LPKF Laser & Electronics SE

Klaus and Peter will walk you through the business development for the first six months and provide an outlook for the current financial year. After that, we will open the floor for your questions in a Q&A session. The conference will be recorded and published for a period of two weeks on our website. And before we begin, please note that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. With that, I would hand over to Klaus.

Thank you very much, Bettina. Hello and welcome everybody to our first half year results. I want to give you, of course, a key summary of what happened in the first six months. We'll dive a little bit deeper into the individual businesses, but of course give you a deeper insight what's happening in the advanced packaging sector, where we see our positioning and what we expect as the next steps. Let's get started. First half of 2026, a challenging first half that we expected and anticipated in our planning. We had a weak core business, so the only growth sector we saw was in the electronics segment. and as expected and planned we have a very weak year in solar because the transition to perovskite is happening and we are in a transformation phase with welding so that burdens our revenue and earnings for the first half one aspect of counter steering and Peter will later give you more detail is our north star program where we reduce fixed costs transforms the organization We are about halfway through. The second phase is initiated and running, so we are on track here. Our strategic focus stays unchanged. We want to enter significantly larger temps than we do with our current market fields. And we want to become strategically relevant in these fields, meaning offering more than a process step, becoming a strategic partner to our company, to our customers. And this sector is, of course, advanced packaging with the transition to glass happening, where we see Now that we expanded our portfolio and with AI driving the market and the wafer start strongly, that we have a significantly larger TAM than we modeled a year ago. I'll show you more details about that. Our mid-term market ambition stays intact. Despite short-term headwinds, we stay the course, enter a much larger TAM with advanced packaging, and also bring our costs and our structure to a level that we reach a sustainable double-digit EBIT margin by 2028. Let's come to key takeaways and insights from our markets. So what we see and also anticipated in our planning range is that we have a persistent macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. We have the Iran situation in the first half, which of course brings uncertainty to our customers and into supply chain and causes cautious investment behavior. When we look at the solar sector specifically, as expected within our planning, at the moment there is very limited investment happening because the transition to perovskites is running. We are positioned in perovskites both in the USA and in Asia with first prototyping lines and the activities are going with a very strong efforts from our customers. Once perovskites have reached maturity for high volume application, we see a very good market potential for a long period of time. That's also the reason why we basically managed through a very difficult year for solar, where we expect and plan for less than half the revenue we had in our record 24 solar year. In the Semicon industry, you can see it in the press, you see the public announcements of large players in the field. We are now in the phase where the transformation towards glass-based packages for AI for advanced packaging is becoming real. Joint ventures are formed, are getting capitalized. Large companies make announcements about their ramp up and volume plans. So we are now in the phase where LPKF needs to prove that our very good positioning that we have achieved supporting our customers in development for many years now gets transitioned into being qualified into the equipment stack and participating in the ramp up and in the high volume phase. We have updated our market model based on the latest projections from analysts on wafer starts for high performance computing and are now looking at a total addressable market in 2030 that is very significantly larger than what we anticipated. Now it's time to prove that we are in the equipment stack and in the operations for this market. Overall business development, advanced packaging with light being basically our entry ticket into that market. We have a very good positioning. A big share of the players in this market are already working and have ordered LPKF equipment for their development and qualifications. We now, as mentioned, need to transition that into broad orders for the ramp up. And we have expanded our portfolio already now with additional process steps. Basically, already at the start of this market, becoming more than a one-trick pony, becoming a strategic player. Rapid prototyping, slightly lower revenue in the first half, but higher order entry. So basically we see ourselves on track here. When we look deeper into the markets, we see a healthy demand above expectations from China and Europe. We are seeing a weak U.S. market, which is largely driven by uncertainty about availability of grants in the public sector from the U.S., but in the big picture, it evens out. In our SMT sector, which is dominated, of course, by our laser depaneling for PCBs, We saw, especially in Q2, an investment restraint and some shifts of projects due to geopolitical tensions. Still see a clearly stronger first half, specifically in order entry, and continue to stay the course. We see that laser depenetrating is a long-term relevant portfolio element for LPKF. We talked about solar as expected and planned a week here significantly lower revenue which also is that dominating factor why we have overall LPKF lower revenue in the first half. Delayed capex decisions because people want to invest into perovskites once they are ready and these activities are still in a qualification phase. Welding, revenue down year over year, earnings negative. You know we had a large consumer business supporting us in last year. We have made it into smart robotics that is giving us a good foundation for the year. We have to transition, and that's what we're doing, this product line. We have to significantly change the cost structure. Peter will talk about it in a minute. But we see that we make the right progress getting into consumer electronics, smart robotics, medtech, that we can make our planning target for the year and set up the product line in a way that it can get back on a profitable growth path. A lot of this has to do with Northstar and changing how we operated LPKF. I hand over to Peter to give you more details about that.

Thanks, Klaus. Operation Northstar program. The first restructuring wave is completed. We really Finalized it now in the first half year. The future organization in the second wave, and then we'll get in the next slide a little bit deeper on this, we'll go in this sharpen and improve APKF overall again.