Rational Ag Lndsberg

Good afternoon and welcome to Rational's earnings call for the second quarter of the fiscal year 2026. The results will be presented by the CEO, Dr. Peter Stadelmann and the CFO, Jorg Walter. Thanks to everyone who submitted their questions in advance. They will be answered after the presentation. To avoid duplications of questions and, of course, for your convenience, I will post all the questions that have already been submitted to the company in the chat box on the lower right-hand corner. Should you have any additional questions, please feel free to also enter them in our chat box on the lower right hand corner as well. Please note that in order to ensure a smooth and uninterrupted presentation, Rational has chosen to use a static image instead of a live camera feed for today's presentation. Also be aware that this event will be recorded and you will be able to review it later on Research Hub. We're looking forward to an insightful exchange and I will now hand it over to Dr. Stadelmann.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. The first half of 2026 developed in line with our expectations A proof for our strong market position and innovation leadership The world's first and only cooking solution using three energy sources simultaneously and smart. Log 56 is a highly frequented restaurant in Ireland. The chef explains why he is about to buy even a second iHexagon. And please note what the customer is using its former oven for these days. Enjoy the movie. That's fine. Thank you. . . . . . Yeah, so you had some real feedback from an existing customer and I think can understand now also the potential that is in the iHexagon technology. Another important event was the National Restaurant Association Show 2026 in Q2, which takes place in Chicago. We run 52 arena shows where our cooking solutions could be watched in action. And we created more leads in the show than in 2025. The high level of customer engagement and interest in our cooking systems confirms the significant growth potential we continue to see in this strategically very important market. Another event were the cooking for change challenges or initiative from Sodexo. Rational is Sodexo's global preferred supplier for cooking solutions. So, Lexo is the world's biggest catering company employing more than 426,000 staff and serving 80 million dishes per day. We support them in their Cooking for Change initiative to promote sustainable cuisine. 500 of Lexo's chefs participated globally in this challenge. It created over 20 million views on social media and also gave us a lot of attention. Our partnership with Sodexo highlights how rational technology supports efficient resource utilization, waste reduction and sustainable food production at global scale. We not only support challenges, we also participate ourselves. We are proud to have received another Best Managed Companies award. This recognition reflects our long-term management approach to keep strong customer focus and entrepreneurial UIU culture. In addition, we just recently got named one of 12 leading quality stocks by the German Handelsblatt. Criteria were revenue and earnings growth, high profitability, strong balance sheet and a resilient business model. We see ourselves in great company here with the shares from Microsoft, SAP, Visa, BNP Baribas or for instance, Samsung. and our people remain a key competitive advantage. The entrepreneurial culture embodied in our Unternehmer im Unternehmen philosophy continues to drive customer focus, innovation and execution across the organization. To foster that culture, to thank our employees and their families, we held our traditional summer party two weeks ago in Lundsberg More than 2600 participants have a lot of fun and food. Let us now turn to the financial performance. Overall, we are pleased with the first half results. We achieved profitable growth, strengthened our market position and continued to invest in future growth opportunities. After six months, our revenues grew organically by 8% and 6% after every adjustment. We achieved 642 million euro. Growth was higher than in 2025 and 2024. This is in line with the expansion of our sales force by also 8% and the increase of our sales activities at the very same growth rate. Looking at the quarterly results, we see revenue increased by 4% to €324 million in the second quarter. In retrospect, the first quarter benefited from some pull-forward effects in the United States related to pricing actions. We assessed the magnitude of those pull-forward effects with €6-8 million. The 8% and 4% growth rates in the corresponding quarters add up to the consistent 6% for the half-year 2026. Underlying demand remained solid and in line with our expectations.

For more details, I hand over to Jörg. Thank you, Peter, and also hello everybody in this call on my side. Let me now turn to our sales developer. and others. Overall, revenue growth continued to be driven by Europe, while developments in the other regions were more mixed. Let us start with Germany. Revenue increased by 9%, reflecting a demand in our home market. We are particularly pleased to see that the growth remains strong in the second quarter, as we had a positive one-time effect from a major stockholding dealer in the first quarter. Looking at Europe, excluding Germany, revenue also increased by 9%. are broadly based across the region with particularly strong developments in Austria, Spain, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Eastern Europe. We also saw a return to growth in Benelux, while only a few markets, such as Turkey, remained below the prior year. Overall, Europe continues to demonstrate resilience and remains a highly reliable growth contributor for our workers. Turning to North America, revenue increased by only 4% to 150,000 in the first half. However, before exchange rate effects, we were able to grow the first half by 10%. Growth of the region was entirely turned by the first quarter, we already mentioned that, where we saw an organic growth of over 23%. And one factor was this pre-buying through the February price increase, and that pushed the last level of the second quarter down. Now turning to Asia, revenues declined by 2%. The main reason was the continued weakness in China, where revenues were down year over year by 25%. Here we are heavily affected by Yang China's decision to source Combi open locally. This was partly upset by solid growth in Japan, India, and in several partner markets. While the short-term environment in China remains challenging, we continue to see attractive long-term opportunities across the region, and especially China with our new product, Combi. The smaller regions, Latam and the rest of the world, I don't want to comment in detail as we usually see higher variances on a quarterly basis here. Maybe only a word to the near Middle East. Dubai, the conflict with Iran is affecting our sales in this region, which is part of the rest of the world. And this is the main reason why we are showing a decline in sales in this area. To summarize, the regional picture, Germany and Europe remain the key growth drivers together with North America. We also had a down digit growth rate by 10% in October. Let's take a look at the development of our product groups. Starting with iCombi, revenue increased by 5% to 562 million euros. As our largest product group, the iCombi continues to benefit from solid demand across most regions that are the effects we just talked about. And the iCombi remains the backbone of our business. Looking at the iVario, revenue increased by 14% to 79 million euros. and as we have stated before we generally expect the iVario to grow faster than the iBombi due to its lower market penetration and growth potential in many markets. The half year numbers once again underline this expectation and especially positive to note here was the higher sales level in North America with a growth rate of 24%. Let me now turn to the development of our EBIT. In the first half of 2026, EBIT increased by 11% year-on-year to €170 million, with an EBIT margin that reached the highest number since many years, to 26.5%.