Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Oerlikon Q2 2025 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Yusuf, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and that this conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star followed by one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or for broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Aymeric Jamin, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Oerlikon's First Half-Year Results Call. My name is Aymeric Jamin, Head of Investor Relations. I have here with me Michael Suess, our Executive Chairman, and Markus Richter, CFO of Oerlikon. Michael will start the presentation with a strategy update. Markus will then highlight our financials and outlook. We will end with a Q&A. With that, I would like to open our presentation and hand over to Michael. Michael, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Aymeric. Hello, hello everyone, and welcome to our half-year 2025 presentation. Before Markus takes us through the financial details, I'd like to start with some reflections on our strategic journey. I'll keep it short, only to remind you where we're coming from. The past 10 years, we have fundamentally reshaped Oerlikon from a conglomerate into a focus, which was always requested. A high-performing pure-play company, where we are on the... While we are in this transition, we have created a diversification in our marketplaces within the service solutions as a leader in advanced technologies. On the other hand, Barmag is on a good way to be divested, as we have signed in May. All the procedures in between are on track. From our side, there is no doubt that this divestment will work out in time and in quality.
If you talk about in quality, you remember the transaction value was CHF 850 million with an additional earnout potential of up to CHF 100 million. What's even important is that we have, parallel to that, a very strong reduction in our pension liabilities. Sometimes maybe that's not really perceived in a proper way, but I have to strengthen that because that was a massively deload of pension liabilities of our company. What we have done on top of that, we optimized further our portfolio, which unfortunately ended up in an impairment of CHF 46 million. We will go to details in the Q&A if there are some, but one or two of them are battery development in Europe, green hydrogen development in Europe, where we simply have stopped certain R&D activities and some other stuff in addition.
The structural cost measures are implemented or further on track, and we will see benefits second half year and further on benefits in 2026. Cost structural improvements are on a regular basis. We do that consistently, not as a one wave, but as a consistent further development, the performance quality within the company. I said that I simply will further confirm that the transformation is on track, is on track to be an agile and efficient organization. We have a distinct brand and a distinct investment case for you, and very open to all the Q&As you will have to us. Markus, would you like to take over from my side and go through the financials?
Yes, sure. Thank you, Michael. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the H1 2025 results presentation also from my side. In H1, we continued to execute on our strategic priorities to drive efficiency and innovations. We achieved stable orders in a very difficult economic environment as Western industrial production continued to be subdued. In parallel, we noted increased cautiousness among some of our customers driven by ongoing trade tensions and geopolitical uncertainties. Finally, the significant appreciation of the Swiss franc against all major currencies during the period had a negative impact on our financial results. I will start with an overview of our first six months, followed by an update on our end markets, including the results, and we'll conclude with our outlook. At Oerlikon, orders were stable year-over-year at constant FX to CHF 826 million, with a book-to-bill ratio over one.
This is a really strong achievement and the confirmation that our strategy to diversify away from automotive and tooling slowly benefits our company. Group sales decreased 3% at constant FX to CHF 786 million. This was driven by lower activity in our service business in the context of downturn in automotive, luxury, and the general industries. Operational EBITDA margin was 16.7% in H1, down year-over-year in the context of difficult end markets, negative mix effect, and FX. We are focusing on managing costs extremely diligently and continue further with our structural cost-out actions to support the margin. These actions across areas offering limited growth potential aim to gain agility and efficiency and expect positive effects in the second half of 2025. Moreover, as part of our pure-play transformation, we optimized our portfolio towards structurally higher profitability.
This resulted in the impairment of some R&D projects and assets at our night riding and elderly businesses. Despite the current challenging environment, Oerlikon continues to drive innovation and successfully launched a new PVD equipment platform in Sputter, as well as new thermal spray equipment, Surface Two, and new CVD coating BALDIA VARIA . With that, let me provide you an update on our end markets. Oerlikon is operating across the tooling, automotive, luxury, aviation, general industries, and markets. Particularly, the general and tooling industries show a close correlation to industrial production. In the first half of the year, the PMIs in the Euro area remained in contraction, while the U.S. and China stayed around neutral levels. In addition, the ongoing trade tensions led some of our customers to adopt a wait-and-see approach. In the first half, our service business was down 5%.
This activity is usually early cyclical and has, particularly in the general and tooling industries, a close correlation to industrial production. As such, we were impacted by contracting PMIs in the Euro area and close to neutral levels in China and the U.S. In automotive, global light vehicle production saw a slight increase in the first half of the year. However, regional disparities persisted, with North America and Europe recording declines. Industry agencies' forecasts have been recently revised downward but remain roughly stable for the full year. In the EU, uncertainties generated by changing industrial policies create a challenging environment for our customers and delay investment decisions. In flow control, our performance is closely related to car model launches. The recent slowing momentum in automotive production and the trade tensions are weighing on the reacceleration of car launch projects, affecting particularly the U.S.
We continue to drive innovations to make future mobility more efficient and sustainable, be it in the vehicle body or in the battery, hybrid, or combustion powertrain technology. In luxury, the market momentum remains relatively low for the time being, with customers acting in a wait-and-see mode. This is primarily related to the weakness in the Chinese end market, inflation, and some geopolitical uncertainties, which are dragging on the spending power of the middle class. Midterm growth drivers for the luxury segment remain well intact. With product quality, value for money, and trends for more sustainable products, Oerlikon, with its unique offering, is well positioned when the markets pick back up again. In aviation, we saw 6% passenger growth year to date, with industry agencies expecting 8% growth in 2025. Rising flying hours are driving MRO activity and demand for our solutions.
We see plane manufacturers reinvesting and upgrading old equipment. Our products are supporting them to develop more efficient and more sustainable aircraft engine technology. The trend had been confirmed at the Paris Air Show in June 2025. Overall sentiment from the key players is positive, and all remain confident in the growth trajectory for the next years. Summing up, we see a continued subdued industrial environment. While PMIs remained in contraction in Europe and close to neutral levels in the U.S. and China, trade tensions prompted some customers to adopt a wait-and-see approach. The positive trend observed in aviation is confirmed. With that, let's discuss where we are with the financials. Orders in the first half of 2025 were stable organically year-over-year at CHF 826 million and slightly down, FX adjusted at CHF 786 million.
In light of a challenging industrial production and trade tensions environment, this is a very strong performance with continued market share gain over the period. Our diversification strategy across end markets and geographies has been instrumental in this achievement. The first six months of 2025 were supported by organic sales growth in aviation and energy, compensating for lower organic sales in automotive, general industries, tooling, and luxury. The book-to-bill ratio remained above one throughout the first half year, signaling our resilience despite market headwinds. Operational EBITDA in the first six months of 2025 amounted to CHF 131 million, down year-over-year. The margin had been impacted by transitory negative effects from mix and FX. Ongoing macro-economic challenges and trade tensions are temporarily weighing on our service business. Although this business typically delivers higher margins, it is also early cyclical by nature.
Oerlikon continued its structural cost-out actions in the first half as part of its pure-play journey, which should support margin in the second half and will position us upon market recovery. I will come back on this topic in more detail later in the presentation. As part of the pure-play, Oerlikon is updating its ROCI calculation and removes the effects from amortized, acquired, and tangibles from the formula. This change aims to better reflect the core financial performance of the company. Our operational ROCI was impacted by the lower EBITDA in the first half. Through our strategic initiatives, we are committed to improving our return on capital employed, aiming to restore it to a level that reflects our long-term value creation goals. With that, let's slide on Barmag. Barmag is presented as discontinued operations following the signature of a definitive agreement for its divestiture to Rieter.
In H1 2025, orders in polymer processing solutions improved sequentially at CHF 367 million. This represents an 18% increase compared to H2 2024. It is down year-over-year due to different seasonality in line with Barmag expectations. Filament orders were up 20% sequentially and came in line with the expected seasonality pattern. We see continued signs of momentum in small and mid-sized filament orders. When it comes to non-filament, we continued to see low order momentum in the first half of 2025, driven by weak PMIs. Polymer processing solutions' sales for the first six months were CHF 352 million, up 9% year-over-year at constant FX. Operational EBITDA increased to CHF 29 million. This represents a margin of 8.2%. The transitory lower margin is due to the customers' price concessions granted in 2024 to maintain order volume.
We expect recovering pricing levels and innovation to support margins beyond 2025. Furthermore, Barmag is about to implement ongoing manufacturing footprint optimizations. This will benefit Barmag man-made fibers' profitability beyond 2025. With that, let's move on to our outlook on the next slide, please. When we presented our full-year results back in February, we anticipated 2025 to remain a challenging year. That view was based on a careful assessment of the macro-economic landscape and early signals of volatility across our markets. Since then, the environment has become even more complex. Tariff tensions and geopolitical uncertainties impacted a certain number of our end markets. Our diversification effectively helped mitigate the impact. In the face of these headwinds and the subsequent soft start into the year, we update our full-year guidance.
We now expect organic group sales in 2025 to be stable or to decrease by a low single-digit percentage at constant FX. In terms of EBITDA, we foresee a group margin between 17.5% - 17% for the full year, whereas the lower end of the margin range would be expected in the event of further escalation in geopolitical tensions. Moreover, our ongoing cost efficiency initiatives are expected to provide structural support to margins with tangible benefits already anticipated in the second half. Let's now recap for the first half of the year on the next slide. As we reach the midpoint of 2025, we remain focused on navigating a complex environment with resilience and discipline, while continuing to execute our pure-play strategy. Tariff burden has erupted, adding pressure to already fragile market dynamics and pushing some of our customers to wait-and-see mode.
Geopolitical tensions have not only persisted, they've intensified, creating further uncertainty for businesses. In Europe, evolving industrial policies, while aimed at long-term competitiveness, have introduced short-term unpredictability. In the face of these headwinds, we remain focused on what we can control. We are executing our strategy with discipline, maintaining financial resilience. We are accelerating our structural cost-out measures to enhance agility and efficiency, with effects expected to support margins in the second half of 2025. At the same time, we continue to drive innovation, not only to stay ahead of the curve, but to unlock new growth opportunities in emerging technologies and markets. Finally, we are firmly on track with our pure-play transformation, including the corporate cost adjustment, reinforcing our commitment to long-term value creation. Thank you very much. With that, let's open up for Q&A, I would say.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast while asking a question. Please limit yourself to three questions and place them one by one, each allowing the company to answer each question individually before posing the next question. Anyone who has a question may press star one at this time. Our first question comes from Vogel, Sebastian, UBS. Please go ahead, sir.
Hello, good morning. I've got three questions. I'll ask them one by one. The first one is on the indicated cost-out that you have mentioned for Surface Solutions. Is it also causing some extra costs in the second half, or is it just a saving benefit that you expect there? That would be my first question.
According to that, we expect savings for the second half of the year. We are on track with the execution. Potential additional costs in terms of, for example, severance packages will be part of restructuring and will be normalized for the operational business.
Got it. Second question is on the trading volume or trading backdrop, sorry, so to say. Can you share a little bit of your thoughts on order and sales momentum by the end of the second quarter and the beginning of the third quarter in your key end markets, i.e., general industry, automotive, and luxury, and what you have seen there?
Is it to Markus or is it to me?
To both of you.
Okay. Markus, do you want to start or should I?
Go ahead.
Okay. First, before I answer that question, maybe one additional comment. All these tariff discussions, which we see, and maybe you have, I'm sure you have realized that this EU-U.S. trade agreement is not a fully trade agreement yet because it's not formalized. It's the idea about this 15%. Switzerland actually is struggling with the 39%. Now we have two layers. The one layer is what does that impact us directly. With our regional setup and organization, I think we can handle that in a proper way. Despite the fact that for sure exports to the U.S. directly out of Switzerland, we will see to ask for exemptions because in most cases, we are mission critical. What is much more difficult to judge on is the indirect effect. How does this tariff discussion impact the U.S. consumer behavior? How is it impacting the U.S. trade overall, and how is it impacting the export capabilities of our customers in Europe? We still have 50% of our revenue in Europe, 25% of our revenue in the U.S. and the Americas, and 25% of our revenue in Asia. To predict what the second half of this year and maybe first quarter next year is, is a little bit difficult. What we see is that we had a, let's say, a weak second half of 2024, a weaker 2025, and we see some stabilization. Anyway, to go for a 17.5% guidance, the second half will have to be better than the first half. Part of that is a saving, but the other part of that is to stabilize our top line. Has that answered your question?
Many thanks. I'll follow up there in that regard. More regarding the dedicatedly for general industry, automotive, and luxury, was the demand that you have seen by, let's say, June, July, was that stronger than the average that you were showing for the first half, or was it weaker?
As far as I have seen it, but maybe Markus, you may correct me. Luxury is flat, not really increasing, not really declining. The only thing we see is there is, in our favor, an ongoing process, which was a strategy to enter this market, to walk away from electrogalvanic and to walk closer to PVD. That percentage is on a good track. We have some really new innovations, shown them, but they're working actually on how and in which way they want to place them in the market. It's on the luxury side. On automotive, the picture is much more diverse. As you have seen, the automotive, especially the premier car manufacturers, have shown a massive reduction of their income situation. This is not changing any new models launched, but maybe that's changing the behavior to launch additional models. This could have an impact.
Actually, I do see more fights for flat and not for further decline. Outer order index, I have not seen a decline yet.
Got it. Many thanks. One very last follow-up. Generally, in terms of mix, can you provide us a sort of rough ballpark of the business mix regarding equipment versus powder versus services and where you're standing at the moment, if possible?
That's a little difficult, but I can share two things probably. 80% of our revenues actually have headwind and 20% have tailwind. That's the aerospace part where we are in that's running well. There are more orders, especially on the equipment side. Any equipment which we sell is further tracking than our service part. Service on the equipment side is in a pretty good ratio. We don't disclose that because that would go too deep into the reporting structures. The service business overall, most of our business, as you know, PVD is services. In equipment, a decent part of that is services, where there's not a real service business that's in the materials business. That's direct sale. To split that in percentages, I'm not in a position to do that now.
Got it. Many thanks. Happy to go back to the queue then.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Billion, Louis, AlphaV alue. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Could you provide more insight on your exposure to the U.S. market? You have previously highlighted that the U.S. was a key growth driver. However, the U.S. sales are currently down year on year. Could you help us better understand the dynamics in the U.S. market? Do you expect potential tariff shifts to have a positive impact on your U.S. growth? Are you seeing any of your clients relocating operation or establishing manufacturing sites in the U.S.?
Let's start with the last part. A lot of our clients have U.S. sites, and it's for the moment not visible for us that they shift massive production towards that site. One of our bigger clients, the Volkswagen Group, does not have the biggest exposure into the U.S. Audi has none, Porsche has none. If they plan to do something, that would not work short term. That works mid to long term. Overall, our exposure in the U.S. is a good one, but as I said, 25% of our business is U.S. market directly. What is important for us is that a lot of our European customers who are exporting to the U.S. may have an impact, may have a positive or negative impact on the tariff situation.
That is why we are a little careful and cautious because that makes the whole world for us very, very difficult to judge on. Very often we quote stuff which is in a Tier 2 or Tier 1 situation, enters then a car or a product, and we do not know, finally, is this product moving towards the U.S. and tackled by tariffs, or is that moving to India or China and not tackled by tariffs, or does it stay within the European Union? The predictability of markets within the last three months dropped a lot because we had seen it. I don't tell you anything new, and I don't want to hide behind pure politics. It is a matter of fact that the Israel situation is completely unclear. The Iran situation is unclear. Nobody talks about Taiwan anymore.
Russia and China have just recently launched a common exercise with the navies. We have the tariff discussion, which goes erratically up and down. Now India is announced to get higher tariffs from the U.S. The European deal, as I said, in my eyes, is not really fixed because it's a handshake between the European Commission head and the U.S. president, but there is not a real deal structure behind. Last but not least, we have to face this 39% threat on the Swiss industry. Here again, we can handle that somehow by our international network and our direct activities. It will have an impact, but it's an impact which we get probably under control.
What we cannot handle, and what is difficult to foresee, is how this tariff situation is impacting our clients' situation and the overall behavior of customers to buy the equipment where we are getting our coatings on.
Yeah, Michael, thank you. If I may add to that, if we consider the FX headwind and USD depreciation, we are actually flat year-over-year for the U.S. or for the Americas. Here we have shown some resilience. Going forward, we see some upside in the energy, oil, and gas if the promised drilling activity is coming back. We see a bit of a delay of the uptake of that. Don't forget, we have the world's leading technology with our new matrix material, a drill head that has set world records in terms of depth and growing through hard rock. If the drilling activities for generating new oil sources will come, this will be a great upside for us. On the tariff side, I want to mention this, I'm sure you're aware, but the service business is typically very local.
We have a location in the U.S., and 100 mi around it, or 150 km around it, is where you have the customers, except for materials and equipment business, as we discussed earlier. I feel we're flat in a very weak environment, which shows our resilience and shows that our customers really appreciate us as part of their partner and how valuable we are to their supply chain.
Okay, thank you.
May I add to what Markus was saying, I don't want to overwhelm you with all these words and phrases, but when we talk about oil and gas industry, we have as well to differentiate between upstream and midstream downstream. We have seen a good thing in the oil and gas industry and midstream downstream, but there was no upstream. Upstream was half that. If there's now these activities of higher drilling, that would be in our favor because that's where we are engaged in the oil and gas sector. It's always important which part of a sector is moving. Actually, I think on one hand, it's a burden. On the other hand, it shows the resilience of the company because 80% of our markets are really in headwind. Despite that, we're still in a very high profitability level.
If then for the half year, I stated that very often, a business like Oerlikon is very difficult to judge on quarter base or half year base. When we do some impairments now, we correct within the pure-play story, we correct some developments which have not either taken place or which have really materialized, like in night riding, where the market volumes are consistently falling and not developing proper. There we had to act on. This is a correction which is not talking anything about the operational strengths of the company. It's not talking about the innovation pipeline which we have. The only what we need is a little, little boost from the back in one of the other markets because 20% aerospace is 20% is good, and we will increase our market share there, but it's going over time.
All the other industries, even semiconductor, first half year was pretty weak. This is a market where we're building actually a position for us, but still that market, even that market is not a strong market.
Next question comes from Michael Foeth, Vontobel. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my question. Good morning. Actually, two, if you could make some comments on whether your midterm EBITDA margin target of 20 %-2 2% is still valid at this point, and maybe on the back of your cost savings and streamlining, what the timeline to get there would be. That would be my first question.
Markus, I would like to start because yes, it's intact, and it's massively depending on how our market environment is working. In that market environment where we are in, we are more in the 17 or 18 as we are working, actually. If some of these markets, and they will, by the way, they will have not 80% of our markets, I would say most of industry, because we're covering general industry, automotive industry, luxury, semiconductor industry, tooling, cutting tools, forming tools. This is a huge portion of industry. If some of that industry is turning, there is a very high opportunity to get on this 20% and further on.
In a given market environment, if you ask me on timeline, if the market environment next year is the same than this year, we are more in that area where we are actually, maybe a little bit higher because our savings are working. Savings doesn't mean that we cut off something nonsense. We are simply additional drive our performance within the structures, procedures in that very pure organization, which we are now a little bit released of all this stuff, which was more too much corporate heavy. By the timeline, it depends massively on the markets and depends massively on how the international community is thinking about open trade.
Maybe if I may add to that, currently we're looking into the possibility of having a capital markets day next year. With that, because it's really a transformative mode for us right now, we can give you much better and much more concrete updates on that. Thank you. I guess my second question probably gets the same answer. You know, you redefine the way you calculate ROCI, and the question would be, now it's still pretty low and not in value-generating territory now. The question would then be, you know, what timeline do you have in order to get value generative? You will probably answer that at the same time, I guess, or if you want to make any comments on it now.
ROCI is something where we simply see that we have done significant investments and activities in the past. By the way, within our depreciation, there is a significant portion out of a very old deal. That was the old Metco deal, which is phasing out over the next couple of years, but it was in 2021, 2022 still significant. There are some other activities where we're working, where we have invested, where we do not need to invest all the time. For example, we had no worn carbon coder and diamond coders, which we developed, and we are now on a very good edge to introduce them into the markets. There were things to be done where the ROCI was not in favor of that.
As you mentioned, I'm not happy about a 4% or 5% ROCI, and there's a clear task to get that on a level, as you said, that we are capital-aggregative and not capital-dilutive.
Thank you.
The timeline about that is in a shorter period, I would say over the next two years and not over the next five years. Market situation, it can be a year, it can be two, it can be one and a half. Definitely with the pipeline we have, and this should sound really encouraging for you, with the innovation pipeline we have, day by day, we take market share. In a flat or even shrinking market environment, we take market shares from our competitors. The technology position of Oerlikon is a super strong one. The only thing we need is a little bit more market to grow to strengthen that.
Right. You're correct, you get the same answer, a more formulated view on that also as part of a potential CMD in 2026. Thanks for your understanding.
Sure. Thank you.
The next question comes from Foletti, Alessandro, Octavian. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning everybody. Thank you for taking my questions as well. A couple as well, very easy, I think. Is there a way, can you quantify the impact of the business mix in your margin decline?
Markus, can you do that?
As mentioned before.
Sorry, as mentioned before, we don't go on that deeper level, but here the truth that you are aware of are intact. The majority of our business is around the services business. This is where the margin accretion is coming from for our group, and this is where we have the biggest hit due to our end markets, general industries, tooling, and automotive. A good portion of what we see in our results and in our difference in results versus last year is very much coming from a mix. We also have to consider that our 0.6% or CHF 5 million is coming from FX. I'm sure you decommissioned that already, and as for the mix, it's the majority of the remainder.
Okay, thank you. Thank you. We're still good enough even if it was just qualitative. On the pension effects, you mentioned, Mr. Suess, that you restructured massively the pensions, and I see the liability going down. I wonder if there was an effect on the P&L as well, and if that also would be nice to hear if you can quantify.
Maybe I didn't get your question proper. Can you repeat?
You mentioned in your statements, Mr. Suess, that you restructured the pensions, the pension liabilities, or was it just in connection with Barmag?
It's in connection with Barmag. Barmag was carrying a huge liability, and when we have finalized the carve-out of Barmag, the sell-off of Barmag, then we have a much, much smaller pension liability on the company. It's not only about the classical debt levels, it's really on the pension side, which gives us a massive release on that because typically by structure, Barmag was a mainly German-organized setup, and in Germany, you had a much higher pension liability as we have typically in the remaining company with the setup we have.
You alluded to that. We don't have the effect yet in our books. We will see the effect only at closing, which we expect to be in Q4. Here we expect something around CHF 120 million - CHF 130 million effect at the year end.
All right. Thank you. That's great. Remaining on Barmag, maybe, is there also foreign exchange, accumulated foreign exchange, recycling through the P&L that has to happen?
Markus.
I'm not sure I understand the question, to be honest.
In the past, when you, if I remember correctly, when you sold, I think the vacuum business or the, what was it, advanced technology business, there were accumulated translation differences from foreign exchange that were sitting on your balance sheet that had to be recycled through the P&L once, leading to significant book losses, but non-cash, but book losses. This is what happened a couple of times in the past.
You're talking about CTA and the currency translation. Also here, as you're aware, this will be happening with a closing. This is at Q4. As of June, we can say that we're in the ballpark of around CHF 200 million for that.
Okay, good. Thank you for that.
Next question comes from K noblauch, Adrian, ZKB. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, and also thanks for the clarification there on the pensions. My first question is you have a rather big discrepancy between the reported and the adjusted EBITDA or operating, or how you call it. Can you elaborate there on the nature of your impairments, specifically this night riding or Eldim? What are they exactly, and how do I understand one-offs there?
Oh, it's a restructuring. All of them go under restructuring. Obviously, the difference, as you mentioned correctly, is related to these impairments. We have three types of impairments. We have the impairment for night riding, which is a business that has challenges on the customer side, very connected to the automotive business, and with that, also very under pressure from the market. We don't right now see a good way to have an accretive business out of that, and that becomes sizable. This is the impairment for night riding. The next impairment is for Eldim. While we believe and we see strong uptake in the aviation industry, Eldim is a special case. We have a very large contract, a long-term contract with the main player in the aviation industry.
However, as you are aware, the qualification process and sometimes the setup of the production may take longer than anticipated, and this is the case here. We see a delay of this contract. The contract will come in its full form at the moment, but at a later stage. We took cautious steps on this one. The last one was already mentioned. It's a bunch of R&D projects that were referred to by Michael before. Maybe one thing is important to me on the Eldim side. Don't forget, this was a business that we acquired as part of the Metco transaction somewhat 10 years ago. Here, the write-off is mainly on the intangible assets. The tangible assets are still intact. Does that help?
Thank you.
Maybe I like to add a little bit because the quality is different. Night riding is a declining business where we are in touch with other business partners how to solve that. It's a small, pretty much small business. Eldim is a story where there's a growth plan behind, but that growth plan is, as Markus was saying, with a big contract of transferring activities from a customer of us towards us. This takes a little longer because his capacities to push forward and to do all this verification, qualification work on are sometimes a little bit defocused. By that, we have to do that. The last one, and it's not a bunch. Maybe Markus, I have to correct it. It's dedicated. It was some activities on green hydrogen and stack development for that and batteries on solid-state batteries where we simply have said there's a freeze on now.
We stopped that. We have to write that part off, which we have invested already. It's not the know-how is not gone, but we have to wait until the markets are really promising and coming back. Green hydrogen is not that market as it was. It was somehow promised five or six years from the European Union. The same is with the solid-state battery situation. The other major part of that was a development for certain titanium powders, where with the titanium powder development, this was simply obsolete, and we had to write it off. That's an older story out of a couple of years ago. That's really, and the last one was a start of a development of a new coder, which we stopped because that coder became too big and not for the right market.
It's really dedicated write-offs, which we do according to the pure-play that we say whatever is not fulfilling our requirements, we don't carry it with us, but we simply take it off.
All right. You're receiving the cash proceeds for Barmag later this year. You stated the priority of usage of these cash proceeds by paying off the term loan in February. You want to do growth initiatives, and you were thinking of a special dividend. I was wondering, do you have any leverage level in mind that you want to reach before you're thinking about paying out a special dividend?
We would like to discuss that in the board when it's the time. First and above all, the major target is to deleverage. That's what we have announced and what we will do. We will see how the situation end of the year looks like, which kind of activities we're doing, and what is the, let's say, the remaining headroom for a potential special dividend. Special dividends, as you remember, we paid in the past always as a part of a divestment, saying that those shall participate in that. As long as we can afford that, it was always good. We will not do anything which we cannot afford.
In terms of going forward, it's just a clear ambition to be well below two for the leverage ratio going forward.
The next question comes from Arnold, Christian ODDO BHF . Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, gentlemen. I have a question on the balance sheet and there, especially on the prepayment received on orders and trade payables. These were quite lower than half a year ago, and I believe this is mainly due to the fact that, yeah, we don't have Barmag in there anymore. We only have now CHF 20 million, I think, on prepayments and trade payables, only CHF 108 million. Is that a new level we should think about, or do you think that prepayments will play a bigger role again? Of course, never to the same extent as it used to be because you don't have Barmag anymore. Is this also due to the fact that you face lots of headwinds and therefore you don't have much prepayments? How shall we think about that?
First of all, you're correct. A good portion of the advanced payments that we received were for Barmag business. As you know, as part of the discontinued showing of Barmag, the entire Barmag is shown under assets held for sale in one position. Going forward, we have also started an initiative to restructure our net working capital, by which we want to improve the ratio between receivables and payables. The project has started and is well on track. Knowing that we may not get to the advanced payment levels without Barmag as part of pure-play, we have organized to get to a better positioning of our net working capital with that.
The question, Markus, was a little bit more about the prepayments. Here, structurally, definitely, there is a change because in the Barmag business, and you have seen that if you've been following the company, when you have an increasing market, you have always significant prepayments. In the years 2023, 2024, cash-wise, the company was suffering a lot by these prepayments because we had to deliver the work, but the payments have already been done. The very negative cash impact in the years 2023, 2024 towards the company came from this decline. Since 2025, it's more or less bottoming out. Dimensional-wise, this was always one of the reasons why we said we had to separate. The business is in its quality totally different.
We're talking about 50 million - 300 million order size for single orders versus a lot of small customers and a lot of small service businesses in Metco in Oerlikon. Structural-wise, there is a change, but what Markus was mentioning was even to get a better ratio within our net working capital. There are some significant moves which we can do. On the prepayment side, the quality level will decline towards what you know now out of 2021, 2022, 2023, not because there were no prepayments anymore in a dimension. On the other hand, there will be more prepayments again when we do, especially on the equipment side, when we have some more market tailwind again for further growth. In a growing market, for sure, you have higher prepayments than in a shrinking or flat market.
To be precise, the dimension Barmag was bringing, that's a different dimension because the business there, we do not have in Oerlikon in regular big projects, let's say above CHF 10 million . Barmag doesn't start projects below CHF 50 million The typical project size is 150, 200, sometimes up to CHF 300 million . They only start there when there are significant prepayments. They have to finish the project as well when their premiums are already taken. That's part of their business model.
Yep.
Was that precise enough or is it too?
Very clear. Maybe just a follow-up on the potential restructuring of networking capital. What kind of potential do you see there? Are we talking about an improvement of CHF 25 million, CHF 50 million, CHF 100 million?
At this stage, we're going in that direction, but at this stage, we're not yet ready to quantify. I would say give us to year end to have an announcement here.
Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question, and this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.