Gea Group Ag Ord

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GEO Group AG Q2 2023 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Oliver, welcome back. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Heidi. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. As you can imagine, that is not a normal conference call for us, given the sudden and unexpected death of Markus Ketter this week. please be aware of the cautionary language that is included in our safe harbor statement as in the material that we have distributed today. And with that, I hand over to Stefan.

Thank you, Oliver. As Oliver said, our chief financial officer, my dear colleague and good friend, Markus Ketter, suddenly and unexpectedly passed away on Sunday at the age of of only 55. You can imagine that we are all shocked and devastated by his loss. With Markus, Gea loses an outstanding CFO and a highly valued individual whose drive, professional excellence, and also distinctive sense of humor will be greatly missed. Personally, I'm also losing a dear and loyal friend. Our thoughts are with Markus' wife, his two children, and his entire family. Despite this tragic loss, we will now provide you with a detailed update on our Q2 numbers. As you all know, we had a strong start into 2023, and this positive development continued in quarter two. Order intake has been up by 2.4% organically, but declined in reported terms slightly by 1.6%, year over year to 1.38 billion euro. I hope this provides to you that the fact we are not giving quarterly order intake indications anymore was and is not a signal that our order intake will suffer. We even have an optimistic view, especially for our new technologies, for new food, for CO2 capturing, and for our sustainable products. I will talk about these topics in more detail soon. Sales have been growing nicely by 9.4% organically, leading to a strong improvement of our EBDA before restructuring expenses by 14.4% to €192 million. The respective EBDA margin was up by 1.1 percentage points, to 14.3%. Last but not least, we also increased our ROSI significantly by 4.1 percentage points to 33.8%. Sustainability is one of our seven strategic pillars in our mission 26 because we are convinced that GEA can and will play a major role in the decarbonization journey of our customers. We enable our customers with our technologies and solutions to achieve their climate targets and meet ever-increasing regulations around emissions, water consumption, and waste disposal by taking a more circular approach to processes. In order to empower customers to make smart decisions for a greener future, we launched our AddBetter label in June. is our eco-label promoting GEA sustainable solutions that are significantly more resource efficient than their predecessors. The efficiency improvements are calculated according to ISO standards and are validated by TÜV Rheinland, a global leader in independent testing, inspection, and certification services. This eco-label provides customers with the maximum transparency as they can access the data behind each at-bedder labels. When we launched AddBetter in June, our AddCool spray dryer, the marine separator, and the dairy robot were the first solutions to receive the label. All three of them consumed between 9% and 49% less energy than their predecessors. In the meantime, other technologies have been added to the AddBetter portfolio. These include also water-efficient technologies like our water-saving unit for the cooling of separators. By reusing the cooling water, this unit can save 99.9% water compared with the previous generation, totaling around 1.3 million liters of water per day. To give you a feeling of the magnitude, the annual water saving equals 1940 feet freight containers full of water. So we are talking about really significant water savings here. At our Q1 results in May, we have talked about our carbon capture technology, which in the meantime, we installed at Phoenix Cement in Beckham, Germany. Phoenix Cement has an annual production capacity of 500,000 tons of cement and is emitting 1,000 tons of CO2 per day. First, analysis have shown that our solution is performing well. and is able to capture 90 to 95% of the daily emissions. The clear aim of the pilot plant is to reduce the production-related CO2 emissions through carbon capture. In addition, our customer would like to go even a step further and develop with us a complete value chain for carbon capture, including transport, storage, and, if applicable, utilization. After the successful pilot, the scale-up is planned. Due to its mobile containerized design, the pilot plan can also be used in other cement plants worldwide. We are currently seeing a strong demand for this technology, especially in Europe and North America. CO2 is generated in many industrial processes, not only in the cement industry. And at the same time, it is also often essential for the production of many products, for example, in the brewery industry. No beer can be produced without CO2. The industry is dependent on the CO2 market unless they are investing in the technologies to capture the CO2, which is generated as a byproduct during the fermentation process. We do offer technologies to recover, purify and reuse the CO2. The result of our purification process is 99.998% pure food grade CO2, which can be used for carbonating the beer or any other beverages. Our technologies enable the customer a circular economy with a clear benefit to be CO2 self-sufficient and hence independent from the CO2 market. It can even turn out to be an additional revenue stream if more CO2 has been recovered than needed for the beer production. Payback periods are short, ranging between 1.5 and 4 years, making the CO2 recovery an attractive investment. In addition, customers can optimize their energy costs for the CO2 recovery systems by reusing the waste heat arising from the CO2 recovery process. CO2 recovery from alcoholic fermentation is not a new technology. We have systems installed in 35 countries and four continents, but in the last years, this technology has gained a lot of traction, and we are convinced the demand for this technology will further rise. I will continue now with the business and financial review. We were able to continue with a positive development from Q1 23 by further improving the majority of our key performance indicators. Once again, we have managed to grow our order intake organically year over year despite a strong prior year quarter. Due to negative FX impacts, reported order intake declined by 1.6% to 1.38 billion euro. Three large orders with a total value of 81 million euro were received in this quarter in comparison to two large orders totaling 52 million euro in quarter 2022. Quarter two, 23, was another quarter of strong organic sales growth. Sales was up notably by 9.4% year over year on an organic basis, driven by both strong service and new machine sales growth. EBDA before restructuring margin reached 14.3%, a significant 1.1 points increase, and was driven by an improved gross margin and slightly lower operating costs. ROSI improved further due to the strong increase in EBIT before restructuring expenses, overcompensating the higher capital employed. All divisions contributed to this positive development, except for food and healthcare technologies. Our net liquidity declined from €264 million to €65 million, mainly because of the second tranche of our share payback program, which we finished at the end of the fiscal year 2022. Between the second quarter 22 and year end 22, we bought back own shares for in total 170 million euro. As you all know, these shares are held as treasury shares. So all in all, another successful quarter. Looking a bit deeper into the crew performance, order intake declined in reporting terms by 1.6 to 1.38 billion euro due to FX effect but grew by 2.4% on an organic basis. Liquid and powder, as well as food and health care technologies, grew their order intake organically and overcompensated the declines in the other three divisions. From a customer industry perspective, beverage was again strong, but major growth contributor has been chemical in this quarter. As I just said, this quarter has seen three large orders, but also orders between 5 and 15 million have seen an increase year-over-year. Given the strong order backlog at the end of Q1, sales grew strongly by 9.4% in organic terms. Service sales grew organically by an outstanding 12.7% year-over-year, driven by healthy growth across all divisions. All new machine sales have been strong, growing by 7.7% year-over-year. While the new machine business at liquid and powder as well as food and healthcare technologies has been flat year over year, the other three divisions have been growing their new machine business by double-digit percentage points organically. The service sales share was 35.5%. That means 0.9 percentage points higher than last year. The strong organic sales growth combined with an increase in the gross margin and lower operating expenses resulted in an EBDA of €192 million and €24 million improvement versus Q2 2022. When looking at the EBDA margin, we achieved a significant year-over-year improvement of 1.1 percentage points. Now let me continue with the figures for the division, separation and flow technologies, which had a very strong quarter in terms of sales and profitability. Order intake declined organically by 5.3% year-over-year. This decline is purely the result of an extraordinary high order intake level in the prior year quarter of €420 million. Since Q3 2022, this division has been growing its order intake organically each quarter and on average by 11.8%. This is a fantastic growth, I would say. In this quarter, the growth in the customer industries, dairy processing, new food, and in industries such as oil and gas, energy and renewable resources was unable to compensate of the decline in the other customer industries. The order pipeline overall is on a stable level compared to prior year. The order backlog of €663 million is almost on the same level as the record backlog at the end of Q1 2023, which lays a good foundation for further sales growth in the coming quarters. Organic sales grew considerably by 14.7% year-over-year, driven by double-digit organic growth rates of both service and new machines. The service sales share decreased on a very high level by 1 percentage point to 45.9% in the quarter. EBITDA increased strongly. by 12 to 99 million euros, and the EBITDA margin improved by 0.8 percentage points to 26.1%. Higher sales, declining operating costs, and a better margin in the service business resulted in a notably increase in profitability. Let's move on to liquid and powder technologies. Auto intake increased organically by 15.8% year-over-year. While the customer industry's beverage and chemicals showed a strong positive development in this quarter, food, new food and dairy processing were below priority levels. Liquid and powder technologies has won three large orders totaling 81 million euro this quarter versus one large order of 32 million in Q2 2022. These large orders were received from the customer industry chemicals for distillation and gas cleaning. Rotec pipeline looks overall good with beverage in a more dynamic performance than food and dairy processing. Order backlog remains virtually unchanged from Q1 23 at a record level of 1.6 billion euro. Sales increased organically by 3.7% year over year. While the service sales grew organically by 17.6% year over year, the organic new machine sales remained unchanged. As in the first quarter of 2023, the high order backlog at the beginning of the year has not yet been processed as many large orders are still in the engineering phase. This explains the muted new machine sales generation in this quarter and will lead to an acceleration of sales growth later this year. Due to the strong service sales growth, the service sales share increased by 2.8 percentage points to 23.4% in the quarter. EBITDA before restructuring expenses rose by €1 million year-over-year to €40 million, and the EBITDA margin increased by 0.1 percentage points to 9.2%. Gross profit rose due to higher service volume and better gross margin, while operating costs remained stable. Continuing with food and healthcare technologies, order intake was up by 2.6% organically year over year on an already high level of order intake in prior year's quarter. As you might remember, Q2 2022 contained one large order of €20 million. Even though no large order was booked in this quarter, the order intake increased from €282 million in Q2 2022 to €287 million. When looking at the order pipeline, we are expecting an overall stable business environment. Organic sales growth was 3.6% year over year. This was driven by a strong organic sales growth of 11.8%, which overcompensated the flattish new machine sales. As a result, the service sales share increased by 2.3 percentage points to 33.0% in the quarter. EBDA decreased by €4 million year-over-year and the respective margin dropped from 8.1% in Q2 2022 to 6.1% in Q2 2023. Cost-profit declined year-over-year due to lower margins in the new machine business. The profitability of the new machine business has been impacted by the execution of some older projects with long lead times, whose selling prices had not yet accounted for the cost inflation. Operating costs, however, remain stable. Moving to farm technologies. As you might remember, we have stated in our last conference call that we might see a temporary phase of lower order intake growth on the back of contracting raw milk prices and higher interest rates. Pew2 has now seen a normalization of the order intake after several quarters, of strong growth. The organic order intake decline of 4.5% year-over-year was mainly driven by manure and conventional milking systems because of tougher financing conditions in combination with falling milk prices. Demand for automated milking systems, which do account in the meantime for roughly one quarter of the business, has remained relatively stable. Sales increased organically by 9.9% year-over-year. This strong development was driven by an organic new machine sales growth of 11.3% year-over-year and a healthy service sales growth of 8.2% year-over-year. The service sales ratio declined on a very high level by 0.9 percentage points to 44.2%. EBITDA increased strongly by 9 million euro and the according margin improved from 14.2%, from 11.3% in Q2 2022. Cross-profit has been significantly above prior year's level, driven by strong organic sales growth and better margins, which overcompensated the increase in operating costs. Finally, let us turn to heating and refrigeration technologies, the division with the strongest organic sales growth in this quarter. After eight quarters of strong organic order intake growth, 14.9% on average, order intake decreased organically by 9.1% in Q2. The year-over-year decline results from an extraordinary high order intake in the prior year quarter and postponements of larger orders into Q3. The positive development in heat pumps and sustainable engineering solutions, we call it SENS, continued. Organic sales increased strongly by 21.9% year-over-year and was driven by new machine sales growth accelerating from 22.1% in Q1 2023 to 28.7% year-over-year in this quarter. Also, service sales showed a healthy organic growth rate of 11.5%. Its sales share, however, declined by 3.2 percentage points to 35.4% due to the strong new machine sales. EBITDA rose by 3 million to 16 million euro, and the according margin improved from 10.6% in Q2 2022 to 11.4% this quarter. Cross-profit was up year over year due to higher sales and better gross margin, which overcompensated the increase in operating costs. SFT and FT now. Closing the divisional chapter now with the overview on the EBDA contribution, except for food and healthcare technologies, all divisions contributed to the profit improvement. However, it clearly stands out that separation and flow technology as well as farm technologies have been the major drivers accounting for more than 80% of the year-over-year EBDA improvements. In total, EBITDA before restructuring increased to €192 million from €106.7 million. Translational FX has lowered our EBITDA by €6 million. Excluding this FX effect, as we have defined it in our full year guidance, our EBITDA would have improved by €31 million to €198 million. Coming now to another important topic, networking capital. Networking capital increased by 73 million euro year over year to 458 million euro due to higher inventories and trade receivables as well as lower trade payables partly offset by an increase in advance payments. The increase in inventories and trade receivables need to be seen in connection with the record order backlog of 3.45 billion euro and the strong sales generation. On a quarter-on-quarter perspective, networking capital went up further from 6.9% of sales in Q1 23 to 8.5% in Q2, which is, however, still on a low level. While inventories have remained virtually unchanged, quarter-on-quarter higher trade receivables combined with lower advance payments have triggered the uptick. Due to this quarter-on-quarter uptick, the networking capital issue went up until the guided corridor of 8% to 10% of sales. We are, however, confident that net burning capital will come down over the next quarter and will be slightly below the guided corridor of 8% to 10% by year end. Operating cash flow was 31%. 31 million euro, which is below prior year quarterly figure of 51 million euro. The decline is explained by higher cash outflows for taxes and others. The position others includes mainly cash outflows for value-added tax and prepaid expenses. The step-up in capex-related outflow of 15 million euros year-over-year to 56 million euro is in line with our full year 23 guidance of around 240 million euro. As a result, free cash flow is negative at 33 million euro and below prior year quarterly number of 11 million euro. Consequently, our free cash flow conversion rate before restructuring, which is calculated over the last four quarters, has been below the target corridor of 55 to 65%, as only 34% of EBITDA was converted into free cash flow. Main reason for the lower cash generation has been CapEx of €222 million and the net working capital outflow of €81 million over the course of the last four quarters. Free cash flow generation will significantly improve over the course of the second half and hence The free cash flow conversion ratio will see an increase from the current level, but we do not longer expect to reach the target corridor of 55 to 65 at the end. Net cash, including lease liabilities, declined from 247 million euro at the end of the first quarter to 65 million euro driven by the negative net cash flow of 52 million euro and the dividend payment of 164 million euro. Let me now talk about our financial headroom. On the left, you see our debt instruments as well as their respective utilization and maturity structure as per end of June 23. As per June 30, merely €2 million out of the €62 million uncommitted that bilateral credit lines were drawn, and €100 million of a fixed-rate borrower's note loan, which will be due on February 26 in 2025. The first liquidity position is supported with an undrawn committed syndicated credit line of €650 million, whose maturity has just been extended to August 28. This debt instrument currently serves only as an additional liquidity backup facility for us, To sum it up, we have only 100 million euro of financial debt. Continuing now on the right side of the slide, equity improved because of the higher net profit resulting in equity ratio of 39.6% after 38.7% at the end of Q2 2022. The decline in net liquidity is mainly due to the second tranche of our share payback program mentioned earlier. Let me now come to our outlook for the fiscal year 23. As a result of the positive development in this quarter, we confirm our guidance, which we have upgraded in May. Organic sales is expected to grow organically by more than 8% after 8.9% last year. For EBITDA before restructuring expenses, we forecast to reach the upper part of the range of 730 million to 790 million euros with a comparable margin of about 14%. And ROSI should exceed 32%. Please bear in mind that the guidance for EBITDA and ROSI is based on constant exchange rate. Finally, our roadmap for 23. The next important date will be the release of our Q2 results in November 8, followed by our full year 23 results in March next year. This concludes my presentation, and I hand back to Oliver for the Q&A session.

Yeah, thank you very much, Stefan, and I want to ask Heidi to start the Q&A session.

As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. We will take our first question. The question comes from the line of Klaus Bergling from City. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thank you. Hi, Stefan. Thanks for taking my question. First, my condolences to Gia and to Markus' family during this very difficult time. Absolutely shocking to hear. I wanted to ask around FHT first, Stefan. You're saying a slight EBITDA growth instead of significant previously. EBITDA is flattish in the first half, but that would still imply quite meaningful improvement to the margin already by the third quarter, as I see it. If you could talk through... Sorry, Lars.

Lars, we had some technical issues. We couldn't hear your question from the beginning. Can you please repeat it again? Sorry.

Sure. No, I wanted to ask around FHT, if you can hear me. You're saying slight EBITDA growth instead of significant previously, and EBITDA is flattish in the first half, and that would imply a quite meaningful improvement to the margin already by the third quarter, as I see it. If you could... Talk through why this was just a one-quarter drag. The new FHT management team is in place, but have you started? I'm a little bit surprised to see the improvement so soon. And then orders in FHT, underlying extra-large orders, you're up almost 10%. You had the issue with weakness in frozen food last quarter. Is that now improving, or are you also seeing better momentum in food solutions as we hear that from others? Thank you.

Voice quality is quite bad right now here, but I try to answer what I hopefully understood right. So the first question is about FHT and the expectation of the EBTA in the rest of the year. I mean, the negative impact you see this quarter in FHT is based on a single event, let's say like that, on projects where we obviously missed to increase the prices fast enough. And this is a very, very limited amount of projects in a single unit where we had a long time from order intake to execution. And that caused here the issues. But we expect that at the end of the year, we will be on track here again.

And then the growth, if you heard my question on why did we recover on the orders? Hello?

Yeah, hi, Klaus. What do you mean by that?

No, it's a tough comp. You had that weakness in frozen food last quarter. You changed management, and now growth is accelerating again. I was just wondering what is driving that.

Yeah, I mean, you know, FHT is a conglomerate of various businesses. I mean, frozen food is one of that, yeah. But we also have, of course, pasta. We have bakery and so on. The markets are very fragmented. We have very good order intake situation also in the pharma cluster, which is also part of that. So this is the situation here.

Okay. My next one is around the orders through the quarter. SFT is a normalization. But when we back out, food and pharma, they are down properly in the double digits. LPT, so good, solid, larger orders, but we're all in chems, in gas, not in BP. And then in FT, automated milking systems stop growing and the conventional side is down. So my question really here is around food and the dairy verticals. Do you think we will stay around the current level here? Is it just tough compares? Or do you think there are reasons why food and dairy can decline quarter and quarter beyond seasonality here into the third? Thank you.

Yeah, I mean... What we see in our pipeline also for the rest of the year looks quite okay. I mean, we all know that we are not living in a booming environment. Interest rates are going up. The economy is not as strong as last year again. But all in all, we are very optimistic. And it's always very difficult, let's say, to make conclusions based on a single quarter only in our business. So we don't see, let's say, any trend that dairy and food should become weaker. There is always, from border to border, a little bit of a fluctuation. But we are very optimistic that we will see also investments growing in food and dairy in the future. There is no indication we have that this should decline in the medium to long term.

That's good. A very quick final one. It's on the margin in FT, very solid expansion. You're above the midpoint of your 2026 range for the division. I know it's just one quarter, but how should we think about the margin here as we enter the second half? Is it a quick normalization or do you think you can sort of sustain this level And then related to that, are you planning to update the market on the money progression, given that the above 14% for the group is not far off your group money and above 15% three years out? Thank you.

I mean, you know, last year in farm technology, we had some impacts. because we missed to increase prices fast enough in the hygiene business. So this is also where you can see that we recovered. We have excellent pricing models now in place. That's also the reason why you can see that the margin is high. We have extremely good order backlog in farm technology. So we are also very optimistic that we can see very, very good margins in farm technology for the time being. Thank you.

Thank you. We will take our next question. And the question comes from the line of Sebastian Cooney from RBC. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hello, everyone. I can only say my sincere condolences as well to the family of Mr. Ketter and I know that you I've worked with Markus for many more years than just the GIA years, so I wish you all the best in this difficult time. Thank you. My question is just relating to the situation in the dairy market as well, really, and food processing. We saw about 3% volume drop for the largest listed food processors globally. So the actual volumes of their retail sales have dropped. And at the same time, when I look at GEA's food processing order intake for the last 12 months, it looks up 12%, and that's probably not just pricing, it's probably also a bit of volume. So there seems to be kind of a discrepancy between what we see on the retail side and what we see on the equipment orders. And you mentioned already that you don't see a drop-off in food processing, but could you maybe, or do you have an explanation why we see falling retail volumes in the markets, but higher capex by the food processors? Is that that we look at the wrong companies, that we should not look at the listed food processors, but maybe the third world and developing countries food process, what would be your explanation? It's still growing.

Yeah, Sebastian. It's difficult to say for me because I don't exactly know what kind of numbers you are looking at. I mean, the food industry is a very dynamic one. There are always new products coming up. A lot of our customers are also investing in new products. new meat products, also beat alternative protein products. So we see a lot of investments going on here. And I also remember we had just recently the large international trade show Interpac here in Düsseldorf, where I also spent a lot of time and talking also to other industry players. And the mood was quite optimistic. I mean, nobody has any fear that that CapEx will fall down here.

Okay. And then the second question is on staff costs or operating costs. You mentioned several times that operating costs have not really increased in most of the divisions, but I think there's some raises coming up for IG Metall workers, but maybe also for your employees in other regions. Can you give us an indication of what you expect for the staff costs or maybe just generally operating costs as we go into the second half.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, there will be no additional increases come this year because all the wage increases we made already in the first or second quarter. So that's all in meanwhile. And we, of course, increased prices early enough that we can also compensate that additional costs. The expectation of this year, we have additional wage costs or personnel costs in the area of 5 to 6%. And next year, it might be a little bit less, but it will continue. And therefore, we are also continuing increasing prices. You know that we are And we have been very successful in increasing prices with a very few exceptions I just mentioned before. But all in all, for the whole group, we have been very successful in managing prices up. That's also what you can see in our gross margin. And yeah, the wage increase this year is around 5% to 6%.

Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Thank you. We will take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Sven Wehr from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes, thank you very much and good afternoon. Of course, also first up, sincere condolences for the tragic loss of markets from my side. My first question is actually on the use of cash. And I was just wondering when we look at the current share price, it's round about the average share price when you bought back stock last time. and that cash gets finding M&A challenging. So I was just wondering what your attitude is regarding buybacks. Is that something you would start contemplating more and more in the rest of the year? That's the first one.

Okay. Thanks, Sven. I know this question. It's not the first time we get this question. I mean, of course, I think you understand We are thinking about all these options. And of course, we are also aware that we have to create good ideas. How can we use the cash? As soon as we have made a decision, we will announce it.

Okay, thank you. Second question is, when we look at the guidance for the full year margin of at least 14%, I guess to get to the 14%, you only have to have a flat margin at second half after strong improvement in the first half. So obviously granted that the margin improvement in the second half will probably not be as material as in the first half, but we just discussed obviously no additional headwind from wages. So is it just you being conservative or are you factoring in much more headwind from mix? Because in some areas, the OE share should go up relative to aftermarket? Just be interested in more color on this one.

Yeah. I mean, we are, you know, that we increased our guidance quite early, I would say, in an environment where other companies came out with profit warnings. We always want to rather under-promise and over-deliver But we feel comfortable with our guidance. If you look at our accumulated half-year numbers here, and you also know that the second half of the year is normally much stronger than the first half of the year. So I think we are fully on track, and we will also deliver good numbers at the end of this year. Again, good numbers. And what I also need to mention maybe, because I think this is really remarkable, I mean, when When we started here, my dear friend Markus and myself, in the year 2019, the company generated an EBDA of 490 million EBDA. And this year, despite we sold seven companies with approximately 300 million sales, We will see this year a number which is at the upper range of the guidance, which you know. So I think this is really a significant improvement. And since quarters, we are improving our profitability. And that continues. We also have our mission 26, which we fully confirm. And therefore, you can also expect a good year 23.

That question I had was just on the dairy side. I mean, how much should we really stress the implications of the dairy price volatility on the actual order behavior? I mean, I've been covering the stock for some years, and it always struck me as a bit more coincidental. To me, it seems rather that on the farm technology side, you had a very high level of orders, and that now normalizes maybe also a little bit independent of where exactly the milk price is today. And I guess also...

lower dairy prices would probably increase the pressure to to automate further so i was just really thinking should we get too hung up on what the daily daily milk prices do yeah i mean the the milk prices if it was like you say always uh volatile that's that's very clear there are good times or bad times for the for the farmers uh it it is uh definitely uh not falling further down. It's rather stabilizing. The demand, I think, is also for the next five or 10 years. There is a growing world population. There's a growing middle class. And dairy is in demand. So I'm not really cared about the future of farm technology. And at the same time, I think we also have to make ourselves aware that farm technology is a very interesting recurring revenue business. More than 40% of what we have in farm technology is recurring business. It's service, spare parts, consumables, hygiene, liquids, We also do more and more digitalization services here. And there's also a very clear trend that the farms need to automate because otherwise they cannot be successful in the future anymore. So I'm not scared about the medium and long-term development here as well.

Okay. Thank you, Stefan. Much appreciated.

Thank you, Sven.

Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. We will take our next question. And the question comes from the line of Lars von Kleff from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Lars von Kleff, your line is open. Please ask your question. As there seems to be no answer, I shall move to the next question. Please stand by. Your next question comes from the line of Akash Gupta from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes. Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. I also wanted to start with offering my condolence on the sudden death of Marcus. He has indeed left a long-lasting impact on Gaya Financial in his four years at the company. Now, coming back to my question, I have just one, and this is on the slide number eight where you show this carbon capture solution. So a few questions that I have on this one is that if you can perhaps quantify what is the typical size of such modular solution, and what I mean by that is that you have four buckets for your size of orders. Is it less than one million or between one to five for other categories. So that's the first part. And then the second question is if you can comment on your current capacity utilization and how quickly can you ramp up production in this technology. And finally, we have seen a number of other companies also have similar solutions. Can you talk about uniqueness and any patents that you have in this technology which will be differentiating yourself with the rest of the competition. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Akash, for your questions. So as I said, we just start with the technology. I mean, we have the technology. It's not a new technology. It's about filtering and washing of the steam. This is a technology We are known since years, and we also have a lot of know-how here. But it's not a patented technology. It's also not a unique technology. Other companies can do that as well. However, the market is opening now. It's about winning the market. It's about winning the market shares. We see ourselves very well positioned here. We already made some significant progress Decisions to also increase staff significantly in that team. So we will ramp it up to the first time now up to 50 people here. And we just started with a small team of about five people. So we will significantly scale it up. We have very good experience now with our customer here. It's about, let's say, more sales shop now being present, taking the opportunity. And I think we are very early here and we can win a significant market share here. And we all have to be aware that the cement industry is the biggest single polluter worldwide for CO2. So there is a huge, huge volume. And one installment might be, depending on the size of the factory, like you said, probably between one and five million. That might be the range where the single orders in the future will be.

Thank you. Thank you. We will take our next question. And the question comes from the line of Lars von Kleff from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes, thank you very much. Good afternoon. Of course, you also have my sympathy, and we're all sure that Markus will be missed, sadly. Quickly, I'm asking a question about the order intake. You said several times that order intake recently benefited from your chemicals customers. Do you see demand from that sector slowing down now that the outlook for the industry becomes a bit worse, or is demand still up looking into Q3 when it comes to new order intake?

Yeah, maybe it is a little bit misleading for outsiders when we talk about chemicals because this is not You might consider being the typical chemical industry. There's a lot of rumor and discussion. Will chemical industries survive in Germany and so on? So this is more that we define it as chemicals because of the applications. But also, our chemicals very often are applications which are going into food and beverage industries, for instance. So this is maybe important to mention. Therefore, we see interesting opportunities. Also, when we spoke about CO2 capturing for the cement industry, it's also that we do CO2 capturing in the beverage industry. So also in breweries, in a fermenter, there is CO2 generated. And we also have solutions to take out the CO2 of a fermenter and make it make it liquid to be used for the production of beer at the end, for instance. Therefore, we see what we define or how we define our chemical business. Let's say we see increasing interesting markets here. Absolutely. And this has, of course, nothing to do with the discussion you see in the media about the chemical industry.

Perfect. And then I remember that in earlier calls we discussed that there were still some supply chain bottlenecks persisting, slowing down your overall sales growth. Have these supply chain bottlenecks fully disappeared in the meantime, or are some products still slowing you down with your growth ambitions?

Let me answer that question. Johannes Skillet speaking here. We have seen indeed last year a constraint in our supply, which has resolved to the largest extent. So currently we are not even in the electronics business affected any longer on the supply chain side to further grow.

That is definitely good to hear. And then maybe thinking about your organic sales growth, Would you be willing to split that into a price and a volume component for Q2?

That's not so easy possible because we are not selling to a large extent with price lists. If we would have price lists, then it would be quite easy to calculate. So you know that the vast majority of our turnover projects where we make anomaly cost plus calculations or value based pricing and therefore it's not so easy to to really split it up we mentioned already in the in the past a number and we said that it is a It is in the area of maybe 4% to 5% would be increased in prices.

Okay, perfect. And then one last one, if I may. I appreciate that you started your AdBeta label just recently in June. I guess it's a bit too early to ask which percentage of your order intake can be linked to these at-better labeled products.

Yeah, I understand. That's a very small number so far. It's very clear because we just started three months ago. And these are all new products which we now push into the market. But what is, I think, more important, if you look at these nine products which I showed you, the most important thing is we are really making a difference here. provide our customers with more sustainable solutions. And that will put us at the forefront in the industry. I'm quite sure that we care and we focus about reducing energy, reducing water consumption. I could talk two hours about really smart and clever solutions solutions our engineers found because we are putting this one and a half year very clear focus on r d and development of sustainable solution we even now we invented in gear the sustainer tons you know what a hackathon is of course and therefore we invented the sustainer tons we are bringing together multidisciplinary teams focusing on issues which has only to do to improve the state of the world by decreasing water consumption and decreasing energy. And this is the most important message. And sooner or later, of course, we will accelerate the growth of those products which have the label.

And I guess it's fair to assume that your customers are also willing to pay somewhat more for these products. state-of-the-art products that they have undoubtedly benefits and that I guess you with your market position are then also able to negotiate I don't know a beneficial margin for you as well or a slightly higher margin.

Absolutely. Absolutely. This is exactly what we call value pricing and what we also do. Because if in examples I mentioned, we can save tons of waters a month, a week, a day. It has a big, big value for our customers.

Yeah. Perfect. Thank you. I'll go back to Lauren then.

Thank you. We will take our next question. Please stand by. The next question comes from the line of Klaus Bergling from City. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes. Thank you for taking the follow-up. I just had a question on new food applications. Obviously, financing costs are up. We're hearing of some startups struggling. Customers are trading down. We've seen some profit warnings in this space. Your target here, Stefan, is 400 million sales for the out-years. Can you talk... But what you see here are projects anyway drying up. Do you still feel good about the 400 million? I know you said that you're already conservative when you presented this number at the CMD, but you're also saying today that demand is still solid in SFT, but down in LPT. So curious to hear about new food.

Yeah, we are still very optimistic in terms of new food. I mean, the impact you see at the moment is maybe the normalization of artificial hype, which was mainly in the area of plant-based food. So everybody wanted to try the plant-based food. Then everybody discovered that it may be not as good as meat. And that's the area where the drop mainly comes from. I personally believe that we will see in the medium to long term significant growth in cell-based meat. That's also where we now build a factory for for Believer Meat, which is an Australian startup, and they are building the first ever cell-based meat factory in the US. We built the factory for them, and they are very optimistic that they can also beat the price point they need. And once that might happen with cell-based meat, which looks like meat, which tastes like meat, which is meat at the end, I'm very optimistic that we will see here things accelerating.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. There seems to be no further questions. I would like to hand back to Stefan at Qubit for closing remarks.

Okay, so thank you for participating in our call which was a very special week for us as well. And thanks for your understanding. I want to close the call with a summary. The Q2 was another strong quarter. And I mean, we had now really many, many successful quarters in a row where we really proved and showed every quarter that we are performing. And we never had a quarter two with a margin of 14.3% in EBDA. We also see a positive development for the second half of the year. Also, the pipeline we see makes us confident that we can deliver a great year 23 and continue our journey towards the mission 26. So thank you very much for your participation. Stay healthy and talk to you next time.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.