Ion Beam Applications SA

Hello and welcome to IBA's full year 2023 results conference call. All participants are currently in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. I will now hand over to Olivier Legrain, Chief Executive Officer of IBA.

Thank you, Olivier. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us today on our results call. Together with me, we have our CFO Soumya Chandramouli and Henri Deromere, newly appointed Deputy Chief Executive Officer. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the company disclaimer on forward-looking statements. It is a summary of our call today. I will start with an overview of IVA performance and progress in 2023, as well as the performance of proton therapy and dosimetry. Henri will discuss the performance of other accelerators and Soumya will provide us with the comment on the financials and the outlook before I open the line for questions. This slide will be familiar. It outlines the growth dynamics within the different business units, which remain unchanged, but as I highlighted before, our focus is on backlog delivery, maintaining growth momentum, and selective investment to support the growth. We will outline progress on these drivers as we get into the detail of each business unit. The next few slides outline some important figures for 2023 financial results. Starting with revenue, as you can see, we achieved double-digit revenue growth in 2023 with accelerated backlog conversion in the second half of the year. other accelerator at the record year with a 51% increase in revenue. Dosimetry also saw strong growth with a more modest uptick for proton therapy. Next, we have laid out order intake for 2023. It's important to note that the group 2022 comparable is related to one-off boost from proton therapy contract in Spain, With that in mind, 2023 order intake is encouraging, with dosimetry performing particularly strong. Moving on to the important topic of backlog, this remains at 1.4 billion euros at the group level, and you will see here how this splits out. In the second half of 2023, we saw a strong conversion of backlog across the business. During the period, we made good progress on all four of our sustainability streams. In particular, I'd like to highlight the research launched recently on environmental applications of electron beam technology, our P-Core pre-certification now in progress, the ESG mapping exercise started with EcoVadis on our supply chain, and finally, ONCEA Community, an employee-inspired initiative to accelerate the expansion of holistic cancer support centers. I will now hand over to Soumya as we take a look at the key financial for 2023.

Good afternoon, everyone. So as anticipated, 2023 was significantly second-half weighted with strong backlog conversion across the board. As a result, a positive rebate was achieved for the full year, However, on the back of financial and tax expenses, the net result for the year was a loss of 9.1 million euros. The dividend proposal of 17 cents per share reflects the performance of the year. And on the cash front, we're in a good position and also have undrawn credit lines for 40 million euros available as needed. Looking more closely at the first versus second half comparator, the strong catch up is very clear, reflective of the backlog cycle, particularly within PT and industrial solutions. Now, if we turn to look at OPEX year on year, investments are key to the growth of the different businesses. And this chart highlights the fact that although there was an absolute increase in OPEX, which included, among others, investment in recruitment, digital initiatives and infrastructure, there was a reduction as a percentage of sales as we continue with our targeted investment approach alongside tight control on costs. I now hand over to Olivier for a closer look at product therapy.