Hello, and welcome to the presentation of the result for the financial year 2023-2024. Before I hand over to Mr. Kapsch, some housekeeping issues. Please note that this call will be recorded. With your participation, you agree to this. We would appreciate if you turn your camera on during the call, and finally, at the beginning of the presentation, your microphone will be muted. After the presentation, for the Q&A session, you will have the opportunity to unmute yourself and ask your questions verbally. However, if you have an urgent question during the presentation, please let us know by raising your hand. Thank you very much. And Mr. Kapsch, how was the last financial year?
Well, thank you very much, Marcus. I am very pleased to communicate to you today our last fiscal year results, and I am very well prepared to answer your questions. I will try to do my best to answer them properly as far as I'm able to do so. I have to apologize, I caught a cold, so maybe my voice is not the best today, but I'll try to do my best. So let's start with the presentation. So regarding the last fiscal year, we had lots of project successes that are going to strengthen our base for the revenues for the current fiscal year and for the fiscal year ahead of us. I will go into detail regarding the order intake of last year.
It's not just about the order intake, but it's the volume, but also about the quality of the order intake. The results from operating activities, the earnings before interest and tax, increased to EUR 70 million, of course, heavily impacted by the settlement of the German claim, and I will go into detail on that, and I will present a comparison about the one-time effects, positive as well as negative, later on. Our key financial indicators, regarding our balance sheet are showing a solid base, basis now again. Of course, we are not yet where we want to be, neither in regard to the equity ratio nor the indebtedness, but that's what we will cope with in the forthcoming years, financial years.
Now, the settlement agreement in Germany has significantly improved our financial position. It's approximately EUR 109 million impact in our cash position, and EUR 79 million impact in regard to our EBIT. The outlook for 2024 and 2025, which is the current fiscal year, we are envisaging growth, a revenue growth, which is beyond the general market growth, and a slight improvement of our EBIT, but not of EUR 70 million, but the adjusted one, which I will explain later on. The revenues are EUR 439 million, which is slightly below fiscal year 2022, 2023, but the invoiced sales are higher.
So, from a pure financial perspective, from a cash perspective, we are better from a revenue recognition perspective, in regard to IFRS rules, we are a bit lower. Why? The major impact is America, where we were a bit lower than in the previous fiscal years. Why? We did not push that much for revenues there, but for getting a stronger position in regard to our stability in North America. EBIT improved to EUR 70.3 million. I will go into the details later on. EBIT margin, of course, 13%, and the free cash flow, which was really important, is really important, reached EUR 106 million.
The major part of it was used to pay back debt, which means pay back loans to our banks, and which put us in a way better financial position than we were a year before. The result of the period, which is attributable to the, to the equity holders, is, EUR 23 million, which is, roughly EUR 30 million, EUR 28 million better. Sorry, EUR 48 million better than the year before. Net debt is EUR 106 million, which is a huge improvement, and, total assets, and total liabilities are EUR 444 million, which is a slight reduction compared to the previous year. Why? We were a bit better in our working capital management, but there is still room for improvement in our working capital management, particularly when it comes to contract assets and, inventory.
The equity ratio raised by eight percentage points to approximately 19%. So, when it comes to the significant events, the very important events, it's of course the settlement with the German government, which had a cash inflow of EUR 109 million till today, and an EBIT effect of EUR 79 million. And out of this EUR 109 million, we used EUR 88 million as payback to our banks in order to reduce our loan, our outstanding loans. The restructuring of the financing, we recently agreed on the restructuring of our financing, which is not a real restructuring, but which is an extension of our current financing structure until March 2026. Sorry. In November last year, we did a capital increase.
We issued 1,300,000 new shares, out of which 63% were taken over by the KAPSCH-Group Beteiligungs GmbH, which is the main shareholder, and the rest was taken by the capital market, so that the basic structure remains the same. Well, we reached important milestones in existing projects, so we were able to close out lots of our critical projects, particularly in the United States, in North America. And these projects we were able to sort out will now turn not all of them, but many of them into cash cows, because they are now gonna go into maintenance and service projects and operations projects, where we have pretty decent margins.
As I indicated in the beginning, our invoiced sales reached EUR 558 million, which is higher than in the previous fiscal year. South Africa, the tolling system in South Africa is a really interesting story because it was extended several times, and it was now extended again for one month. We assume that it will be extended further on, but sometime within this fiscal year it will come to an end. Numerous new projects awarded. There are lots of projects that were awarded, which are not yet in the order intake, of course, but additional ones that were awarded since April first of this year, which do not yet appear here.
So the order backlog increased by 15% to EUR 1.4 billion. Now, let me bit explain the revenue structure, how the EUR 539 million are structured. When it comes to our segments, tolling and traffic management, 70% is tolling and 30% is traffic management. Tolling went decreased. Tolling decreased. Well, this is not, this is of course not favorable, but explainable, because this is primarily America, where we stabilized our business and did not heavily push for new business. What we are now gonna do, and what we are already doing, because we have a stable situation there.
Traffic management increased by 7% to EUR 160 million, and this is a pretty good sign, because we invested in traffic management a couple of years ago, because we are convinced that tolling and traffic management, at least when it comes to the connected vehicle, they will merge or converge. When it comes to regions, we had a growth in the EMEA region, which is primarily Europe, by 2%. Of course, I reiterate, a decrease in Americas and unfortunately also in APAC. But APAC was affected by a postponement of signing of contracts, so we assumed that the contracts will be signed mid of last fiscal year, but they were signed just recently. The business types: operations, implementation, and components.
Operations, meanwhile, accounts for 56% of our revenues, which is a kind of stable base, because this is sustainable. Implementation accounts for approximately 28%. This portion will be a bit higher this fiscal year because of the order intake, and 16% in components, and components decreased. Why did components decrease? This is also primarily because of North America, not because of Europe and the rest of the world, because their component sales are still increasing. So, well, this slide shows the two segments, tolling and traffic management. And this also shows that we generated losses in tolling in the fiscal year 2022-2023, and we were profitable in 2023-2024.
But one has to admit that this is due to the German settlement. But what one should always consider is that if the German contract would be still alive, this segment would anyway be highly profitable. Traffic management segment, we are pretty much satisfied with the segment because it's now the second or third time in a row that we are able to generate an EBIT margin of 10%. As one or the other of you might remember, four years ago, we had hardly any profitability in this segment. So let's address the next slide, and now I show you the bridge. We normally do not explain one-time effects.
This is not what we do, but this time we have a real special situation, and therefore, we bridge the profitability in the P&L to a hypothetical P&L, because I think this is really important to understand the dynamics. In fiscal 2022-2023, our EBIT was at EUR 5.2 million. In fiscal year 2023-2024, it reached EUR 70 million. So I take this 70 million, and this composes from the German claim, which is EUR 79 million, which is a positive impact, and for the bridge, therefore, counted negatively. The second positive effect was customer receivables and a reversal of allowance because we thought that the customer will not pay, and meanwhile, he accepted the invoice, so this has a positive impact of EUR 4.1 million.
On the other side, we have a margin adjustment in projects, primarily North America, which is EUR 25 million, and we have one-time restructuring costs of EUR 3.2 million. Why do we count the adjustments in North America as one-time effect? Because, this is what we did in order to get rid of all of our historical problems in these projects. So netted, the EBIT would be EUR 15 million. So this would then mean that we tripled the real operational EBIT from fiscal year 2022-2023 to 2023-2024. Please, next page. So, the result attributable to equity holders is EUR 23 million. That's what I already explained in the very beginning, and here you just can see the impact.
I just would like to point out one topic, and this is the financial result. Because you could think what happened there, EUR 13.9 million in the previous year, EUR 30 million, financial minus EUR 30 million financial result in this fiscal year. Of course, this is composed of primarily the for approximately a quarter higher interest rates on on 2 tranches of financing, which we meanwhile paid back. The second one is we had to pay kind of an earn-out to the banks in connection with the with the German claim. And this is an IFRS rule, has no cash impact, but is an IFRS rule, is the hyperinflation adjustment in regard to Argentina, which is approximately EUR 7 million.
So this is the explanation for the EUR 30 million negative financial result in the last fiscal year. So, when it comes to net investments, we are not a capital-intense enterprise. We are a personal cost-intense enterprise because we invest lots in R&D and in project execution. That's where the major part of our value chain is. Furthermore, we have a pretty high portion of third-party materials and third-party services. But why did we increase from 3.3 to 4.9? This is because we added one production line for components in our facility in Austria, because there is huge demand in components. Now, you might question, why is there huge demand?
You previously or I previously presented to you that we sold less components than in the previous year. Yes, this is correct, but this is heavily impacted by North America, and North America manufacturing is located in Canada. So, but, Europe and the rest of the world is, has increasing demand for components. The free cash flow impacted by, by, the German claim, EUR 106 million, which is really important for us in order to reduce our debt position, and that's what we did. I already explained total, total assets and the equity ratio before, so I think I do not have to add anything further. Next slide, please. And this is the outlook. So we are expecting, a growth in, revenues, which should be beyond the, the growth of...
the general market growth, which means, a growth beyond 7%. And we, we are envisaging, a slight improvement in the EBIT beyond the adjusted EBIT of the last fiscal year. So thank you very much, and I am now prepared, or we are now prepared to answer your questions.
So you will be unmuted now, and, please raise your hand in case of a question, and, I will call your name. No hand raised yet. Teresa Schinwald, analyst from Raiffeisen Bank . Hello, Teresa.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. My questions, I was surprised first about the revenue weakness in the and this, yeah, accounting versus cash. So if you could explain it again a bit more in depth, not only the motivation, but the mechanics of it. And the second was also a top, is also a top-line question, because you already showed in the presentation that the order intake was very strong, and now even confirmed that the contracts that were delayed have now been signed.
And in the light of the strong order intake and this signing of contracts, so the revenue recognition, the top-line guidance of only above markets at 7.5% and a bit, rather, it seems rather conservative, and is actually below what I had expected. So could you also talk a bit more about your caution in this regard?
Okay. So regarding the accounting topic, how the mechanics is, so in regard of IFRS, you have the method of percentage of completion. What we tried to do in the last fiscal year is to reduce our contract assets. I named it before, sorry. Our contract assets, because the contract assets are heavily pushing or pressing our working capital. So our goal was to release liquid funds by invoicing and reducing contract assets. And this results in the difference between the net sales, which is the revenues, and the invoiced sales. So invoiced sales went up, and net sales went down. So that helped us to free up cash. That's the mechanics behind.
The top line, the top line, you said it's, it's conservative. Well, I do not want to overpromise and raise expectations we, in the end, will not fulfill. Because, then I have again a pressure on the share price, and that's what I would like to avoid. But I do not want to motivate you to think, "Okay, they are gonna raise... They are, they are now telling us, they will raise their, their or increase their revenues by 8%, but, well, let's assume it's 15% or 20%." Please, I do not want to motivate you in this direction, yeah? But of course... You know, the market is not, not really, not really easy. There are lots of opportunities out there.
This is correct, particularly when it comes to North America, and we have a good pipeline, but we also sometimes in the past had a good pipeline, and then tenders were canceled, were postponed, so I'm a bit cautious now.
May I add one thing here?
Yes.
Teresa, if you look into the consolidated financial statements where we break this order backlog down into the next fiscal years, you will see that the number of backlog with EUR 1.4 billion is high, but it is just 386, which are as of 31st of March, which are directly attributable to the next fiscal year. So, many of those, and this gives you the answer, of this EUR 1.4 billion is effectively operations revenues, which will come on a longer, on a longer time horizon. And, yeah, we are almost, almost there where we were last year at this point in terms of visibility, and that made us just a little bit more cautious.
Thanks a lot. I'll go back in the queue.
Thank you. Daniel, no, it's you.
Yeah.
It's definitely you. Sorry, I saw Mr. Troy, but this is not a hand from Commerzbank. Daniel, please, analyst, Erste Bank.
Thank you very much. Can I ask you to provide us maybe a little bit more insight in the regional dynamics that you expect to see in the current fiscal year? You know, you talked about the past a little bit, but maybe you could also lay out about your big regions, how you expect the business to shape, if you expect maybe also already a recovery on the components business side? And maybe, as far as possible, can you also talk about the biggest potentials that you see, project related, that should be awarded in the, let's say, next 12 months?
Well, first, regarding the regions, I would assume that North America is well, more or less stable. More or less stable. Latin America will grow. EMEA, either stable or, let's put it as stable, and APAC will grow. And, Africa, we do not yet know. So EMEA should be stable and, or grow. North America, stable. Latin America, grow. APAC, grow. And, Africa, I don't dare to give you an answer now. But, rather decrease than increase.
I think there was also a question on components, Daniel.
Mm-hmm.
Did you want to answer?
I'll answer.
Yeah. Look, I think we have to look at components from two different angles. In absolute terms, you see, that we lost 2% of revenues. But if you look at the unit level or units sold, we cannot confirm this development, and this is particularly due to the fact that we have, in North America, a development from, let me say, one technology to another. It's not a pure substitution yet, but it is a smooth development. And this other technology, which we also cover, by the way, has lower unit costs. That means, revenue goes down, not because we lose volume, but it is just that it is partly replaced by volumes at lower sales figures. So a classical business mix issue.
But that's just North America, not the rest of the world, please.
And will you be able to also talk about the rest of the world? Because I would expect this to be exactly the opposite, the rest of the world, that you would actually increase your sales mix towards more satellite-based on-board units, especially whichever-
Well, satellite-based on-board units is currently a European topic. This is Europe. Nowhere else in the world you have satellite. There are countries considering satellite, which is India, for instance, but no one in North America, no one in Latin America, no one in Asia-Pacific is, with the exception of India, considering satellite tolling. Currently.
And would you, would you then also see maybe also an upgrade from passive sticker tags towards microwave on-board units, which would also actually increase-
No.
-the mix?
No... No, I would see the opposite.
No, that's exactly what I was telling you.
It's the opposite. It's the opposite. The DSRC tags, when it comes to RFID, yeah, are substituted to sticker tags. But this is a—this depends on the technology. So you cannot substitute European technology by sticker tags. That does not work. You cannot use sticker tags in Europe, because sticker tags are based on 915 MHz technology, and DSRC is based on 5.8 GHz technology. This does not work. Even in North America, you need other transceivers, which means other antennas. But they have multi-protocol readers that can read different protocols. But all the different protocols are on 915 MHz in North America. So where you have 5.8 GHz, you cannot use sticker tags. Yeah?
Maybe related to this follow-up, you've just increased your on-board unit production capacity in Austria, right? So would you expect that this capacity will be utilized in the current year already? Or, how do you see dynamics, demand and dynamics develop going forward?
Well, first, we had a huge order backlog, and this was also a reason why we implemented the, or installed the, the new line. Secondly, there is huge demand, but, the demand is volatile. So sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower. And, of course, this is not easy to plan, and this is not easy, or it's not- it does not help to have the manufacturing facility running in three shifts, each and every day. So that means lots of flexibility in our manufacturing subsidiary in Vienna. And I see our head of manufacturing-
Yeah, yeah, he was here, he was here.
... is listening, and I hope he agrees to what I say.
Hello, Martin. Okay.
Yeah, maybe he go.
Maybe turning to the last part of my first question, would you be able to, if possible, talk about the bigger potentials that you see currently tenders out that might be awarded in the next 12 months? Just to get a feeling on the market dynamics.
Yes, of course. There is, but I can't name. Of course, I can name those we already signed, and we already presented, which is, for instance, Switzerland, which is a huge success, but I can't name the others that are not yet signed. So there are lots of projects in North America, and these are by far the biggest projects. There are projects in Europe, also in dimensions, somewhere between EUR 20 million and EUR 80 million in revenues. There are projects in Latin America, but all somewhere between EUR 5 million and EUR 25 million. We recently signed a contract in, and already delivered, and this was very fast, in Brazil. Brazil is one of our really strong markets and growing markets in Latin America.
Of course, there are projects in Southeast Asia that we are going after. And, yeah, that's it, more or less. And of course, there is the extension that we envisage in South Africa.
Yeah, okay. Understand. Yeah, perfect. Thank you very much.
You're welcome. Any further question? Okay. Yeah, okay.
So-
Thank you. If there is no further question?
We thank you.
Thank you very much. Have a nice afternoon or day, depending upon where you are. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye.
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