Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you, all, both here in person at the SIX ConventionPoint in Zurich, and of course also those joining us online to the StarragTornos Group Annual Media and Analyst Conference 2026. We truly appreciate your time and interest in our company. As we begin, I would like to draw your attention to our vision, which is displayed on the screen. This vision continues to guide our strategy and our commitment to delivering excellence in our industry. Today, we will present the 2025 financial results and provide insights into key business developments that have shaped our year. We have structured this conference to ensure clarity and also transparency, allowing you to gain a comprehensive understanding of our performance and future outlook.
I'm pleased to introduce to you our two speakers for today, Martin Buyle, the Chief Executive Officer, and Markus Jäger, the Chief Financial Officer. They will each play a crucial role in presenting different aspects of our performance and strategic direction. As you can see, the agenda outlines our key topics for discussion. We will conclude today's session with a Q&A, where you will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage directly with the leadership team. Without further delay, I now invite Martin Buyle, CEO, to open the conference with his introduction and business review. Martin, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. A warm welcome also from my side. Thank you for taking the time this morning and for being with us today. I want to start my presentation by looking at who the StarragTornos Group is. As a reminder, we consider ourselves the benchmark for high precision machining solutions, be it in the technologies of milling, turning, grinding, or boring. We have a long history as a company. It dates back until the 1860s. We have a global footprint, so we operate 30 locations worldwide, 11 of them being production sites. Our workforce is 1,800 employees big, and we have a distinct market focus on different industries, which I'm going to illustrate in a minute to you.
As you have seen from the video that you've seen before, we touch almost every aspect of our lives with our machines. Which are the key markets that are important to us and that we are serving? Who are the customers that we are serving and what are the applications? I want to start off with the Aerospace sector. Aerospace sector at the moment is mainly and to a large extent driven by, first of all, the desire for mobility. People want to travel more. There is a large increase in commercial aviation, but also at the moment, we are talking about a lot of interest, of course, from the defense industry.
Fuel efficiency, sustainability issues remain a constant driver, have been a driver in the past, and they not only have an influence on the world climate, but also on the cost structure and the cost calculation of the airlines. Typically, customers are military and civil OEMs, jet engine manufacturers, and Tier 1 suppliers to those OEMs. The second very important industry that we are serving is MedTech & Dental. You can imagine the main drivers there for this industry. We have an aging population, especially in the developed world. We have an increased demand for miniaturization and also for precision, and we have an imminent cost pressure in this industry, which requires more efficient machinery, more automated machinery on an ongoing basis. We are working together with customers who are mainly active in the field of orthopedic products, of dental implants, and of instrumentation of any kind.
A third industry that we are also covering well, which is not doing so well at the moment, unfortunately, I'm going to say a few words on that, in a minute, is the Luxury Goods industry. Of course, the drivers there are completely different. We have large parts of the world that have an increased income, so they can afford more expensive products. It has also become lately, since COVID, a means to preserve private wealth. We are working together there with high-end luxury watchmakers and jewelry brands. Our main applications, they are all parts in a watch or jewels that require very high precision and also a very high surface quality. Turning the page over to the next three key markets that we are serving.
One of them, of course, is Energy. Energy is a mega trend. I don't need to explain this too much. We have two main drivers here. First of all is to switch from fossil energy to alternative sources of energy and also an overall growing demand for energy. Think about AI applications, think about digitalization; it all requires a lot of energy. We are working there mainly for gas or steam turbine manufacturers, so they still exist, and they are having good times at the moment, and also with suppliers for the wind turbine market. Transportation is another important market to us, and I have to emphasize that we are not primarily talking about the automotive sector here, but anything else that is off-highway and also think about marine transportation, which is more in the focus for our company here.
As you see in the applications, our customers produce drive components for marine applications, gearboxes, and also engine blocks. For big agricultural machinery, for example, the combustion engine is still the method to produce energy, and it will also continue to be. Last but not least is the industrial markets, which is a little bit of a mixed bag between different applications that we serve. Our niche in this industrial market is applications where miniaturization and precision is required. Of course, also there we have this ongoing need for becoming more efficient, going back to environmental requirements, which is a main driver for us. How are we different as a company from all the competitors around us, and what does it have to do with this market focus that I just explained?
At StarragTornos, we are following a focused niche leadership strategy, which means we try to focus on highly differentiated applications rather than standardized volume markets, because the standardized volume markets require usually economies of scale, which obviously we don't have when we compare ourselves to other big competitors. We are convinced that the multi-brand strategy is the right thing to do, so we have 11 brands in our portfolio, each of them having a long history, and each of them consequently also having a good brand equity, a targeted positioning, and also a very loyal customer base. We don't offer a machine, we offer a manufacturing solution. A manufacturing solution includes a machine, includes the toolings, includes the application technology, the software, and the automation.
Performance is our second name, I would say, and this is also a way how we differentiate ourselves from other competitors. In many cases, as I mentioned before, our machines are considered benchmark when it comes to machine power, precision, and productivity. We have a very strong service base, customer base and installed base that we can work on, increasingly also introducing digital products, which gives us another possibility to extend that business. Last but not least, we are among the only companies in our industry that have European roots and that also have European ownership and a long-term strategy.
This has become increasingly important in these days when defense has become a more important topic and that Asian companies are more and more entering Europe, acquiring businesses here, and so on. This is really something that sets us apart from our competition. What are we doing in order to reinforce this, to reinforce our positioning? We're investing heavily in R&D and continue to do so. About 7% of our turnover is invested in R&D on an annual basis. Following the drivers that I have just explained before, we are still working on fully benefiting from the synergies. We have introduced the measures that were necessary. Now, as time goes on, we are harvesting them. We continue to expand in high- growth applications.
We want to become one of the top three players in each of the industries that we serve and each of the target applications that we serve. The after-sales business, as I said, is a very good base layer for our business. We believe we can still grow it by penetrating the installed base further and by coming up with new products like digital products. As the ground layer of all of this, we keep developing our own talent and our own expertise. This is due to the fact that we have an increased shortage of skilled labor.
This concerns both our company but also our customers, and we are increasingly asked to help out our customers on jobs that require skilled employees, and that's why we continue to invest in talents. We have about 100 apprentices in our company at the moment. What are the key figures of the past year? The CFO, Markus Jäger, will dive into this more deeply just in a minute. As a few cornerstone figures, we achieved CHF 473 million in order intakes last year. We achieved about CHF 442 million in net sales, which ended up in a bottom line, an EBIT of CHF 6 million or an EBIT margin of 1.4%.
The Board of Directors will propose to the Annual Shareholder Meeting a dividend per share of CHF 1 , and the global workforce I have already mentioned before. Looking at some of the figures a little bit more in detail. Order intake figures were relatively constant compared to 2024. Overall, the signal is good. Overall, the level could be kept. I'm going into a little more of an analysis of those on my next few slides. Going to the last line in this table, the order backlog in turn increased slightly. We are still sitting on a good order backlog. Overall, there is enough work to do, and I will refer to that as well when we come to order intake. Net sales has decreased since last year by about 10%.
We have several influencing factors there. Some of the factories are not fully loaded while others are fully loaded. We have received a lot of orders, as you might remember, which we have already announced in the second part of the year or even in the fourth quarter. The turning into turnover will be in 2026 and in the subsequent years, because some of those projects are large projects and multi-year projects. EBIT, as a consequence of a lower turnover, has come down.
We have countered this reduction by cost saving measures that we introduced in various plants in the course of last year, following, in general, a very cautious approach and following an approach where we can react quickly to influences that keep being thrown on us as we have a lot of examples on this in the last few weeks. Net profit was kept at CHF 5 million. Markus is going to say something about that later. Now looking into the order intake a little bit more, and I'm referring now to the industries I have laid out to you just a minute ago. The most positive sign we have received from Aerospace, we have seen a surge of 40% from 2024 to 2025.
You see that Aerospace is now more than a third of the overall order intake of the group. MedTech & Dental has seen a decline. The biggest decline we had to account for was in Luxury Goods. We have come down to about CHF 29 million in order intake. This is due to the fact that the whole industry is running at a very low pace, and this caused us some issues last year. It was counterbalanced, as I said before, by the Aerospace spendings mostly. Industrial could be kept at a similar level than last year. Transportation and Energy going backwards a little bit. You see the amounts are not as big as if you compare it to the large portions of our order intake.
These two industries are heavily influenced by large projects. So it depends, it c an go up and down a little bit more than the rest because it really depends if there are orders on the market, big projects on the market, and if we get them. Overall, as I said before, more or less constant order intake, which is the good news. Looking at it from a geographic point of view, which is also something we regularly do, the message is pretty simple. Everything went up except for Europe. Europe came down by about 20% in order intake. The Americas grew and also Asia grew. Europe of course, includes Switzerland. Switzerland includes Luxury Goods. There is a direct link between the reduction of, the Luxury Goods segment and the European performance overall.
Asia, probably a word about Asia. We have seen quite some increase there coming from a low level in 2024. I would say it bounced back to a regular level in Asia, something that we could expect. This is an overview. We're switching now over to net sales. This is an overview, a rough overview on how the net sales is composed of. Most of it, about 1/3 is the service business— 1/4 is the service business, and 3/4 is the machine business. Machine business, naturally, hopefully following my explanations, has suffered more from a downward trend in net sales than service has done. Service is a very constant business.
I mentioned innovation as being one of our key activities. What has been done last year? I just pick out two of them. On the left side you see one of the latest machines that we brought to the market from the Starrag product range. This is a machine. You don't need to go through all the details. This is a machine that is clearly focused at commercial aviation and titanium manufacturing because titanium is directly associated with the increased use of carbon fiber- reinforced material.
All of those of you who have been on an A350 or a Dreamliner 787, you have been flying on an airplane that is mostly composed of CFK material, and it also includes a lot of titanium. We believe the trend is going this way. We have a major order secured for a big European airplane manufacturer and execution is underway. The machine is doing fine. It will be a new benchmark in this industry.
On the right side, you see, our latest development, in the Tornos range. It's the DT 7 and DT 10. This is based on a modular, product platform. It addresses the needs of the customers for compactness and for higher efficiency and, productivity. It also includes digital features like a closed loop manufacturing option. It means you machine something, it gets measured inside the machine, the machine gets adapted based on the measurement, and then you keep machining. It's a learning machine that improves itself during the course of operation. We also believe that this is going to be a real feat, and we are expecting good results from this machine as well. Just to show you two examples of what we have done last year in this respect.
Of course, sustainability activities have also been performed last year. We have done some, let's say, more technical things like a double materiality analysis based on ESRS. We try to translate sustainability mostly into our products, because I think that's how we benefit from it as a company, and also that's how our customers benefit from it. The X70 Heckert machine, which is displayed here on the right-hand side, is a good example. It's again a machine that addresses the customer needs. It has a more compact footprint, and due to the drive systems inside, it also consumes less energy than its predecessors. Finally, a word on the merger synergies. We have implemented most of the measures in 2025. They have been mostly focused on global procurement, so sourcing material together between the former Starrag organization and the former Tornos organization.
We started using our global footprint, our global production footprint, sales and service footprint, our infrastructures. We have started off well in China, in our Taiwanese factories, and we have seen first positive effects in the annual result 2025. In order to have full- year effects and in order to have the full effect, this will flow in gradually into the results of this year and the years to come. Cross-selling opportunities between Starrag and Tornos have been pursued of course this year. Most of those are related to the Luxury Goods segment somehow, due to the fact that this has had a low performance overall, this segment. The cross-selling activities have been implemented, but we will see more of an effect of this in the years to come.
Having said that, I'm now going to hand over to the CFO to give you a deeper insight on our financial figures.
Thank you, Martin. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to give you a little bit an insight, a deeper insight into the financials. I would like to start with this slide. You allow me, not from the right to the left, I start with the left side. Why it's important for us, first of all, we delivered what we promised. We turned it around in the second half of the year. We gave the market guidance that we will see positive numbers at the end of the day. Now, CHF 6 million EBIT, is it good? We are not satisfied with it. Just to set it clear. Why?
We said we are aiming for 8%, and this is 1.4%, and this will be our utmost target. We want to go in this direction. This is very clear. Now, why only with respect to say this, CHF 6 million? Now I go to the right-hand side. To your left side, sorry. We merged at the end of 2023. You all know that. Nevertheless, I'm showing you here five years because it gives a little bit a better picture what have happened. When we start on the very left side, so the 2021- 2023 are pro forma numbers, 2024, 2025 are equal to our financials. You see the order intake. 2023, it's about CHF 590 million in 2022, CHF 530 million in 2023.
What Mr. Buyle just explained to you, there are market segments, how they develop. Let's just take one out of them. It's Luxury Goods. In this CHF 529 million, we had CHF 100 million out of the Luxury Goods segment. You see the impact. When we go further in 2024, the Luxury Goods came down from CHF 100 million to CHF 50 million, and now another CHF 20 million down to CHF 30 million. We believe now it's bottoming out, but we don't believe that we have a big impact in 2026. We don't see it. We see it further down the road, maybe 2027. The good thing about it is that we have not lost customers.
Our customers are in the same position that we are. We strongly believe that this valley we are going through will end at the end of 2026, and we see much more to come in 2027. Just add this CHF 100 million to this CHF 473 million. That gives you a little bit picture. We don't believe that it come back immediately in one year, CHF 100 million, but we believe that when the market is coming back, you could imagine where we will go. Order backlog, despite the fact that yes, the orders came down, we could keep it on last year's level. This also is a good sign for us. Net sales, Mr. Buyle already mentioned it, 10% down, when we are precise, 10.5%, but it doesn't matter at the end of the day; i t's significant.
It's CHF 50 million down from one year to the next year. For us, this is what I wanna show you the next slide. This is important for us . When you look at our business, this is really—y ou have to understand that, what we show you here. That's more or less the same information what you have seen before, just a little bit a different graphic. I like the graphic because what you see here, always the second bar is the order backlogs, so this CHF 336 million you have seen before. Look at the other bars before, it's CHF 197 million and CHF 276 million. This is order intake. In the second half year of 2025, even so, the economic conditions are not that good still for us in certain areas. We could achieve CHF 276 million.
Now, when you go back, CHF 221 million in 2024, CHF 266 million in 2023. We have to go back to 2022 to see similar levels. We see it's really pushing back, it's coming in. Not all our segments, but therefore we have this portfolio theory that we say, "Yes, some of our segments, market segments are performing quite well." When the others are coming too, then you can make your own judgment where it could end up. Now let's have a look at our P&L. As I mentioned, we can see it, the glass half full or half empty. As I mentioned before, when we talk about 10.5% sales down, that means CHF 50 million, a little bit more than CHF 50 million. Gross profit margin in the range of 60%.
It's easy to calculate. Just this CHF 50 million, we lost CHF 30 million on gross profit, CHF 30 million. Now, compare that with our costs. We have personnel expenses, about we had in 2023, I have to say, four, sorry, about CHF 183 million. We have other expenses in the range of CHF 76 million. We have CHF 260 million expenses. We are losing on our gross profit, CHF 30 million. We would have to reduce our cost base by about 12% to cover that. This is not. It could be possible when we say, "Okay, we don't believe in our niches where we are," but we believe in it. What we could do, what have we done? First of all, let's have a look at personnel expenses.
We could reduce the personnel expenses by CHF 17 million last year. We had to add CHF 2 million back into it because we made a restructuring in Chemnitz, in our plant in Germany, one of the plants in Germany. Because this plant is really built up more or less they serve the Industrial segment. We said we have to make it profitable because the industry is coming back. We do not see CHF 100 million coming in the next years we had our business set up. We reduced it to a level that we can also assure when we make CHF 70 million or CHF 60 million, that we are profitable with this plant within the engine business. I'm not talking about service. It's a different story. I'm talking about engine business, yeah? To make it profitable.
We are still in the position when the business really comes back, that we can go with the wave. We have make a restructuring out there. The other thing what we have done is, yes, of course, we wanna keep our people. We are at the edge of the technology where we are working with our machines. We need the people, we need R&D, we need the technicians, we need the assembly guys, because we cannot just take a passing stranger and say, "Okay, help us to assemble a machine." It will not work. We have to keep our people. Therefore, we tried to go wherever it was possible to make short time work. For example, in Vuadens, luxury good. This plant is just set up for Luxury Goods, more or less, and MedTech.
We also had on top of it in Chemnitz short- term work, but also in Moutier. That means with Tornos. We played the whole card. More or less short- term work helped us with approximately CHF 4.7 million to reduce our cost base still. When we are looking forward, we have reduced our total workforce by approximately 167 FTE, full-time equivalent. Last year, on average, we had 1,880 full-time equivalent in our books. We started this year with 1,814. You see, we reduced this year once again our cost base. When we look at the other OpEx, we could reduce them by approximately 10%. We reduced it by, maybe a precise roughly CHF 7.6 million.
In total, we are in the position to reduce our costs by CHF 22 million. As I mentioned before, the hit from top line was approximately, CHF 30 million. Therefore, our EBIT went down to what you see here, to CHF 6 million. Now, between EBITDA and EBIT, you have another million, for additional depreciation because, you know, last time when we were here a year ago, we just told you that we have finished the new plant in Taiwan for Tornos, so we have higher depreciation. When we look at the financial result, we have been in the position to reduce our finance expenses by approximately CHF 1 million, sorry. On the other hand, the FX effect was negative for us in the range of CHF 2.8 million in this area.
We have strong exposure to the U.S. dollar as well as to the euro. You know that this thing quite strengthened. With that, even though we are doing hedges, we could not cover everything. Last but not least, when you look at our net profit, CHF 5.3 million, where is it coming from? It is also we had some positive tax effects. First of all, we had quite an intensive tax investigation in our sub-holding in Germany. We have five organizations there. Covering the period 2016- 2019, so four years. Even though it took very long to finish it was a positive outcome. You just have to imagine to have a positive tax outcome in Germany. We could achieve that.
No adjustment, so we could release accruals in the magnitude of CHF 1.6 million. We had in all our legal entities in Germany this year of 2025, positive income. We are assessing our assets through impairment tests and so on. Therefore, we were in the position we have loss carry forward. Some of them we could make an asset out of them, and therefore, we have a positive impact here on the taxes. Going further. Let's talk a little bit about the balance sheet. Last year, I said, and I will say it once again also this year. Are we satisfied with our net working capital? No. To say, clear, no, it's too high. There's one reason why it's too high: i t's just the inventory. We are still what you see here up there, CHF 177 million.
Even so, you see that we did quite some good work from CHF 215 million down to CHF 177 million, but it's still too high. It's still a legacy out of the years 2021, 2022, where in Corona times, 2019 started, where we thought we will not be in the position to deliver to our customers, the goods they are asking for because there was quite some tension. Therefore, at the end of the day, to make it simple, we purchased too much. We did it on purpose because we wanted to be in the position to deliver our goods, our machines to the customers. Now we have to reduce it. When I see next year at the end of the year, CHF 20 million less, then I'm happy. Why?
Out of this CHF 177 million, you will see it in the annual report, it's approximately CHF 100 million raw material and components. This CHF 100 million we have to bring down by at least CHF 20 million, then we are on the right spot. On the other hand, you see here, receivables going up. This is mainly driven by our long term contracts, what we have with our customers. The normal term is in this way, we ask the customers as soon as we sign the order to make a down payment in the range of 10%. Thereafter, we are accumulating revenues. Only when then the customer says, okay, he takes over the machine, the next 60%, they have to pay.
When we finally hand over the machine to the customer, the next 20%. In between, we cumulate accounts receivable out of POC. In this amount of CHF 132 million is approximately CHF 70 million out of this portion. It's going up, will be invoiced to the customers in a later stage. You see, the opposite position in the total current liability is CHF 164 million. Out of that, approximately CHF 50 million are prepayments from our customers. Despite what have we done in addition this year, our investment in CapEx were only about CHF 12 million. We in-house production was a little bit increased in Germany. We finished at Tornos SA the inventory system, so smaller things, and we invested CHF 2 million in our systems. Now going forward.
Next slide, I would call it the nice slide. There you see our cash position, the cash flow. When we look at it from the free cash flow last year, CHF -7 million. This year, we increased to CHF 35 million. It's quite an achievement. You see it's coming from operating cash flow, roughly CHF 48 million. We invested CHF 12 million, now it's CHF 35 million. When you look at the last line here, net cash debt, that means we have CHF 29 million more cash on hand than we have bank debts. We have been in that position that we did it. At the end of 2025, we had no current borrowings. We paid everything back. We could clear it. It's quite a good development. What have we done?
This is what I said, this CHF 36 million is a payback, so that we have also for the future, the lines, available for us. We paid a dividend of CHF 5.5 million. From the cash we have our foundation, and we are ready to move if there is, whatever it comes to us. We are very stable here, also going further, how we are doing business. At the end, with that slide, I wanna finish my presentation. That's the payout ratio, what you see here. As mentioned, profit, net profit, CHF 5.3 million. We have roughly 5.5 million shares outstanding. The earnings per share is CHF 0.98, roughly Swiss francs.
The Board of Directors, as Mr. Buyle already mentioned, will propose to the shareholders at the AGM that we pay out a dividend of CHF 1. Let's see if this will turn into reality. Most likely, yes. With that, I will hand over back to Mr. Buyle. Oh, very quick. Only this. Sorry. This was also my beginning statement.
Yes, we wanna grow. We haven't been in the position to do so just because of the market conditions. We wanna achieve a EBIT of 8%. We are sticking to that. We wanna achieve that. Therefore, I said 6% to —1.4% is not even close to this. With a little bit of tailwind, we should be in the position to do so. Dividend still with now this year, a little bit over 100%. It's beyond the range we provided to the market. Thank you.
Thank you, Markus. I'm going to take over, and I want to say a few words on how we look into the year that is already ongoing since three months, 2026. I want to refer back to the industries that I mentioned before and that I explained to you before, because those are the most important drivers of our business, and they will determine how the year 2026 will go. We have a certain correlation, of course, with the overall economic activity, and that relates to the first bullet point on this slide. We don't expect a broad-based recovery. Economic uncertainty is everywhere. We have thought the new trade barriers will become the only risk, but now we have found out that there are other influential factors going on, oil prices going up.
I think you know much better about that than me. Those are all external influential factors which bring us to the conviction that we will not see bright blue skies in this year on an overall, on a macroeconomic environment, on an industrial environment. Having said that, we believe that Aerospace and also the defense sector is going to continue investing, not just in 2026, but we believe this is a mid- to long-term growth and a mid -to long-term investment commitment, looking at the fact that some of these areas have been neglected over the last thirty years. It takes more than one or two years, more than one or two good years to revive what is dearly needed in these days, as we now gradually find out.
We are less optimistic about the recovery of the Luxury Goods segment this year. Our estimation is that it will remain at a low level, probably leveling out in 2026, with then picking up in 2027 again. It's still a long way to go. We're just in the beginning of the year, and it's too early to say. What we can say for sure is that it's not going to be an explosion in a positive way in the Luxury Goods segment. The other segments, Transportation, MedTech & Dental and Energy, have a higher correlation to the overall economic activity. Transportation also depends a bit on how the spending behavior is going to continue like this.
As you might know, Transportation is also one of the industries where we include defense spendings as well. The order backlog, as I said before, has been kept at a good level, which secures good capacity utilization in some of the plants that we have. We're running at full steam in many of the plants. On the other hand, we have not enough work to do in other plants, so it's a little bit of a mixed picture. We believe this is going to remain this way. By the way, what has not been mentioned yet is that, of course, we also try to use the resources mutually and unload the factories that have a lot of capacity utilization with the ones that don't have so much.
We help each other out in very simple terms. We are going to do that, of course, in 2026 because we don't want to let opportunities pass by as we believe this is a unique opportunity that is opening up for our company in the next few years. Really it a lot depends on that we carry through the projects that we have on hand on a very good pace, and hopefully we get some revival from the general economy. I would say a precondition for this has to be that the general chaos that is going on at the moment needs to calm down to a certain level so people can start making their investment calculations and they have the perspective to invest again.
We remain cautious with what we do. We are prepared for everything. We're also prepared to scale down or scale up, because Luxury Goods segment, Swiss watchmaking, has often been called dead. We believe it's as dead as always means it's bouncing back, and it will bounce back at some point. You also have to be prepared for that point in time because there you have an opportunity to deliver material. I was asked about outlook 2026, so what does it mean in financial terms? Summing all this up, what I said now, I think the best way to put it is that I am looking into a year 2026 that is about the same magnitude as 2025. It's way too early to say it's going one way or the other.
We have too many moving parts on the table, and some of the dynamics in the background are similar to the ones we have seen in 2025. Hopefully, we will get surprised in a positive way, but it's too early to judge. Unfortunately, in the last few months, we always have been surprised in negative ways. I'm very cautious, and don't want to be considered pessimistic here. Good. I'm finished with my presentation. I hand it back over to you, Rolph.
Yep. Okay, we have now reached the Q&A section of our conference. We will first start to take questions here in the room. As you know, we have also quite a number of people following this conference online, and we will give those people the opportunity to raise questions after we have been through the room here. Please feel free to participate. Who would like to start? I will come to you with the microphone so that the people online are also able to hear your question and of course, also the answer.
Okay.
Fehrenbach, AWP. Did I understand you correctly, excuse me, that the assumption for the current year of probably stable or what was in connection to sales maybe? You said, I understand it's difficult to predict, to make a clear guidance, but do you see a chance to keep sales stable or even maybe slight increase? Regarding a second question, if you allow, the margin, you said you have, you expect positive effects of different measures you've taken. You're with 1.4%, pretty low. Do you see any improvement potential for this year? Thank you.
The first part, when I talk about expectations, I always talk about bottom line. Top line is there to serve the bottom line. To be honest with you, it's very difficult to give anything more precise at this point, because we have too many influential factors going out there. My statement was related to the EBIT. Concerning your second question, what do we do or what can we do in terms of improving it? I think we have initiated quite some measures last year, which are going to show their full- year effect this year. As I said, we are prepared to take further measures if needed. We also think that we can benefit fully from the synergies that we have initiated.
First priority here is the global procurement initiative or the common procurement initiative, which of course goes better if we have more volume. That has indeed a correlation with the net sales figures that we are talking about. This is basically the improvement potential that we see, but we must not forget that the biggest leverage on the top line is never a cost-saving measure, but is an improvement in sales. We will serve our P&L best if we can make sure that the orders on hand are processed swiftly and according to what we have sold. If there are some external influences that serve us, this is nice.
The main topic is benefiting from the initiatives we have already started. If necessary, start new ones and make sure we process the orders as planned.
Anyone else?
Marina Hofstetter from Schweizer Maschinenmarkt, and mostly the French-speaking part of it. I have two questions. The first one would be, what is driving your clients' investments? You talked about the European roots and the European ownership of the company. That has a big impact, I guess, in the defense industry. Do you see also a positive impact in other segments? And besides the performances of the machine, what do clients expect? More service? You said service is something quite stable or more automation, more complete solutions. And the second question would be concerning the French-speaking part of Switzerland, production sites. You talked about short time work for 2025. How does 2026 look like?
Okay. The first question, I'll try to be short because I could say a lot about that. What drives the investments of our clients? It's very different, sorry, not very similar, because we are working in so many different areas. Of course, defense spending at the moment is driven by the demands to defend or to build up, let's say, a credible wall of defense. We're not talking about the tech investments here, we're talking about defense investments mainly. If you look at Aerospace, the main driver is the increased mobility of people. I mean, imagine Airbus has 8,000 airplanes on order, an order backlog of 8,000 airplanes, so it's incredible. This is certainly a need.
I would say in general, we come to the table when the need of the customer is about gaining efficiency, having a high level of precision and having a high level of reliability. People are looking for good service support. I think that's very important. This is very often it's the decisive factor for customers to choose for us because they know they can rely on a good service organization. At the same time, automation is one of the key elements, one of the key drivers for investment because it's simply the fact that you don't find people anymore. Not skilled, not unskilled, and out of the ones you find, the skilled proportion is even lower.
This is a worldwide phenomenon, for some reason, which I did not fully understand, but I when I travel to customers, I see it everywhere, not just in Europe. How can we tackle this? We can tackle this by integrating the machines more into manufacturing systems. I call this digitalization, and also increase the level of automatability or of automation, which we very often sell together with the machine. Can you repeat your second question?
[inaudible] .
Yes, the production sites in the French-speaking part are both, of course, very focused on, let's say, the industries that are not going so well at the moment. We are still working with short time in both of those factories. The factory in Vuadens, we use as a spillover factory for production that we cannot handle in the plants that are fully loaded. We can gain some synergies there. Moutier, we are also applying the short time work and, of course, doing our best to improve the situation as much as we can. Those two factories, of course, are mostly affected by the downturn in the Luxury Goods segment.
Good morning or lunch. Tobias Klöpper from ZKB. Quick question on, you already touched briefly on this, considering you have a pretty large footprint and concentrated orders in aerospace and defense. How can you even further efficiently use your footprint? Can you shift more production, you just mentioned, to French-speaking part of Switzerland? Or maybe a few words on this.
Well, the first priority, of course, is always to use the footprint for the intended purpose. If that is not possible, if the markets are down also, we have increased possibilities now by the merger with Tornos to use mutually the factories that we have. Of course, we can always only distribute the workload that we have. We are doing this now already at a quite professional level. We're also including even the Taiwanese factories for pre-assemblies. I think it's a little bit opportunistic because it really depends on how the utilization is there and what is needed.
I think what we have shown ourselves after the merger is that we work together in a more close form, and we are much quicker to exchange capacity utilization if needed now. This is something that we have not been very used to in the past, but it worked out quite well. Without that, to be honest, we wouldn't be able to manage all the orders that we have on hand in the segments that I explained.
Andreas Meier, Finanz und Wirtschaft. Why aren't you doing better in Energy? Because last week we heard at Accelleron that the order backlog at the power generation companies are very high. You have to wait five years for turbine delivery and also power transformation have all books full of orders, also because of this high demand of energy for all these data centers.
Mm-hmm.
Why aren't you affected from that boom in power generation?
It's a very valid question and a good question. I explained a little bit before, Energy to us means mostly gas and steam turbine manufacturers, which would qualify for Accelleron, and also wind energy. We are always looking at these figures in relative terms. How do we compare it to the year before? I would say the years 2022- 2024 were heavily influenced by a lot of investments in the Chinese wind turbine market. Because according to the five-year plan, China installed 9,000 wind turbines per year. Investing 9,000, 9,000, 9,000. China is over-invested in wind turbine energy at the moment. The orders from China went down, which pushed us up in the years before; t his is now missing.
It will pick up again once the next five-year plan takes place because there is an increase in electric power from wind turbines planned. It has been substituted to a certain degree by the, let's say, traditional way of creating energy. Mostly, we have seen a lot of inflow from orders in the gas and steam turbine field. The Energy sector to us, in general, is very much attached to very particular projects. If we get two of these, we will see an increase of 20%, and if we don't get them, it's more or less flat. Energy is the sum of a few big projects, usually.
Due to the influence that I explained, it came down a little bit because this Chinese wind power boom has come to a plateau. It will increase, I would say, maybe 2027 again, and it has not been fully replaced by the investments in fossil energy. What is actually going on at the moment, and Accelleron is probably a beneficiary of it, probably not, is investment in nuclear energy as well. The new technology that's called small nuclear reactors or small modular reactors. We're not talking about entire nuclear plants, we're talking about decentralized power generation. I believe this is going to be a trend that supports us in the next years, not just 2026. Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Anyone else in the room here?
Marc Possa, VV Vermögensverwaltung AG. Just an understanding question concerning your footprint and the load factor differences among these 11 production sites. Maybe the first question, how can you really shift labor from one to the other site? I mean, you correctly said they're dedicated, they're purpose-driven. It's probably, even though they are mechanically skilled, difficult to just translocate them. Then the other question is, where do we see the maximum and minimum loads among these 11 sites? Because the average is misleading. How can you adapt the footprint, the structural footprint accordingly, depending on recovery of certain sectors or not break-even points, basically.
Yeah. The cross-utilization, you mentioned rightly, the cross-utilization is dependent mostly on the skill level of people. We are often asked by customers, "Why can you not produce more? Because you have so and so many people." The problem is, it's always bottleneck capacities that decide how much you can produce. I mean, you can read it in the textbook, but you can also see it in reality. When we shift production to other production sites, it's usually because we have a similar skill set there. For example, we have machines that are produced in Rorschacherberg. They are very similar, technically speaking, to machines that are produced in Vuadens. So we find a workforce there that is capable of doing it with a minimum amount of training.
What we try not to do is to shift workforce from one place to the other because it's usually expensive. If you shift it cross-border, you have a problem with immigration and so on. You end up in administrative issues. What we found out is it's better to put the value creation in its entirety into other plants. There we are dependent on. It doesn't work that we put a Bumotec machine into the Rorschacherberg factory where they produce huge machines because the skill set, the basic skill set is always there. But the specialized skill set, we need to look for other places. It's not fully replaceable one and the other.
Concerning capacity utilization, in some plants, we're running at 110%, 120%. It's really beyond the top. We could do more, and we do more, but that is then outsourced to other factories. If you look at the, let's say, the lowest capacity utilization, I would say somewhere between 50% and 60%, which is okay, which is not durable on a long-term basis, but we do not expect it to be a long-term effect because the industries that we are in, all of them have a driver behind that secures that it will come up again. As I said, the Swiss luxury watch market has been called dead many times.
Even I know that with my age, and it has never been true. We truly believe that the fundamental drivers behind that will come back. It's just the Swiss watchmaking industry is a matter of over-investment in the last few years, which we are seeing, let's say, the compensation effect at the moment.
No further questions in the room. I would like to hand over to the people online. Please go ahead.
We have a question from the phone from Louis Billon from Baader Europe. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. My first question is a follow-up on the gas turbine and in the Energy division end market. I understand that gas turbine manufacturers order now to secure the product, but they would prefer to be delivered in few years. Do you expect your order to convert into sales in not in 2026, but in 2027, 2028, for the Energy division?
I cannot answer that question in very general terms. It depends on what we are talking about. We have orders on hand that have a throughput time of, I would say, 12-16 months. Out of the big projects that I mentioned before, probably most of those projects have a longer throughput time. Really depending on when we get the order, depending on when the POC turnover is going to take place. What I can say, it's over a longer period of time, but I cannot say it will hit us in 2026 or not, because we have a constant flow of projects, obviously. Like it is almost with every product, it doesn't turn into turnover immediately.
That's why we have for most of our clients, we have applied the POC method.
Okay, thank you.
Go ahead.
Second question, if I may. You have mentioned that the lower margin is also a part of the lower margin is due to the mix effect with a higher proportion of low margin products. Is it a structural change, or should we expect the opposite impact next year or in the next few years? Maybe it's related to the end market. Could you give us more color on margin by end market?
I would say, the reduction in— I'll try to summarize this briefly. The reduction in the margin that we have seen is to a large extent attributable also to the decline in Luxury Goods that we have seen because margins are good in the Luxury Goods; and it directly correlates. A lot of it directly correlates with it. Having the same top line does not mean we have the same bottom line. In our group, it's very much an effect of what kind of products that we sell. And we are of course dependent on the wellbeing of the Luxury Goods segment. We also have decent margins in the Aerospace segment. Where the more competition is, like in Industrial, margins tend to be worse.
Even I cannot say this in generality because it really depends, again, on the projects that we have. As I said during my presentations, we are not competing in the mainstream. Mainstream is not the place where we are and where we should be because it's all about price, and the price war, we usually don't win. We win if precision is needed, if performance is needed, and if efficiency is needed. To answer your question, the bouncing back of Luxury Goods is that will definitely help us a lot, but it's not the only leverage that we have. I repeat myself, for us, it's important that we can work through the order backlog that we have in a proper way.
If we have one or two factors that will help us this year, I'm sure we're going to see a good performance.
Thank you. Any further questions from our online audience?
We have no more questions from the phone.
Okay. Thank you. Okay, we have now reached the end of the conference. I would like on behalf of all of us. Sorry. Oh, you have a question. Okay. You didn't. Please go ahead.
Thank you. [Thomas Bodi], [South Awage]. You said the synergy program that the first effect you saw at the end of 2025. Can you quantify how much it is, and what do you expect from the synergy program in 2026?
We have had several initiatives on the synergy program. As I said, the most important one was the procurement synergies. We calculate those between CHF 5 million and CHF 10 million as synergies in procurement. Of course, Markus has elaborated on the stock levels that we have. It takes a certain while until it trickles down into the P&L. That's why it's very difficult to derive the synergy program effect on the P&L directly because it has a certain time lag. What we could achieve in terms of using commonly or mutually the infrastructure that we are using is probably. I would estimate in the area of CHF 2 million- CHF 5 million, I would add on that.
Overall, we are talking about maybe an influence of some somewhere below CHF 10 million. As I said, you won't find this one-to-one in the P&L, as the most important effect of this, which is the procurement effect, will take a certain while until it works itself through the stock levels that we have that are, as I said, or as has been said before, too high. Does that answer your question more or less?
Okay. We have reached the end of the conference. We would like to sincerely thank all of you, both here in the room and those who are joining us online for your time and engagement today. For those attending us in person here at the SIX ConventionPoint in Zurich, I warmly invite you to join us for an apéro in the foyer. To our online participants, thank you once again for your interest. If you have any further questions, we are, of course, available at any time. Wishing you all a pleasant rest of the day and a successful week. Thank you.
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