Austriacard Holdings AG (ACAG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Konstantinos, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Austriacard Holdings conference call and live webcast to present and discuss the first half 2026 financial results. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. We are joined today by Mr. Manolis Kontos, Group CEO; Mr. Markus Kirchmayr, Group CFO; and Mr. Dimitris Haralabopoulos, Group Investor Relations Director. They will take you through the presentation and discuss the first half 2026 results. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Dimitris Haralabopoulos, Group Investor Relations Director. Haralabopoulos?

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Austriacard Holdings First Half 2026 Financial Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone attending today's event that during the course of the call, we may refer to forward-looking statements and certain non-IFRS financial measures. The relevant definitions, reconciliations and disclaimers can be found in the interim financial report, the results press release and the results presentation, all of which have been posted on our corporate website. Moreover, and in relation to the voluntary takeover offer by DNP, we advise you to refer to the published offer document and the relevant official announcements that have been posted on the dedicated section on our corporate website. With that, I'll now hand over to Manolis Kontos, Group CEO, who will take you through the highlights of the group's financial results. Manolis, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Dimitris. Welcome, everyone, to our H1 conference call. As Dimitris mentioned, we will have the opportunity to share with you some highlights of the results and also touch base briefly on the current public takeover offer that DNB has made because there's been some recent developments. So I will use also this opportunity to give you a summary of where we stand. So with that, I'll start with a financial summary, and we will elaborate as always, on the key metrics as part of this presentation. So starting from the revenue side, we had quite a strong first half of 2026 compared to the relevant period of 2025. Especially if you look at quarter-by-quarter, the second quarter showed a significant growth, but we need to keep in mind that the second quarter of last year of course was quite weak. And then nevertheless, the key areas that we have been focusing on and were part of our strategy are all performing as we had planned them, which means that as far as the solution is concerned, the digital services and also the identity and payment solution, which is our core focus are all showing a strong performance. As far as markets is concerned, the U.K., U.S. and the fintech clients, which has been quite a strong contributor over the course of the past few years continue to support the growth in this category. And our new segment that we have been focusing in the last year or so, which is the citizen authentication solutions started getting traction. And last but not least, our investments behind technology and specifically on our GaiaB AI technology are starting now to move from small pilots to actual projects. So all these are, let's say, the answer that our strategy was correct, and we're already starting to see the results out of it. On the other side, from a cash flow and balance sheet point of view, there is some pressure in the first half of the year on the operating cash flow, but nothing that creates any concern to us because it's all related to investments that we are doing to support growth as far as the working capital is concerned, and I will elaborate in the presentation later on. And all these are expected in the second part of the year to normalize. And that's why on a full year basis, we are expecting that the group operating cash flow will be broadly unchanged versus the full year position of 2025. The leverage and the debt, obviously, because of this working capital investments shows a slight increase versus, let's say, the previous quarter. But when we compare versus the same let's say, period of last year, the H1 of 2025, we are at 2.1 leverage versus 2.3 that we had in the relevant period of 2025. And the debt is around EUR 100 million, which is in line with what we expected. As far as now the Dai Nippon takeover offer, we have the final results. When we published our financial statements, we didn't have the final picture. But now today, we were notified yesterday about the final outcome. So we have updated our percentage. And now we see 96.5% as the percentage of shareholders that accepted the offer, which I believe shows that it was quite successful as far as the takeover offer is concerned. Nevertheless, the offer has not become unconditionally binding because there's one last condition precedent that is outstanding that has to do with the Austrian foreign direct investment authority, providing its feedback and approval, which we have no, let's say, yet the final date of when this should be expected. The rest of the condition precedents are all met. As such, once this final condition precedent is met, then the deal will be considered, let's say, final. Now -- as far as the guidance that we had given, based on the performance that we see in the first half of the year and the outlook based on our reprojection that we do internally, we would like to revise our revenue, let's say, projection from high single digit to low double digit versus the same full year 2025 position. On the other side, on the group EBITDA margin, because of all these, let's say, extraordinary events that are taking place as we speak, like the DNP offer, the settlement of a stock option plan that the management had from the past, we have some one-off costs, which if we take all these costs under consideration, we do not expect the EBITDA margin to improve. And the overall EBITDA, including all these costs should be marginally declining. But if we exclude all these costs, we will be showing also a growth on an operating point of view. The EBITDA margin should be -- the EBITDA absolute figures will be improving versus last year, if you were to take out all these extraordinary costs. Moving at the details now of the presentation. As mentioned in my introduction, the 2 main categories that we are focusing, which is the digital technologies and the Identity and Payment Solutions, both are performing strong. On the digital technologies, the Greek public sector digitalization projects are one of the biggest contributors in this significant growth. But the Identity and Payment Solutions, which continue to be the biggest category of the group are showing a strong growth of 13%. And you will see that the growth is both in the Payment and Identity side on the Payment side in the back of the performance of the fintechs, both in the U.K.-based and U.S.-based fintech clients. And in the Identity, mainly in the Africa region and Middle East, which anyway was our focus as far as that solution is concerned. On the other side, the document life cycle has some pressure, especially in markets like Romania and Greece, where we are seeing still the migration of whatever paper communication was done to digital. So what the take out of this is that we are not showing obviously growth in the heritage offering, which is the paper communication, but this is converting into digital services, which also come with -- over time will come with a better margin. And as far as the Middle East focus on the security printing projects, we continue having focus in that space. And we already had in the beginning of the year a small project that had to do with national elections. But also for the balance of the year, we are projecting and we are running some large-scale projects that have to do with security printing projects in the Africa region. As far as the EBITDA performance is concerned, as I mentioned, we have -- we are absorbing some one-off costs, especially on the SG&A side that has to do with the deals and the change of control event that is taking -- that is triggering certain costs. That's why there is a onetime effect that is impacting us and led to the EBITDA margin being in the range of 10.4% which is slightly below the first half of last year, which was 10.8%. If we exclude all these one-offs, we will be seeing a similar performance in the EBITDA, let's say, line compared to sales. So a 14% growth would be recorded on a like-to-like basis. On the net profit side, quite a strong performance being 5.8%. On the one side, we mentioned here that there is this minority stake gain that we have of EUR 2.2 million, but we need to take under consideration that at the same time, we have all these one-off costs, which are at a similar level. So we can assume that this increase that we see on the net profit on a comparable basis is there. So although we mentioned the EUR 2.2 million of the Seglan sale, but if you then also take under consideration the one-off cost, the net profit performance would be at a similar level of this EUR 5.8 million that we see in the first half of 2026. Looking at the quarters, we see what I mentioned before that the second quarter of 2026 is showing a significant growth versus the similar quarter of 2025. So from EUR 81 million in 2025, we moved to EUR 97 million in 2026. And as far as the EBITDA is concerned, there is, as I said, a lot of costs that are being captured there, either factual or projected. That's why we see this decline. If we take again out this one-off cost, as we showed here in the presentation, the growth would be -- for Q2 would be 26%. So quite a good performance as far as the EBITDA margin is concerned. I will speak a bit about the balance sheet and cash flow because this is one of the areas that we are showing a picture that might not look that good. But as I said in the beginning, all this is temporary. So there is a temporary buildup of working capital, which led to this negative operating cash flow. But this negative operating cash flow. So all in all, there is this negative performance versus the previous comparable period. It's expected that all this will be mostly, let's say, offset in the second part of the year. The main areas where we're getting the pressure is on the trade and other receivables where there's EUR 26 million, which has to do with the public sector of Greece. As we know, all these projects in the second part of the year, most of them are coming to closure. So they will be all be invoiced and collected. Contract assets, it's a similar situation where we had EUR 9 million increase again with the public sector digital projects in Greece, where we are recognizing based on the contract execution, and we are then going to be invoicing and collecting. So again, this is planned to happen in the coming months. And as far as the stock settlement, this has to do with the completion of the stock option program that was running for the previous years. And there is already a first cash-out payment of EUR 2.6 million, and there is a balance to be settled in the second part of the year. On the other side, the inventory buildup, which was a key topic for us in the previous year, we see that this is not anymore the case. So we are seeing a slight decline, which is in line with all the efforts that we have done in the previous period in order to be able to manage our inventory, especially when it comes to the semiconductor part of the business, which is the biggest, let's say, inventory item that we have for the production of smart cards. So this is now under full control. And once we are out of this contract assets and trade receivables related mainly with the public sector projects of Greece, the whole working capital and operating cash flow will be looking significantly different in the full year situation. So that's why we are not at all concerned. It's all a timing topic, which will be managed in the second part of the year. CapEx on the other side, we continue to invest for growth. So all these investments that you see here, either on machinery and equipment or software development are there to support the growth on the software development side in order to be able to capture the digital technologies, let's say, growth that we have planned around our AI solutions, our Card-as-a-Service and our data capture platform. So all around the solutions that we are deploying commercially, there's still, let's say, investment done in order to be able to have the right offering to deal with the market needs. And on the tangible, let's say, side, which is the machinery and equipment, there is 2 investments that we have done. One has to do with the Middle East and Africa, where we have decided to invest locally in Africa in order to have capabilities closer to the market. So this is one part of the investment we have done, which will enable us to not only address the market from a distance as we have been doing up to now, but have closer proximity and by having an operations, let's say, in East Africa, where the investment has taken place, we will be able to serve better and capture more opportunities in the Middle East. So this, again, the reason we invested is because of our strategy to be able to offer security document solutions in the region of Africa. And on the U.S. side, which as you have seen, is performing quite strong. We are also investing in a second personalization center in Salt Lake City in order to be able with our New Jersey setup and the second one in Salt Lake City to serve properly the whole North American market. If we move on, as far as the working capital is, as I said, on the one side, there is a buildup on the trade and other receivables and on the contract assets, but all these are temporary, as I mentioned, and will be offset in the second part of the year. On the regions, we see that all our regions are growing. So CEE is growing 7%. West and Americas is growing 23% and Turkey and Middle East is growing 26%. The growth as far as CEE is concerned is in the back of the digital technologies, where we're seeing the biggest, let's say, growth as far as the increase of the contribution of the digital technology and the product mix that we have in this region. This region, as we have mentioned, has a focus to increase the digital technologies contribution overall. On the Identity and Payment Solutions, there is a slight decline. This is because we had last year some renewals from Romanian banks and from the health card of Austria, which are missing from -- which were in the base of last year and missing in this year. This is the cyclicality we have for some projects. So nothing related to any business deterioration. It's all, let's say, the cyclicality that we have in certain product lines. The only one that is declining and it's something that we expected had to do with the paper communication business and postal services, where we anticipated anyway a decline, and this is also being reflected here as we see. But on the other side, it's more than offset from the other side of the business. That's why even this region, which is the mature region of the group, let's say, is showing a 7% growth. The focus region, which is Western Europe and America, you see 26%, very solid growth, both of the Payment Solutions in Europe and U.S. And on the Middle East and Africa, although Turkey is not growing, let's say, because, again, it's a mature market for us, we are getting quite a good performance from the Middle East and Africa region, which is our focus area going forward. All these sales performance is reflected on the EBITDA level. So you see that the West, which, as I mentioned, is the one that had the strongest performance as far as the revenue is concerned, is also showing quite a strong performance on EBITDA level. On the other side, CEE, because of the fact that there is a decline, especially in the document life cycle part, there is also pressure on the EBITDA margin. But in absolute terms, it's not that significant. It's around EUR 2 million, and it's more than offset from the rest of the region. So overall, the group is showing a 10%. And as I mentioned, let's not forget that the comparable growth is 14% and not the 10% that we see here. When we look it by solution, the solutions that we focus, which is Identity and Payment and digital technology are growing strongly, both adding EUR 13 million and EUR 14 million, respectively. And on the other side, the document life cycle, which is the one that has to do with the heritage offering, postal and printing services in Greece and Romania is the only one that is showing a decline. But as I said, this is not a surprise to us. This is something that we anticipated. On the digital technology side on the public sector of Greece, there is still a remaining part to be recognized in the second half of the year and some of it will be rolling over in 2027. So there is a significant part that has already been recognized, EUR 65 million, but there is another EUR 80 million in front of us, which is split somehow almost half and half between this year and next year, which means that even for next year, there will be some part to be delivered. This shift in revenue mix is exactly what we wanted to achieve, which means that we wanted to increase the contribution of the digital technologies in the product mix, which we already see here in the outer circle on the left side of the slide. On the other side, our core business, which is Identity and Payment continues to be the strongest let's say, contributor to the total revenue, 63%, 64%. This is the one that we are looking to continue growing as far as the reach and the client is concerned. And we will be seeing the document life cycle management reducing its contribution and looking to be replaced from the digital, let's say, solution and technologies. So closing on the full year outlook, we still continue to invest behind the digital technologies on the AI side, on the card service, on the holistic citizen solutions, so which are all areas that we believe that has still a lot of potential, and we have a lot of know-how and technology that we can offer. So we will continue investing behind this, both commercializing what we have, but also implementing and building new solutions to fuel the growth going forward. We have quite a solid backlog of customer onboarding, especially in the Western U.S. region, where we are still getting traction, not only from the fintechs, we also started getting traction from the systemic banks, let's call it. So the focus and the investment we have done in this part of the world is starting to pay off. We are rolling out now our Card-as-a-Service in that part, mainly Central Europe and Western Europe, I would say, is the focus areas as far as the Card-as-a-Service is concerned. And our GaiaB, we have started already having actual projects, one quite significant one in the Middle East. And we are already in the Greek and Romanian market having the first actual implementations. So we have moved now from proof of concepts, and we are starting to have actual implementation. We are very optimistic on our GaiaB capabilities, and we're already seeing quite a lot of interest from the clients that we engage with. So we believe that in the coming period, we will see GaiaB contributing significantly in our growth of our digital technologies. And that's why we continue investing behind this in terms of resources and in terms of offering. Cost management is a challenge as we are also seeing quite a lot of pressure as far as the selling prices, especially in markets like Turkey, where the banking cards expected price point is always a challenge to meet. So we continue looking at initiatives, where we can reduce our cost base and improve our efficiency. And this is enabling us to, a, offset the pressure on the top line, but also working to improving our margin on our big category of our business, which is the payment cards. So this continues to be a focus in order to be able to optimize our capacity and have the best possible cost base. Working capital is expected to improve significantly in the second part of the year. Already, we know some of the elements that we mentioned here like some VAT claims and all these things have already been recovered. So we are quite, let's say, confident that we will be able to see a significant improvement in the working capital in the second part of 2026. And as far as the guidance, just to close again before I open, we are revising our expectations to have a low double-digit growth as far as the top line is concerned. On the EBITDA margin because of this extraordinary year that we are in with the change of control and the DNP offer that we are going to be seeing all the non-budgeted costs associated with it impacting us. We cannot keep the, let's say, the growth projection that we had given. But on the other side, we don't anticipate even with incremental costs that we have to absorb in the year that there will be any significant variance versus last year as far as the absolute EBITDA figure is concerned. And on the group operating cash flow, we are keeping our projection that we should be broadly in line with our closing position of 2025. So although we have all these, let's say, one-off costs that we have to also finance. Nevertheless, this would mean on a comparable basis that there would be an improvement in the operating cash flow if we didn't have to also absorb all the deal-related costs that we are absorbing in 2026. So with that, this concludes the presentation part that we wanted to share. So we can open up for questions. If there are any questions, we are happy to address.

[Operator Instructions] Ladies and gentlemen, there are no questions at this time. I will now pass the floor over to Mr. Kontos for any closing comments. Thank you.

So thank you, everyone, for joining our call and giving us the opportunity to give you an update on the first half of this year. As always, we are always available if there are any follow-up questions to address them. So with that, I would like to wish you all a good afternoon, and thank you again for joining.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a good afternoon.