Ascom Holding AG (ASCNZ.XC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your conference call operator. Welcome to the Ascom Half Year Results 2025 Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] The Ascom CEO, Nicolas Van Den Abeele; and the Ascom CFO, Kalina Scott, will answer questions. The conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Kalina Scott, Chief Financial Officer of the Ascom Group.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome also from my side to our half year results conference call. My name is Kalina Scott, I'm the CFO of Ascom and also responsible for Investor Relations. Today, as part of the agenda, first, Nicolas Van den Abeele will give you an overview of the half year results at a glance. Then I will take you through more detail of the financial results. And then I will turn on off again to Nicolas for strategy and business update as well as for information on our guidance. At the end, we will take questions. You can ask questions by phone, or you can post them in the chat. With this, over to you, Nicolas.

Thank you, Kalina. Good morning, and a very warm welcome to all of you as well to our first half year results call. I would like to start my presentation with a couple of points. First of all, the highlights on the financial figures. As you will have seen in the press release this morning, we posted good progress on some of our financials, in particular, on EBITDA and also on cash flow. But this is on the back on a very volatile market environment, which I will come into in the presentation. In the second part of our presentation, which is on the strategy update, I'll come back to where we stand and the progress that we made on our platforms, which, as you know, is a very important milestone and project that we're working on. So I'll give you an update on that as well as on the tariff situation and the work that we did on lowering our cost base last year and also the first half of this year. But let me first start with first half '25 at a glance. The first point to mention, which is a note at the top of the slide is that going forward, we will report our figures actually according to three regions, which is a change in the organizational setup that we did earlier this year to have a much more leaner and streamlined setup. So going forward, we will announce our results according to these three regions, which is Region North, which is Region South, which is the U.S. & Canada, which comprises the countries that you can see also listed at the top of the slide. Moving to the first half figures at a glance. We posted a flat revenue overall at constant currencies, a slight reduction in actual currencies. We had a good progress in the region South with a positive development in a number of markets, Region North being flat, but on the back of some headwinds, which we've seen mostly in the U.S. & Canada due to the current market volatility, but also the currency headwinds that we had over the first half of this year. Likewise, in terms of incoming orders, where we posted a negative growth of 4.2% at constant currencies. But on the other hand, actually a positive book-to-bill and a healthy book-to-bill of 1.12, which I will comment on later on. We progressed well on our EBITDA margin, where we can show an increase of 1.2% year-on-year versus first half 2024, thanks to the positive effect and visible effects of the cost measures that we've taken, but also an improved gross margin in the first half of this year, which increased from 47.3% to 48% in H1 '25. Group profit at CHF 2.2 million, which is below H1 last year, mainly due to unrealized FX losses on intercompany loans, which Kalina will also highlight a bit later today in the presentation. And last but not least, a good and solid cash flow generation with a cash balance at the close of the first half of close to CHF 30 million, which is a good progress that we have made year-on-year, thanks to tight receivable and cash flow management, but also thanks to a lower CapEx expenditure in the first half of this year. So moving into a little bit more detail on our financials, as you can see on this slide. We posted a net revenue of CHF 140 million, as mentioned, which is flat at constant currencies, but mainly driven also by some market uncertainty and headwinds that we've seen in the U.S. & Canada in the first half. Likewise, in terms of order intake, as mentioned, a decline in constant and actual currency, but an increase sequentially versus the second half of last year of about 10%. But actually, the good point is the positive back-to-bill -- book-to-bill ratio, which is standing at 1.12. As mentioned, EBITDA and gross margin, a good progress, and we're happy to post that in the first half, despite a flattish revenue developments, we posted a good progress in EBITDA and also on our gross margin, which, let's say, is a result of visible cost measures that you can see, thanks to operational efficiency measures taken in the second half of last year, but also first half of this year. A very good progress in our net cash position, as mentioned, an increase from CHF 16.5 million last year to almost CHF 30 million in the first half, thanks to, I would say, a tight working capital management and receivables management, but also as a result of a lower capital expenditure in the first half. So these are the key financial highlights. I'll give the floor now to Kalina for a much more detailed update. I will come back a bit later after Kalina's presentation on the strategy update, on the business update, on the situation in the U.S. and the tariffs as well as on our guidance. Kalina?

Thank you, Nicolas. On Slide 8, you can see an overview of the key financial figures. Some of them, Nicolas already presented, you see the incoming orders declined by 5.7% from the previous half year. The order backlog declined by 0.6% compared to the situation in the first half of 2024, whereby it is important to mention that this is predominantly due to currency effects. The net revenue declined by 1.5% compared to the first half of 2024 in actual currencies. What you see on the second row, however, of these charts is the result of our efforts that we started in the second half of 2024 to improve profitability at Ascom by reducing the cost base and also to increase the cash generation. As a result, you see that the EBITDA has increased by 15% or CHF 1.6 million compared to the first half of '24. The net working capital was reduced by CHF 8.5 million, and the capital expenditure was reduced by CHF 3.7 million or 40%. All of this has led to substantially better cash generation and a more stable financial position. On Slide 9, we begin to go through the details of these items. Incoming orders declined by 6% [Audio Gap] products and services. And you can see that the decline is quite more substantial in Swiss francs compared to local currencies. The distribution of the order intake development was quite different among the regions, whereby the region North could post an increase. The region South showed a small decline. And we had substantial headwinds in the U.S. & Canada, just as Nicolas mentioned. This had to do with the macroeconomic uncertainties, which everybody feels and was further exacerbated by the currency impact of the lower U.S. dollar. On Slide 10, you can see the development of the backlog. In actual currencies or in Swiss francs, this development is negative. But in constant currencies or in local currencies, it would have been an increase of 4%. The split of the backlog remains largely unchanged with about 52% in projects, products and services and about 48% of maintenance and support, which is our long-term core business. On Slide 11, you can see in more detail the split of the revenue between local currencies and the currency effect. While in local currencies, the revenue remained stable compared to the first half of 2024. The currency effect led to CHF 2.4 million revaluation, which in the end brought us to the CHF 140 million net revenue in the first half of 2025. Maybe I should mention here that most of our revenue we generate in euro as well as in the U.S. dollars. Also, we generate revenue in British pounds, in Norwegian and Danish kroner. And all of these currencies were lower in 2025 compared to 2024. So this negative currency effect comes from all of these currencies. On Slide 12, you can see the development of the net revenue split by maintenance and support, projects, products and services on the one hand, where we see that the development was quite similar and relatively flat in these two areas. Whereas when we look at regions, we see that Region North showed a small decline in Swiss francs or was actually stable in local currencies, whereas Region South showed a small growth. Similar as in order intake, also net revenue in the U.S. & Canada was lower than in prior year. And this was also partially due to some large orders that we received in 2024, and which could also be turned to revenue in the first half of that year, which we could not repeat in the first half of 2025. Looking at Slide 13, I will mention a few more details about our income statement. Starting with the fact that we could improve our gross profit from 47.3% in the first half of '24 to 48% in the first half of '25. This had to do with the redundancy program that we executed in the second half of 2024. For those of you who participated in the full year conference, you will remember that we mentioned that we did a substantial redundancy program in the second half of 2024, which impacted the results of 2024 negatively in the sense that not only we had severance cost, but also we had to book provisions for some of these redundancies. Then I also mentioned that we will see an improvement in the profitability of 2025 because this cost base will have already been reduced. And this is, in fact, what you see here across all cost line items of the profit and loss statement, starting with the gross profit. This is also what you see in marketing and sales, where cost was reduced by CHF 2.8 million or 7%. This is also due to the same reason to the lower personnel cost. Research and development increased, but a lot of this is actually due to higher amortization of intangible assets, which is also included in this line and to the fact that less of the R&D expenses have been capitalized in the first half of '25. Also in administration and G&A, we could save costs by the same manner, as I mentioned before. This led to the EBITDA margin increasing from 7.4% to 8.6%. We had, however, some substantial headwinds in the currency exchange rates. And here, I would like to differentiate between two aspects, the realized and the unrealized portion. It is important to note that the operational center of Ascom is in Sweden. So there are certain realized FX expenses that result from the development of the Swedish krona, which, in fact, is the only currency that appreciated in this period compared to the Swiss franc. But the substantial part of the FX expenses or the financial expenses, which you can see is due to unrealized expenses, and these result from the revaluation of our intercompany loans, which are in foreign currency and which we give to the various countries from the holding in the local currencies and therefore, turned back into Swiss francs leads to these unrealized FX losses. On Slide 14, you can see the development of our cash position. The biggest positive development came from operating activities, which is the result on the one hand of the higher EBITDA, but also the substantially improved net working capital. Then also we had CapEx that was lower compared to the first half of 2024. And also, you see that for dividends and for share buyback, we have expended approximately CHF 4.5 million, which leads to a cash position of CHF 29.5 million at 30th of June 2025. On Slide 15, looking at the balance sheet, you can see a solid position with reduced net working capital, but also with a solid equity ratio of 37.9%. Our share buyback is ongoing. You can see a few cornerstones on Slide 16. We announced in March -- on March 12 that we will start the share buyback. We launched it in May. The framework of the share buyback is -- or the aim of the share buyback is to buy 3 million shares to a maximum amount of CHF 15 million, and we expect the share buyback to be finished latest in November of 2026. By the end of July, we have bought approximately 522,000 shares at an average share price of CHF 3.8, and we have paid approximately CHF 2 million for this share buyback. With this, I turn over back to Nicolas.

Thank you, Kalina. So I would like to proceed with an update on our strategy and also business. So first of all, as a recap, I mean, Ascom, our strategy and our ambition are to become the key enabling platform across the two domains in which we're active, which is healthcare, acute care, hospitals and long-term care as well as enterprise. And our revenues are split in these two segments with around 70% that we generate in the health care segment, around 30% in enterprise. The total addressable market, which is quite sizable, is around CHF 4 billion across these three segments. So we have a market share on average globally of around 8%, but depending on the countries, in some countries, much higher than that. So our ambition is to become that key enabling platform, which is the real-time critical platform of communication and collaboration across these different segments. Now we play into some key trends and some key needs of our customers, be it on the health care side, the shortage that many of our customers are facing, hence, the need for workflow automation and digitalization, be it also the complex integration, what we call medical device integration of multiple medical devices that you see across the different care areas in hospitals, making that, let's say, integrate and tangible is also one of the key things that we do. Likewise, in long-term care, aging population, the need for additional capacity, a need also to stay longer at home with monitoring solution before moving to a care home. These are all key trends that we see in the market and key trends in which Ascom plays into and has also key value propositions to offer. We view it as second to none in critical communication, real-time communication and collaboration. We're also a platform of reference in the market for alarming and monitoring, making sure that whenever there's an occurrence that the alarms are triggered, that they're also tended to within the seconds or the minutes by the appropriate caregiver with the necessary escalations to the next caregiver. So everything we do across these two segments is making care delivery or work in general, more efficient for the worker, for the caregiver, but also allowing and enabling better patient outcomes. So that is our strategy. Looking at the two key segments in which we're active and the different solutions that we offer, we are one of the key players in the market that offers end-to-end workflow communication and automation solutions. In health care, we do that across the different care domains, which is the general ward, which is the intensive care unit, the operating room, the emergency department. And we offer a key number of solutions, which you can see on the slide, going from alarm management to medical device integration to clinical surveillance, so really monitoring the state of a patient with early warning scores, OR operating solutions with scheduling, with inventory management and a number of more solutions that we offer across the health care domain. Likewise, in enterprise, with a number of solutions similar to health care like alarm management, like workflow efficiency, like staff assignment and task assignment and workflow and workplace safety. Now the market trends, the underlying market trends are definitely solid. These are key needs that our customers need, the need for critical communication and collaboration, need for digitalization. But we've seen in the first half of this year, a certain market volatility, which in particular in the U.S. was quite noticeable, which led to a number of delays in investment decisions given the market and political or geopolitical situation basically. This was compounded also by some adverse FX impacts, in particular, the dollar, but a number of other currencies as well, which is visible in the figures that we've posted in the first half. Nevertheless, we believe that these delays, which were noticeable in particular in the U.S. & Canada are of temporary nature. Also in Germany, there were elections. There was also a lot of discussions and certain delays on the new health care bill, which in the meantime has been approved. So we believe this is of transient nature. The underlying and the midterm growth drivers remain fully intact across the three segments in which we are active. For the second half of this year, we have typically a more seasonal effect in the second half versus the first half with a higher order intake, also higher revenue. And this is supported by the strong backlog that we have for the second half, but also a healthy pipeline of new projects on which we are working. One additional comment that I wanted to make, which is an important one on the tariff situation in the U.S. & Canada. To give you a little bit more insight there, obviously, this was a matter of concern, not just for Ascom, but for all companies in the first half with a lot of volatility and changing market environment. We anticipated on that with -- I mean, at the end of last year and early this year, building additional inventory in the U.S. to pre-empt any possible tariff move situation. But it's important to mention also that as a Swiss company, actually, we do not produce or export from Switzerland to the U.S. I mean we have our production, but also development activities located in multiple locations, not in Switzerland. So we're not subject to the potential 39% tariff. What is the situation today? We produce for the U.S. market a lot from Mexico, which is our Nurse Call, which today is exempted from tariff. So there's a 0 tariff for Mexico to the U.S. We produce also on our mobility side in China, which are our microphones for 5G phones, but also DECT phones, where we have a tariff situation of 20% to 30% depending on the device itself. Again, it has an impact. I would say it is important, but it's manageable. We have anticipated to that in the first half of this year with additional inventories. We've also worked on making sure that we can adjust prices, and we've done that over the first half to cater for potential cost increases on some of these products. Maybe a last comment. While there is a tariff situation in the U.S., we -- if you look at Ascom as a whole, invoice around half of our turnover in software and services and about half in hardware across Nurse Call and mobility devices. Now the impact, obviously, is much less than half of the turnover for the U.S. because we import only a part of that. We also source certain things locally. So moving to the next page. Given that, let's say, overall situation in first half, we posted some important customer wins, which are strong proof points of the value that we bring to our customers. And I just listed a few here on this slide, a very important one in Switzerland here, the Kantonsspital Baden, which is the regional hospital in the region of Baden, where we've actually deployed a fairly large system, Nurse Call system, but also with workflow solutions and alarm management, which really enables that hospital to improve efficiency, to improve care delivery to the patients in a much better, much more ergonomic and a much more efficient way for the caregivers. So it's a very important flagship reference for us. We invited a number of overseas customers also to visit that site and hospital, and we're proud of that reference. The second one in Germany, which is the Wertachkliniken, where we did a nice project on Medical Device Integration together with Alarm Management, likewise, a very nice reference. Another reference in the U.S., where we have a partnership agreement actually with AvaSure, which is a company also active in the health care domain with hospitals and long-term care homes, where we have a partnership to deploy jointly what we call the virtual nursing type of solutions to make the work of the nurses better, more efficient with also a virtual nursing capability so that they can rely on more specialist nursing support whenever needed. The fourth reference is closer by in the Nordics, in Sweden with ISG Nordic, which is a company specialized in the enterprise side in basically staff safety workplace safety, staff monitoring across multiple enterprise domains, and we have a strong partnership with them and a lot of projects working on Staff Safety, on Secure Communication, on monitoring and task management basically for the workers across these different verticals. Last but not least, a reference in Finland with the Kokkola Hospital, which is also a project on Alarm Management and Medical Device Integration. And as you can see, some very nice proof points on improvements that we brought to the hospital staff in terms of reduction of non-actionable alarms and making, again, care delivery much more effective and efficient. So with this, I would like to give you also an update on where we stand in our strategy execution and the progress that we've made in the first half of this year. Two points I would like to highlight on the next couple of slides. One is on our portfolio strategy. Second one later on is on what we've done in terms of having a leaner cost structure and a leaner organization in Ascom. So first of all, an update on our portfolio strategy. As you know, as you will recall from previous conference calls, we've invested over the past 2, 2.5 years on streamlining our portfolio, on moving our portfolio, integrating it, but also moving it to cloud-enabled platforms. And we are very, very advanced in that. We -- the ambition is that we seamlessly integrate our different platforms into one where we can offer on the same solution and platform basically our alarm management, our workflow management, our surveillance and monitoring across the different domains, but really coming from the same integrated platform, which gives a lot of benefits to our customers in terms of value that we provide, but also simplifies much, much more in terms of complexity of the solutions that we offer. We're pretty advanced in that, and I will highlight that briefly. So in terms of the enterprise platform, I mean, we are fully ready, and the platforms are available. But also in long-term care, we are now moving in the second half of this year to scaling basically our deployments and our rollouts in terms of these new platforms to our Long Term Care customers. We will complete that journey and that transition early next year with also making these new solutions available for our Acute Care segment. which will be early 2026. Now what does it mean specifically? So it basically means that if you look at the left-hand side of this slide, today, we have already a number of customers on our new platform, close to 20 customers in enterprise and long-term care that we are scaling up in the second half of this year to move many more of our customers to that new platform. The initial rollout so far has been on the number of applications, which was mostly centered around Staff Safety. We are now ready to scale that up and to offer also next to Staff Safety, also the other solutions in terms of alarm management, SmartSense, which is a monitoring solution, but also task management to these customers. And with our platform, we are also now capable of supporting all customers across long-term care and enterprise, going from very small ones to very large 400, 500, 600 rooms or beds type of customers in the long-term care domain. What does it basically bring? I mean, this is a new platform. This is a cloud-enabled or cloud-native platform, which integrates, as I mentioned, the different solutions in terms of alarm management, clinical surveillance, in terms of monitoring. It can be deployed in an on-premises or in a fully cloud version. And it definitely brings distinct benefits to our customers in terms of easier scalability, in terms of self-healing capability of the platform, which really increases the quality and the reliability, but also making automated updates so that you don't have to send technicians or you can do it immediate and not have to plan specific service windows to do that. So a lot of additional benefits. As mentioned, we're ready to scale up now, which will be in the second half of this year with our long-term care and enterprise customers, and we will finalize and complete the transition early '26 with also our healthcare hospital customers. Now next to that platform integrations, there's also a number of important innovations on which we're working on. Just to name one, Ascom is viewed in the market as being second to none in terms of alarming, critical alarming in a health care setting, which is a very regulated and complex domain. But what you see is that basically every alarm has to result in an action. And sometimes you have a number of alarms that actually are nonactionable because it depends really on the physical condition and the contextual information of a given patient. And there's on average around 50%, 60% of alarms and alerts generated by medical equipment in a hospital, which is not really actionable and which results in, let's say, an action by a nurse or a doctor, which could have been prevented. And so everything that we're doing right now is to develop smart alarm filtering in order to reduce these nonactionable alarms for the caregivers but also moving much more to what we call pre-emptive alarming. So really pre-emptively being able to spot potential deteriorations, potential risks of certain patients with early warning scores and other type of solutions, right? And that's the next thing in terms of alarming. That's where the industry will be going to, and we want to be on the forefront, obviously, of that. The second point I wanted to mention is the effort that we've done, as Kalina highlighted as of the second half of last year and this year in working our cost base. And we've implemented a cost efficiency plan as of the second half of last year. We've also implemented earlier this year a new organization where we combine the different country structures in bigger regional setups, which are the three regions I referred to, Region North, Region South, the U.S. & Canada, but also underneath that, integrating part of our sales and marketing teams, but foremost our customer delivery and service and operations teams. So this has now been completed. It's an important step that we've done earlier in the year, but with visible impact also in terms of cost as of the first half of 2025, but also second half and run rate 2026 with a net additional saving in '26 versus '24 of around CHF 3 million. So with this, I would like to conclude and give you the key takeaways basically, which is that, I mean, Ascom is really second to none in a number of care areas, a number of key solutions, which bring really value to our customers. Despite the volatility that we've seen over the past number of months, our markets are healthy, have solid growth trends. And we also expect that over second half, the volatility should normalize or should more stabilize, which is important. Strategically, we have worked a lot, and we are completing the important milestones in terms of our innovation road map, also in terms of our platform conversions. And we've worked our cost base with visible impact in the first half and also on a full year basis 2025. And we're committed to work further on our growth, which we know has been a little bit subdued in the first half, but we expect a better second half of this year, but especially continue to work on EBITDA accretion as well as cash conversion, where I believe in the first half of this year, we've shown some good progress. With this, I would like to move to the guidance of 2025. And we can reconfirm the guidance that we also have given at the beginning of the year at our full year conference -- full year '24 results conference in March, which is that for the full year 2025, we expect and we target a low single-digit revenue growth at constant currency, but also an EBITDA margin of between 9% to 10%. So an unchanged guidance for the full year, and we're committed, obviously, to delivering that. With this, I would like to conclude the presentation, and I move back to Kalina for questions and answer.

Thank you, Nicolas. So with this, I would like to open the floor for questions. We will take first live questions from the phone and then the questions from the chat. Operator, would you please instruct the participants accordingly?

[Operator Instructions] First question, Reto Huber, Research Partners.

I have about three. The first one is you were saying that your order intake increased sequentially. Maybe you could give us a little bit of color what drove this? Then secondly, there was a lot of optimism at the last conference because you hired a new sales rep in the U.S. coming from GE Healthcare. I'm wondering is the person still there and is he or she making progress? And then thirdly, you explained that you were going to transition customers to your new platform. I was wondering, is this going to be associated with extra costs that should be regarded as one-off in the second half of this year?

Thank you, Reto, for the three questions. Let me take them one by one. So the first one was on order intake. And we gave you the two sets of data indeed sequentially versus second half of last year, where you see a 10% increase. But year-on-year, we're actually down 4.7%, 5.7% versus first half of 2025. Now what are the different drivers? We -- I mean, there's always a seasonality also towards the second half of the year, where we've seen in the past that typically H2 is stronger. Now last year was a bit weaker in the second half. What we do expect basically or what we saw in the first half of this year is that in a number of regions, mainly in Europe, actually, we have seen some growth, mainly in the Nordics or in the North region. But we have seen a delay in investments, particularly in the U.S., which has been reflected in the numbers that we've shared with you. The main reason is investment delays due to the uncertainty and the volatility in the market as a result of the trade-war. The second reason, as Kalina also highlighted, is that in the first half of last year in the U.S., we had a few larger deals, which were kind of one-off deals, right? Now that being said, we expect also in the second half for the U.S. a better uptake in order intake based on the pipeline and the funnel that we see today. We also expect that in the other regions, I mean, there are some deals that we are working on, which normally should come in. So we should be able to post also, let's say, a positive evolution over the second half of this year. So that's with respect to the order intake. With respect to the U.S., we've announced in March a change of leadership. So we brought a new person on board coming from GE with a very strong sales profile, sales background and track record, knowing the industry very, very well in the U.S. He came on board towards the end of the -- I mean, the first quarter of this year. So we -- I mean, we're working on a lot of initiatives. They're not yet visible in the results, but I'm confident that, I mean, step-by-step, we will also see the positive outcome of that with the new leadership in place, not just Tobias Stanelle that we hired, but also some other changes that we did in the team and some of the people that we brought on board. We also expect that the market situation or the uncertainty in the U.S. market should stabilize. Obviously, we cannot predict. But if we look at the discussions which are ongoing with the different countries and if you look also at our supply chain setup, we -- I mean, it should stabilize in the months to come. So it should not have, let's say, a big additional impact in the second half of this year. With respect to the new platforms, we -- I mean, this will be an incremental approach. I mean we are starting to deploy our solutions in enterprise and long-term care. We will -- and we expect it to scale up in the second half of this year with more customers moving to that new platform, in particular, in enterprise and in Long Term Care. We will only do that as of 2026 in the hospitals in the Acute Care part of our business. So it will be an incremental, let's say, transition because it also depends on the projects that you win and the time line of deployment of these projects by the customer. So don't expect it to happen at once as of the second half of this year. But I would say, over the next 2 years, we will see a good increase and an incremental increase step-by-step to that new platform. It will bring additional benefits. I mean, first of all, this should help us to scale more and to be able to scale more with a similar cost base. Secondly, it should help us also step-by-step to be more efficient in terms of deploying a more simple solution and maintaining or upgrading a more simpler and a more stable solution as well given the benefits that I was highlighting to. So yes, there are positive benefits, but this will come, let's say, step-by-step incrementally over '25, '26 and probably early '27. Thank you, Reto.

Can I quickly, did I misunderstand this, you're not going to convert existing customers to the new platform, but you're going to sell the new platform to new customers?

No, it's going to be both. So we -- I mean, the existing customers which have new projects, obviously, all new projects will go to the new platform. But we also have an upgrade path, let's say, for the existing rollouts, which will seamlessly migrate to the new platform. But again, this will be a stepwise approach. So it's not from one day to the other that you move everyone immediately to the new platform. This is more of an incremental approach.