Suss Microtec Se

Welcome to the earnings call of MicroSA following the publication of the first Q1 figures of 2026. I would like to welcome the company's CEO, Burkhard Frick, the CFO, Dr. Cornelia Balvisa, the COO, Dr. Thomas Hohe, and the Manager of Investor Relations, Florian Mangold, who will guide us through the presentation in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat. And with that, I hand over to you, Mr. Mangold.

Thank you very much for the introduction. Welcome to our conference call after the release of our interim statement for Q1 2026. For those of you who did not join the full-year call a short five and a half weeks ago, a quick disclaimer. This call is being recorded and considered as copyrighted material. It cannot be recorded or rebroadcasted without permission, and participating in this call implies your consent to this procedure. Please also be aware of the safe harbor statement on page two of the slide deck. It applies throughout the call. And now I'm handing over to Burkhard to guide us through the presentations of the first quarter.

All right. Thanks a lot for the intro. Welcome, everyone, also from my side. Let's start with an overview of the key financials for 2026. Order intake of 149.3 million marked a new record in the company's history, surpassing the previous record of 147.5 million in Q4 2024. This performance is broadly distributed across customers and applications. We also see the bonder business return along with renewed demand from China. This strong Q1 breaks the usual seasonal pattern. Typically, Q4 is the strongest quarter of the year followed by a slower Q1 in terms of orders. Revenue of 86.5 million is down significantly as expected. With product lead times of around six months, This reflects the lower order intake volumes of summer 2025. Q1 was expected to be the low point of 2026 with gradual improvements towards the end of the year. Now on profitability. The gross margin of 36.1% is within our guidance corridor. The EBIT margin is lower due to reduced coverage of fixed costs. But we expect it to improve significantly going forward. And now we are on the page you are seeing. A few more words on the order intake. Q1 was the best quarter for the order intake in the company's history. Demand came from both segments and across our customer base. We are seeing strength from our AI-exposed customers, but orders are strong across all customer groups. From a geographic perspective, Europe and North America were strong, and demand from China is also returning. Regarding sales, we already stated on the full year call that Q1 will be weak. From here, we expect sales to improve as we move through the year. Now on the order situation, on the full We were cautious because Q1 could have reflected a pull-in from the second half of 2026. At this point, we continue to see very good order momentum in Q2 as well. And we are ramping up flexible manufacturing capacity again. Now let's take a look at the performance of the two segments. First to advanced back-end solutions. Order intake was significantly above the previous quarter and well above Q1 2025. The main drivers were strong order intake in bonders. Around 50% of the segment order intake was for bonding solutions. Imaging was also strong, driven by high order volumes for the UV projection scanners. Revenue was down significantly. The only product line that grew year on year was imaging solutions. Bonding, which was down 65%, and coating, minus 8% per week. Each product line contributed roughly one-third of sales, another indicator of an unfavorable product mix. Profitability was significantly lower than in the prior year due to a weaker product and customer mix, with a high share of imaging and coating. Now let's move to Photomast solutions. Order intake was approximately 50 million. A solid improvement versus Q1 2025. Orders from China accounted for roughly one-third of the segment order intake, indicating that China business is returning, at least in Q1 2026. As a result, we almost doubled the segment order book on the back of a strong first quarter order intake. Revenue was lower in Q1, reflecting the lower order volume and reduced capacity. The EBIT margin was under pressure due to a lower fixed cost absorption by the decline in sales volume. And now I'd like to hand over to Cornelia for a deeper dive on our numbers.