Ascom Holding AG ($ASCN)

Welcome, everybody, to Ascom's 2025 Full Year Results Conference, and also welcome to the participants that we have on the webcast. Our plan for today according to the agenda, which maybe is going to show in a minute. Yes, there we go. First, Michael Reitermann, who was our CEO at interim from September of last year to the beginning of February of this year, he's also a delegate of the Board of Directors, will take you through the results and the highlights of 2025. Thereafter, I will go through the financials in more detail. And afterwards, David Hale, our CEO as of February of this year, will show you the outlook and the guidance. Finally, we will present our proposal to the General Assembly regarding the distribution to shareholders. We will take your questions in the end. We will start first with the people who are present at the conference, and there afterwards, we will take questions from the webcast. So many thanks. Michael, over to you.

Thanks, Kalina. Yes, a warm welcome also from my side. I'll give you the business update, Ascom 2025. And we start with the key financials. Probably most of you have already looked at them. So 2025 at a glance. And I also want to mention here our improved operational performance in all segments and regions, and I will give a couple of examples later on in the slide how we have achieved that and also some metrics along that. You know that the net revenue increased to CHF 292 million, which was an increase of about 3.8 percentage points at constant currencies. The incoming orders increased to CHF 311 million, 3.2% in constant currencies. The EBITDA grew to CHF 34 million, a considerable increase versus 2024 of about 60%. And the margin improved from 7.4% to 11.7%. Net profit, also quite an increase from CHF 3.7 million to CHF 15.1 million. And the equity ratio is at 40% and net cash at close to CHF 30 million. So now after having given you the highlight financials, let's look what drives our markets. The secular growth drivers continue to trend positively for our businesses. And I will just give you a few concrete examples. Demographic change, everybody knows about it. Statista quotes in December 2025, by 2030, all baby boomers in the United States will be 65-plus years old, including myself. That means 1 out of 5 Americans is in retirement age. When you look at staff shortages, Euronews reported in May of 2025 that across the European Union, health care systems face a shortage of more than 1 million staff. That's physicians, that's nurses, that's caretakers. The consumerization of the patient. Just one data point, in 2024, so in our time, this is almost a century ago, 70% of the Internet users actually were looking for medical information on the Internet. And that means that our health care providers face more and more educated consumers and that, of course, also they have to adapt to. When we look at care anywhere, there is a bio space study in the United States, where they said that the U.S. home health care services market was about [ CHF 130 billion ] in 2021, and it's expected to almost double by 2030. And when we talk about health care digitalization, there was a McKinsey article from summer 2024 where they referenced a global survey of 200 health care executives. And 85% said that digital and analytics transformation is either highest priority or one of their top priorities. Unfortunately, in the same study, 75% said that they don't allocate enough resources to those trends. And last but not least, which we sometimes forget in that environment, are the regulatory demands. Last summer, AHA, the American Hospital Association, published a paper that said that health systems and hospitals must comply with more than 600 discrete regulatory requirements and spent more than $40 billion in trying to fulfill them. Now on the next 3 slides, I will talk about our 3 core segments: Acute Care, Long-Term Care and Enterprise. And I want to give you a picture how do we view those segments. The first one is, of course, we still have the major market dynamics, the secular growth drivers that I just outlined. But another trend is in Europe, but especially also in the U.S., the consolidation of hospitals, groups getting larger and larger. And later on, I'll tell you about an example of our customers where they have 40-plus hospitals and clinics. They also move from reactive care to proactive care. If you can prevent the deterioration of somebody in an ICU or somebody in a ward, that is reducing length of stay and it's also reducing the cost for the health care system. So now what do we do in the Acute Care segment? We are becoming the hospital management system for insights and action. And that, we do with our solutions in alarm management, clinical surveillance and decision systems and our classical nurse call systems. This will allow our hospital customers to have higher efficacy and better efficiency. And when you go to the right side, the focus here is, of course, on the high acuity areas, so basically emergency department, operating room, intensive care environment. This is where our solutions can really make a difference for our customers, but also in the recovery and general ward area, if you can detect changes in the status of the patient earlier, you can make a difference. When we talk about Long-Term Care, our second segment in the health care arena, again, you see aging population, caregiver shortage are major drivers. But also people are trying to live longer at their home. And that, of course, is also kind of an opportunity for us, how do we enable and embrace that. Here, we focus on as a company on our solutions where we have the alarm management, activity monitoring and clinical surveillance. Because of the pattern of a resident, we don't call them patient here, of a resident changes, let's assume they spend more time in bed. They spend more time in the restrooms. They take more frequently showers. These are changes in the behavior and the status of the patient. And if you evaluate them cleverly, you can predict and become proactive in treating those situations of the patients. And when we then look on the right side, it's about home care. This is something which is an opportunity for us. We haven't been strong there. But together with the cheap sensor technologies that you see coming to life, probably some of you have an Oura Ring or a Whoop or a Fitbit, et cetera, et cetera. So they are more sophisticated, more clinically proven sensors, and they will make a difference in that segment. Our major areas here are home care, independent living. And I don't know. I mean, my mother is in a long-term home care in Germany, and this is not fully utilized because they don't have enough staff. There's a certain ratio of staff to occupants. And if you don't find enough staff, your capacity is only 80% or 75%. And so our technology has had an opportunity to make a difference there as well. The third, but not the last segment, is our Enterprise segment. Here, the market dynamics are a little bit different from what we see. It's, of course, also staff shortages but a lot more about remote work. Workers get stretched in the facilities. And you probably have heard also, there is safety concerns, security concerns for people who work alone, whether it's in hospitality, whether it's in transportation or in other segments. And our solutions, when we talk about alarming, when we talk about mobile communication, those are efficiency improvements and security improvements that will make a difference in the lives of our customers and their employees. And when you look on the right side, the different segments, we call them the verticals in the Enterprise, we basically play in different markets, in different verticals because we, of course, analyze where do our solutions have the biggest benefit. And I'll tell you later on in the customer example about the secure establishments, which especially in Switzerland has been a good opportunity for us. Now how do we address these 3 segments? We do that with 8 core capabilities grounded in one containerized platform. And I'll lead you through the 8 core capabilities. And you have heard them already or quite a few of them in the 3 segments: Acute Care, Long-Term Care and Enterprise. And we start with alarm management, clear workflow management for nurses, for staff in a long-term care home, patient surveillance or resident surveillance. I brought the example how long are they in bed, where are they in their room, et cetera. Decision systems, communication and collaboration between patient residents and nursing staff or loan workers and their central department and, of course, also amongst nurses. Analytics and reporting. We talked about the administrative burden. Here, we can alleviate the administrative burden for our customers. Data management and, last but not least, asset tracking with RTLS solutions, et cetera, et cetera, is becoming a bigger, bigger driver for us as well. And when you can see at the bottom, our elements nurse call, our patient system solutions and, on the right side, mobility, of course, the Myco, our DECT technologies, they are integrated in those solutions. But also third-party sensors becoming more and more important because the more you can measure, you can analyze and drive your customers' benefits. On this slide, I also want to talk a little bit about the changes in the organization which we have made in April 2025, where we streamlined our organization through consolidation and simplified interfaces, which actually enabled us to achieve closer collaboration between departments, across countries, across headquarters into the countries and allowed for the co-design of efficiency improvement measures, which led actually to quite some of improvements across our customer care and our professional services organizations. And on the left side, you see the improvements in 2025. Here, the project margins, so when we implement our solutions in our customer environments, they improved by more than 5 percentage points. The billable utilization of our professional services staff increased by more than 10%. And then on the customer care side, the average ticket resolution. When there's a service call, you create a ticket. And the average ticket resolution reduced by more than 15%. We also launched a couple of initiatives in Q4 of 2025, which are directed towards the top line. The first one, we call commercial intensity. And here, it's about measuring in a consistent framework and managing the performance of our own sales team, but also the performance and the knowledge level of our partners. Because in quite a few countries, we have an indirect go-to-market approach. And then the second one is the Enterprise growth segment. And Enterprise is an interesting segment for us because the book-to-bill cycle, so basically from order to implementation and revenue recognition, is the shortest of the 3 segments we play in, much shorter than in Acute Care and also shorter in Long-Term Care. So that's why we started focusing at the end of 2024 and have launched an aggressive lead generation campaign for staff safety, alarm management and mobility. And we are looking forward for those activities to yield results in 2026. Now revenue, we said we grew 4 percentage points in constant currencies from CHF 287 million to CHF 292 million. And as you can see, 66% of our revenue comes from health care. And here, about 1/3 is Long-Term Care. And in 2025, Acute Care grew, Long-Term Care was more flattish. And then 1/3 is about Enterprise. And on the right side, you see how we think about our business. Of course, number one, winning orders from customers. And you saw the 2 initiatives, commercial intensity and also enterprise initiative. But here, it's also important that we have a technological and solutions differentiation because that allows us to win more orders. You saw in the 2, 3 examples that I gave on the professional services side, on the commercial -- on the customer care side that we also improved our processes, whether it's the design of the solution, the delivery of the solution or then the servicing of the solution. And the better we do that, the more opportunities and the more understanding and the more financial funds we have also to continue to innovate because we are in segments where innovation is a must. And with innovative solutions, we, of course, then start the wheel at the beginning again, we win. And I truly believe that our solution portfolio differentiates us from individual solution providers. And I think when we talk about now about a couple of examples, you can see that. These are integrated solutions that we brought to our customers and that made us successful. And we wanted to have an example in the Acute Care segment, in the Long-Term Care segment and in the Enterprise segment. The Acute Care segment is from the U.S. And here, this is one of those examples where I said earlier, consolidation. Ochsner is the largest IDN in the U.S. Gulf Coast. It has about 40 hospital/clinics under management. And what we have done here, we implemented our Telligence nurse call solutions, Unite medical device integration. And those solutions bring the Ochsner team measurable benefits regarding response time, friction, inefficiencies between their medical staff, doctors-nurses, nurses-nurses and allows them to deliver smarter and more connected care. The second element is from the Long-Term Care and comes from the U.K., our region North. And here, we signed a contract with Nourish Care. And Nourish Care is the U.K.'s leading digital social care provider. Its platform is used daily by more than 400,000 care workers in the United Kingdom. And here, our Ascom's nurse call, monitoring and alarm management, combined with Nourish's digital care planning solution, enables a platform that allows for increased efficiency, increased safety, a better residence experience and, again, a reduction of administrative tasks because we can map them digitally. And in the first step, the joint teams are targeting approximately 90,000 beds that Nourish has under management. And the last example gets closer to home, in the Canton Zurich. In 2024, we installed our first solution in the secure establishment, Zurich West. We also told you about it in one of the previous conferences. Here, we had now the opportunity to roll out our Ascom solution in 8 secure institutions in the Canton Zurich. Here, we basically use our deck with the Myco 4 technology and multiple software elements containing the integration of technical alarms, staff safety and especially our Prisoner App. And that allows staff in the prisons to actually identify inmates, look at their profiles for identification, improves the risk management and, if necessary, can also support the handling of the prisoners. And just in the last day, we won now our first project outside the Canton Zurich for secure establishment in Switzerland. And all of these opportunities that you see here are in the million Swiss franc-plus range, and we will continue to look for such opportunities in order to drive the Ascom business. And now I hand it back to Kalina to give more details about the financials. Thank you.

So let's go through the financials in more detail. Starting with an overview of top line figures and also profitability and cash flow. We see that incoming orders have increased by 1% in Swiss francs and by 3% in constant currency, order backlog at 3% in Swiss franc and 6% in constant currency. And net revenue, we had an increase of 2% in Swiss francs and 4% at constant currencies. This resulted in a very good EBITDA result, where we increased by 61% and from 7.4% EBITDA margin in '24 to 11.4% in 2025. Capital expenditure, just taking you to the other end of the graph, decreased from 15.5% to 11.1%, a substantial decrease, which is due to lower capitalization that we used to do in the past, but also due to the fact that we completed one furbishment project in 2024 and we don't have this capitalization anymore in '25. And this is the result, what you see in the middle, that the free cash flow improved substantially, on the one hand, from the better profitability; on the other hand, from the lower capital expenditure and also due to better management of net working capital, we achieved free cash flow of CHF 21.8 million. Now starting from the top of our financials from the top line. Incoming orders, the increase of 3.2% in constant currency, you can see has an uneven split between projects, products and services and maintenance and support. While projects, products and services remained flat, we could see quite a substantial increase in orders for maintenance and support. This has the positive effect that such orders are quite stable and contribute to recurring revenue at Ascom. When we look towards the regions, we have now introduced the new group of North, South and U.S. and Canada. We could see strong order intake in the North, mostly coming from health care in Norway, where we see big hospital groups that invest heavily in digitalization. But also, we could see strong order intake in Sweden both from the health care and from the Enterprise segment. South remained flat as a whole, whereby in the individual countries we could see quite some differences. Here, we had a strong development in Germany, but it was compensated by a lower order intake in Switzerland and Australia, most notably. The region USA and Canada remained relatively flat in constant currency and with the development of the U.S. dollar versus the Swiss franc, this resulted in negative 6% development of the order intake. And this is predominantly due to the uncertainties that we have in the U.S. health care system. The development of the backlog, you can see over year-over-year. So over the past 4 years, we have development of positive 4% in constant currency -- sorry, in Swiss francs and 6% in constant currency. And also in 2025 versus 2024, we have an increase of 5.9% in constant currency and 3% in Swiss francs. Also an important point that we'd like to mention is that more than 50% of the order backlog, which we have generated or which we have on the books as of 31st of December '25, is scheduled to turn to revenue in 2026. The net revenue development of 3.8% in constant currencies was then impacted by currency effect in translating to Swiss francs of 1.9% and therefore, resulted in the CHF 292.1 million revenue in Swiss francs. Here, the recurring revenue element, 27%, was similar to prior year and is at a very good level. Here are some more details towards the split on the one hand versus products, projects and services and maintenance and support as well as the split from half year to half year, half-year-to-half-year comparison. Starting with the first graph, we see the opposite development of what we had in order intake, namely, that we have in maintenance and support a lower increase of 2% in Swiss francs and 4% in constant currency. And in products, projects and services, similar growth rates. Then we had quite an extraordinary development in 2025 regarding to half 1 versus half 2 development. At Ascom, the second half is stronger than the first half. This is typically the case. And it was also the case in '24. But in 2025, this effect was much more pronounced. As you can see, in half 1 '25, we remained flat to the half 1 of '24. But in the second half, we had a substantial growth compared to prior half 1 of 5%. Going through the profit and loss statement. Here, I want to draw your attention to the fact that we could increase gross profit from 46% to 48%. And this is due to the optimizations which were put in place starting end of last year but also throughout 2025. These optimizations in our service and support organization, and this resulted due to lower personnel costs in a better gross profit. And this is despite the fact that we had CHF 1 million of write-offs on obsolete components and also CHF 0.5 million of U.S. tariffs that we paid, which were not there in 2024. So I would say we have a very good development on the gross profit level, and this is a level which we aim to maintain. Going through the other cost items. You see that marketing and sales, we reduced the cost quite substantially. This also had to do with the reorganization and with our new operational setup and also resulted, by largest, through personnel -- through reduction in personnel costs. Research and development, you can see a small increase in the P&L. This is more due to the fact that less projects were capitalized and therefore, they do not appear in the CapEx on the balance sheet, but rather appear here in the profit and loss statement. And finally, our administration cost was also reduced, and this is also due to the efforts to maintain strict cost growth. As a result, our EBITDA margin increased from 7.4% to 11.7%. And this is a result that we are quite happy with. Here a little bit more detail to what I mentioned before regarding the CapEx development. You can see in the dark green area the reduction of investments in tangible assets. And this is what I mentioned, the refurbishment of the only office which Ascom owns, which is our office in Sweden. It was finished in 2024. And therefore, in 2025, we have only a very low level of, I would say, recurring tangible investments. And the area which is light green is intangible CapEx. It consists of approximately 2/3 of capitalized R&D developments and approximately 1/3 of capitalized ERP migration, which we are still continuing. Here is the view of the cash flow. So as I mentioned, we are very satisfied with the development of the operating cash flow, which is CHF 32.6 million in 2025. There you can see also which parts of this operating cash flow were used for capitalization, for CapEx and also for return to shareholders, which here consists of the share buyback of CHF 6.8 million and the dividends of CHF 3.6 million. So altogether, we returned CHF 10.4 million to shareholders from Ascom's cash flow, and this is compared to the CHF 10.8 million in 2024, which was paid as a dividend. Finally, a view to our balance sheet. We continue to have a robust balance sheet with a good cash position. We have 40% equity ratio and basically standing very confidently and strongly with a very good financial and financing situation. Maybe one point here on the net working capital because I mentioned an improvement of the net working capital throughout the year, which indeed we achieved. However, we had a very strong revenue development in the months of November and December, and this increased our accounts receivable at the end of December. So this is something which is not evident when you look at the December balance sheet number. However, also here, we are in a very good situation at the moment. So this concludes the financial part. And with this, I would like to hand over to David.

Thank you, Kalina. [Foreign Language] Good morning. Very happy to be with you all this morning. Maybe just a couple of points to my background. I've been with Ascom now for the past 5 weeks for the second time because I actually was an intern at Ascom [indiscernible] in Bern, Switzerland almost 35 years ago. So I'm actually -- I can say I'm happy to be back. Totally different activity at the time. And after I left Ascom, I actually went pretty quickly into health care, and that's where I've spent more or less the past 25 years. I spent quite a bit of time at GE Healthcare here in Europe, a little bit in the United States, half that time, about 15 years, focused on diagnostic imaging, services, capital equipment, MRI, CT scanners. And then the second half of that time really on the health care IT side, so everything that is radiology IT, cardiology IT, perinatal, perioperative IT systems. And then I left GE Healthcare and joined a pharmaceutical company called Guerbet. It's a French-based pharmaceutical company, family owned but publicly listed. I was the CEO of that company for the past 6 years and had also a Board position with a long-term care chain out of France for a couple of years. And I'm currently on the Board of Ambu, which is a Danish medical device company, also publicly listed, that operates in the area of endoscopy. But very happy to be here at Ascom now. Just to come back to what Michael had mentioned earlier, I'm not going to go back into the numbers. But I think what's super interesting to recognize here is you have a demographic shift of patients combined with a very big change in how we deliver care. And those 2 changes combined is what's really creating opportunities and consistent growth that you're going to see across the health care for many years to come. Health care has the beauty of being a sector that structurally has grown and will structurally continue to grow, but continue to grow in different areas. If you just take the U.S. as an example, if you look on the top left, you've got kind of the shift in demographics that Michael was talking about earlier. And if you look at the percentage of the population, birth rates are falling, people are living longer. So I have a shift in the percentage of my population that is elderly. And if you look at the cost that it takes me to deliver health care to an older population, it's kind of, for a health care system, the worst of both worlds. It's a bad segment mix. I've got my most expensive older population, which is actually growing. And this is creating massive margin pressure for health care systems. And a recent study was done to look at where are the opportunities to improve the margin of health care systems. So in the U.S., we talk about improving the margin. But even outside of the U.S., you can talk a lot about how do I have to do more with less resources because every government around the world is looking to how they decrease health care cost in their system, reimbursement cost, overall health care system costs. So if you look at the different opportunities, there's actually several areas here where Ascom's portfolio can really add value and bring that value to our customers if you're talking about clinical workforce management, operating room, inpatient operations and also in the emergency department. And if I try to translate that into, okay, how should I think about growth for Ascom, where Ascom plays in the market? If you take our underlying solutions, starting with mobility, moving into alarm management, medical device connectivity and all of those solutions across the system, we can expect over the coming years anywhere between a 4% to 7% growth in those areas taken at large where Ascom really has an opportunity to bring something to the table. So if we look at 2026, obviously, objective is to continue to deliver profitable growth, but there's 3 main areas that we're going to be focusing on to do that. The first one is really to continue to exploit the benefits of this new organization that Michael talked about. We have opportunities now that we're structured as a regional organization to better balance resources. If you think about delivery of projects, service of our customers, previously, those were optimized within a country. Now we have the opportunity to better optimize those across the region. Also focusing on further operational improvements, project implementation efficiency. Michael talked about the improvement in our profitability on the projects. You can do that through standardization of deployments. I can do that linked to the first item, also sharing my resources and optimizing those across the region. You have now many AI tools that I can be using for improving my delivery as well as improving my development. And finally, accelerating our innovation pipeline, and I would also say, preparing our commercial and marketing teams to be able to deliver that innovation. So those are really the 3 areas that we plan to focus on in 2026 to deliver -- continue to deliver that profitable growth. You've seen the guidance, so I won't spend a ton of time on that. But what we're saying for 2026, we're going to deliver low to mid-single-digit revenue growth at constant currency and an EBITDA margin of 10% to 12% in 2026. So with that, I will hand it back over to Michael, who will present the proposals for the Annual General Meeting.

Yes. Thank you, David. Really glad to have you onboard, this time on the same side, because we were battling each other for many, many years, me on the Siemens Healthineers side and he on the GE Healthcare side, both in imaging, et cetera, et cetera. So glad that we are now fighting the same fight. Yes, proposals for the Annual General Meeting. And I have switched now my head, not ex at interim CEO, now I'm a member of the Board. And I'll talk about the proposals for the Annual General Meeting. And on this slide, I will outline our dividend proposal to the AGM, an update on our share buyback program and what it means for our shareholders. So the Board is proposing a dividend of CHF 0.20, to the Annual General Meeting. This is based on a group profit of CHF 15.1 million, and CHF 15.1 million corresponds to an earnings per share of CHF 0.43. We also have to see that in the context of our share buyback program. We will continue to complete our share buyback program in 2026. We launched it in May of 2025. And as of the end of December 2025, we bought back 1.8 million shares for about CHF 7 million. And together with the 2025 dividend, we returned about CHF 0.30 per share to our shareholders. In 2026, we expect to repurchase the remaining 1.2 million shares now at a higher average share price than in 2025, at least we assume that. And that's how we spend probably around CHF 8 million to buy back those 1.2 million shares. And together with the 2026 proposed dividend, we plan to return to shareholder amount up to CHF 14.9 million, representing up to CHF 0.45 per share. That's our proposal to the Annual General Meeting. The other proposal is about the members of the Board of Directors. As you probably know from the last AGM or afterwards, Valentin Chapero has decided to not stand for reelection to become a member of the Board of Directors or the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The other 5 members have decided to stand for reelection. So we propose to the AGM the reelection of the current Board members: Nicole Burth, Laurent Dubois, Jurg Fedier, Dr. Monika Krusi and myself, Michael Reitermann. We also propose to the AGM the election of Laurent Dubois as the Chairman of the Board. And I end our presentation today with just a glimpse, who is Laurent, Laurent Dubois. He actually also battled me on the GE Healthcare side for a few years. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Ascom since 2020. He is a Belgian national, lives in Switzerland. He is the CEO and a member of the Board of ADB Safegate, a Belgium-based company, which is airport technologies. When you Google the company, you probably will see that you have interfaced with a lot of their technologies when you are flying. And he has a long background in health care as well. So more than 20 years background in understanding processes on the customer side in the U.S., in Europe, around the globe with McKinsey, GE Healthcare. And so I believe that Laurent has an excellent profile for becoming the next Chairman of Ascom. And that's why we propose him to the AGM. So thank you very much. I hand it now back to Kalina to lead us through the Q&A.

So thank you, everybody, for your attention. We open the Q&A session.

And first -- yes, there we go, what's the first question.

Yes. I will have 3 questions. The first question is about your midterm goals. Are you going to announce them some time? Is this planned? Then the second question would be about this big order that you got in December. Maybe if you could talk a bit more about its nature, its size. And yes, my third question would be about the tariffs. You mentioned that CHF 0.5 million amount of tariffs you have to pay. Are you going to try to reclaim that? And do tariffs still influence you in any way?

Yes. Thank you very much. So regarding the first question, well, we'll probably ask Michael to give an answer, and then I will take questions 2 and 3.

Yes. I mean, basically midterm goals, there are 2 rationales why we don't right now give midterm goals. The one is, of course, the global uncertainty. I think we said that a couple of times. And then, of course, also, David will have the opportunity to now look at the business and also then make decisions where he wants to take that business. And David, I don't know whether you want to add anything to that, but I think that is why, at the moment, we will not plan to issue a midterm guidance fully aligned.

Then on the big order of the U.S., we just disclosed the following situation. It is a big order that we have already received in 2024. And it is not uncommon for Ascom to receive big orders, which are then delivered over multiples of years. So this is nothing unusual. This particular order was actually in the Enterprise segment, but we also have such orders in the health care segment, of course. What was a little bit unusual is that a big chunk of this order was asked to be delivered in December, right? This is something which is where we don't really have a very, very granular visibility because the customers can decide also on short term to ask us to deliver. So this is the situation that we had. So in this sense, it is not a one-off, per se, right, because we have big frame contracts also in other countries. It is just a little bit unusual in terms of the timing and size. And the last question regarding the U.S. tariffs. Yes, the impact in '25 of about CHF 0.5 million was, in fact, lower than what we feared in the beginning. So our current setup is such that we are partially impacted but also partially can deliver in the U.S. free from tariff. And the situation, unfortunately, remains dynamic, right? So we have to see how things will develop. Certainly, we will try to claim the tariffs that we have paid. We have already started first steps in this direction. But also here, there is substantial uncertainty whether this will materialize and also when. What I would expect for this year is that we will continue to be impacted. But in terms of magnitude, I cannot really say it's going to be more or less than what we had in the past, right? Because right now, we are again very low at the 10%, but we do not know how long this is going to last. So all that we try is to optimize our supply chain and the timing of our deliveries in the U.S. in such a way that we can be impacted in a minimal way.

So the production is made in Mexico for the U.S. market?

We import to the U.S. market from various markets. Mexico is one part, but we also import from China, from Thailand and also some -- a little bit from Europe. So we have various countries where we import. And sometimes, we are exempt from tariffs and sometimes not. And again, this situation is indeed very dynamic. So we follow it very closely and we try to optimize as good as we can.

[indiscernible]. I've got a question regarding your guidance for the current year. For the EBITDA margin, you guide for 10% to 12%. You had 11.7% '25. Given the fact that you also guide for rising sales low to middle digit, isn't this a bit defense? Shouldn't the margin grow again with rising sales? Or is there something special we should keep in mind?

I mean maybe I'll give it a first shot and then Kalina can chime in. I mean, we are looking at some -- first statement, the uncertainties in the market. We just talked about tariffs. We don't know. Right now, the new issue is 10% for 180 days, might be 15%, an increase. It's not the mega number. But we also, from an investment perspective, are investing in our solutions portfolio. We basically have in 2025 made good progress on that. By 2026, when we, for example, say, cloud-based solutions, the Nourish solution, the Nourish care example that I presented, there, we will also make investments in order to integrate into their digital care solutions. So it is an investment case also on the expense side in R&D. And then what you saw on the commercial intensity side, we also want to invest in our go-to-market. And that means education of our own sales force, but especially also the education of our distribution partners. Because today, in many cases, we have distribution partners who can sell the low end of our solution portfolio. So they sell nurse call, they sell mobility. But we see an opportunity to actually -- in software, you usually talk about land and expand. And so we are investing also in our distribution channels to be more capable to then upsell. But that is in 2026 an expense item. So there are a couple of investments in the future, in 2026, so that we decided to give a wider range and a more cautious range. And I don't know, Kalina, whether you want to add something.

I don't think there is much to add to this. I think this is pretty much all. I think also from our perspective, when we make our forecast, we see a number of uncertainties. And we just want to remain reasonable but, at the same time, a bit cautious.

Michael Inauen from ZKB. I'm not going back to the EBITDA margin guidance, would have been my question as well. But maybe you can just try to give us a hint on how much this December delivery actually helped your margin. I mean, I'm surely helped on the gross profit margin that you had everything in December. So just to understand if maybe that's the difference that we can look into '26. Second question is, as far as I remember, you changed your setup or particularly the people in North America, I think, about a year ago. And in order intake, it looks pretty good. So I'm just trying to understand how successful this new team is, how satisfied are you with these people? And can we look at a more stable Ascom environment in North America? And just an understanding question as the last one. I think you say somewhere in your presentation or in the annual report, 13% of your revenues is software. I'm just trying to understand what exactly that is. Is that usually attached to something that you sell on the hardware side? Or is that generally everything recurring that repeats itself, like on a Software as a Service level? Just to understand, maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like to get it better.

Thank you very much. So I would then answer the first question and the second question regarding the development of the U.S. team. Michael, I suggest that you answer this one. And then the software percent of revenue, I can start and then, of course, you can complement. So on the U.S., we can say that it impacted our EBITDA margin by a bit less than 1 percentage point, just in terms of rough estimate. Then the development of the U.S. team and how we see its progression, I think, maybe, Michael, you can give your assessment.

Yes. How should I say that to be diplomatically correct? I think we have a better team in the U.S. at the top but also on the next layer, so basically the people who work in the regions with our distribution partners, who, what I said, working on educating them so that they basically are not only, let's say, infrastructure facilities people, but they can actually have a clinical discussion. And that was clearly identified by the new leadership probably summer 2025. We are investing now in that and how do we educate them and train them to have this land-and-expand concept, that we basically are in 20% of the U.S. hospitals with our nurse call, but we don't go to the higher-value software solutions. So this is one element that was clearly identified by Tobias Stanelle. And then the second one, we also, not only on the sales side, but also on the implementation side. We made some, I think, good choices with new people joining us, somebody who worked with us on -- probably some of you know that we have a collaboration with GE in the United States about digital CMU, central monitoring unit, where you integrate out of, let's say, 10 different hospitals the ICU so that you basically can leverage the staff. And you don't have to have an ICU observation site in each hospital. You can centralize that. That's productivity, et cetera. And he worked in that. And he is now responsible for our professional services and customer care. So the 2 elements I showed earlier where we already made improvement. So I believe we are on a good way in North America. We'll see. And probably all of you know the OBBBA, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So we don't know what that now means for the funding, especially Medicare on the elderly. We saw that more and more of the people will go in this elderly segment and you have to have the funding in order to support that. And we don't know yet what impact it will have on the funding situation in North America. So a little bit hedging our bets, but I definitely think the prerequisites have improved quite a bit in North America.

Yes. Thank you very much. And then the software question, yes, the 13%, which we show is, in fact, consists only of the licenses, which we sell, right? In reality, we usually sell a project. And within this project, we have hardware and we have software and we have also services, which either we deliver ourselves with our technical experts or we have a partner or both, right? And in the end, it is a combination of hardware, software and work. And the part that here we count as software, the 13% is only the licenses. One can, of course, argue that if we had not developed the software, we would not be able to deliver the entire project. So we are still thinking of what would be a correct way to demonstrate the value of our software also in the financials. But at the moment, we think that this is a transparent way to show it. And then, yes, we will consider if there is an alternative to demonstrate how important the software really is for Ascom. I don't know if anybody wants to add.

I would just add that software, thinking about it as the license only is extremely restrictive because even the -- you install a software license with someone, even if they buy it as a perpetual license, you still have upgrade opportunities that are pure, what we would call professional services work that don't necessarily involve additional software license, but which generate new projects and therefore, also new service revenue. So there's -- I think, as Kalina said, we're kind of looking -- there's software and there's software-induced revenue and how do we look at that better as a whole.

Any other questions? This seems not to be the case, then I will go to the question. We have one question in the chat from [ Dominik Maurer ]. He's asking, looking on the explanation for the increase in R&D cost of lower capitalization on Slide 20. The capitalization was reduced by CHF 1 million, but R&D cost went up by CHF 2.5 million. What is the reason for this? Yes, and this is indeed a good observation. So the place in the annual report where we show our R&D expense in terms of cash view, right? So it is free of capitalization, but also free of amortization of intangibles is on Page 148 of the annual report. And there, you see that we have an increase of CHF 2.4 million in real R&D expense. And from this, CHF 1.4 million, you can see in terms of increase in the P&L and the remainder, CHF 1.1 million is a reduction in the CapEx. What we also have here is a certain complexity comparing year-on-year and also certain complexity that you have with various FX rates. But basically, this is where you can see the full picture of what -- of the R&D expense and its development year-on-year in terms of entire R&D expense. Let me see if there are any other questions on the webcast. Yes, we have a second question from [ Mark Possa ]. Could you talk about your visibility and its change? That's question number one. And question number two, about the competitive landscape and its change. So about the visibility of the results, I can say my personal opinion, then maybe I can hand over to Michael to add something. I do not see any substantial change in the visibility. But again, other than what we see is a macroeconomic impact on Ascom, right? So we have -- as a large part of our revenue, we have projects as well as customer support contracts, right? Customer support contracts are long-term contracts. And there, we have close to 100% visibility. Regarding projects, these are also typically mid- to long-term projects. So they -- also you can argue that we have a certain visibility on the revenue. And there, of course, it depends on execution on our side, but also it depends on the speed of execution of the customer. So this is in terms of revenue visibility, right? The visibility on the order side is again much more impacted by tender activity at our customer site and the investment appetite of the enterprise customers. So this is a bit from a financial perspective, how I see it. I don't know if you want to add anything.

I mean, I interpret visibility means visibility for project wins, revenue and order entry. That's what I assume.

That's how I interpret it as well, yes.

Yes. Basically, in 2025, and I think at the end of 2024, beginning of 2025, we have a much more stringent, what we call funnel review where we basically go through all the regions and actually say, hey, what are the projects that you have on the horizon that you see, then which ones are you bidding for? What are our success chances there? What do we need to do from a corporate perspective, from a regional perspective in order to be more successful. Then we assign probabilities like you always do when you have a good funnel management. And that gives us then a very good -- a reasonably good visibility in order to see what orders will come in. So I think that is a change in the organization also with the focus on the 3 regions. So this is now more easily deployed into the regions, this funnel review. And I have been participating now for 5, 6 months. David had 1 month of experience. And I think this is a good way for us to become more predictable internally on what will be the order entry. From a competitive landscape, I would say, and this is a little bit of my observation. I think some of our competitors that have been acquired by larger companies sometimes are not investing as much as we think they should in R&D. And that's why I believe by being the innovator, having innovative solutions, I think in the next few years, we have a good competitive position because some of them are not as innovative going forward.

Okay. Thank you.

I would just add one thing. The -- if you look at our competitors, we very often have competitors that are smaller niche players. Sometimes they vary from country to country. And Ascom, first of all, provides a total solution across a particular space. And the advantage of that is, in particular, for example, if you're looking at medical device integration, we're sitting or seeing pass a ton of data because we're connecting to each one of those medical devices, whereas a niche player may connect in one area or one particular space. And one thing Michael talked about earlier, which is when you talk with customers is incredibly powerful and something they're looking for. When you see all that data pass for somebody that's sitting in the ICU or someone even that's sitting in an inpatient environment, you can start to predict with some decent level of accuracy, a deterioration potential for that patient long before a human or human eyes would be able to predict that. We're sitting on top of that data. We're sitting on top of the whole of that data. Some of our competition are sitting on parts of that data. And if we can figure out how to grasp that opportunity, I think that's an absolute opportunity for Ascom to see how we turn those data into real insights that you can do something with. You have the same thing in Long-Term Care. If you're following your residents around with sensor detection technology, as Michael mentioned, that's 4 nights in a row, your mother stayed in bed half an hour, then an hour longer than 1.5 hours longer, something has changed. And that's not something as a human caregiver, you would naturally pick up on. So there's lots of, in my opinion, pools of opportunity there where someone who's across the platform like Ascom can play where some of our niche competitors who only see a piece of the puzzle will struggle to be able to play.

Thank you. We have one more question from the chat from [ Mark Webb ]. And it is, could you update more on how the Enterprise business is going and break down sales between prisons and other and geography? Maybe on the second part, I would like to mention that we do not provide breakdowns within Enterprise neither by geography nor by type of customer, but we are happy to give an update on the development of the Enterprise business. Here, maybe I will hand it over to you.

I mean the Enterprise business, as you can tell, we basically use a lot of the technologies that we have in Acute Care and in Long-Term Care and redeploy them. We have a couple of software solutions that then sit on that, for example, the Prisoner App. And it sounds like we have now twice picked secure establishments as we call them, as examples, for the customer examples, but this is definitely not the majority of our business. It's blue light services. So basically, when you have police, when you have fire departments, they want to have secure communication when you basically loan worker is a big one, when you are an oil platform and you suddenly want to know the worker doesn't move anymore or basically the device that he's carrying is in an awkward position that you can send an alarm. These are the solutions across the board that we are providing there. And that is way beyond the secure establishments. And I think we have a really strong point in the DACH region. And we believe that we have the opportunity to be more successful in other countries, regions with Enterprise. And that's why we started the Enterprise initiative, Enterprise growth initiative, where we want to aggressively, with the lead generation campaign, go after new customers in each country with a different focus on a different vertical/industry, but we believe we have opportunities to grow in that segment, and this will be an emphasis in 2026.

Thank you. There are no more questions from the chat. So final call for the participants in the room. Yes, one more question.

Jorn Iffert, UBS. Maybe one question. The OEM has gained some share in the total revenues. And I was wondering what is behind? Is it this U.S. bigger order? Or yes, a little bit if you can comment what went better than Ascom Group in the OEM part of the business.

Yes, it is true that in '25, we had a somewhat higher share of OEM, but I would not necessarily see this as a trend. One can also argue that '24 was particularly low in terms of OEM. So OEM for us is a relatively stable business, which, of course, we try to satisfy our customers, but it's not one of our main growth drivers to put it like this. So I would say that there is not any trend that can be seen in this. It just happens to be a year where our long-term OEM customers ordered a bit more than in '24. Also here, we have some visibility, but not really to the last million that they are going to order. So yes, I would say this is what we can say today also in terms of visibility. We have long-term contracts. We know that these contracts will be fulfilled. We are not entirely sure of the exact timing of the orders, but it's certainly a business that we are very happy to keep and to continue. One more question has come from the chat. If you were to give an educated guess, okay, better than [indiscernible], where will the industry be in 5 years' time in terms of consolidation? I suppose this refers to our industry. Where will the industry be in 5 years' time? Yes, we can guess which industry, but yes...

Maybe 2 answers. One from both perspectives, and then we're sure that we get Mark's question covered. From a -- if you look at the health care segment, already today, you've got roughly 80% of the health care establishments in the U.S. that belong to a system of some sort. And when they belong to a system, there's 2 meanings to that. They can simply belong to a purchasing group. So in the U.S., there's 3 main purchasing groups that centralize buying or it can be a part of a system. As Michael mentioned, you have Ochsner in the South, you have Kaiser Permanente along the West Coast. You have Advent Healthcare across a large part of the U.S. You have Mayo, which has several clinics across the U.S. And it's 2 steps. One is if you join a purchasing organization, they're doing it for 2 reasons. One is to save money at the end of the day. The second one is also to standardize across who they purchase from because it's easier at the end of the day to do implementations. When they're part of a complete system, you will actually see them standardizing across solutions, like they will choose Ascom nurse call for all of their systems. And the advantage of that is when they've chosen you or when you're on these purchasing groups list, if they've chosen you, you have free rein. If you're on a purchasing group list, you have a license to hunt. So you still have to go sell. But each health system has an advantage if they buy it from you and the purchasing group wants you to buy it from them. In terms of a competitor, and you'll see the same thing, in my opinion, in long-term care in the U.S., and you already see it, you have chains in Europe already. You have [ Korian ], which is in many European countries. You have Emeis, which is in several countries, very strong in France, but in several countries. Bupa exactly, and more of these are coming. From a competitor perspective, I think it depends on who you look at as the competitor. If you look at it from a big health care industrial type competitor, I think they will do, like Michael said, continue to buy, but not sure if they're going to keep up with the investments that would be needed to keep going. If you look at it from the smaller niche players, there will either be consolidation or they will disappear because at the end of the day, the more you move towards software, the more you have to be able to invest. And if you don't have scale to be able to invest, it becomes very complicated. Even if you're looking at specific regions, you need a minimum size of your customer base from a profit perspective for you to be able to go direct in that region. Otherwise, you'll never be able to make the return on investment. So I think you will see a consolidate or disappear strategy in some of these smaller niche players as we go forward.

Regarding AI, could AI be an enabler to reduce the implementation time and, in the end, increase the addressable market for you? Or is it more a threat because some services, software solutions are obsolete going forward?

So if we don't do AI internally, that would be a threat because it can absolutely increase your -- think about a -- we have hundreds-plus projects per year that we have to manage, and you have to schedule the right resources with the right competency. And it's like imagining FedEx sitting in a room with 10 people around the table trying to decide on a human level who's going to go here and where over the day. It's not efficient. If you don't start to use those tools, somebody else will, and they will become much more efficient, much more cost competitive than you. So that's why I mentioned for me, those are areas where we will start to look at and focus on in terms of driving our own internal improvements. You talked about deployment. You can also think about it from a service perspective. Today, someone does a service call, very often, you're dependent upon an unstructured knowledge base that the field engineer can quickly go look in, did somebody already call with this particular case how to -- or -- and therefore, a certain level of expertise. You have now agents that listen into the call, so AI agents that listen into the call, they start already building a prompt for you and go out and dig into your database and actually doesn't matter if it's structured or not structured anymore and be able to come back with you, okay, dear engineer, try this, try this, try this because this already occurred at certain places. And we're already doing some limited, I would say, pilot testing with that type of thing inside the service. From an external perspective, same opportunity. We have, for example, with our operation room OR suite, Digistat product in Italy, they are literally running the operating room and the scheduling using Ascom product. And what happens is some of the doctors, the surgeons, they come on Wednesday by noon, and they have to deliver their desired schedule for the following week. And then a human sits down and looks at the 60 -- in this case, they have 60-plus operating rooms in one customer, and they schedule and plan individually each of the operating rooms. And every day, there's an emergency, which means every day something changes. You could quite -- there exists even on the market, algorithms that will allow you to do OR planning, to do dynamic updating of that OR planning. And that's things that we need to look at how we integrate into our portfolio because that's a real value add for the customer. The operating room is typically the biggest expense, but also a revenue generator for a hospital other than potentially cardiology. If I can optimize my operating room utilization rate, every point additional that I get out of utilization rate of my operating suite is direct P&L impact on the bottom line. So there are absolutely opportunities. And I don't think Ascom has to necessarily every time be the creator of those. There are some that we may want to -- because it's so high value add for us, we may want to be the creative. There may be others that we want to partner with. And it's the value of having that vendor-agnostic open platform.

Then we have one more question from the chat which is, are there any patent changes or expirations ahead in terms your bundle? The short answer to this question is no. We don't have anything in the horizon to threaten us in terms of patent expirations or changes. So I think with this, we are probably going to conclude. No more questions from the room and no more questions from the chat. If you should have any further questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You have my contact also in the press release. And thank you very much for your participation.

Thank you.

Thank you.