PVA TePla AG

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me start with some good news. We have seen very strong order intake over the past nine months. In fact, we are on track to achieve the highest annual order intake in our company's history. This gives us confidence as we look ahead to 2027. We expect these orders to translate into revenue and put us back on a growth path next year. Our metrology business is a key driver of this development. Over the past months, we have invested a great deal of effort into expanding this business. And we can now see that our strategy is paying off. We have successfully won tier one customers in the logic and memory sector. And we continue to receive new orders for our technologies, particularly in scanning acoustic microscopy. For 2026, we remain on track and we have not reached our targets yet, but we are making good progress. We expect which should allow us to achieve our full year targets. So we are confident about the weeks ahead and optimistic about 2027. Let us now take a closer look at the highlights of the third quarter and the first nine months. The demand for our technologies remains very strong. Our order intake has reached a record level. In the first nine months, we received orders worth more than 273 million Euro. That is an increase of 55% compared to last year. Both our segments contributed to this growth with particularly strong performance in metrology business. At the same time, we are still facing a lot of challenges. As you know, we have invested in people, technologies and structures to prepare also our material solutions business for future growth. These investments have increased our cost base. Particularly in the first six months, capacity utilization in material solutions remained at a lower level due to They are an unfavorable product and project mix, but also due to lower order volumes in the first half of 2025. As a result of that, revenues were not yet sufficient to fully offset these effects, which consequently impacted the segment's nine months results. And we expect this to change significantly in the fourth quarter. As a result, we are not quite where we wanted to be at this point. However, the third quarter has been a step in the right direction. Revenue increased 12% year on year, and both gross margin and EBITDA margin improved. Our focus now is on execution. We will turn our strong order backlog into revenue, improve product mix, and increase capacity utilization. In short, we need to translate the strong demand into profitable growth and we expect a strong finish of the year. Several customer projects are scheduled for completion in the coming weeks. and these will contribute to our fourth quarter revenue. With these projects on track, we fully expect to achieve our targets for 2026. And a strong order intake puts us in a solid position to return to growth in 2027. Ladies and gentlemen, as already said before, we are following our strategic path step by step. Short-term success is important, but what matters most for us is long-term success of the company. And this mindset is something that we are sharing across the entire organization. So with having said that in the first part, it's your turn, Markus.

Thank you very much, Jalin. Good morning and a warm welcome from my side. And before we start to go into the details of our financials, I would like to give you the three most important headlines from our perspective. As Jalin said, order intake is at a record level and Q3 has been very strong with metrology clearly above our expectations. For Q4, we expect that the momentum will be kept. SAITs and EBITDA have been in line with our expectations and Q3 has been the first quarter of the year where we didn't have any material one-offs and are able to show the strength of our business model. As we announced, we approached double digit margins in terms of the EBITDA. For Q4, we see ourselves on track to reach the guidance and we will give you the details how to do so in the coming minutes. So let's start with our revenue. In Q3, we achieved a revenue of almost 63 million, which means an increase of 12%. Metrology is 46% over the comparison timeframe in 2025. And the growth shows how we are translating the order intake of the last quarters into revenue. Material Solution, on the other hand, is 14% below Q3 in 2025. But as we will see with the order intake, the order book is constantly growing and it's a matter of timing, not of demand. For the first nine months, we are 4% above 2025 with 182. And it's more or less the same picture we have in the third quarter. Metrology is 29% above 2025 and material solutions is 13% behind. For those adding up the individual quarters, I would like to give a little side note here. We have a change of presentation in the second quarter, which means that what has been shown as cost before is now deducted from the revenue in the direction of 1.4 million. Coming to the order intake. Order intake in the third quarter was above our own expectations with 87 million. Material solution is behind the third quarter of 2025, but this is also due to the project nature of our business here. If you compare it with the second quarter in 26, we're 20% ahead. Contributions came again from the energy sector. and we're happy to announce that we have a second customer for Indium Phosphide with the first systems here in the order intake. Metrology is way above our own expectations here with 64% increase in an order intake of almost 51 million and the demand is clearly driven by the ultrasound SAM systems. For the fourth quarter, we expect that this momentum will be kept with contributions in material solutions coming from crystal growing in the energy sector and in metrology to be developed roughly stable in other terms between Q2 and Q3. Our group profit TePla AG, Gert Fisahn, Elke Kleemann, Carl Markus Groß, Jalin Ketter, Sebastian Gonsior And here as a side note, the change in presentation I noticed before also immediately affects the gross profit. In the first nine months, we're behind 2025 with 29.1%, which is primarily caused by the lower utilization and an unfavorable product mix and material solutions in the first half of the year. which is as Jalin explained caused by the low order intake in the first half of 25 and the specific nature of the projects where the orders have been received late in 2025 and early in 26. Our EBITDA in the first nine months is at 10.4 million which is clearly behind our goals and here Non-period related and one-off effects in the direction of 5 million affected our results. But looking at the third quarter, we achieved as we announced or approached double digits with 9.6% and an EBITDA of 6 million, which is a clear improvement of 61%. We take a closer look at our individual segments. You can see, as I said, that your revenue is clearly below the previous comparison timeframes, but your order intake is constantly improving. So with an order intake of 125 million in the first nine months, we are plus 36%. But in terms of the order intake, we're still at a high cost level and these orders needs to be translated into revenue to offset these costs. But this is expected to accelerate in the fourth quarter and in 2027 onwards. Metrology, on the other hand, revenue is constantly growing due to the order intake and the shorter project lead times we have here. and the EBITDA in the third quarter has been extraordinarily strong with an EBITDA margin of 23% and 8 million euros. So let's conclude how we want to achieve our full year guidance. The third quarter had an EBITDA of 6 million. which means in total we're at 10.4 million and lacking a little bit more than 15 million to reach the lower end of our EBITDA guidance. For the fourth quarter, we expect the revenue to rise significantly due to the projects where the orders have been received late 25 and early 26 in material solutions and and other projects which are terminated for the fourth quarter. These would help us to raise the gross profit margins due to economies of scale, but also due to a way stronger product mix we're seeing here coming into revenue. So we're approaching the mid 30s in terms of gross profit margin. And at the same time, our overhead is expected to develop flattish, which will then bring us to an EBITDA in the fourth quarter necessary to reach our guidance. That's it from my side. I'm happy to be available for the Q&A. And now I'm handing over to Jalin for the strategy update.

Thanks, Markus. Ladies and gentlemen, our strategic focus is beginning to deliver results. and our metrology business is a key driver of this process. I would now like to take a closer look at the opportunities that we see in scanning acoustic microscopy. In acoustic microscopy, we are seeing a clear shift in customer demand. More and more customers are moving towards a more high volume manufacturing. This requires fully automated inspection systems that can be integrated directly into production lines. And we are well positioned to benefit from this trend. We have now qualified our technology at five tier one customers in the logic and the memory sector. This tier one customers have now become the largest group of customers in scanning acoustic microscopy. and they accounted to more than half of the revenues in methodology in the first nine months of 2026. At the same time, smaller customers still contribute to our order intake. And despite that growing demand on automated solutions, manual SAM systems are remaining a very important part of our portfolio. And this mixture gives us a very attractive customer mix in the metrology segment. With this new customer group, we need to follow different requirements and also produce even more automated systems starting from next year. Due to this, we already announced that we increased our production line or in the increase of our production line. And now I can say that the facility is finalized now and will get into operation until year end. With this capacity increase, we now have enough space to produce more than 100 fully automated systems per year in midterm. Our short-term focus now is on the education of the team. Ladies and gentlemen, I started the presentation with good news and I would like to end on the same positive note. Based on a now developed existing customer base, we see a clear path toward achieving our revenue targets in metrology. So our focus within the midterm strategy is strongly shifting from market development now to execution. and there is more potential ahead for upcoming years. Our estimates for market size of acoustic mythology remains unchanged. And where we are today, we are on track to develop the market share of 30 to 40%. Our strategy is clear. We will continue to focus on the fast growing market for acoustic mythology. We will expand our service offering for existing customers and we will focus on executing our current orders. To meet the strong demand in acoustic methodology, we have also decided to shape our product portfolio. This means that we will no longer offer certain niche optical metrology tools, something that we already announced in the first quarter of 2026. However, we continue to explore new opportunities in optical metrology. Over the medium to long term, we expect scalable optical metrology solutions to contribute to our growth as well. So let me conclude. 2026 has once again been a challenging year. We are managing organizational improvements, volatile market demand, and a difficult economic and political environment. But at the same time, we see enormous opportunities ahead. New technologies and the growing demand for AI are creating significant potential for our business. and we have made important progress to position PWA TePla to capture these opportunities. So with that presentation, we are finished and we are happy to take your questions now.