Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We are now at the last presentation before our lunch break, and I'm very happy and excited to introduce to you Mr. Felix Strohbichler, who is the CFO of Palfinger, and who will share his insights with us in the next half hour. As always, we'll have roughly 20 minutes presentation, followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. If you feel like asking questions, please use the chat box to enter them, and we will then address them during the Q&A. We will record this event, and you will find it later on on Research Hub together with the presentation deck. That's all I have to say. I will now hand it over to Felix. Felix, floor is yours.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the presentation of Palfinger AG Based on the Financial Year 2025. Our results of the first quarter will be released next week, so please follow our latest release next week. Starting with what actually makes us stand out, what is the equity story of Palfinger? We are at the same time a technology and an industry leader, which is something which is not usual, so we have a market share in several of our product lines of 30% or even more. At the same time, we are a premium supplier, a premium player, and a technology leader. Secondly, Palfinger is a highly resilient company. We have a very broad product portfolio. We are globally present in all continents. We have 30 production sites in several countries worldwide.
We have a huge customer diversity, and we also consistently implement our strategy in the region, for the region to even further increase our resilience. Very important for you to understand is that Palfinger is clearly a growth company. We have, on the one hand, a focus on growth markets like North America, India, and the marine market, but we also expect a huge momentum in the near future in Europe, and also service segment is a major driver for our future growth. Last but not least, this growth, but not only the growth, also the potential we have out of digitization, optimization of our footprint, and standardization gives us a huge earnings potential to substantially improve our bottom line in the future. In this slide, you can see why Palfinger is so resilient in terms of customer diversity.
We have a lot of customer segments we are serving. The biggest of those is infrastructure, with around 18%, and then the second biggest is already at 14%, so it's quite spread out, and it's a lot of industry segments which have a very interesting outlook and growth potentials like waste management, infrastructure, marine, public sector, including defense, forestry. All of those sectors are very good in terms of outlook, and of course, this broad setup helps us a lot to balance out weaknesses in one or the other sector. Combined with the broad geographical footprint, it also helps us then to balance out downturns in one or the other market. We have a solution for every customer need. On the one hand, in terms of lifting solutions on trucks and on rail cars. On the other hand, also on ships, on oil rigs.
We offer solutions for offshore wind farms. We offer defense solutions like slipway systems. This is a very broad product offering. What all those products have in common are the digital solutions which come with our offerings. Coming to the market development of last year, but obviously, I will also talk about the actual situation. We have seen that Southern Europe performed quite well in the past years. Northern Europe has been weak, but improved in 2025 and is still on a reasonable and good level. Germany, however, is still on a low level, has been on a low level last year. There have been no positive effects out of the infrastructure package. We hope for some minor effects this year.
We actually count on larger impacts next year, but this is something which has not been reflected in our numbers, even not in the order intake in 2025 so far. Coming to North America, obviously, the tariff situation and especially Section 232 had, of course, an impact, on the one hand, on profitability, but even more so on the willingness of customers to take buying decisions. The Section 232 namely weighed on demand and led to a lower order intake in North America, even if it was higher than the year before. In Latin America, we had, on the one hand, a very volatile market environment in Argentina. However, overall, we had a record revenue in Latin America due to a very strong situation in Brazil. At the moment, we see that Brazil is going back slightly in terms of order intake, but still on a good level.
In APAC, we have to make a difference between China on the one hand, India and the rest of APAC. China shows no noticeable economic recovery, even not now, so not in 2025, and also for 2026, we expect perhaps a slight improvement, but not significant. India clearly remains the key growth driver in APAC. This is also the reason why we are going to open an assembly factory in India in 2027, which will allow us to serve the market as a local player, which will give us a much better cost position and which will also allow us to serve other low-cost countries with solutions coming out of India. Going to Marine. Marine has been a problem child a few years ago.
Today, I can say that Marine is one of the best parts of our group, with an excellent performance driven by major orders from offshore wind, cruise ships, oil and gas, and we still have a consistently good order intake, so we do not expect here a significant change of the very good market environment. On the other hand, in Russia, we still have a ring-fenced setup with around EUR 80 million of revenue. In the last year, the sanctions actually have been a very clear negative impact on the performance, so we have almost no earnings in Russia at the moment. There was a sharp decline, and we do expect that this will continue on a similar level also throughout 2026. What does this mean for our P&L in 2025? As you can see, there was a slight decline of, if not 1%, in revenue to EUR 2.34 billion.
EBIT was the third best year in history, as well as also the turnover with EUR 174.3 million, an EBIT margin of 7.5%. What is, of course, more important for our investors is the consolidated net result, which came close to the previous year result. This allowed us also, combined with the very good free cash flow, I will come to this in a minute, to keep up the dividend at the level of EUR 0.90 like the year before, which means the second highest dividend in Palfinger's history. At the right side, you can see the revenue distribution by region. EMEA at the moment is still at 60%. EMEA has already been a little bit smaller in the pie because North America has been already stronger. Last year, due to the tariffs development, the share of North America has gone back slightly to 24%.
The other regions account for around 4%-6% each. Here you can see the free cash flow statement. I'm happy to report that in 2025, we could show the absolute record in free cash flow in Palfinger's history with EUR 181.5 million, obviously based on a good operational performance, but also on positive effects, on the one hand, in working capital. We further increased our working capital position, which was still too high due to effects out of the post-COVID phase. On the other hand, we also have been rather low in terms of investing activities. If you compare to the previous years, this was rather low, and this led to this very good free cash flow. For the next years, we have the plan to clearly show a free cash flow of more than EUR 100 million.
The level of EUR 181 million was exceptional due to these two special effects of change in working capital and lower level of investments. Coming now to our balance sheet. This is one of the slides I like most because last year we managed to bring down net debt by more than EUR 200 million. We have now EUR 160 million of net debt. The average remaining term debt is quite reasonable, 3.17 years. This is a substantial improvement of our balance sheet based on a sale of treasury shares, which I will talk about in a minute. This strong improvement, of course, on the net debt side, also improved all the balance sheet KPIs. Equity ratio went up from 35.3% to almost 43%. Gearing is at extremely healthy 50% net debt to EBITDA at 1.7%, which is a very good KPI when talking to banks about financing.
I mentioned already that we sold our treasury shares last year in summer. We placed shares for EUR 100 million at the placement price of EUR 35.40. We had acquired those shares when reversing a cross-holding with a former shareholder of Palfinger, the SANY Group in China. This amount of EUR 100 million will support our implementation of the Strategy 2030+, and below you see those areas which we highlighted also in terms of investment, key things for our Strategy 2030+. On the one hand, we are investing a lot in the expansion of our service setup in North America. We opened a spare parts hub recently in North America. We will add several service locations which are owned by Palfinger. We will add service partners, and we will substantially increase the number of mobile service vans. We are heavily investing in defense projects.
I already mentioned the spare parts hub in North America. We are also expanding service locations in EMEA. We are implementing the new plant in India, which I mentioned before. All those projects are supported with this placement of the treasury shares. I already showed you the improved balance sheets. Obviously this had a very positive impact on the balance sheet. What is also very important for our investors, that the now very good free float of 44% increases the liquidity of the share substantially and enabled the inclusion in the ATX index. You see this on this slide. Last year we had a substantial positive development of our share price, around 70%. This went in line with a substantial improvement of the liquidity already in the first half of the year and even more so after we sold the treasury shares.
Since March 23rd, we are now part again of the ATX index, which gives us easy access to international investors due to a higher visibility and even better visibility. Of course, also further increase in liquidity is expected due to the fact that index funds will invest in Palfinger. Coming now to the outlook for 2026. What do we expect? Of course, we will be able to tell you more in a week. What we stated at the year-end was that we have an order backlog which extends already beyond June, July. We are more or less covered for the first half year. The first half year will be, from today's expectation, slightly above the prior year level.
Also for the rest of the year, we said we are confident, but actually we do expect that we can continue the positive development we see in the first half year. We set ourselves ambitious financial targets for 2030 with our new Strategy 2030+, called Reach Higher. We can reach more than EUR 3 billion of revenue through organic growth if we get at least a certain tailwind from the market, which we expect. This will help us to achieve a 12% EBIT margin and 15% return on capital employed, being the number one for crane and lifting solutions, of course, also in 2030 and beyond.
Major paths to reach these numbers is a substantial focus on services in North America, and we also count on a certain recovery of some core European markets like Germany and France. Which is not fully reflected in these numbers is the big opportunities which are created by the investment programs around the world. I would like to highlight especially Germany and Europe. In Germany, there are overall investment needs of EUR 3.7 trillion until 2035. Probably not all of this will come through, and financing is still a major issue. It just shows the potential of Germany alone in terms of necessary investments. EU, at the moment, has an infrastructure investment gap of EUR 500 billion-EUR 800 billion every year. On top of this, we already see major impact from the U.S. target project, artificial intelligence infrastructure amounting to EUR 500 billion.
One day, we hopefully, and I'm convinced that one day we will see also an end of the war in Ukraine, and reconstruction of Ukraine today should lead to a need of investment of EUR 500 billion as well. We are confident that in the future we have a lot of opportunities, and we are prepared to benefit from those opportunities, and we are ready for the future. Thank you for listening to my presentation. We still have now 15 minutes for your question. I'm looking forward to your remarks and questions. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this run-through. We do have a lot of questions, and I'm going to start out with a very specific one regarding the Tail Lift business, which is still loss-making. What specifically do you think it needs to change it or to become viable, or do you think there is a potential divestment on the table?
The business has been positive the year before. The problem was last year that our core markets, Germany and U.S., have been extremely weak. We have done a lot of efforts, especially in terms of product cost set up, which improved actually our position a lot. If the volume is missing, of course, this makes it very difficult. Actually, it's rather a volume question. We are not actively marketing this entity for sale. Obviously, it's a non-core asset, and we are open for opportunities. At the moment, it would be a wrong point in time to push for a sale due to the market development. We see already a certain improvement in Germany, in the market. It's not yet great, but it's going in the right direction. In U.S., the market for us is still rather depressed.
It doesn't mean that we see this as a core part of the group, but we are also not forced, so to say, to put it on the market for whatever price.
Thank you. We talked about APAC in your presentation and that China is still rather lackluster. The question is: India being the central growth driver in APAC while China shows no recovery, are you deliberately deprioritizing China, or is that just purely a macro-driven outcome?
Well, I would say that we keep our market share in China, it's around 15%, but we have a factory which is actually able to produce 5,000 units, and at the moment, we are producing around 2,500 units. We have enough room to grow without the need for further investment. It's not a deprioritization, but actually, in China, we are set up for growth. It's just a tailwind we need in order to get there. In India, it's much more in the focus because here we are really creating a new setup, and we will also use India more than China for export business for low-cost markets.
Thank you. Everybody's talking about defense spending, and defense is now listed as a dedicated growth driver alongside marine for you. How large is the current defense revenue, roughly, and what products and contracts are driving that?
Well, at the moment, our revenue for defense solutions is still limited at around EUR 50 million. We do expect that we can grow this revenue to EUR 100 million within the next five years. This doesn't sound that much if you look at the overall revenue. However, it's very attractive business with a lot of service revenue, which also comes with it. We highly prioritize here the defense solutions, and we invested massively into product development. Just to explain to you what are the main solutions. On the one hand, in marine, we are the market leader for slipway systems. So if you look at the battleship with the V-shaped inlet at the rear to let in fast rescue boats, for example, this is a solution which comes from Palfinger as the market leader.
One unit costs between EUR 3 million-EUR 6 million, so this is a very attractive high-end business. On the other hand, on the land side, we supply, of course, cranes, truck-mounted forklifts, but the main product is a special hookloader, because logistics in NATO armed forces are based on ISO containers, and there are special hookloader solutions in order to do this transportation. Just to give you an idea, our main competitor, Hiab, has been communicated that they sold about EUR 100 million last year, mainly from the hookloader division. This has been the case for decades. Hiab is historically the market leader because Hiab used to have 80% market share 60 years ago. For hookloaders, Palfinger only entered the market two decades ago.
Now we are very aggressively pushing into this segment, so we do expect to gain a major share of the defense market, especially for the hookloader system. This is a clear focus.
Thank you. You talked about the need for infrastructure spend in Europe and in Germany. The question reads: the 2027 targets require recovery in both Germany and the U.S. by basically the end of the second quarter of this year. How confident are you that regarding that timing, given the German infrastructure package has really not showed a lot of effect in the last year?
Yeah. I think we have to speak between Germany and U.S. In the U.S., obviously, the war in Ukraine doesn't help, so this is, of course, a certain uncertainty factor. Hopefully, this war comes to an end rather soon. My interpretation of the situation is that Trump is trying to get the next possible exit. Let's hope that this is the case, then I think the market in North America has a big potential to recover very quickly. But of course, every month now counts, if we can really see this end of the war and also an improvement in the market. In Germany, we have seen some more reasonable months lately. However, as I already stated, not yet from the infrastructure package. Obviously, Germany is a certain risk that it really would now kick in at a significantly higher level.
Just to give you an idea, U.S. is around 22% of our revenue, Germany around 15%-16%, so those two markets are accounting for 40% of Palfinger's revenue. If there is no recovery in those two key markets, which are depressed today, it will be difficult to really go for a ramp-up, which is required to achieve then the 2027 output numbers.
Okay, thank you. We've talked about the defense business. There's a follow-up question, same thing for the marine business. What's the revenue of that marine generated in 2025 in EBIT? And what do you forecast for the current year in 2026?
The share of revenue was around 14%. EBIT margin was clearly double digit, and the same will be true in 2026.
Thank you. Looking at, and you had a slide on your equity ratio and leverage and the like after you sold the treasury shares. The question now is, with the equity ratio having improved so significantly and overall the balance sheet being quite strong, how do you view your capital allocation priority going forward? Are you going to be more on the organic investment side, spending more money on M&A, or increasing shareholder returns for all three, maybe?
Well, first of all, we have a growth strategy, which will require investments. I showed you some of the investments we have in front of us. A major investment is also the footprint optimization of Palfinger. If I go back 25 years, Palfinger did 40 acquisitions between 1999 and 2016. All those acquisitions came with a suboptimal footprint, which today is a huge opportunity to improve this setup and to change it. This requires quite some investments in the next years to come. We do expect CapEx levels of around 5%+ of the turnover in the next five years to come. This is already a quite significant chunk. M&A is not in the focus, so at the moment, we do not pursue any major acquisition targets.
From time to time, we have some smaller targets, but we're talking here about a few millions in core markets or in core segments where we are not entering any diversification or so. This is very limited and sometimes even not really communicated. It's a clear organic growth strategy. Our dividend policy is one third of net income. We have stuck to this dividend policy for a long time. The only exception was in 2020 when, for well-known reasons, we decided to cut the dividend according to our policy in half. But since then, we have always had, on average, around one third of our net income, and this is also something we intend to keep.
For the time being, the focus is clearly on organic growth investments, which we do in our core segments and in our markets, and dividend policy will remain. Of course, if in two years or so, we see the luxury of a balance sheet which becomes too strong, this is a nice problem, and we will deal with this at the right time then.
Thank you. Looking at your revenue growth bridge for 2030, one of the larger contributors is AWP. What gives you the confidence that the demand for Aerial Work Platform remains strong or growth, and how does competition in that space look or will unfold going forward?
Well, actually, I'm quite confident about the market. The market is also quite healthy at the moment. Our problem in aerial work platforms is not the market, it's actually internal reasons. When we did the acquisition, mistakes were made, wrong management decisions, and this led to a product development phase, which led in the wrong direction. We are now putting a lot of efforts into correcting product development and creating a new set of products. Actually, it's a long-term project because changing a product portfolio is nothing you can do within a year or two, this is rather a 5-7 years time horizon. We are on track here, and as I just said, the market is very positive, and we can also see that a lot of competitors are actually creating good margins and making good money in this industry.
Great. Thank you. Looking at the time and that you have to catch a flight, I'll limit it to two more questions. One of them is regarding the proportion of service and digital versus hardware. Do you have an idea? Can you give us a number, how that contributes each?
If you look at software, and I think this is very much the same for a lot of companies in similar industries, the idea five years ago was that we would generate significant revenue with digital solutions. The reality is we talk about a few million euros, but most of the solutions we offer are expected by the customer to come with the product, and this is actually part of the premium offering of Palfinger to also provide those digital solutions. Yes, there are some million euros, it may be EUR 5 million or a little bit more, but it's not like 5% of revenue.
It's something which is relatively small, growing, but the reality is that most solutions we are creating for our customers are, so to say, a free offering, but of course, also with a benefit for Palfinger, because in the end, if we have better ways for our customers to track the products, to see the running hours, to better plan the service, this should also increase the service revenue, but this is rather indirect and not direct revenue from digital solutions.
Great, thank you. One more question on the divestiture of the Megarme Service business. Do you have a sentence or two on that as well?
Well, actually, this was a part of an acquisition we did about 10 years ago. It was actually done for another reason, and there were two parts. One part is marine service. We have here a team servicing, for example, oil rigs, welders who do repair works on oil rigs, for example. On the other hand, there was also a division of this business doing cleaning of skyscrapers, which obviously is nothing which is technology driven, nothing which adds value to the group, and this is why we decided to get rid of this as we found the opportunity to sell it to somebody.
Great. Thank you so much. I think that was a very high information density that we had on this call. I very much appreciate you taking the time. For those of you who want to look over it again, we will have a recording of the call on Research Hub a little later today, and also the presentation deck for your convenience. We'll take a little lunch break, and we'll see each other again at 1:30 P.M. with a presentation by Semperit, and I will put the link to that in here. Felix, thanks so much for taking the time. I know you're stressed because of your flight, so I appreciate it even more. Thanks to everybody who joined. Thanks for the great questions. We'll see you all later. Felix, I wish you a safe trip wherever you're going.
Thank you very much for your attention, and please remember next week is the earnings call of Q1. Thank you very much. Bye.
Thank you.