VAT Group AG

Okay, good morning everybody to this year's VAT Q4 and full year results presentation. We started the session a little bit differently, as you may have noticed also when you came in. The reason is that today we officially launch our new brand and corporate design campaign that has been developed over the last months by our corporate communications team, headed by Anja Brun, who is here, and Naomi, who is taking pictures. And I think it's a very ambitious project. project that the team went through after 60 years of VAT. Today, this year, we celebrate the 60th birthday and of course eight years, nearly nine years after the IPO, it was time for a refresh of the existing brand image that we have. So we not only, or the team, not only changed the font and the colors, I mean, we also finally jumped into the presence. We now have a new URL or web address, which is vatgroup.com, no longer the VAT valve. And I think important with that change is also we are more than valves. And Valve is our core. We started with that. We are still extremely strong in that, world market leader, but we are also more. And I think that is put together better also in the VAT group web address. But also stationery and everything had to be changed. We kept the logo nearly unchanged. There is a small change in it that maybe... afterwards you can try to figure out what the change is it's very subtle but there is a change so a great a great project and i think it caused also a lot of headaches because everything had to be ready by today you have to think about a lot of different angles that you need to address to least being also compliant with the with the six stock exchange that the links on the six page are updated as well otherwise i would receive a call from the um from the regulator and i i would not want that this afternoon it's a different time today So that is the new brand image. You also see we have a couple of annual reports also there to design completely new and I think great achievement and really, really well done by Anja and the team. With that, I guess it's time to go into the bit that you all came here for, which is the Q4 and full year results. I guess with the high-level release that we now issue in January on a regular basis before going to several conferences in January, you knew the headlines, but today should also be, of course, a bit more details about how we see the future. this year, and then beyond. We will not go too far beyond 2025. For that, we will have a capital markets day on the 20th of May in Haag, in our new innovation center. But more about that after the presentation. So with that, I would like to hand over to Urs, our CEO, whom you all know very well. And yeah, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Michel. So first of all, , some of you still understand that here, but of course, everything will be in English. So good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us again in the Guildhouse Zurwag, a wonderful environment here and also on the webcast and over the conference line for the presentations of our full year result. I'm very excited to be here. most of you probably have seen already the results so we are very proud on the results we achieved last year and even more excited about the future what's coming in 2025 and beyond that so for today I will start with the review of VAT's business highlights 2024 and then hand over to Fabian Giozza, our CFO, to do a deep dive in all the financial numbers. And then I will provide a market expectation and an outlook 2025 and beyond. I think we will close with a Q&A. We will reserve enough time for that. For those online, please use the chat box or follow the instruction of the operator. So let's start with the highlights of 2024. Our markets, and particularly our main market semiconductor, experienced a transitional year in 2024. Our customers' inventory returned to normal level. I think this was the base in the end for the growth. And over the year, we had kind of an ordinary run rate pattern for the whole year. So we would characterize the whole year as normalization from the quite low sales levels we saw in 2023. However, VAT is not only dependent on external factors. We also delivered a gross profit margin this year of over 66% and an APTA margin of 31.2% despite continuing our investments in infrastructure and a record level in R&D. As we always stress, we have to invest ahead of the cycle, so we want to be ready when the market is growing. This brings me to three key messages I want you to take home from today's event. The first one, which is also represented here, we return to growth in 2024. So 2024 represents a growth year in our core market semiconductors with orders up 84%. and sales up 22%. This shows we came out of the drought and we returned to normal run rates. And this we achieved despite of quite an unfavorable shift in wafer fab equipment spend towards more mature nodes and a higher share of legacy lithography tool, which are not vacuum tools. Both these trends were driven by China. VAT certainly also was profiting from the growth in China, but the muted investment in leading edge certainly delayed our growth in adjacent products. We increased market share in semi and overall by two percentage points. I think that's a great achievement as well, and it shows that our strategy of outgrowing the market is kicking in. Outstanding in 2024 were the achievements in spec wins. With 132 spec wins, we achieved a new record. And this is the testament in my point of view of our customer centricity and the innovation spirit we have in VAT. These spec wins will turn into additional sales in the coming three to five years and therefore will fuel as well our growth story in the future. The second point is that we are ready for additional growth. So we made huge progress in our footprint expansion in operations and for our innovation community. Our 1B plant in Malaysia is up and running, and we increased our output from our facilities in Malaysia to 330 million Swiss francs. The run rate at the end of the year was already close to 500 million Swiss francs. In summer, we started another project in Romania. So we started to launch a new facility in Romania, which will be completed in the course of this year. And of course, as already mentioned, the Innovation Center, the new heart of VAT in the future. The opening will take place in the coming months and you will be invited to see and experience it during the Capital Markets Day. The third one I want you to take home is that our long-term growth story is alive. I often get asked about the short-term development, but what excites me in our industry most are the long-term perspectives, both in the sheer size, but also in the technology advancements. Maybe we can go back to the slide. I see it here, but you don't see it anymore. Sorry.

Sorry about that.