Jost Werke Se

Thank you very much and a good morning from Norisenborg here in our headquarters and a warm welcome to our earnings conference for the first half year of 2025 and Q2 of 2025. We had challenging global markets, but JOST was able to continue its growth plan driven by the merger and acquisition of Hiva that we've taken, but also driven by some local market share gains. The Hyva post-merger integration is fully on track. The first synergies are being implemented and the exit of the non-core cranes business has been prepared in the second quarter of this year. We have signed the sales and purchase agreements this Monday on August 11th of 2025. We are also glad to report that we had some market share gains in agriculture in the APEC region and also in South America. where we were able to sign new long-term contracts with our agricultural OEMs. Market demand in Europe, Middle East and Africa was stabilized in the second quarter with order intakes slowly increasing. However, the demand in the US slowed down dramatically due to uncertainties based on the tariffs policy and the economic policy of the new administration. We've also been able to place a promissory note loan of 320 million, and we're very happy with the attractive conditions that we were able to obtain. Let's go to the financial highlights and they show the resilience of our business model. Our sales in Q2 were up 31% on mainly supported by the Hiba M&A and that effect already excludes the Cranes business. that is considered operations that we will discontinue. The organic sales were slightly down by minus 3% compared to the Q2 of 2024. The adjusted EBIT grew 10% to 37 million euros and the adjusted EBIT margin reached 9.5%. This was supported by a solid operating performance and also had some positive effects on the classification of the crane business as discontinued operations. Viva contributed positively also to an adjusted EPS in Q2 2025, offsetting the sales-driven organic decline of the earnings. And as a result, our adjusted EPS in Q2 2025 increased 3% to €1.41 versus the Q2 of 2024. Our leverage calculates to 2.78, which is temporarily above our target threshold of 2.5 due to the dividend payments that we have done in Q2 of 2025. We expect the target to be below the 2.5 threshold again by the end of 2025, end of this year. Free cash flow declined to 5 million euro. that is mainly because of higher working capital. Driving factors here are the HIVA consolidation, the growing activity level in Europe, and also a stock increase to make our supply chains more resilient and to protect the supply chains, especially towards North America. Looking at the markets, the markets, as I said, were not supporting you. You can see here that Europe, Middle East and Africa on truck and trailer were slightly positive compared to Q2 2024. However, on tractors and hydraulics, we had a contraction. North America contracted significantly based on the uncertainties, mainly on the tariffs. And APAC is, you know, if you want to say a mixed bag with some light in the truck business, some shadow in the trailer business. and tractor and hydraulics more or less around zero. Within that market environment, we operated quite resilient and that is also because we have meanwhile a business model with a wide range of end markets and a wide range of products and customers. If you look at our sales by destination, we sell less than half in Europe, Middle East and Africa meanwhile. the rest is distributed quite nicely between americas and asia pacific and if you look at the applications you can see that a little more than half is transfer application and the rest is hydraulics and also agriculture where we expect some growth um so that we will be beyond 20 also in agriculture in the future so meanwhile a very nice setup and a very resilient setup With that, I would like to hand over to Oliver to give us some more details on the financial performance.

Thanks, Joachim. And as always, let's start with the regions. And within the three regions, I will focus a little bit more on the isolated second quarter results. And then when coming to the group, focusing a little bit more on the full half-year results. So let's start with EMEA. As Joachim pointed out, We have seen in the second quarter a slight uptake of the demand. The reported sales were increasing by 21%, which is, of course, driven by the M&A of HUVA. And all those numbers and all the numbers on the next slides, just as I wrote in the beginning, are from continued operations, excluding the sales and results from the grains business. And if we do this without the IVA effect and at constant currency, we see an organic growth in the EMEA region by almost 4%. And that's the case because both transport and agriculture demand have stabilized a bit through the second quarter and the order book had gained some momentum. However, we need to point out the whole situation remains very fragile and basically changes also from time to time. So we need to really be be cautious going forward in assessing that. However, the momentum is better definitely than the weeks before. And if we then go down to the EBIT, we also see that profitability compared to the second quarter last year has increased in the EMEA region and this is driven both from slightly higher fixed cost absorption effects and also significantly by the categorization of the grains business without discontinued operations of grains business. That helps a lot. And by that, the margin increased then from 5.4% last year to 5.8% this year. Good signal is also that still it's the case that we don't use short-term work in the European plants anymore, which should help us also in the weeks going ahead. Next page. If we then go to Americas, also here you mentioned reported wise the sales are increasing driven by M1A, so almost 8% reported sales growth. However, if we look at constant currency and without the lever acquisition, we report minus 11% decline. and this is basically driven by both transport and the agriculture market are significantly down versus prior year. The good thing is on the EBIT side, we still show with 11% a very decent margin in light of all the habits that we have there, which are not only the tariff discussions and then the the underlying market downturn, it's also the ethics effect. As you all know, the US dollar has weakened a lot versus the US currency and that puts pressure on both sales and EBIT as we pointed out here. So that's why we are still happy with 11.0% EBIT margin in this region. We also should note prior years, very high margin in America's region was partially driven by, let's say a special situation for two a very solid agricultural business in the second quarter. Last year, with very high shares of premium loader sales on the one side, and on the other side, we were benefiting from sharp declining in material prices, while selling prices still remained very high because of that delay in material pass-through to the customers. We benefited last year as well. So overall, in light of the decline of the business in Americas, I would say we concretely laid our teams there. to a very solid contribution to the overall resize. If we then go to our third region, which is APAC. Yeah, Joachim, again, it's a little bit of a mixed picture here. The reported sales grew sharply by more than 100%, which is driven by the Hiva acquisition. Hiva has a very strong position in China, but also in India. but also here we exclude the acquisition effect and the FX effects we see a decline of minus 10%. That means although China as a single country region is doing better than we anticipated before and that helps us also in the overall reported organic numbers, but we see a decline of the activities in India and also in selective other countries, especially in Australia and South Africa, where the US has a very strong position and so that's a little bit of a burden. When we look into the EBIT and EBIT margin in APAC, so go back, we see also almost a doubling of EBIT numbers, which are driven by M on A. And despite the expected dilution of incorporation of Hiva, we see a solid EBIT margin of almost 40%. And this is not only driven by still a very good China business. We also see that the first synergies really are implemented and start to incorporate in those numbers. And this is especially true in the APEC region as, as you know, high bar business is in APEC the biggest one. So we would have expected anyhow that this first synergy start to realize there. So that's about the regions. Let's go to the group overall. We say a very solid result in light of all the economic topics around us here. So the sales from continued operations grew by 31% in the second quarter and for the full half year by 28%. If you exclude the M&A and FX effects, it's minus 3.2% for the second quarter and minus 6.5% for the first half year, which we say, especially the second quarter, we did quite well and we are able to here and there, especially in the agricultural segment, benefit from slight market share gains, especially in the APEC region, but also partially in South America, as Joachim pointed out. So that helps that there's an organic decline of only 3% in the second quarter. We believe we did quite well in the overall economic environment here. When we look into the EBIT and EBIT margin, the absolute EBIT increased by almost 10%. and the margin is at 9.5%. That's partially driven by the classification of the grants business as discontinued, but even excluding that, we were close to 9% for the second quarter, and for the full half year, around 9.1%, which is a strong result, again, in light of the tariff discussions and so on and so forth. We still see overall that the direct TAVRF impacts are, let's say, as we always communicated, probably in the range of a mid-single digit number. And we still strongly believe that within the second half year, we should compensate here and there. However, as we always pointed out, the indirect impact from economic downturn in the US, that is probably the bigger risk for Jost as a company. and we see materializing that the U.S. economy is really at the moment going down. We need to see what that will bring for the second half of the year. However, also in America, we see a very strong aftermarket at the moment and that helps to stabilize the margin at a very decent level again. An extra slide that you don't know from before, just for your reference, we also show here the bridge for the regions and for the total group. How would sales numbers have looked like in case we would incorporate the cranes business as continued, which is not the case anymore. And again, regarding the half-year margin, we report 9.5 excluding cranes and 9.1 including cranes business, which is a very solid development for the first half year and then fully aligned with our expectations that we had at the beginning of the year. Next page is then our usual net income and adjusted EPS bridge. Reported net income declined for several reasons to 20 million euro. The biggest impacts here are for sure non-cash and pure accounting items, so to speak, resulting from the purchase price allocation that we do with the Hiva acquisition. And on top, we have to incorporate special PPA items for 2025 driven by inventory step ups and order backlog capitalization that we need to do, which for the full year will roughly amount to 20 million. So there is a significant portion incorporated in those numbers. If we start from that 20 million, add up the expense taxes and the finance results, we end up with a reported EBIT of 40 million. Then comes this just mentioned PPA effects on top and roughly 6 million of so far expensed integration costs, more or less 100% related to the hyperintegration layoff costs, restructuring costs, whatever we do there and fully in line of our expectation. We are then seeing an adjusted EBIT of 73 million, and then we normalize the finance result and the tax rate ending up with an adjusted net income of 46 million or 3.06 earnings per share, which is exactly more or less the same like last year. And that underlines somehow that, yes, we see an organic decline that has a volume impact on our P&L, but on the other side, there is right from the beginning now a positive contribution of the hybrid acquisition into the full P&L. That's a quick update. I don't want to go into the details. A slide that has been shown also with the Q1 presentation, it shows the acquired assets and liabilities at their fair value assessment at the date of the acquisition, so 31st of January 2025. There have been some changes here and there because the valuation is still ongoing or was still ongoing after the Q1 reporting is now almost final. Two major topics have been incorporated and you see then the result also in the goodwill position. One is we will start from beginning of this year to do a regular depreciation of trademarks, which will on the Hiva trademark, but also the Quiki trademark. The details are also laid out in our half year two report. And the other effect is related to the classification of the brand's business as discontinued operations. So for that reason, we also had to anticipate the fair value and fair value adjustments of especially the inventory of that business unit. And that has been incorporated in those numbers. Besides that, it's just, yeah, minor effects. So that was the balance sheet effects from the acquisition. If you go into the P&L effects, most of them are already described. We have expensed roughly 14 million of new PPA charges from the hybrid acquisition and on top is roughly 7 million inventory step ups PPA that I mentioned before. Fully in line with our expectation, slightly higher just because we have now incorporated trademarks to creation. And I promised last time to give a quick outlook for the full year once these adjustments have been made. And that's mentioned here on the last bullet point on the right side. We expect now for 2025 a full year net income impact from the IVA PPA of roughly 28 million for 2025. And then going forward 2026, probably around 50 million. That's the basis of or based on the latest valuation status. It's almost final. and we shouldn't expect any further material deviation from that picture. Next slide. Coming quickly to cash flow and also after that to our balance sheet KPIs. Joachim already mentioned free cash flow in the second quarter was depressed by working capital topics, especially driven by a slight increase of the activity in EMEA and also the incorporation of inventory that we had to secure in light of the terrorist situation and safety stock discussions. For the full half year, it means still 49 million free cash flow, which is still a conversion rate of 1.1 and therefore above our threshold of 1.0. So we should be fine with that for the moment. CapEx ratio stays well below our target at the moment, 2.3%. We communicated that it could be in 2025 up to 2.9%. So also here you see we are managing somehow also the situation. It's not that we are cancelling, let's say, smart projects. Whatever we need to do to improve our P&L going forward, we will do. However, in light of the economic activity and the fragile situation, we do a careful spending, that's for sure. And also when we look into the net working capital factors, we see that despite the situation I just was describing in the second quarter, with EMEA and the safety stock discussions, we are managing a networking capital ratio of 17.5% at the end of the first half year, which is very below our full year guidance of 18.5%. So we should here be very safe for the end outlook. If we then go to our capital figures, we see ROSI decreasing from last year by 4.1% points down to 13%. Again, fully in line with our internal models after the acquisition of Fiverr and the dilution EBIT has an impact also here on ROSI. Nevertheless, our goal is for sure once the full synergy potential has been reached that we are back in our corridor which should be above 17.5%. Equity ratio is for two reasons at the moment depressed and has been gone down versus end of last year, down to 21.3%. The big effect is the dilution in the financing of the VIVA acquisition, so the extension of the balance sheet. But on the other side, and as you all know, this was especially in effect from the second quarter, the devaluation of the USD versus the Euro had a huge FX translation effect in our equity because we hold big positions in USD net assets, our own US business, but also the hybrid businesses denominated in USD. And that has for the full half year an effect of minus, almost minus 60 million euros, just pure translation effect. So it's non-cash, etc. However, it shows up in the equity ratio and has standalone an impact of almost 3.5% points. So without that, just for that, it's almost 25%. and then even slightly better than we thought. Initially, leverage already mentioned by Joachim is at the moment at 2.78. Also in line with the expectations, we always see a slight uptick of the leverage in the second quarter driven by the cash out of the dividend. Nothing else this year. And we stick to our target by end of this year to remain below the 2.5 threshold. That's from my side, and with that, I'll hand over again to Jörg.

Thanks, Oliver. So let's see how we see the rest of the year. Looking at the markets going through it, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, we see a slight market upturn like we've seen already in the Q2 for truck and trailer. slight contraction in tractors and slight uptick in hydraulics. So overall, I would say for Europe, Middle East and Africa, slightly positive. In America, it will continue weak. We've had a very weak first half year and we expect that the second half of the year will be more or less equally impacted. by the uncertainty caused by the politics of the new administration, especially the tariffs politics. While in APEC, we see a few positive trends, so stabilizing and slightly positive outlook for the APEC markets. Based on that market outlook and based on a solid half year one performance, we're happy to confirm our outlook for the fiscal year 2025. The numbers that I will show here are for the continued operations. So sales will be up 40 to 50% versus prior year. Last year we had sales of 1.069 billion. Adjusted EBIT will be up 23 to 28% versus prior year. The same for the adjusted EBITDA. And you see the numbers of last year here with 113 for the adjusted EBIT and 148 million euros for the adjusted EBITDA. CapEx ratio, we are targeting 2.9% of sales and working capital, we target to be below 18.5% of sales. So certainly the outlook for the for 2025, including this discontinued operations also remains unchanged. And we, I would, you know, like to add that we're probably at the lower end of that range right now because of the market contraction, but we're still very comfortable to confirm this outlook for 2025. So let's come to the summary. We believe we had a solid Q2 in the, rough market environments proving that our business model has become more and more resilient over the years. The Hiva PMI integration is well on track and we're focusing on our core business and the Hiva core business to generate and to continue our profitable growth story. The disposal of the Cranes business has been successfully prepared in Q2 and we've been able to sign it this week. We expect closing within Q4 of 2025. A slight upside potential for European Middle East and Africa and also for our agricultural business, but certainly tariff uncertainties will continue to affect Americas and the weak Indian market will also slow down the recovery in Asia Pacific. Our local for local approach, our strong market access worldwide and our high customer diversification limit the impact of those uncertainties, tariffs uncertainties and the shifts in regional demand. And so it's very confirming for our overall strategy. And as I said, we're happy to confirm our outlook for 2025. So with that, I would like to thank you for your attention and we're open for your questions and remarks.