Gea Group Ag Ord

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GIA Group AG Q2 2026 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 the 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 Luckenbach, Head of IR. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you very much and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me on the call are Stefan Klebert, our CEO, and Alexander Kocherscheidt, our CFO. Stefan will begin today's call with the highlights of the second quarter and Alexander will then cover the business and financial review before Stefan takes over again for the outlook 2026. Afterwards, we open up the call for the Q&A session. 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, hand over to Stefan.

Thank you, Oliver, and good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our conference call today. Before starting with the review of our second quarter results, let me share with you some important news, which we published last week. The executive board has resolved that we will start another share buyback program in the amount of up to 500 million euros. Keeping in mind that we have already bought back and canceled shares with an aggregated volume of 700 million Euro in the last five years, the new program brings us to a share buyback volume of 1.2 billion Euro between 2021 and 2027. An impressive volume in relation to our market cap. The new program will be split into two branches and will run until the end of 2027. The first tranche of the programme, worth up to 250 million euros, starts tomorrow and will be executed over the next seven months. Like the last programme, all repurchased shares will be cancelled once the programme has been completed. These news clearly demonstrate our conviction in GEA's growth opportunities. We are growing our top line, improving our profitability further and making continuous progress towards our mission 30 targets. Thanks to our strong cash generation, the share buyback is not limiting our investments, R&D spending or potential acquisitions. As in previous programs, there is an ESG feature linked to the buyback. We will donate part of the guaranteed outperformance, which is the difference between the purchasing price and the volume-weighted average price of our shares over the duration of the program, to the Deutsche Universitätsstiftung. It will be roughly €250,000, which will be used to support exceptionally talented students in STEAM education. I am turning now to our second quarter release. After having already reported a strong first quarter, we accelerated top-line growth and improved profitability further in the second quarter. Order intake rose significantly by 14.2% year-over-year to €1.5 billion. This performance was driven by strong growth in all order sizes. Base orders, however, had by far the highest absolute growth contribution. Large orders, though orders above 15 million euro, had a total value of 34 million euro, while no large order had been booked in the prior year quarter. Sales grew strongly by 10% to 1.4 billion euro. Organic sales growth was even higher at 11.0%. EBITDA before restructuring expenses increased by an excellent margin. 15.6% year-over-year to €251 million. The corresponding EBITDA margin improved to 17.4%. This marks a new record level for GIA. Return on capital employed continued to rise from an already high level in the prior year quarter to 36.8% in the quarter. This marks a new record too. Due to an excellent cash generation in the quarter, net liquidity turned from a net debt position at the end of the second quarter in 2025 into a net cash position of 71 million euro at the end of the second quarter in 26. To sum it up, a very strong second quarter with improvements in all key performance indicators. Due to this very positive operating performance and confident expectations for the remainder of this year, we raised our guidance for the fiscal year 26 as announced on 21st of July. We are now guiding organic sales growth to be between 6 and 8% for the full year 26, up from the prior range of 5 to 7%. The new range is well above our midterm target of more than 5% organic sales growth. EBDA margin before restructuring expenses is expected to be in the range of 17 to 17.4% up from the prior guidance of 16.6 to 17.2%. This brings us already close to the low end of our mission 30 target even if you have to consider that this year's EBDA margin is before restructuring expenses while from next year onwards the EBDA margin is as reported. The new guidance for return on capital employed is between 36 and 40 percent clearly above the prior range of 34 to 38 percent. As you can see we are once again delivering what we promised or even more than that. This is one of my favorite charts. Once again, we have been recognized as one of the world's most sustainable companies by Time Magazine and Statista. Over 5,000 companies were evaluated globally to identify the top 750 companies, and GEA not only made it to rank 17 globally, but was ranked first among all German companies. This is a special honor for everyone at GEAB as it underscores our position as a real frontrunner in sustainability. And it is exactly this distinctive aspect, sustainability, as a driver of long-term value creation that we strive to communicate to the capital market. Over the past few years, our investor relations team, together with my executive board colleague, Dr. Nadine Sterley, has done a fantastic job in transparent and understandable ESG communication. It is especially rewarding to see that this work has been recognized and appreciated by you, our investors and analysts. Receiving the German Investor Relations Award for Best ESG Communication is a great honor to us. It reflects something we truly care about, engaging openly with our stakeholders and bringing our shareholders along on our journey towards an even more sustainable company. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your vote, your trust and your continued support. We see this award not only as recognition of what we have achieved, but also as encouragement to keep pushing ahead on our journey Guided by Our Purpose Engineering for a Better World. And now I hand over to Alexander, who will give you more insights into our performance in the second quarter.

Thank you very much, Stefan, and a warm welcome from me as well, ladies and gentlemen. I will now walk you through our business and financial performance in the second quarter. Let's have a closer look at the group performance. As Stefan has already highlighted, we had an excellent second quarter throughout all key performance indicators. Order intake increased significantly by 15.4% organically, with all divisions contributing to this positive development, except for PFA. From a customer industry perspective, once again, and for several quarters in a row, dairy processing and dairy farming continue to be strong. In addition, food and other industries were showing good demand. Translational FX effects became smaller. While we had an adverse translational FX effect of more than 3% in the first quarter, it shrunk to 1% in the second quarter. Sales grew organically by 11.0%, driven by excellent performance in both new machine and service sales. Organic growth in the new machine business reached 11.6%, supported by double-digit growth rates in almost all divisions. The service business continued its growth trajectory and reported an organic growth rate of 10.2%. This marks the 23rd quarter in a row with organic service sales growth. An impressive performance. On the back of the slightly stronger growth in the new machine business, the service sales share declined by 0.5 percentage points to 39.6%. EBITDA before restructuring expenses rose by €23 million to €251 million, resulting in a corresponding year-over-year margin expansion of 0.9 percentage points, The higher volume and better growth margin were the drivers of the profitability increase. Moving on to the divisional performance. I will start with pure flow processing, which reported very strong top line growth, so order intake and sales, while the EBITDA margin declined slightly at a high level. Order intake rose organically by 9.8% year over year, driven by orders below 5 million Euro. Demand was strongest in food, dairy processing and marine, but also beverage, energy and distribution and storage contributed to the impressive growth rate. Thus, order intake strength was broad-based across different customer industries. Organic sales grew significantly by 12.9% year over year, and others. As the new machine business grew even more than service sales this quarter, the service sales share decreased on a high level from 47.0% in the second quarter of 2025 to 46.2% in the second quarter of 2026. EBITDA before restructuring expenses rose by €13 million year-over-year to €145 million, driven by higher gross profit, which was partly offset by increased operating costs, such as higher selling expenses in line with our order intake development. The corresponding EBITDA margin declined on a high level by 0.5 percentage points year-over-year to 27.5 in the quarter. Turning to Nutrition Plant Engineering, which caught up strongly from a slow first quarter. The division reported impressive numbers across all key performance indicators. Significant order intake growth, strong sales, as well as a substantial EBITDA margin expansion. As a result of this performance, all key indicators turned from a negative performance in the first quarter to a positive one in the first half. Order intake for the second quarter was up organically by more than 40%. This was driven by a very strong performance of orders between 1 and 15 million Euro, as well as two large orders from the dairy processing industry, which totalled 34 million Euro. The prior year quarter contained no large orders. In terms of customer industries, dairy processing remained strong. and this is not only driven by the two large Asian dairy processing orders. Even without these two large orders, this custom industry would have been a strong growth contributor. In addition, pharma showed good demand in the quarter. Sales increased organically by 10.6% year over year. Service sales continued its growth trajectory, increasing organically by 11.5% year over year. At the same time, new machine sales rebounded as expected and promised after reporting a decline in the first quarter. As mentioned already in our first quarter call, we expected an improvement in new machine sales kicking in in the second quarter. EBITDA before restructuring expenses increased from 45 million euro in the prior year quarter to 56 million euro in the second quarter of 2026 on the back of higher sales volume and better growth margins. The corresponding EBITDA margin rose strongly by 1.3 percentage points year over year to 11.3%. Continuing with pharma and food applications, which delivered strong sales growth and a substantial profitability expansion. Order intake, however, declined organically by 9.6% due to timing of orders. Base orders, which are orders below 1 million euro, Thank you very much. The impressive track record of continuous profitability improvement, which the division has built up over the last years, continued in the second quarter. Absolute EBITDA before restructuring expenses and the corresponding margin reached new record levels for a quarter. EBITDA rose substantially by 30% year-over-year to 45 million euro, driven For the first time ever, the respective margin crossed the 16% mark and reached 16.2%, an outstanding achievement. Finally, farm technologies. Farm technologies reported another quarter of double-digit growth rates in order intake and sales. Let me give you some more details here. The favorable market environment for dairy farmers, which began in December 2024, continued steadily throughout 2025 and the first half of 2026. This translated once again into a notable increase in order intake. Order intake rose by 11.4% organically due to strong demand for both automated and conventional milking systems in the new machine business area. In terms of order sizes, base orders were the growth driver. Organic sales rose significantly by 15.4%. New machine sales continued their strong performance since middle of last year with a substantial year-over-year organic increase of 22.6%. Service sales grew organically at 8.6%. As a result of the significant outperformance of the new machine business, The service sales share declined from a high level of 51.1% in the second quarter of 2025 to 47.8% in the second quarter of 2026. On the back of higher sales volume, EBITDA before restructuring expenses rose by €3 million year over year to €30 million. The corresponding EBITDA margin declined slightly by 0.2 percentage points to 14.2% because of the lower service sales share and product mix effects. Let me close the divisional chapter with an overview of the EBITDA growth contribution in the first half and in the second quarter of 2026. There are two important messages. Firstly, we have been able to increase our EBITDA before restructuring expenses in both time periods considerably. Secondly, all divisions contributed to this positive development. This underlines our broad-based strengths, resulting from our price and cost discipline, as well as savings from our procurement and production optimization efforts. Let me now turn to another important topic, net working capital. Year over year, net working capital declined by €27 million to €396 million. This reduction was driven by a combination of higher trade payables and higher contract liabilities. The high volume of large orders over the last four quarters led to higher advance payments, which are reflected in the increase in contract liabilities. This resulted in a networking capital to sales ratio of 7.0%, placing us at the bottom of the guided corridor of 7 to 9%. On a rolling last four quarters basis, which smoothed seasonality, the ratio was even lower at 6.3%. Free cash flow reached an outstanding level, marking the highest second quarter free cash flow in six years. Let's have a look at the main drivers. After a moderate network and capital outflow of €12 million and a €26 million outflow in the others position, which mainly resides from miscellaneous balance sheet movements like VAT, operating cash flow stood at €185 million in the second quarter. Capex related cash outflow was relatively low at 39 million euro compared with our full year 2026 guidance of around 240 million. As in previous years, we expect Capex to ramp up in the second half of 2026. As a result, free cash flow was very strong, amounting to 151 million euro. After deducting lease payments and interest paid, net cash flow amounted to 131 million euro. The strong net cash flow was offset by the dividend payment. But even so, we ended the quarter with a net cash position of 71 million euro. In the first half, free cash flow was still negative at 39 million euro. However, we saw a very strong catch up in the second quarter. We are therefore on track to achieve roughly the same level of free cash flow for the full year as in 2025. Free cash flow generation over the last four quarters has been strong, reaching 483 million euro. The corresponding cash conversion ratio, which indicates how much of the EBITDA before restructuring expenses has been converted into free cash flow before restructuring expenses, landed at a solid 54%. With that, I hand back to Stefan for the outlook.

Thank you, Alexander. As already mentioned at the beginning of today's call, we have increased our guidance for 2026 based on the very positive performance in the first half of this year and the promising expectations for the second half of 2026. Despite the volatile environment driven by geopolitical tensions around the world, GEA's positive journey is not only continuing, it is even accelerating. And this is based on the various levers which we initiated with our mission 30. Finally, our roadmap for 2026. The next important date will be the release of our third quarter results on November 9th. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing many of you at upcoming roadshows and conferences. Alexander, the investor relations team and I will be meeting investors until the end of September. This concludes my presentation and I hand back to Oliver for the Q&A.

Yeah, thank you very much, Stefan and Alexander. And yes, let's start with the Q&A session. And therefore, I'm turning the call back to you, Maddalena. And please go ahead with some more instructions.

Thank you. 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. One moment for our first question. and this question comes from the line of Akash Gupta from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi, good afternoon and thanks for your time. My first one is for Stefan. Stefan, you earlier touched base in your prepared remarks that you are technically hitting the bottom end of your 2030 target of 17% to 19% already this year. I know margin guidance for 2030 excluding restructuring including restructuring and this year is excluding restructuring but I'm wondering if you can talk about the timeline for potentially revisiting 2030 targets which looks conservative. And then my second question is for Alexander which is on farm tech. Your new revenue guidance is 8% to 10% organic after more than 20% in H1. and that would mean that even at the top end of the revenue outlook, you are guiding a modest revenue decline in second half. FarmTech has seen more than one times book to bill for three consecutive quarter and backlog is at highest level since Q2 of 2023. So maybe if you can help us understand what is driving this revenue guidance for FarmTech. Thank you.

Yeah, Akash, thanks for the question and I mean, First of all, I think the positive message is I think there is no question mark that we can make the Mission 30. These question marks might be finally gone. And I think if you also, we know each other very well, Akash, since a long time. And if you see this performance now, I think it proves that we can deliver what we promised. Let's first finish now the year 26 and let's see where we finally end. And as I said, we are definitely touching the lower end of the mission 30 already at this year's end. And then at the right time, we might think twice and we will see if there is any room for recalibration. But the company has, of course, a lot of potential, like you can see.

Yeah, OK, sorry. So second question, Akash, regarding the FT sales. We, of course, are running also against a second quarter of last year. That's also always the case if we then compare the two numbers. And this has been quite a strong one last year. So that's the first one. And yeah, the comparison in H2 is quite high. So that leads to our overall guidance of 8 to 10 percent.

Thank you. But still, when I look at your last three-quarter order intake, even if we have similar revenues in second half, we should get growth in farm tech revenues in second half. So I was just wondering if there is anything we are missing there.

No, there's nothing that you're missing. So that's the guidance we are giving and that's based on the current expectation. I think with the yearly growth rate, we are still within the growth trajectory that we are needing also in comparison to last year's growth in FT. So that's where we currently sit.

Thank you.

Thank you. We are now going to move to our next question. And this question comes from Neihan Yang from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. I just have two. So I think on your previous earnings calls, you talk about the acceleration in organic sales growth throughout the year. I wonder if given your strong first half performance, are you still expecting this? And in that case, would it be still further room to upgrade your four-year guidance of 26? and my second question is if you could give us a bit more color on how much visibility you have now for the order book to support future quarters at current high growth organic orders growth rate or even higher. Thank you.

Thank you, Maihan. Thanks for your question. Well, you are right. Normally, we can accelerate organic sales growth in the second half of the year, like also profitability. That makes us very optimistic that we will achieve the guidance which we promised. We know each other not so long time, but if you follow GER during the last years, we always deliver what we promise. So for us, it's not an option to over-promise and under-deliver. So we rather like to do it the other way around. So that is what I can say. There are always some risks in the air, not coming from our company, coming from outside developments, but we are very optimistic that we see Let's say it's growth, which is in line with the guidance we just gave. And the auto pipeline, or let's say, of course, we are The second half of the year is a little bit of an uphill battle, let's say, because we are comparing against especially a very strong Q4. So it is very unlikely, let's say like that, that we can beat last year's Q4, because last year we also booked Balatna here in this fourth quarter. So Just also to manage expectations. Don't expect a Q4, which might be even above the last year's Q4. But as I always like to say, a quarter is very difficult to judge in our business because it happens so fast that we can book something in Q3 what we expected in Q2 or vice versa. So more important is the 12-month period, I would say. and we are very optimistic that we can see at the end of the year a significant growth also in order intake. Doesn't matter when we book it.

Understood. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Maja.

Thank you. We are now going to move to our next question. And this question comes from from CT. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hi, Stefan Alexander, Class at Cities. My first question is on your exposure to the data center build-out. It seems like you haven't seen much growth here yet, but we're hearing from others of increased orders here in the flow end of the business. So these are pumps, valves, fittings, etc. Could you talk through your exposure here, Stefan, and to what extent you can make this sort of commercial, to commercialize this opportunity? I'll start here, thank you.

Thanks, Klaas. First of all, it's very good to hear you today, so thanks for the good connection. I cannot comment on what others are promising or telling or whatever. For us, from today's point of view, we don't expect any significant business from us in the data center. but this is not a big problem for us because as you know we have a lot of other verticals where we have really interesting growth. Also just to mention that we are extremely successful in the topic of continuous tablet pressing where we have a unique position and you also could maybe read that now Novo Nordisk is also starting with the GLP-1 tablets in Europe. This is something where we might benefit significantly from. So there are different verticals for us which are very interesting, but most likely data center is not.

Thank you. My second one is sort of linked to other questions in that your guidance seems conservative. So if you look at pure flow processing, but it's a little bit simpler. The implied second half growth in the full year midpoint shows a sharp acceleration to 2% below consensus around 5% and there is confidence that this is just effectively conservative as it's been thought to cycle. Are you seeing anything here that would suggest a slowdown or is linked to tougher compromising or something else? The implied margins Very good for PFP. Thank you.

Okay. First of all, I was maybe too fast in giving you kudos for the good connection because it was quite, quite, quite bad again. But I think I've got the point. Well, what should I say? You know, Lars, we know each other also very long. You know that we are always guiding what we can achieve. and there might be, if everything goes in the right direction, there might be upside potential, not only in PFP. This is, I would say, how I can comment it, but there is nothing which you don't know and should know to be sure that we might be worse than expected. We do our job, we do like always, It might look conservative, but let's see where we end up.

Okay, my very quick final one, if you can hear me okay. If the very strong orders, X the large orders in MPE, which seems to be driven both by dairy processing and pharma, did any of these two segments, X large orders, accelerate more than the others quarter on quarter? And the debate now in GIA is sort of moving on from large orders to base orders in MPE. You have a tough come from large orders in the second half. But the question now, do you see this underlying order level sustained into the second half? Any comment on the sort of base order pipeline, 1 to 15 million would be useful and across geographies? Thank you, Stefan.

Yeah, I think that's good what you mentioned because we see a very good base load in NPE. By the way, also here, while we are talking about verticals and verticals, and Gross Drivers. Also the whole high protein trend is something which is very favorable for us at the moment. There is a lot of investment going on. The world needs to have high protein and also many people are moving to dairy-based products which might not have consumed it so much in the past. This is what we see. And on top of that, we have an interesting and very promising pipeline for large orders in NPE. So also here we expect a very good second half of the year in terms of order intake and of course also in sales.

Thank you.

You're welcome, Lars.

Thank you. We are now going to take our next question and this one comes from Max Yates from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I just wanted to ask firstly about your services growth. So 10% organic growth in services in the quarter. It's obviously a very impressive number and I guess far above what your installed base is growing at. I guess my question is you laid out in your sort of previous plans, you know, moving up the service ladder, trying to kind of recapture more of your base, higher value per machine. I guess I just wanted to understand how far along are you in that process? And, you know, maybe if you could give us any sort of quantification of, you know, how much were you capturing of your deliveries into your installed service base versus today? How much is that going to capture rate? Just any sort of quantification. Our service is a very important part of our success story in the last years, of course.

We achieved meanwhile a percentage of roughly 40%. Can it be larger? Yes, I mean, but it also, you know, it depends on how successful we are in new installations. We don't want to outgrow it to, let's say, 45 or 50 percent because that would mean that we are selling too little or too less new installations. but we promised in the mission 30 to grow service business to 2.9 billion in 2030 we are very well on track here we also are increasing our number of digital products which we sell this is a very interesting part for us and where we can also accelerate service growth but it's also that we do a lot in all the traditional areas that starts with Thank you very much. In the past where we have only license agreements where we charge per month, per unit, per cow, whatever and that will also help us to boost service also further in the future.

Thank you and maybe just a sort of conceptual question about your margins. If I look at your margins, it looks like you're going to be trending towards the upper end of that target that you gave by 2030. Just conceptually, when you look at your peer group, I know previously you'd shown charts of benchmarking where you were versus the best-in-class peers. It's implied that you will have closed most of that gap. When you look at how the business is running and the path over the next couple of years, Do you still see major opportunities to improve efficiency? Are there still divisions, maybe things like rolling out the SAP systems that can really unlock a huge amount more margins? Or do you really see, once you get to those levels, you really are operating as best in class and it really then moves on to investing in the business? I'm just wondering conceptually, You know, beyond the midpoint to those targets. How do you think about it?

Understood, understood. Yeah, the journey is not yet over. And I think there will also be a mission beyond the Mission 30 whenever it has been completed. And this is, I think, I also can say there's only one gear. It's very difficult to compare us to peers. When you look at the pure flow processing part, for instance, we are definitely best in class and outstanding in The average might be a little bit lower than so-called best-in-class peers. However, they don't have businesses like we with nutrition plant engineering. and others. This is the business unit and the division which we run with a negative network capital which brings us to a ROSI of almost 40% already now. So this is also what we don't have to forget. And I give you also maybe a little bit shades of grey when we talk about the SAP program which we call Transform360. At the moment, we are spending a lot of money, medium size of double digit million what we spend per year for the introduction and rollout costs. And we have at the moment not yet any synergies made out of that. And this is all in the P&L. If you think about once we have completed the rollout, we don't have this cost anymore, though you can add that to the EBDA immediately. And on top of that, we have the synergies which we will create out of one common system. So even if we would see no improvement in the operational business simply by Completing our Transform360 journey by saving the money we spent today for the introduction and at the same time leveraging the potential we have from the synergies that will create another level of profitability.

Understood. Just one really quick housekeeping question. Restructuring for 27, once you take it above the line, how much do you think that number will be next year?

Next year zero, because we don't exclude it anymore next year. And even if you look at the numbers you are used to, these are things which are not recurrent. It's not that this company must have 40, 50, 60, 70 whatever restructuring costs a year because this is also what we promised at the end of 26 we will be done we will be ready with our transformational system and our transformational journey and then there is only a very very small number which might kick in but it's not that we will see huge impacts here

So you're not going to guide to flat margins because you've just taken 50 bits of restructuring above the line or something like that?

Now, what we guide is that from next year on, we don't have EBDA before restructuring anymore. We have all in.

Yeah, I know. I understand. But if suddenly the restructuring is above the line, it will be margin dilutive if it's there. So I'm just trying to understand. Yeah.

Yeah, you are absolutely right, but also today and in the last years we disclosed both numbers, so you always had the number EBDA All In and you also have the number we officially guide EBDA Before Restructuring. But what I can say if next year we change to EBDA All In you should not expect any significant decline based on that fact. So we will be ready and done with everything we need to do and that's the message.

Very clear. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We are now going to move to our next question. And this question comes from Uma Samlin from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for taking my question. So my first question is on the growth margins. I guess you've had really significant improvement in the past few years on your growth margins. And this quarter, if I'm correct, it seems to be the highest on record. give us a bit more insight on what's been driving the improvement, if there's any wealth there, and how sustainable that is.

Hi, Uma. So the growth margin has been definitely positively impacted over the last years, I have to say, by both the clear focus on the project side to drive project execution excellence. And on the other hand, also by it's impacted positively by our Cox program, which we also talked about earlier. at the last Capital Markets Day. And this is also continuing. So we are, of course, happy to see the margin having risen to this level, but we don't see that this is now one of top high level and it should go down. Not at all. We are continuing to focus on execution excellence and also to drive Cox down even further, engineer to design, This is an ongoing exercise.

Okay, that's super clear. Thank you. And that doesn't include any tariff refunds?

Sorry.

Does it include any tariff refunds?

In the first half year we had a number of tariffs which we got refunded of a mid-sized single digit million euro number and of course this also works in a way that we are passing the refunds on to our customers where this is appropriate and this was roughly half of this amount in the first half.

Okay, that's super clear. Thank you. Another one for me is a follow-up on the Mission 30 target. You mentioned that you're closing into the Mission 30 target, and I guess you also mentioned that, you know, you're yet to finish the SG&A program and the COGS program. So I guess that means that you'll see further upside from here in terms of margins, given, you know, you still have, like, half of the COGS programs left, and also, like, you add As I understand correctly, SG&A only expected like 28 to 30. So if we add, you know, both of those savings into your margin trajectory, does it mean that you still have like a couple of percentage, you know, to go to 2030?

Well, I think what we promise we deliver. Let's say it like that again. and it is clear that we also have additional opportunities. Like I just mentioned, when you think about the Transform 360 program, what comes out of the savings from G&A costs here and on top of that, we will still continue to optimize our cogs. Also, here we are not at the end. This company is a fantastic company in really resilient markets. with a lot of potential which we can deploy over the next years. When we are faster than originally expected, everybody is happy. We will definitely not be slower.

Thank you very much, Stefan. Thank you.

Thank you. We are going to take our next question. And this one comes from Sven Weyer from UPS. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is just on the buyback. And I was just wondering, of course, it's the biggest size so far. I mean, should that tell us anything about timing of M&A? Maybe you can speak a bit about the M&A pipeline, whether that has changed, whether things are a bit less imminent on the M&A side. That's the first one. Thank you.

Okay, thanks for the questions. I know nothing has changed. I mean, it's simply that, I mean, no huge acquisition is expected to fall from heaven, which we would not know, where we would not have any idea that it would come to the market. And everything which might come also over the next Thank you very much.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Just wanted to confirm that. Second question is just, sorry for belaboring the point, but coming back to the revenue guidance for the full year. I mean, did you have any pull forward revenues from the second half? Because I remember that, you know, part of the rationale for a back-end loaded guidance originally was that you generate a lot of plant engineering sales where you got the orders late last year and they would simply not come earlier. In terms of revenue generation, but have you maybe pulled forward things into the first half somehow?

Sven, that's Alexander speaking again. So the Q2 numbers were quite strong. I think that's very obvious. and at the same time there were no significant effects that you were just mentioning. So given the full year guidance, I think Stefan has mentioned this already, so we are here to deliver what we promised. and that's exactly also the headline for this full year guidance, I would say. And there's nothing more to add. I think that has been our logic over the last years and will continue also to be the logic for the next years.

It's understood, thanks. And the last question is just also coming back to what you said on the order intake, Stefan. I mean, you said you expect Thank you very much.

A very, very interesting pipeline. We have a lot of really interesting big orders or potential orders. And it's like the example of Palatna I also explained many times. It's not always easy to say, can we book it still this year? Might it flip over to Q1? But what I can say, we are talking to a lot of very interesting customers with huge projects. And it might depend on what can we still book this year and what might flip over to 27. But the most important message is we have a good base load. And on top of that, we have an interesting pipeline.

Did I understand you correctly that your order intake will be up either way, whether you land one of these big ones or not?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, of course, if everything goes south, it's bad, but normally this does not happen. So I expect an interesting growth rate at the end of the year. It might be percentage-wise not as high as it is now for the first half year because we are beating against a very strong market and many others.

Thank you, Stefan. Thanks, Alexander. Thank you, Sven. Thanks, Sven.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. We are now going to take our next question. And this one comes from Adrian Pell from Auto PHS SA. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi gentlemen, good afternoon. Just a couple of quick ones. Actually, on cash flow, I heard you say last time that actually you strive for keeping that stable versus 2025. which was a good year. Now actually you increased the guidance on the margin side of things. Q2 looked pretty solid on pre-cash flow. I was just wondering if you have more optimism here now on this number. And the second one is maybe two very quick housekeeping ones. One is actually on the Financial expenses side, they were a bit higher in the second quarter. I was just wondering if there's something special in there. It looks that you are a bit above normal run rate. And the same is probably the case a bit for the tax rate. I mean, it was kind of in the corridor of what you're guiding at, but I'm just thinking about if that's something where you see the up end of your guidance and how cash tax rate will look like versus the guided range. Thank you.

Thanks for the questions, Adrian. So let's start with the cash flow one. So as said already, we expect free cash flow to be in the range like last year. We have to also look at the half-year number. Free cash flow is still negative. The rebound in the second quarter was very strong, as you also said. But we also see, because it's also dependent on the level of prepayments we get in, which is dependent on also larger orders to land in the next two quarters. So that gives us a little bit of, of course, uncertainty regarding the projection. So you asked about more optimism. We feel confident with the guidance that we will be on the same level like last year. And on the tax rate question, I take this one first. The range that we guide for the full year is still intact. We expect to be below 30% or in that region. The cash tax rate is somewhat lower. It's also expected to be somewhat lower for 26 in total. So that's what we expect. So the second question was around the financial result, if I understood you correctly. Yes, yes. Thank you for your time.

I was just wondering if there's, I don't know, three, four million.

Yeah, it's nothing special in there, perhaps a little bit of timing topics, but the expectation is minus 30. Perfect. Thank you. Thanks, Adrian.

Thank you. We are now going to take our last question. And this one comes from Sebastian Quen from RBC. Please go ahead.

Thank you for squeezing me in. I have three questions, one on biofuel exposure, one on farm tech, and one on tax rate again. Now with the biofuels, with the Middle Eastern crisis, do you see any incremental momentum from regions' clients to push stronger into biofuel and biodiesel, and what is your exposure there? That would be my first

Okay, I'll start with the first question. This is not really an issue for us. We ourselves at GEA are anyway not really significantly impacted by energy prices because this is not a big, big issue for us. We are not so energy intensive. However, our customers are. And like you know, we have developed a lot of brilliant and smart ideas how to save energy with different various equipment so this might be for us even a gross driver than any air risk and with biofuel itself we are not really so much involved.

Thank you. For the farm tech question there were a few questions coming already but I want to explore a little bit the midterm outlook. We now have a very tough year for farmers, for crop farmers in Europe. A lot of crop farmers also are dairy farmers. It's kind of a mixed business here in Europe. So I was wondering if you see Are there any discussions amongst your, especially European client base, to maybe postpone, delay investments or where you hear stories of farmers being cash squeezed and therefore maybe reducing investments that they would otherwise have done? Is there any commentary you have on that? Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, it's more that due to the weather conditions in summer, It's lower, but we are very optimistic to see a good development coming back at the end of the year. And the business is very solid. And this is mainly based also on the fact that farmers need to automate, farmers need to invest more and more in automatic milking systems because of the shortage of labor, of the reliability of labor. and we have the solutions and we have especially the solutions for the larger equipment for the DPQs which at the end is only coming more or less from us and therefore we see a very good pipeline all over the world and we are very optimistic that also this trend will continue that we see good order intake and increasing sales and margin in farm technology.

Very helpful. Thank you. And my final brief question on the tax rate again. You still expect below 30%. Cash tax rate is a bit lower. I assume that's because of the use of certain tax loss carrier forwards, tax assets, or activated tax losses. And could you update us, if you have the numbers in front of you, on the... Overall expectation of tax clauses that you can still use and maybe give us a rough number for the next, I don't know, years of how much those tax assets would reduce tax payments. Is it 5 million? Is it 20 million? Is it 100 million?

Sebastian, I think the question is a bit difficult to answer now in this context. The tax loss carried forwards, especially in the US and also here in Germany, still are in our books and we can also use them in the next years. But with the positive development of our business, this will come down, of course, in the next years. But perhaps we can have a deeper dive in a session on this one. But you are right, the difference, of course, between the cash tax rate and the overall tax rate is coming from this topic.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you. We have one more question. Just one moment. And this one comes from Timothy Lee from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking my question. Most of the questions have been answered. I just have a little follow up on the 2030 margin guidance. Again, it's probably still room to expand margin, but I think one key element is definitely on the pure growth Thank you very much. I think my question is how far we can see this margin or PFP segment to go on. What will be the driver going forward? That would be super helpful.

Thank you. Sorry, it was a bit difficult to understand your question, but I think we got it that you were talking about the PFP, so Pure Flow Processing Margin and the outlook for this. If this is right, so as we already explained in the earlier part of the call, so the year-on-year comparison of the single quarter is now no indication of, let's say, margins going down in PFP, because again, I think if we compare the margin, the comparable margin in Q2 last year, this was, I think, Thank you very much. which makes it more, let's say, challenging to even grow on this level, but still potential is there. I think the levers we were talking about also on the gross margin side, efforts on the COC side as well as working on the mix of the business is also still valid for the future. So that's the answer to your question, if I got the question right. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no further questions for today. I will now hand the call back to Stefan Klebert for closing remarks.

Yes, thank you. Thank you everybody for listening and thanks for your good question. I'd like to summarize our call and tell you that it was really outstanding second quarter and very good half year. With broad-based improvement in order intake sales and EBDA margins, though that really shows we are fully on track and on back of this strong performance. Also, our outlook for the second half of the year is very optimistic and therefore we have increased our full year guidance for all three guidance parameters. and on top of that we launched a new share buyback program reflecting our confidence in GEA's attractive growth perspectives. So with that I will close the call today and hand back to your operator.

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