Bossard Holding AG

Welcome to our, um, summer announcement of our half year results of the. Um, from agenda perspective, we would like to guide you through the highlights 2023. If you, uh, financial overview that will be done by Stefan. I will then continue with the strategy 200 progress and, uh, give you a bit of an update where we are and then, um. go into an outlook for 2023. So starting with the highlights for H1 2023, we dare say it's been a good first half year. We would say the second best result in the boss of history in terms of sales and EBIT compared to some peak years in the last two years, 2021 and 2022. uh obviously as all the other industries we have seen a weakening in the last couple of months which is due to a destocking of our customers so our customers had built up stock over the last years and namely in the last 12 months and now are depleting some of their stock together with a general decline in the overall um business development this has led to a global demand normalization as we call it again after the peaks we have seen in 2021 and 2022. Also, we have seen a high negative foreign exchange impact on the top line. It's been like 4.6% on the bottom line, closer to 7% impact. So the FX has impacted us quite heavily in a negative way. We have seen only a slow recovery in China. after um kovit went over was over in q1 we all thought that the recovery would be faster as we've seen and we also see that with other industries this has not gone that um Quickly and, um, so the recovery is relatively slow in China yet. We focus on sunrise industries and, uh, this helped us also in first half of 2023. So this paid off, uh, namely in the segments of, uh, electro mobility and, uh, railway. Uh, and continues to do so, so, uh, over proportionate growth, um, also connected with our proven productivity services, um, namely smart factory. Logistics and smart factory assembly that has helped us to win new business and to create better stickiness with our customer base on the smart factory logistics side. We are now, um. at around 1000, more than 1100 customers and moving towards more than half a million devices, smart devices installed and growing, growing year on year, roughly 7%, also this year and smart factory assembly. This is the internal startup, which helps customers to optimize and automate their assembly processes. We have also doubled our installations year on year. And also we are doing this this year. So this helps to create bigger customer loyalty and stickiness and win new business with customers. Our new digital platform, our Dynamics 365, was rolled out in Singapore successfully in April after Denmark and Sweden last year, and we will be continuing to roll out the new digital platform now. The next rollouts will be in Malaysia and Thailand. So far, we're pretty experienced now in doing that. So with all this, with a normalization in demand and quite heavy investments on the IT side, We are proud of a good first half year 2023. And with that, we're also in line with the with the guidance that we that we gave. So from 2020 compound annual growth rate on the top line was 20% on the bottom line as well for the last three years. So in that sense, we're pretty much we're actually very well on track. So with that, I'd like to hand over to Stefan Sander for the financial review. Stefan, can I ask you?

Yes. Thank you, Daniel. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And in an increasingly demanding... Can you hear me?

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