Ascom Holding AG (ASCN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the Ascom Half Year Results 2024 Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Dial-in instructions for the Q&A will follow before the Q&A starts. The Ascom CEO, Nicolas Van den Abeele; and the Ascom CFO, Kalina Scott, will answer questions. The conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Daniel Lack, Company Secretary of the Ascom Group.

Good morning. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. A warm welcome also from my side to the program after a short introduction of our CEO, Nicolas Van den Abeele; our CFO, Kalina Scott, will present the financials of the first half year. Nicolas then will present the strategy and business update. You will find all documents also on our website, sub Investor Relations. As already mentioned, you will have the opportunity to ask questions after the presentation. When you are dialed into the conference call, you may ask directly following the instructions. When you are in the webcast, you also may type your questions into the system, and we will read them afterwards and answer them. Thanks a lot. With this, I hand over to Nicolas.

Good morning, everyone, and all from my side, welcome to this half year results conference call. I would like to start to give you a first update on the half year results. And I will give you in a minute the H1 '24 results at the glance, but let me start to say that we look back to a mixed H1 performance. And I must say I'm not satisfied with the results that we had achieved, while at EBITDA level, we are in line with our expectation and where we were in '23. Nevertheless, in terms of the top line growth, we ended below our expectation, also below what we had indicated. And we had indicated a flattish revenue development over the first half. We've seen the markets bottoming out over first half '24, but we're not yet at a level that we had actually anticipated or expected during this first half. Now let me give you a few numbers at a glance. We had in H1, a revenue development of around CHF 142 million to be compared with CHF 150 million last year. which, as you can see, has been a reduction of 2.7% in constant currency or 5% in actual currencies. Now there have been some positive developments in certain markets, as in the DACH market, which is very good, as in the Netherlands, as in the Nordics. Nevertheless, some markets were still subdued, in particular, France and Iberia, in particular, also in the U.K., which I will show you in the next pages. Incoming orders had a flattish development in constant currencies, while there was a significant uptake versus the second half of 2022, which is a good point because we saw a significant slowdown of the economy and of the market in the second half in 2023. But sequentially, we have a 13%, 14% increase versus second half last year. Particularly good point there as well is that some of our markets, especially in the U.S., but also the rest of the world markets had a very good order intake performance, in particular, also in health care. And we've seen in those 2 regions, in particular, a good step-up of order intake of actually more than 20% over the first half of '24, which brings me to the EBITDA margin, which actually in percentage terms is in line with previous years, 7.4% versus 7.5% on a lower top line, as you have seen here. Also a very good cash position, net cash position of the group with an equity ratio, which is strong and high of 37%. Now let me give you some more detail on these developments of the first half. First of all, as mentioned in terms of revenue, we saw a decline, which has been actually lower than our expectations. We expected to have a flattish H1. Nevertheless, we've seen a good bottoming out of the market, a good pickup in terms of order intake sequentially. Nevertheless, not yet translated in revenue in the first half of the year. Secondly, we also need to compare H1 this year with a high base effect in H1 '23. As you can see on the bullet on the slide, as actually, there has been a catch-up in H1 '23 after the end of the component shortages. And there are several projects in various of our countries that we have actually delivered in H1 '23, which explain the high base effect on a comparable basis. Incoming orders, as I mentioned, a flattish development at constant currencies in H1, while sequentially versus the second half of '23, a good step-up of around 13% with a very strong contribution in some of the regions that I referred to. And EBITDA on orders still, I would say, good order backlog development, as we will highlight you later in the presentation with a book-to-bill of almost 1.2%, which is good for also future revenue development. And an EBITDA margin of 7.4%, which is in line also with the EBITDA of previous year based on a lower top line, but on the other hand, also a good and better cost management during the first half. Let me show you the next slide, which gives you a little bit of perspective of the growth of Ascom over the past couple of years. And we've also normalized the 2 charts, 1 in actual currency, 1 in constant currency. So you can see on the left-hand side, the revenue evolution over the past 5, 6 years, in constant currency, on the right-hand side, one in actual currency and in constant currency, you can see that there has been a growth of 4%, mid-single-digit growth over the past couple of years, which is good, which also shows that actually first half of 2024 is in line with the same trend that we have developed over the past couple of years. Under my expectations for sure, but I would say it is in line with the trend and we should continue to grow our top line in the quarters and months to come. Nevertheless, the second point you can also see on the left chart is that we had a strong base effect in H1 2023, which you can see with a 10% increase first half '23 versus first half '22. With this, I would like to give the floor to Kalina Scott, our CFO, and she will guide you through the headline financials of first half of this year. Kalina, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Nicolas. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, and good morning also from my side. In the next 20 minutes, I will take you through the half year results of Ascom for the first half of 2024. On Slide 9, you can see the overview of the figures, some of which Nicolas already mentioned. We received -- or we generated order intake of CHF 166.1 million in the first half. At the same time, we had net revenue of CHF 142.1 million. And as a result, we ended up with an order backlog of CHF 311.5 million, which is an increase of 7% year-over-year. In terms of EBITDA, we had lower EBITDA than in the first half of 2023, but we were able to keep a relatively stable EBITDA margin of 7.4% compared to 7.5% in 2023. Our net working capital remained largely stable, and we made substantial investments in the first half of 2024, therefore, you see the increase in CapEx, and I will come back on a later slide in order to go to more detail on this point. On Slide 10, you see more details to the development of our incoming orders. We saw a decline in the maintenance and support of 10%, but here, I have to say that we do not actually see a weakness in the market, nor lower demand for our maintenance and support services. This has more to do with the fact that this is a lumpy business as far as orders are concerned, as we usually have substantially big multiyear orders. We saw stable development and the small growth in projects, products and services. In terms of regional development, we saw a strong development in the U.S., where we grew 20% in Swiss francs and 25% at constant currencies. And we also saw quite strong development from the rest of the world with a growth of 25% in Swiss francs and 30% in constant currencies. In particular, in the U.S., we saw growth in the Healthcare segment and in the rest of the world, in the Healthcare, but also in the Enterprise segment, and the growth was driven from Italy, Australia and Middle East in the rest of the world. In our major European markets, we saw some weakness in the incoming orders and the decline of 16% in Swiss francs and 14% in constant currency. Nevertheless, we have a healthy book-to-bill ratio of 1.17. On Slide 11, we look at the backlog. Our order backlog has grown year-over-year. And here, we show a comparison of 4 consecutive half years. And the order backlog has grown by 8% on a compound annual growth rate. As of 30th of June 2024, we had a growth of 7%, reaching 311.5%. About 35% of this order backlog is deliverable in the second half of 2024. This is an important point, which gives us confidence that we are going to have a substantially better second half year of 2024 than the first half year in terms of net revenue. On Slide 12, you see the development of the revenue overall. At constant currencies, our revenue for the first half was CHF 146.2 million. This is CHF 4 million below prior year in terms of operational results. And in addition to that, we had CHF 4.1 million currency effects due to the currency translation into Swiss franc. On Slide 13, we split the development of the revenue into maintenance and support and products, projects and services. You see that we have a stable and also gradually growing net revenue from maintenance and support, which is indeed a very stable pillar of Ascom's revenue. But in the first half of 2024, revenue from products, projects and services was lower by 8% in Swiss francs and 6% in constant currencies. On the next slide, you can see more specifically where the revenue comes from in terms of region and starting with our biggest region, U.S. and Canada, as Nicolas already mentioned, we see strong incoming orders in that region. Therefore, we are confident that the development in this region will improve. Especially in the Healthcare segment, we see that there is substantial demand. However, the conversion from the orders to revenue in the first half of 2024 was lower than expected, and we, therefore, have lower revenue than in the first half of 2023. Looking at our major European markets of DACH, Netherlands, Nordics as well as the rest of the world, which is a combination of our smaller markets. We see a positive development in constant currency from relatively stable situation in terms of rest of the world to quite good growth that we see in the Nordics. All of these regions actually have different reasons for their growth. In the DACH, we benefited from strong demand in the enterprise segment. In the Netherlands, we saw growth from the customer support. In the rest of the world, we had strong performance in Italy, but weak revenues in Middle East and Australia as well as Central and Eastern Europe. And in the Nordics, we also saw quite some growth from the Enterprise segment. There were 3 regions as well as the OEM segment, which did not perform well in the first half of 2024. These were France and Spain, U.K. as well as our OEM business, there, we saw a revenue decline. And again, for different reasons. In France and Spain, we saw a decline in the demand for elderly care. And in the U.K., as you're all aware, we had some political changes, which led to delay in some projects. Our OEM business is also a lumpy business. So this is not -- this number is not necessarily giving visibility on future performance. On Slide 15, you have an overall view of the profit and loss statement compared to 2023. Here, I would like to draw your attention to the gross profit line. There, we could keep the gross profit margin relatively stable. We now are at 47.3% compared to 47.5% in 2023. We could reduce our costs in marketing and sales. And we could keep stable the costs for research and development, administration as well as other operating expenses. And it is this cost containment that allowed us overall to keep quite stable EBITDA margin of 7.4% compared to 7.5% in 2023 despite the lower revenue. There is another important point to which I want to draw your attention here, and this is that in the first half of 2024, we have higher cost of depreciation and amortization than was the case in the first half of 2023. The reason for this is threefold. On the one hand, we have invested in our very important R&D projects, in particular in the Myco 4 and the platform convergence. These investments were started in 2023. And you can see the higher capitalization in the second half of 2023, and we are continuing to capitalize these important projects, in particular, the platform presents. In addition to that, we're in the process of rolling out a new ERP system. This is also being capitalized. And also last year, we started the refurbishment of our building in Gothenburg, which is an important center for Ascom. This refurbishment is going to be finished this year. So the capitalization will reduce again after the finalization of this refurbishment and will go down from the current level to the more historic level of about CHF 12 million to CHF 14 million. But in the meantime, we expect to see also for the second half year a higher depreciation and amortization similar to the level that we see in the first half that we show here of about CHF 6.5 million. On Slide 16, you see the cash flow development, starting from our cash position at the end of 2023 of CHF 24.7 million. We generated good cash from operating activities of CHF 11.3 million. And then we invested CHF 9.2 million in CapEx. These are the projects that I just mentioned before. We had borrowings of CHF 5 million. And also this year, we paid a substantially higher dividend of CHF 10.8 million compared to prior year, where we paid CHF 7.2 million. This, together with some other smaller positions led to our cash position of CHF 21.5 million. On Slide 17, you see an overview of our balance sheet positions. The most operating items of the balance sheet remained quite stable. So here, I really want to draw your attention to our net cash of CHF 16.5 million as well as our healthy equity ratio of 36.7%. With this, I finish my comments on the financials, and I will remain open for your questions afterwards. Thank you. Back to you, Nicolas.

Thank you, Kalina. I would like in the next section to give you an update of our strategy and also a business update. So first of all, we have a strategy, which is based on 4 key pillars and which we are executing upon and where we are step-by-step delivering upon our strategy and the strategy based on 4 pillars is, on the one hand, becoming the key enabling platform as a company across the Healthcare and the Enterprise segment, which is really becoming the middleware, becoming the platform, which is a real-time action -- platform of action basically across the Healthcare segment, but also across the enterprise sector. A platform to which every device connects the platform that orchestrates information, generates outputs and insights to the caregiver or to the worker to take the most appropriate decision. So that is what we do, that is what we aspire. That's also what we are really focused on over the next coming years to continue to build success based on that. The second point is growth. Profitable growth over the next coming years. And as we said and as Kalina also indicated, the first half has been somewhat subdued. We do expect a higher growth in the second half of this year, and I will come back to that also in the later slides. The third point is our path for convergence and new products and pipelines that also will help us to continue to grow in the future. We are, as you know, since about 1.5 years working on combining our different platforms, which will make our business much more scalable both from a sales perspective, but also from an operational perspective to make it easier to sell with easier platforms with best-in-class, state-of-the-art platforms. And that is something that will be completed in the course of the end of this year and first half of 2025. And last but not least, cost efficiency. We are continuously working on improving that, and I will also highlight some more in the later slides. Now let me start with becoming the key enabling platform. So what we really do is to enable better decisions by providing right information to the right person, caregiver or worker in an enterprise environment to take the best possible decision. And we do that with a number of our solutions, which you can see in the middle part of the slides, and these are really key solutions for which Ascom is good at and is very well known in the market. And it's really enabling on the one hand side, the mobile way of working, not just providing mobile handset, but also the whole mobility platform behind it to make it seamless, to make it possible to integrate all data from different sources and to make it presentable and actionable to the right person at the right point in time. So that's point one. The second one where we are also second to none in the market is our alarm management and alarm orchestration, where we provide information, alerts, alarms in multiple ways with escalation procedures with log files. And that's again where Ascom is really strong at and has success in the market. The third point is our patient-centric care with Nurse Call, with sensors, with medical device integration, with early warning scores, with clinical surveillance, a whole suite of also software platforms to enable, again, the caregiver to provide better care and better outcomes. And last but not least, next to the clinical workflows, a number of operational workflows, which we also provide in order to enable better care delivery, better work delivery, better productivity and especially better patient outcomes. Now we do that with 2 platforms, which is the integrated Healthcare platform and the integrated Enterprise platform, as you can see here, focused at these 2 market segments with a number of solutions or building blocks, which you can see at the bottom, which is our Nurse Call system, which is our Digistat and Unite platform for clinical surveillance and for alarming, but also the Ofelia platform that we acquired 2 years ago and our Mobility solutions. Now we do that across what we call the different care areas or care pathways in any hospital starting from emergency rooms to operating rooms to an intensive care unit to general wards. You name it across the different care pathways by integrating all necessary data, by orchestrating that information and by enabling the caregiver to be able to provide the best possible care. The second pillar of our strategy is growth. And we are focusing and will continue to focus in the coming years to deliver more substantial growth and to step up our growth beyond the 4% average growth over the past years at constant currencies. And I will look here or give an insight on the second half of this year but also beyond 2024. As you have seen, we had a healthy and good progression of our order backlog, which shows the impact and the success we have in the market. And of that strong backlog about the 1/3 is convertible into revenue in the second half of this year. We had a very strong order intake in some of our key markets like the U.S. with over 20%, but also the rest of the world markets with over 20% order intake growth, which also is a strong proof point and will enable us to convert a big part of that order intake into revenue in the second half of this year. So next, we do order backlog and the success we had in these markets. We also have for the second half of the year, a substantial amount of what we call run rate add-on business, which are extensions on the existing installed base or maintenance contracts, renewals, which will help us to deliver a higher growth also in the second half versus the first half of this year. Next to that, for this year and the coming years, we are working on renewed business models. We're working on platform conversions, which, as I mentioned, will help us to be much more scalable in delivering our business and accelerating our top line. And we're working on a pipeline of -- a continued pipeline of new innovations, which also will help us to support growth going forward. Now with this innovation, I would like to give you also some insights on the converged platforms that we are working on. We've highlighted that in some of the past meetings and one-to-one meetings as well. This is a major step that we're making to bring our different platforms together, our different Nurse Call platforms, our different software platforms and to be able to have a seamless also cloud offering going forward. We will be completing this transition by the end of this year for the Enterprise segment. We will be completing it by first half of next year for the Healthcare segment, which will put us in a much stronger position to scale our business, both from a sales perspective, but also from a delivery perspective. It will also enable us to offer more cloud and SaaS-based solutions, which are important in enterprise, which are very important also in long-term care. And we do believe that this will help us to grow further our top line in the years to come. Last but not least, operational efficiency. We are continuously benchmarking our cost structure and also looking at opportunities to be more cost efficient, be more productive, be more efficient. As you know, we have over the past few years, starting in 2022, implemented a cost efficiency program, which we called Shape Up. We're also currently taking further action to look at our cost structure and in particular, look at how we can improve efficiency and productivity across our different functions, be it on the sales or marketing side, be it on sales and order admin, be it on delivery side. Secondly, the platform convergence that we are currently working on and delivering will, over the next 2 years, over '25 and '26 be an opportunity to also increase productivity and efficiency of the deployment of our platforms, having fully integrated platforms, platform that also can be much more cloud-based, will enable us to become much more efficient in the rollout of our different solutions, hence, to also review further our cost base and our productivity here. And then last but not least, remote monitoring, which we are working on to have it also more generalized, which enable us to be more efficient in the maintenance of our different platforms. So a number of activities which today, we are putting further into motion, which will help us over the next 2 years, I would say, '25, '26 to improve step-by-step, but fairly significantly further our cost base. I would like in the next section to give you very briefly a snapshot of some nice references that we won over the past weeks and months, over first half 2024. These are very important and public references. We have made announcements on these references in the meantime. But it really shows also the success and impact that we have with many of our customers around the world. And I'll be very brief. You can have more details in the slides that are made available. But the first one is in Italy, where together with Almaviva as a partner, we won really substantial project, which is around CHF 8 million to start with. Almaviva is a very large IT company, and actually, we are teaming up with them to continue to work on the digitalization of hospitals in Italy. As I said, this is a very large project, around CHF 8 million, and we are digitalizing the whole ICU, also the perioperative workflows in many hospitals across Italy, thanks to that project. So a important win, a flagship project, which we also announced publicly a few months ago. The second one is in U.S. where this is a nice reference with what we call the Veterans Association. You should know that in U.S., you have, on the one hand, large networks of hospitals which are called IDNs, which are integrated delivery networks. Next to that, on the public side, you also have a Department of Defense and the Veterans Association, which have separate networks of hospitals. And we won over the past couple of years, actually, since 2 years now, quite a number of deals with the Veterans Association, and that's a new deal that we could add a few months back with the Bowling Green Hospital or Veterans Association, where we actually are delivering multiple solutions with the software platforms of Unite with the mobility with DECT, with also our Nurse Call Telligence system. So a nice reference that we won also there in the U.S. The third reference I would like to highlight is closer home in Norway with Helse Sør East, which is a very large again, network or trust of hospitals, which covers about half of the population in Norway. And we are a trusted partner to them. We have been working with HSØ, Helse Sør East for quite a number of years. And actually, we won a major contract with them as well to, again, digitalize care delivery. And this solution here that we offered is based again on our Digistat software suite to enable better care delivery and intensive care units with alarm with also early warning calls and improved the digital workflow management. Last but not least, in Ireland, which is a new win. This is a new customer addition in the first half of this year, where we also won a very nice project with the Children's Hospital a nice project on alarm management, alert and alarm notification management with our Unite platform. So in a nutshell, a number of nice references. Unfortunately, not all references are public, so we cannot disclose always or regularly all projects that we win. But with this 4, I hope I can also give you a good insight on the business that is happening and the impact and success that we continue to have with many of our customers. This brings me to the latter part of the presentation, which is to give you an update on our guidance. Ascom is active in markets, which are, let's say, strong markets also going forward, markets which need further digitalization and need -- are in need of critical and clinical communication and collaboration. And we focus on continuing our growth. We focus on improving our financials and we'll continue to do so also in the coming years. For 2024 and the full year 2024, given the slower start of the year, as you have seen in the financials that we have disclosed, but also the current market uncertainty that we have seen over the past weeks or the past few months, we have taken a more prudent outlook on our full year guidance, in the sense that we expect now for the full year 2024, the net revenue development, which is in line with the previous year at constant currency and an EBITDA margin of between 9% to 10%. So we've taken a more prudent view especially given the recent economical development and market developments. With this, I would like to conclude the presentation, and we'll open the floor questions and answers. Thank you.

Thank you, Nicolas. Then I would like to ask the operator to instruct the participants accordingly, please.

[Operator Instructions] We start with the first question coming from Walter Bamert, Zürcher Kantonalbank.

I would like to start with the first question regarding the U.S. Healthcare business. Could you comment on the business mix there? Is it Nurse Call? Or is it software that works better now?

Thank you, Walter. So yes, indeed, we've seen a positive development in U.S. in the first half. And actually, it's a combination of the 2. So it's both Nurse Call, where we have won number of important projects with key hospitals, IDN Networks, but also some very nice breakthroughs actually on the software side with Unite and more and more with Digistat. So it's a combination really of these two.

Perfect. The next question is regarding Italy. When will you upgrade it to a core market?

Thank you for that question. So there's no first grade or second grade within the company. All markets are equal. But we've seen over the past 2 years, actually a good and steady growth in Italy. So we don't disclose the full figures of Italy, but you're fully right. I mean, Italy, given the size of the market, size of the population should be in the same league as the Netherlands or the Nordics or even bigger if you ask me, right? So your question is very valid and pointed.

Okay. Then last but not least, the OEM business. You mentioned that it's a lumpy business. But nevertheless, the worry is that this is structural decline that you're offering in the mobility applications there. What gives you the evidence that, that business should cyclically come back?

Yes. It's a good point, right? And one of the reasons why in the second half of '23, we saw a decline. It was triggered earlier on, especially in the OEM business, which is a quite cyclical business. It's a cyclical business because the end customers are enterprise customers. And that's typically the first sign that you see if there's a slowdown in the market. And that's what we've seen in September, October last year as a starting point. Now on the other hand, I must say that if I look at order intake in first half, actually, it has stabilized on the OEM business. So it's not that we've seen a further decline compared to last year. It has stabilized. But on the other hand, it has not yet picked up to previous or historical levels. And this is due to the current market environment and the market situation. We do expect on a full year basis that, I mean, OEM will slightly pick up in the second half, but will still be at a lower level, slightly lower level than we've seen in the 2 previous years, for example, if we look at '21 and '22, yes.

Are there any further questions?

No further questions so far.

Then we wait another minute. There are no questions either on the web.

I have a further question right now coming from Reto Huber, Research Partners.

I have 2. One of them, you saw growth in Enterprise, which is very nice. Could you maybe explain it that what kind of customer help you to grow there? And then secondly, why are you not investing more in sales and marketing? I saw the respective expenses did not really increase.

Thank you, Reto. Could you just repeat the second question, please? I was not sure if I understood it correctly.

Yes, why are you not investing more into sales and marketing?

Yes. Thank you. Thanks, Reto. So on the growth and enterprise, we are focusing today and since, I mean, the past 2 years, both on Healthcare as well as on Enterprise. And we have some very good solutions, successful solutions also for the Enterprise segment. Linked to what we call personnel safety, staff safety, staff localization and evacuation. And these are similar solutions based on our critical communications and collaboration solution that we use in the long-term care space and in the hospital space. So there's an additional focus on that. And I must say that we have, over the past 2 years, seen a good increase in our business also in enterprise. Now that's what we've seen in H1. And it's typically a combination of our mobility solutions, and it can be the 4G handsets, which is Myco or it can also be DECT combined more and more with our Ofelia software solution. So that's a good point. I would say there's much more potential to be had there because we are not yet actively present in all of our regions or present to the same extent in all of our regions with the Enterprise solutions. So we will continue to work and to focus on that, and it will generate additional growth. Second point is that with our cloud-based solutions that we will be ready with by the end of this year for Enterprise, we want to move much, much more in Enterprise with a full cloud based solution, which will be another driver for growth actually in enterprise. I mean it will be a cloud-hosted solution, easy to deploy, easy to maintain and develop also much more easier to sell. So I would say there, more to come. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that we shift our focus less or away from Healthcare, not at all, but we see the 2 markets being sound markets, healthy markets that can help us to grow further. On your second question, why are you not investing more in marketing and sales? Actually we do, but we do selectively in certain pockets and certain areas. We have invested over the past 2 years more in the clinical expert teams. We also have invested more in sales in certain regions where we really want to focus on, and we've done that in a gradual way. We will continue to do that in a gradual way. I think that's the best approach we can take. But yes, in the first half of this year, we have been quite cautious on certain costs as we have seen the revenue developed slower than we had anticipated. And that's also what you can see reflected in the numbers.

Any further questions from the call?

No further questions, sir.

Okay. Then meanwhile, we got one question from Mark Diethelm from Vontobel on our webcast. I will read it afterwards. If you still have questions on the call, of course, we may continue also there. So the question for Mark Diethelm is the following, back in March, you reiterated your EBITDA margin target of 100 basis point improvement per year. 3 months later, the target for 2024 is abandoned, yet, the midterm targets remain unchanged. Should we now expect an accelerating in margin increase towards 2027 or still a 100 basis point improvement per year?

Yes. The first part of the question is that we've taken a more prudent outlook to the full year 2024. Based on the slower revenue pickup in the first half of this year and based on the current economical or macro environment. So that's the first point that we are a bit more cautious for the full year outlook. The second point on the EBITDA and the guidance for the full year is that we expect a higher R&D expenditure due to the different projects that we've highlighted, which are important projects strategically to invest in, in order to generate also the future sales. And the project that I referred to was the platform convergence, which is really key, and it's going to be a major step up for us in the coming years. So that's the second point. The third point is that we are also taking additional efficiency measures and cost measures, which we are considering in the second half as we speak now but which are part of our run rate business, meaning no one-offs to be announced, but this is part of our run rate business and is also part of our current guidance basically. So these are the 3 elements that made us revise our full year 2024 outlook. Obviously, we hope to do better. But I must say that we need to be also a bit more cautious on the second half given the recent market developments. On the second part of your question, I would like to reiterate our focus on continued profitable growth for the coming years. You've seen that at constant currency, we have had around 4% growth over the past years, which is not in line with my expectations. We've seen that the market in the first half was somehow still subdued. We do expect it to pick up more in the second half. And we also expect a gradual further ramp-up of our top line with that and with also the cost measures that we've taken, the productivity measures that we've taken, there will be additional operating leverage in the years to come, which, I mean, make us believe or reconfirm basically a good equity story and margin development going forward.

Thank you, Nicolas. Meanwhile, we got another question for the CFO this time, also on the web. From [ Marc Possa ], I'll read it. Could you please comment on the development of the short-term and long-term provisions? Why did they rise absolute and relative?

Yes. Thank you for the question. So the long-term provisions increased to CHF 30 million from CHF 28.3 million at the end of the year. This is not a big increase. These provisions relate predominantly to employee-related provisions, and these predominantly to our pension plan and the biggest pension plan that we have is the one in Sweden. So this is what is in these provisions, and this is what the increase is also due to. The noncurrent provisions increased from CHF 1.7 million at the end of the year to CHF 3.3 million at the 30th of June 2024. And these provisions are a combination of employee-related provisions and tax provisions. Here, the increase is due to predominantly to some temporary tax topics.

Thank you, Kalina. Then, are there any further questions on the call?

No further questions, sir. Please go ahead.

There are no further questions on the web. So I think if there is no latest version on the call, let's wait maybe 1 minute. Otherwise, we will conclude this session. I thank you very much for your interest and your participation. And I wish you all a nice summer day, and thank you very much.

Thank you very much, and talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.