Suss Microtec Se

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of the SysMicrotech SE on the occasion of the publication of the figures for the financial year 2024. I am delighted to welcome the CEO Burkhard Frick, CFO Dr. Cornelia Ballwieser, the COO Dr. Thomas Rohr, as well as Vice President Investor Relations Sven Köpsel. The management board will speak in a moment and guide us through the numbers. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your question directly to the management. We are looking forward to the results. And having said this, I hand over to Mr. Köpsel.

Hello, and thanks. Welcome, everybody. We would like to welcome you to our conference call after publishing our annual report today in the morning. And as you probably know from earlier calls, this call is being recorded and considered as copyright material. It cannot be recorded or rebroadcast without permission, and participating in this call implies your consent to this procedure. Please be aware of our safe harbor statement in this slide deck. It applies throughout the conference call. And now I hand over to our CEO, Burkhard, please. Thank you, Sven.

Also, warm welcome from my end. So here's what we are going to cover today. First, we touch the key achievements of the past year. Then Cornelia Valvisa provides more details on the financials. And finally, I will give an outlook for 2025. After that, we will be happy to answer your questions, as usual. Let's go through the highlights. First, we managed to execute our high order book, resulting in record sales of 446 million euros, an increase of 46.6% compared to 2023. Second important message, we have significantly grown profitability, and with that, reached a completely new level of earnings for Zeus. We already exceeded our previous planned targets for 2025, which were sales of 400 million and EBIT margin of 15%. Changes compared to the full year 2023 in detail Cross-profit margin increased by 5.9 percentage points, EBIT margin up by 7.7 percentage points, and order intake slightly increased by 0.8%. I will go into this in more detail in the following pages. As already outlined in our conference call in mid-January, we achieved a record order intake of 147.5 million euros in last year's Q4. This development was driven by our strategic global customers in both divisions, particularly in our photo mask and bonding business and for our UV projection scanners. Demand for our coders continued to improve after a strong Q3. Book-to-bill ratio finally came in at 0.95. Our operations team continued to push forward in the fourth quarter and enabled quarterly sales of over 150 million for the first time in the history of Zeus. That was a major accomplishment and resulted in building far more tools than ever before. I've already mentioned the significant improvement in profitability. We achieved a higher gross profit and EBIT margins mainly due to favorable product and customer mix and overall business volume. Let's now move on with our two segments, starting with Advanced Backend Solutions. As we were able to execute many orders for the initial AI-related capacity ramp-up, our bonding business, and especially our temporary bonders, debonders, and cleaners, were the main growth drivers. Bonding sales more than tripled compared to the previous year. In contrast, sales in our coating and imaging business were below the 2023 figures. as demand was quite weak in the first quarters. In both cases, however, demand improved notably in the second half of the year, which helped us in this year, in 2025. The higher sales volume and related economies of scale, as well as favorable product mix, supported us improving our gross profit margin by six percentage points to 42.2%, and our EBIT margin even by 9.8 percentage points to 19.2 percent. Let's continue with our photo mask business segment. As often mentioned and expected, orders from Chinese customers normalized in 2024. In our photo mask business, orders from China decreased by 15.8 million euro. The good news is that all other regions almost compensated for this development. The order book remains well-filled at around 157 million. This ensures a very high capacity utilization in 2025, and it's the basis for continuing our growth path in this segment. Sales went up by 46.5% year on year to 131 million euros. Two years ago, in 2022, sales were still at 49 million. This is an amazing development in my view. And also, we are growing profitability here. as the increase in gross profit margin to 36.1% and the EBIT margin to 20.7% demonstrates. Now an update for our new production site in Taiwan. I'm doing this today on behalf of our board colleague, Thomas Rohr, who is currently on site in Taiwan, monitoring the progress of the project. He has nevertheless dialed in to this call, and he will be available for questions later in the Q&A session. In November last year, we announced that we had signed a long-term lease for this new building. In the meantime, progress is being made. Our team is already onsite to streamline all tasks. As you can see from the real pictures on the left and the rendering on the right, the building will combine state-of-the-art cleanroom manufacturing facilities with modern office and meeting spaces. I think this will be a great place to work. The official opening of the new Zubai plant scheduled for the end of October 2025. So far, we are on track to meet this ambitious schedule. And now I'd like to hand over to Cornelia for more information on our financial results.