Bossard Holding AG

Welcome to BossArt and the presentation of our semi-annual results 2024. For today, we have four points on the agenda. First, I'd like to provide you some highlights of the first half year 2024. Then Stefan Zender, our CFO, will guide you through the financial review. I will then provide some progress report on our strategy 200 before I will try to close with a focus on outlook 2024. So to the highlights for the first half of 2024. We started with a satisfactory result in a very challenging environment, particularly the first quarter was still coming out of recession year 2023, very demanding, whereas the second quarter showed some light signs of recovery, yet not true signs of recovery, keeping in mind that PMIs that you're probably all aware of, so still in a recessive phase, so we're happy with satisfactory H1 result. We have seen new opportunities in customers, particularly in the electronics, semi-con and aerospace sectors, industry, so we see some light at the end of the tunnel there. Particularly in the semiconductor industry, we see markets like India with their Make in India approach are showing nice signs of growth. Then our cross-profit margins were on a satisfactory level, actually higher than last year. And we also benefited from a lower cost base, which we initiated at the end of last year to help us supporting our profitability. We successfully introduced our new ERP system, Boost, in France and South Africa in April. As you are probably aware, this is our new digital platform with two new rollouts. So we made another milestone, we reached another milestone Finally, last but not least, we acquired the company Dayot Fastening in Belgium. And a bit more on this acquisition. Dayot Fastening in Belgium is a manufacturer of so-called blind rivet nuts. If you want to Google it, used in the sheet metal application. And they are also a distributor for fasteners in the Benelux. They employ approximately 70 employees with a 15 million euro annual sales and the customer base is very well matching our customer base, which is namely in the EV automotive battery. solar panel railway and aerospace sector. So a perfect match in that sense as well. And it is strengthening our market presence in Europe, particularly in the Benelux and in Belgium, where we did have a white spot in the past. With that, I'd like to hand over to Stefan to provide you a financial review before I will catch up again with the Strategy 200 progress. Stefan, may I ask you? Yeah.

Thank you, Daniel. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As Daniel already mentioned, the weak economic demand remained a challenge in the first half of the year. And whereas some customers we have seen still suffered from its normalization effects after the pandemic and some saturated markets, the weaker demand is also in line with the economic environment and the indicators as we're still seeing. In this volatile market conditions, the Bosse Group achieved sales of 509 million Swiss francs in the first half of 2024. This is a decrease of 11.7% compared to the prior year, whereby the currency impacted the sales development negatively by 2.4%. Due to the softening of the Swiss franc in the last few months, its impact was continuously leveling off. Organically sales dropped by 9.3% compared to the prior year. Despite this demanding economic and geopolitical situation, BOSA benefited a grain from having a broad and global customer base and being less independent on a single industry. The BOSA group grew well in the growth industry railway, which is expanding. and identified additional opportunities and acquired new customers in the electronics, semiconductor and aerospace industry and will help us to grow in the future. There was more demand for digitalized and automated C-parts management systems, which with smart factory solutions, Bossert and its customers are able to make a valuable contribution to increase their productivity and profitability, especially in times when labor costs increases and greater resource management is becoming more challenging. On the downside, the group was still encountering lower demands due to the normalization of orders from segments which benefited from the pandemic, but as well from the current economic environment. However, signs of stabilization did begin to appear toward the end of the reporting period, which gives hope that we slowly could reach the bottom. The softening of the demand also impacted our financial performance. Despite the market environment, the gross profit margin of 33.3% was well above last year's 32%. This being a combination of well-maintained pricing, regional and product mix, along with cost savings. Sales and administrative expenses fell compared to last year's 114.8 million by 2.9% to 111.4 million Swiss francs. In the same period, the number of full-time equivalents increased slightly from 2,869 to 2,886, not accounting for the acquisition of Day-On Fastening at the end of June. the number of full-time equivalents decreased year on year by some 50 people to 2,881. Therefore, the lower cost resulted from fewer employees as well as lower wage inflation compared to last year. In addition, cost reduction measures with focus on operational costs had its impact too. Overall, we managed to lower our cost level by nearly 5% in comparison to the prior year. And this despite keeping the same number of FTEs since the beginning of the year to ensure our service, high level of service to our customers globally and to pursue new business opportunities at the same time. On the other hand, investment activities within the framework of our strategy 200, especially in the era of digitalization, continued to be pursued in a targeted fashion. Lower sales in the first half of the year, therefore, led to a lower operating profit. EBIT decreased by 16.6% from 69.6 million Swiss franc to 58.1 million. The EBIT margin amounted to 11.4% in comparison to 12.1% in the prior year. still underscoring the group's continued solid profitability. The financial result of 3.1 million was noticeably lower compared to the 5.6 million in the same period last year. On the one hand, interest expenses were lower due to the decline in net debt. And on the other hand, the weakening of the Swiss franc led to positive currency effects. As an outcome compared to prior year, net income decrease from 49.9 million to 42.4 million Swiss franc. The return on sales amounted to 8.3% in comparison to 8.6% in the prior year. As we will see, currency had still a negative impact on sales performance in all three market regions, though to a lesser extent compared to the prior year. Sales in America fell by 20.4% or 18.3% in local currency to 128.6 million Swiss franc. Of the record sales during the past two years, normalizing demand was observed in various industries such as agriculture, electromobility, and electronics. Opportunities in Mexico developed favorably, with bosses benefiting from nearshoring trends in the electronics industry. In Europe, the group posted an 8.5% drop in sales in the first half of the year to 293.8 million, whereas in local currency, sales fell by 6.8%. The decline was a result of the cyclical downturn in demand, which increasingly stabilized at the lower level over the course of the second quarter. With the acquisition of the Belgian company Dayant fastening at the end of June, the Bossa Group is strengthening its market position in innovative fastening technologies and broadening its market presence in the Benelux countries, as Daniel already mentioned. In Asia, Bossert recorded a drop in sales of 7.6% in Swiss franc and 1.8% in local currency to 87 million Swiss franc. In the second quarter, sales stabilized in local currencies, marking the first time in six quarters that slight growth was achieved compared to both the same quarter of the prior year and the previous quarter. Both have benefited in India from the Make in India initiative and in Malaysia from nearshoring trends that became evident, especially in the semiconductor and electronics industries. Now looking at the balance sheet, total assets have continued to decrease due to the normalization of the supply chain and lower demand momentum. Compared to prior year, total assets decreased from CHF 901 million to CHF 835 million. The decline is mainly attributable to lower customer receivables as a result of reduced sales and to lower inventories caused by the normalization of procurement times and thus higher availability of products. As a result, inventories were reduced disproportionately compared to the decline in sales. In comparison, the equity ratio increased from 41.3% in the prior year to 47.4%. We expect that the equity ratio will further increase towards the end of the year. Compared to last year, the operating net working capital decreased by 12.8% whereas in relation to sales, the capital intensity remained at prior year's level of 47.9%. The reason, therefore, is that sales fell proportionally in the same magnitudes on a year-on-year basis, despite the reduction of operating net working capital. As far as the net debt is concerned, this resulted in a decline from 323 million to 239 million Swiss franc. The decrease was mainly driven by the lower operating net working capital, the lower dividend payout in comparison to 2023, as well as by the continued solid profitability. The gearing net debt measured against equity declined from 0.9 to 0.6, whereas net debt in relation to EBDA decreased slightly from 2 to 1.9 times. Thereby, it also continues to have solid balance sheet ratios, which are within the range of the long-term balance sheet funding targets of a gearing of less than 1.3 times and at that EBIT ratio of less than 2. In the first half of 2024, we invested totally 15.4 million Swiss francs. Thereof, 1.5 million relates mainly to the general maintenance of office buildings and warehouses, including the environment. 5.2 million was spent for replacement investments in ongoing operations. And 1.7 million was invested into smart bins and electronic labels as part of our smart factory solutions offerings. This year we invested so far 7 million in digitalization. The biggest share of this investment was dedicated again to our new global digital platform. As Daniel mentioned, in April, we have successfully completed the rollouts in France and South Africa. What the cash flow of the group concerns, we have seen an overall solid development in the first half of the year. Cash flow from operating activities totaled 64.3 million in comparison to 50.4 million Swiss francs in the prior year. Despite the contribution from a solid profitability, the lower inventory did support this positive development. Cash flow from investing activities increased from 14.8 million in 2023 to 33.4 million Swiss francs in 2024, mainly due to the acquisition of Day on Fastening. Overall, the first half of 2024 closed with a positive free cash flow of 39.9 million Swiss franc in comparison to 39.6 million. In a nutshell, the first half of the year can be summarized from a financial perspective as follows. Despite the negative sales growth, Bossett was able to report a satisfactory result secured by higher gross profit margin and cost measures implemented. The balance sheet was strengthened by the positive cash flow. Therefore, BOSA continues to have solid balance sheet ratios, which maintains the ability for further investments. With this last remark, I hand over again to Daniel. He will give you now an update on the progress of the implementation of the Strategy 200 and what business environment to expect in the second half of this year. Daniel, please.

Thank you, Stefan. As you all know, the Strategy 200 is a long-term strategy which we follow by 2031, when Bostock turns 200 years old. That's why it's called Strategy 200. We're aiming at an accelerated, profitable and sustainable growth based on our proven business model, organically and through acquisition. As you have seen now, we have had another acquisition recently. And this is our ongoing strategy for the next years to grow about the one-third of our annual growth through acquisitions. Achieving relevant market shares in the key markets through seven strategic initiatives. Three of those I would like to briefly highlight. The first one being our Together We Create initiative. The second, our sales engine. And the third, our operations engine. On Together We Create, we are emphasizing our internal and external collaboration in order to be more efficient in delivering results. For that, we have developed guiding principles, which we have presented earlier and also are outlined in our investors' handbook more in detail. We started initiatives on talent and leadership management to retain and develop talent in a scarce global market. As you know, it's not easy to find talents these days, so it's important to keep people and to attract new young talent in a better way. On the sales engine side, we continue to focus on growth verticals. These are changing also because we see now that, for example, there's industries like the HVAC, the heating, ventilation, and cooling industries, which are suddenly growing because of AI-related data processing systems, which produce a lot of heat and therefore need to be cooled down. So suddenly other sunrise industries are coming up. So we're following those and benefit as much as possible. There's a strong shift towards digital lead generation and higher conversions rate. And with that, with less people, we can have a higher focus on profitable opportunities. And we also track that. We haven't lost key accounts during the recession. I think that's very important to mention. In contrary, we're winning new opportunities. But imagine the overall sales, or if you want to compare it to a water level, came down. And it's hard to, you know, by winning new opportunities to refill water. Some of the loss through the recession and the normalization. But what we do count is, do we keep our existing customers and how many new customers are we winning? And we're on the positive side. So that really makes us positive that we're on the right track despite the recessive overall trend. Last but not least, I'd like to talk about the operations engine. On the operations engine side, we have introduced Microsoft Dynamics 365 already in several markets. You can see it under the first bullet. Next, rollouts are coming in Korea, Taiwan, Australia, USA, Canada, Mexico, and Italy this year. So you can see that we're pretty busy with rollouts. And also, as we have already mentioned several times, we are spending overall approximately 70 million Swiss francs until 2026 for the systems. But it's needed, it's important, and it creates more transparency and efficiency after all. So with that, I'd like to talk a little bit about our focus for this year and the outlook. Starting with this year already, we showed some profitable development in the first half year. As mentioned, we reduced our cost base end of last year, and it's important to win new business at a profitable margin. and all that in an uncertain and unsettled economic environment moving forward. So we don't see signs of really recovery. If you look at the PMIs, most PMIs across the globe are still pretty depressed, and we see a few sunrise industries which are doing better than the PMIs, but most of them are still in recession. Therefore, we're cautiously optimistic based on our Project pipeline, which I just mentioned, we're winning new opportunities. We see the opportunities we have in the pipeline and also will only come next year and the years to come. And we continue to focus on efficiency and productivity. What we can say is we watch very carefully the economic development and accordingly, we also say we're not hiring people We're not replacing people. We're very cautious on the overall cost side. And, well, people cost are the biggest cost in the P&L. So we need to be careful in building up new people. Instead, we focus on, well, as mentioned, on Sunrise Industries and Smart Factory solutions to make our customers more profitable using digital solutions. And also we use artificial intelligence internally to improve our services and to make us more efficient, particularly through the Microsoft Copilot, for example. And last but not least, we follow our seven key strategic initiatives, which will mean also further investments over the next years, but we're confident and sure that this is the right way to go moving forward. So with that, We already communicated our midterm financial targets. And so on the sales side, on the midterm, we're still aiming at an organic sales growth of bigger than 5%, which we have delivered over the last three years, operating profit margin between 12% and 15%, which was down 2023, which we believe is a reasonable range to be in mid to long term. and the balance sheet equity ratio above 40%, with the dividend payout ratio constantly at 40% of net income. So with that, I would like to thank you for your attention, and I think we can open up for questions. Thank you very much.

The first question is from Sebastian Vogel with UBS. Please go ahead.

Hello, Sebastian. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Great. I have three questions I would ask one by one. The first one is on the top line. And if I look on like a revenue per day basis, and if I would look into April, May, and June and compare each of these months across the regions, is there any sort of acceleration, deceleration, or is there some sort of stability in that regard that you can share? And a quick follow-up, is there any read into July numbers already possible? That would be my first question.

Well, maybe starting from the back, we cannot say anything about the July numbers yet. To your first question, we have seen some slight improvement in the Q2 compared to Q1. And that is basically, we can say, true for all the continents. In China, we see that, for example, More business is happening with local customers, not so much with international customers. In Europe, we see the end of the normalization or a slow end of the normalization, destocking and slow restart of buying. And in the U.S., it's true that it's a bit of a special situation with our major large accounts we have. which has flattened, I would say, in the second quarter. So in that sense, rather a little bit of an improvement overall in the second quarter of this year.

I hope that answers that question. That helps many things. The second question would be on EBIT margins. In the past, if I'm not mistaken, the second half was usually around like 150 to 200 basis points lower than the first half with your ongoing investment and so on these days as well. Is that sort of at least a good starting point to think about margins for the second half versus the first half? Or is there something other to keep in mind in that regard?

Stefan?

Yes. So that has been the pattern. Of course, it's going to be still the environment's going to be challenging. But if we assume that the sales are, you know, it's starting to come to the bottom, I mean, the outlook is still a bit away, but the ambition is clear on our side and that's why we stay very cautious also on the cost side. The ambition is to stay double digit. I mentioned in the past that 10 million more sales, it's about 3 million more to the bottom line. So you see also with the leverage. So what we can influence is the cost. That's why we stay cautious. and if things start to bottom out and likely some restarting happening i think it's a doable scenario but let's see let's see but definitely we have the ambition to stay in the double digit area well that many things and the third question i have is staying with the cost that what you just mentioned and in the presentation you said that your cox as a potential stage came down quite a bit from

In that regard, is that now a bit of more runway going forward or is it more like a thing that happened now and it won't be repeat going forward or how should we think about that?

Yes, on the cost side, of course, a part of the cost saving is the initiatives. I think part of the cost side, also what I mentioned is that we have less FDs that have some impact from that perspective. But of course, there is always investments or an idea which we are holding back. Uh, from that perspective. And, uh, once we see a bit light in the tunnel, um, there is activities, uh, which we have been cautiously, which we will, uh, release. I mean, the biggest impact on cost savings, as you have seen on one of the slides, I mean, it's definitely personnel, but that we were holding back very much on traveling. and not to customers. Here we talk more about the internal traveling cost of meetings, holding back a bit on the fares, and also on consultancy. Things might, I mean, to a certain extent, this cost is coming back once we get into normal waters again.

Got it. Many thanks. That would be my three questions then. Thank you. Thank you.

The next question is from Christian Bader with Zürcher Cantonal Bank. Please go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon, gentlemen. For completeness sake, I have two questions. First of all, can you maybe quantify what has been your interest result excluding fx effects and my second question relates to your capex it has been a bit overall capex has been a bit lower than i was modeling it so is capex going to accelerate in the second half or shall we expect a similar number okay to the concerning the interest expense

or financial results, the positive impact on currency compared to last year was about 1.8 million. And about 800,000 as a sum up is coming from higher interest rate income, but also lower interest paid as also net debt came down. But the impact from currency was about 1.8 million. To your second question concerning the capex, Right now, what is on our table, I always call it kind of the Christmas wishlist. I'll be holding back also some of the capex. I would say for the total year, somewhere between 34 to 36 million in total. So that means we will see a bit higher capex between 18 and 20 million for the second half from that perspective.

Okay. Great, thank you.

You're welcome.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Dr. Daniel Bossert for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much. And thanks again for joining, for following our results. And we're happy to come back soon with our next announced group results. Thank you very much and happy holidays.