On the EBITDA level and on the EBIT, we decreased the margin from 16.5% to 13.1%.
The depreciation amortization is almost the same level like a year ago. Coming to the result. The result decreased by 0.9 percentage points, or 9%, sorry, to CHF 33.1 million. We had a positive impact from currency exchange. We had a gain there, and we benefited from a lower tax rate. This results in a margin of 10.6% compared to last year's record level of 12.2%. Now coming to the operating cash flow. The operating cash flow decreased significantly to CHF 1.2 million, mainly due to much higher inventories. The growth in inventories relates to higher stock levels as well as much higher work in process, as the normalization of the supply chains did not happen and safety stock is required to keep delivery readiness on an acceptable level for our customers.
Nevertheless, reacting to the supply chain disruptions in a short-term move, and as soon as this comes into new equilibrium with sustainable supply chains, we return to the lean inventories principle we had in place before COVID. Our principle of cash is king still remains valid. Also, out of a position of strength and following the management's long-term view, all strategic investments into capacity expansion are going forward as planned. Nevertheless, the investment of CHF 12.4 million in the first six months of 2022 are considerably below the previous year investment of CHF 32.0 million. This led to a negative free cash flow of -CHF 7.2 million compared to last year, still a decrease. On this slide, you can see the long-term development of return on equity and return on net assets.
There is always a half year effect from seasonality visible in the H1 year. In addition to that effect, the steep increase in inventories drags down the RONA, and the lower profitability impacts the return on equity negatively. The chart reveals the strategic long-term perspective since the last major crisis in 2008, 2009. Interroll has driven forward its globalization and expansion into new markets, as well as the expansion of its technology platform, and massively strengthened its market position with a balanced mix of measures. We boost the productivity while always keeping an eye on costs. We have done our homework during the good times and aligned ourselves even more closely with our customers and their needs through the business model with the end user approach.
As soon as the supply chain issues will normalize, we also expect again an increase in these two KPIs. Due to the time horizon that is difficult to assess with regard to normalization of the situation, Interroll currently refrains from providing an outlook for the financial year 2022. Based on its strong market position, its innovative products, available capacities for growth, and the fast-growing end markets served, we see a lot of long-term potential. With this, I conclude my presentation. I would like to point out that, for the second time, we have published now the full digital half year report on our webpage, and we are always open for feedback how we can improve further.
Now we come to the Q&A, and, for the first time for our half year results, we do now a live Q&A. We are now open for questions. As mentioned already in the introduction, you could do this on the platform.
The first question comes from the line of Daniel Bättig with ZKB. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everybody. Could you help me, please, with the order backlog? Is that at the level of about half year sales, and does it improve with regard to old prices being in there?
To the first part, the backlog, what we have is still quite high, as you can see with the book-to-bill of 0.98, that we could not work it off as planned and as we anticipated because of the new occurred supply chain disruptions. We could not work it off. The sales would have been expected still higher. As a result, we have the backlog for the H2 of the year. We see now an improving situation in supply chain, slowly, but we see now again that it's slightly improving. There are still components which are very difficult to source or have very long lead times.
in general, we see on our product business that we could reduce our lead times to our customers because we have now better availability of the materials and also the stock level helps that we can now produce, and this is the first step that we go into a normalization. On the project business, this will take probably a little bit longer.
When it comes to this slowdown in orders received, especially in Conveyors & Sorters, is there still the chance that you will get orders now in August and September for delivery in the current year, or you think that opportunity is gone? Or is it just a postponement by a month or two because it's not that clear cut for your clients and their clients how to behave in the current market environment.
That's, it's difficult to answer the question. If it's about big sorters, clearly the window is closed for realizing an order intake and the sales still in this year. For smaller sorters, the window is still open. It's open still for some time, so there are opportunities. Important is really to see, and this is why we refrain from an outlook, we need to see how this develops. Now, this, in the Q2 we have seen many postponements, also in EMEA, which has been doing okay. In the first couple of months we had even a very good start, and we have to see how this develops, and this is why we cannot say where we are shooting for, and we refrain from an outlook.
I know it's difficult for you to assess what's really the reason behind those postponements due to the indirect business model, but what do you hear from your clients?
There are a number of project postponements due to the supply chain. If you have larger construction projects, for example, if you build a new distribution center and suddenly the supply chain of construction materials is impacted, this has an effect on the overall execution of the project. This is one reason, but we also see that a number of end users are changing their macroeconomic outlook temporarily, also due to high inflation, due to cost increases. They might be in a, let's say, tactical holdout position where they say, "Okay, let's wait until prices go down a little bit before we progress with the project in order to keep the cost in a better control." The indicator we are really looking at is are there cancellations? Are end users or system integrators stop talking about certain projects?
This, we don't see it as the case. Those are technically still in our pipeline, and that's why we think this might be temporary, but we cannot say for sure, so we cannot give a very detailed outlook or estimation. If you want to use the project pipeline as an indicator and the level of cancellations as an indicator, it gives a picture that is not that pessimistic.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from the line of Sebastian Groh with Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Hello, good morning. Thanks for taking my question.
Thanks.
I would like to start on a quick follow-up on the mentioned postponements and delays. Can you give us a rough idea what the impact has been on orders and revenues? If there's any possibility to re-provide a number. What I would also be interested in is clearly the sequential development. If you could, give us a bit more color around how quarter one compared to quarter two has trended in terms of demand. Eventually, if that's possible, also to give us an indication on July, maybe we can start there.
Thank you for your question. I would start with the separation Q1, Q2. I think we mentioned this in Q1, the demand side was still strong. We had a good start into 2022. The postponement of projects and also in the product business, a little bit of slowdown, which might be that some of the big customers also now reduce their inventories again. This came in the Q2 . It's difficult in July. We cannot say anything yet. We don't even have the figures yet. We see that the pipeline, as Martin said, the pipeline is strong. If we look at the pipeline, we would expect a good H2 year in order intake.
The experience from the Q2 where we have projects, bigger projects, which we said will be order intake in May, then it was June, now it's September, and we have various of these customers which just move, and they are not ready to make the final decision and to issue the PO. So this is why it is difficult at the moment to judge. The pipeline is good. We have many projects which are under discussion. What is positive is even though some projects moved in the timeline, which we have on order intake, but basically we had not suffered any cancellations from the orders we have on hand.
Okay, that's helpful. On the question related to the impact on the orders and revenue levels due to the performance, can you give us a number?
It's difficult to give you a number because it depends really on the H2 year. In the product business, now we go basically from month to month. We have a backlog, but it's not long. Also, delivery times have now come down. We need to see how the order intake is, and we have to go from month by month. On the project level, this I can tell you, what we have lost, a big part is also gone. Now we have still a very high backlog, but it's clear. Now, the last year was a record year. This was a total record year. The book-to-bill ratio of last year of 1.55 was unhealthy by definition.
We had much too high order intake to what we can produce, and we now still have orders from the H1 year in the pipeline to execute. These order backlog will be to the greatest extent be worked off this year in H2 year.
Okay. If I may move on to pricing. You decide prices in the H2 of 2021, also for the H1 of 2022. Are you planning any further price hikes? I'm asking that question in the wake of wage inflation, especially in Germany, of the substantial part of your also production footprint. Related to that, I would also be interested in your thoughts around potential gas rationing and how that might impact your operations in Germany.
Regarding the prices, we follow this monthly. We have also established our own index, where we see what kind of materials and commodities we buy in. We track these changes. We track also the outlook, where we see this goes. Steel has now changed, is now going back. Other components are still going up in the price. But what we see now from the last two months is that we have stabilized the price level, and we do not plan any further price increase if this stays as it is now. What you mentioned with the inflation, this will be then for next year, if the salaries will clearly go up in basically all regions, driven by the inflation. This will then be considered for a price increase, 2023. What we do regularly in January.
If something unexpected happens and the price would go up again, then we would also do another price increase, but only then.
Okay.
This is really the good news we see now, a plateau, no? We see that over our basket, it is stable.
Okay, that's good to hear. That's reassuring indeed. Finally around EBIT, I've noticed that you had a quite significant increase in the change in work in progress and capitalized R&D on the P&L. Can you give us a sense of to what extent really this was driven by higher capitalization of R&D?
Can you repeat it? There's a question which I acoustically did not get.
In the P&L.
Yeah.
You had the in this line item, which is called increase/decrease in work in progress and finished products and also own work or goods capitalized. There is also an element of R&D capitalization included. The question simply is to what extent that increased, because the number went up from about CHF 11 million in the H1 of 2021 to more than CHF 20 million in the H1 of 2022, to what extent this was driven by higher R&D capitalization?
Yeah. Higher R&D CapEx or capitalization of goods is basically zero. This is not even material amount. It goes into the rounding. The entire increase is really coming from inventories, and about half is from the increase in work in process, and the other half is about the increase on the stock level. It's pretty much 50/50.
Okay. Good to hear. Then finally, if I may, just very briefly, similar to the question I asked around the split between Q1 and Q2 on the order trend. For the EBIT, obviously you did point to the deterioration in supply chains in the Q2 . Would it be possible to get an idea at least how the EBIT margin might have looked in quarter one compared to the Q2 ?
It's difficult to answer. Normally, the Q2 always has the lower margin %, so the margin is lower on EBIT because we have more output, we have more turnover coming from the project business, which has a seasonality in. This year we see this a little bit different because we still have a backlog where we sold with old prices. We worked this off. We also have a backlog with new prices. This will have an increase in margin in the H2 year. At the same time, we still have a lot of projects with old prices, so it's a mix.
Yeah. My question was more referring to the H2 of 2022, the reported numbers. I just want to get a better understanding how significant the impact from the deterioration in supply chains might have been on the EBIT margin. I'm specifically asking for the Q1 2022 compared to the Q2 2022 margin, if that is possible.
I cannot answer this, like this, no. It's very difficult because it always depends on the mix. What we have seen last year was by far the best first six months, where we still benefited from low material prices we purchased very early in the COVID crisis. This first six months, we're clearly suffering on the margin side from materials we had to buy on a very high level. You can see this also in the P&L, how much we lose only on material. Now we have a material is 42.1% last year, and now in the first six months of 2022, the material is 49.0%. It is considerable amount which we lost on materials.
Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Hössli. I would like to invite also some other participants to ask questions.
The next question comes on the line of Stephanie Schultzeck from Mirabaud. Please go ahead. Yes, hello. Can I come back to these cancellations and also postponements? Just for clarification, these cancellations does not affect any, and also the postponements, does not affect any of your firm orders. Is that right? Is it this just more on discussions you have with your clients? Maybe can you share with us how much you increased prices and how much of your order backlog in terms of percentage is still with old prices and how much are already new prices. On the material cost, the percentage of sales is 49%. Should we assume the same for the H2 ? That's it for the moment.
Thank you very much. First, to the orders. Now, when we say about the cancellations, then it's clearly referring to what we have on our book. We have basically no cancellations from firm POs we got in the past. When we talk about postponements, then this is valid for both. Now, we have postponements where we cannot deliver our scope because our customer, the integrator, is not ready because the end user is not ready, as Martin elaborated. There we have some postponements from projects where we cannot deliver our scope on time. Then we have projects which are postponed in order intake. We have negotiations with the customers. We basically have done final negotiation. We wait for a PO, and the customer is just postponing issuing the PO month by month. This hopefully answers your first question.
Mm-hmm.
The second question is basically impossible to answer. Now, our order backlog is a big mix, and, as , we did many price increases in the last 12 months, and we cannot assess each order which price has been done. What we can say is that on the, on the products, on the Rollers and Drives, we now see an improvement that we have worked off a big part of the backlog and that we could reduce our delivery time to our customers now, and there we will soon be on new pricing level. When I say on new pricing level, this is the last price increase from this year is then included and will materialize. On the project, this will take time until we have worked them off. To your last question, this is related.
Now, when you say, is the 49% now the new standard, clearly not. This is not the standard, but we have to see that, on the project business, we also have more labor involved, a little bit less material. On the product business, we have more material and, less labor. This changes this mix now. What I can tell you is, my assumption is that this will come back down because we benefit from the mix in the H2 year, and we also benefit that we get the product business with new prices in.
Okay. Great. Thanks a lot. Maybe one additional, if I may, on the product. You were talking about retrofits. I mean, how much of your orders is coming from retrofits? Could you also give us an outlook, maybe a short one on this segment?
Well, in general, I would estimate the retrofit and new project ratio in the range of 40%-50% at the retrofit area, I guess, Heinz Hössli would confirm that figure or that range. We see that we have new drivers that are coming in that cause retrofits. Of course, performance is a topic, but we increasingly have carried out projects already but also have requests for more energy efficiency. For example, in France, we had recently a customer called Triumph. They are manufacturing lingerie and for this, they upgraded their conveyor lines with an energy-efficient solution from Interroll, which saves them about 48%-50% of energy in their daily operation for their conveyor lines.
That can make a substantial difference over the course of a year, when we talk about the electricity bill. It's not only the electricity bill, it's also the attitude. It has something to do that a number of customers are, for example, in a business that is sensitive to customers' expectations on their sustainability. We see an increased interest on energy-efficient solutions, and that would be a very interesting retrofit scenario, on which we are focusing on, to maximize these opportunities in the future.
What Martin just said, now this is the end user market. We also talk about retrofit when we talk about our GLS organization, our Global Lifetime Service. If you take this, then this is a very small portion. Now we say GLS is about 10%. The biggest part of it are sales, spare parts, and the retrofits. We call retrofits where we do something for a customer, where we refurbish an equipment. This is very small fraction.
Okay. Thanks a lot. The next question comes from the line of Serge Rotzer from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, everybody. I have several questions. I will ask one by one. The first one is traditionally in the H2 you have lower volume, lower sales compared to the first six months. Should we expect this also to come through for this year, or do you expect sales volume to be at least on the volume we have seen in the first six months, and what's the reason for that you can produce more? Is it then the supply bottlenecks, which is now gone or the capacity you have? Yeah, please, first on that.
Yeah. Thank you for the question, and thank you. Let us go one by one.
Sure.
The answer is very short. No, the sales in reality, the sales in the H2 year have always been higher than in the first six months. This comes from the project business, especially sorters and conveyors are delivered and installed in the H2 year for Black Friday sales in Europe and Americas. We expect also for this year that the sales number for the H2 year is higher than the first six months.
Yes, you have been right. I have been looking at the order levels. I'm sorry, this was my mistake. On backlog then, you mentioned that you still have backlog from the first six months of last year. Can you give us a feeling? I know it's, you have give us some information, but is it then 50% of sales in the H2 from all backlog? Or only an indication, is it the majority, the minority, or what can you tell us here?
What I can tell you, our backlog end of June was currently CHF 150 million, and out of this, at least one-third is still coming from last year.
Okay. This is very, very helpful. Thank you on that. Again, of course, I don't want to ask the margin question again here, but on the one hand side, you have more capacity, you have to ramp up in China. Should we expect a higher fixed cost, and is the higher volume able to absorb in this higher fixed cost? Also, although I think on depreciation, I think on personnel expense. Can you give us some flavor here?
Yes. Oh, especially now in China, we are in the ramp-up of this new plant, which is now an owned factory, and we moved out of the old building which we rented. There we are in a good position. The costs will be approximately the same, so depreciation will not be higher. Even though we have doubled the space, it will be roughly in the same amount like where we paid as a rent for.
Okay. You mentioned before that the mix should improve and also the pricing should improve. That said, you expect higher margin. Is this correct in the H2 ?
If we go one by one, yes, I expect higher margin on the product business because we have now the prices in the market. We expect on the project business, we do not expect much impact upwards because there we still have a big backlog with old prices, which we have to realize and swallow. Looking really going further also into the next year, I think we are now well-positioned to gain back what we have lost on the price quality to a big extent.
Okay. Thank you very much. Good luck for the H2 .
Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Constantin Hesse with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thank you very much for taking my question. I only have two left. One is, I mean, we're five months into the end of the year. With the visibility you have, I'm just trying to think, I mean, in terms of why you haven't given guidance, what are kind of the key changes that could still happen as to why you have decided not to guide for the full year? Oh, let's start with that one.
Yeah, thank you. The question is good from your end, and the answer from our end is totally different. Maybe you do not estimate this, but it is just impossible to estimate where it goes now. It can go into both directions. It can be a very strong H2 year, and it can also be a continuous trend, like what you have seen on the order intake, that it is continuous on a much lower level than a year ago. This is why we say we cannot give any guidance, even though we would only give you an indicative guidance. This time, we don't even give an indicative guidance because we just don't know where it goes. There are positive signs, a lot of positive signs, but there are also a lot of risks.
The risks are more coming from the macroeconomic environment, not really from Interroll, but it's really coming from the macroeconomic environment.
Yeah, I know. Exactly. If you were to achieve very high numbers, the assumption of that would be that you would see an improvement in supply chain disruptions or, I mean, looking at the current inventories that you have, if you're able to deliver on the projects with the current inventories do you see a good H2 ? Yeah. I mean, I'm just really trying to get a feeling for what your assumptions
Yeah.
for a very good half.
A very good half year would mean that our order intake on product levels goes back to Q1 2022, so that these postponements orders would be realized. The second one, and the most important one is still the supply chains.
Yeah. Okay.
Now, we need to have a normalization of supply chains. We need to get all the parts we need. Sometimes only one component, a semiconductor component is missing, and you cannot ship now. We need also that the normalization in China continues because we also suffered a lot in China because goods have been produced, they are in stock, but during the hard lockdowns, you could not even find a driver which delivers the goods within mainland China.
Yeah. Okay. That's fair. My last question would be, I mean, without giving any guidance or targets, looking into 2023, if I think about a potential recession starting in 2023, the potential impact that that could have on CapEx numbers at your customers.
I'm just trying to think, in how far do you think that this might be partially or even fully offset by an adjustment to CapEx, even though there might be an overall adjustment to CapEx, but it's CapEx related to automation and improving efficiencies, might actually not be down so much because of what we've seen during COVID. What are kind of your expectations going into 2023 in a recessionary scenario?
You mentioned it already. , we have done very well at the beginning of COVID, and the trend was exactly this because people could not work and the ones which have been highly automated, they benefited from the crisis. Automation is clearly one of the fundamental drivers of our business. We expect that this will increase. Not now only because of COVID and the lockdowns in China, but much more about general inflation. And this is not only for one year. Many say now it's not for only one year, they expected also a high inflation next year. This will give a spiral curve and pressure on the labor costs, in addition, like countries like Germany, where we have a shrinking labor force, this puts additional pressure. You don't find people in the future.
You don't find adequate people, we'll have an additional price pressure. They will go for automation. Automation is the key to gain efficiency in this circumstances where you don't find qualified labor.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
We have a question from Mr. Sebastian Vogel from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hello. Good morning. I've got three questions. I will pose them one by one. Coming back to the work in progress position that was discussed earlier, is it fair to assume that it should get to the sort of normal levels that we have seen in the end of last year? How do you see that behaving over the H2 ?
Can you just repeat the first part of the question? We did not get this acoustically.
This change in work in progress position on your P&L that was discussed earlier on. Is that supposed to be getting back to something like 0.4% or 0.5% of sales like it had been in the last couple of years? Do you think given the supply chain situation, it could be staying elevated?
From today's point of view, we expect that the WIP to the biggest extent will change into sales in the H2 year.
Got it. The second question would be on the gas rationing. I wasn't getting the answer beforehand. What are your plans there for your German facilities? Is that in any way materially exposed to gas as a use of energy? Or how do you see the situation? How are you preparing for any potential gas rationing, in particular for Germany?
Yes, we have some plan in place. Of course, one is about the heating of the facilities, where we have a plan to have a lower level of usage if needed. But more importantly, we also have, of course, production processes that depend on the use of gas. Not many, but crucial ones. It's the so-called powder coating process. Here we do rely on gas. However, for those processes, we can anticipate, we already have some tanks with LPG gas that can be used to overcome certain periods of scarcity.
Got it. Many thanks. My third question would be on tax rate and CapEx. You mentioned it in the presentation already. Tax was low, CapEx was also low. How should I think for the H2 in these both positions?
The tax rate is low as it was already end of last year. The driver is clearly coming from the allocation from the profit. Germany as one of the highest tax rate countries was significantly lower than in the past compared to the total group. This probably is not sustainable. We mentioned this already at the March press conference. This is not sustainable level. It will come back. Has to do with ramp-up costs also, what we have in the new factory. We had other structural changes. On the CapEx, we continue. We do not postpone any CapEx. This is just a timing that we say we have now much less spent in the first six months than a year ago.
The basic plan that we spent close to CHF 50 million, again this year, as the last one of this three year, where we said we could spend CHF 150 million, this is still the plan. Nevertheless, we see that, probably some will keep into next year, not because we postpone something, but just because, how it develops and how we will get, bills for the progress that this might be the case. It's too early to tell.
Got it. Many thanks.
You're welcome.
Thank you very much. I believe we are at the end of our time. I would like to invite you, if there are any questions that remain unanswered, to send an email to investor.relations@interroll.com. We will try to answer that individually. Otherwise, thank you very much for your participation and the interesting questions we received today. Here, we would like to close this session for today. Later on, we will upload the recording in the next 2-3 hours on our website. If you would like to repeat, you can have a look over there. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Bye.