Bajaj Mobility AG (PKTM.DU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of the Bajaj Mobility AG following the publication of the preliminary financial figures of 2025. I'm delighted to welcome CEO, Gottfried Neumeister; and CFO, Petra Preining. So they will guide us through the presentation and the results shortly. And following the presentation, we will be happy to take your questions. And having said that, let's start. [Presentation]

So good morning, good afternoon and good evening to the world. This is Gottfried Neumeister. I'm really excited and pleased to be able to speak to all of you. Thank you for your interest and joining us for the preliminary key figures of 2025, which we are about to disclose to you. I would like to lead your attention to the presentation, which we are sharing and which will also be then shared and published on our homepage. We have, in the usual way, staggered it with a presentation by the Management Board followed by a Q&A session afterwards. So first, I would like to give you an overview of where we are, what has happened during the last year. And we will go through it. First, the value proposition, then the ownership and the new set up. Thirdly, the turnaround, what has happened. Of course, also our motorsport is a very important part of it. And then we will go through the achievements, the units. And lastly, the preliminary financials. Coming to the value proposition and what we -- how we stand today, we try to summarize in 4 bullet points. Number one is clearly, the same focus as ever with a very clear positioning of all our brands that we want to complete in the pinnacle of all motorcycle companies. So definitely, the positioning of our group has not changed. We are focusing on premium motorcycles. We have, during the last 12 months, sharply refocused our portfolio. We have streamlined our portfolio and the turnaround is really in full swing and full progress. We have significantly reduced our inventory, which was one of the main factors of the crisis we have been through. And this is really an important one. It is not some romantic feelings of the past. We have had the most successful year in the history of our group in the racing segment, we won 29 titles. We are not a branded house. We're a house of brands. You see, all 3 remaining brands, I will in a second explain you how we've sharpened the portfolio. Those 3 are the remaining ones on the top KTM, READY TO RACE is our -- not only our slogan, it's part of our DNA. It is exactly what others cannot deliver that you can take our motorcycles out of any dealership and you're able to race with them. And you're not only able to race, you're also able to win as we've just seen in the recent weeks. Husqvarna for pioneers is very dynamic, pure design, a different atmosphere, but nevertheless, especially in the offroad, Husq is a very, very strong brand in the U.S. and also in Australia. And then GASGAS, our young, vibrant brand, touching on really the youngsters. The strategic pillars going forward. I think this is really important, and I've said it before, it is not about making volumes. First, we want to really make this company profitable again before we really start growing it. The premium focus, as mentioned, more than ever, we try to really take a different approach. Happy to answer any question you might have also in terms of recalls. This is a very clear offensive strategy that we will, other than in the past, really proactively deal with anything quality related. We want to build up the trust and therefore, we are proactively acting. Service, our excellence. This is something which we want to embed in the future and really increase the standing of the service elements, the customer service, the customer support as a key differentiator. I think we will face in the future even more competition from different parts of the world. I think the one thing which most times money cannot buy for is an attitude thing. Others will be able to really sell cheaper motorcycles. But if you get the spare parts, if someone is answering the phone when you have an issue and how truly you're dealing with your customers and the service element will clearly be fostered in the future. And as I said in the beginning, for us, we focus on profitability and value creation, and then we look for the volumes. A little bit about our ownership and the new setup. We have luckily really for us in May, received an aid through Bajaj EUR 800 million to pay off on one hand, our old existing debt. We used EUR 600 million of the EUR 800 million to pay off our debt and we were able to get EUR 200 million more to really recover and start the production of our company again. And this really followed in November by the best possible outcome, having Bajaj Auto as our new main majority shareholder going up to 74.9% in November. As a result, the company was also renamed at the beginning of this year to Bajaj Mobility AG. I think this is one of the greatest commitments to also have Bajaj in the holding company, the name of a company which is listed itself in India and which we will touch upon in a second. For me, it's about stability and continuation of a very successful long partnership, which is there since 18 years. And this means continuity and as said, a very welcome outcome out of this difficult situation we've been in. Bajaj itself is the #1 3-wheeler maker in the world. They have a leadership in more than 40 countries and being present in more than 100 largest electric vehicle company. I mean, there are so many superlatives to Bajaj. And we also are showing some of the revenues that you get a feeling for those of you who are not as familiar with the company, Bajaj Auto is selling more than 4.7 million vehicles a year, has an incredible industry-leading margin of 20%. And you see it yourself, an annual revenue of EUR 4.5 billion with an EBITDA of close to EUR 1 billion. So a very strong partner, which has teamed up with us, a debt-free partner who is really giving us the necessary help to survive and who is giving us now the backup, which we need to really even recover faster than we have anticipated. A little bit about the turnaround, what's happening. So the headline for the turnaround is simplification and focus. We have, throughout the year, yes, got rid of several past businesses. Number one, the X-BOW, which was a car manufacturing, but we sold only 17 cars, and we clearly decided to focus on our core segment on the motorcycles. Therefore, we got rid of X-BOW. We got rid of MV Agusta. We sold or wind down the complete bicycle business, which costed us more than EUR 400 million in the past. So also very successfully done. And we have stopped to sell CFMOTO within Europe. We had the distribution for CFMOTO in Europe, but to focus on our 3 brands, it was absolutely necessary to cut away any distraction, anything which is not core and those were very important steps during the last 12 months. We have resumed our production in July '25. It was July 29. So really in the middle of the summer, after being closed for more than 6 months, and yes, it went well. It was a very bumpy road because we have started our year with almost all suppliers asking for prepayments. So managing the working capital throughout the year, managing the reduction of the inventory levels, which have declined was a very, very important task. Also, the spare parts availability as we were coming out of the insolvency to really provide the necessary cash is one thing, but to really place those orders and get those deliveries in was clearly another one. But those were, as said, really big achievements, which gave us the confidence. And the biggest confidence came from the second half of the year, where -- and you will see it later, where our sales levels have increased by 60%. So really, the demand is strong and it's coming back. But as said, I will touch upon it in a second. If we go to the next slide, you see the development of our employees over the last couple of years, reaching peak times, more than 6,000. At the end of 2025, we had 3,782 employees. We have, at the beginning of January, announced another restructuring program. And we have announced that we are reducing our workforce by another 500 white collar employees around the world. And this is something which has already started, and this is part of our Phoenix restructuring program. As I told you, for me, the most important one and for the company is how well our products are received. We have really an incredible lineup of new motorcycles, which we started once we resume production. The first motorcycle, new motorcycle was only launched in November. The first one, it's the KTM 990 RC R. In the meantime, we have now won numerous tests even against Ducati Panigale V2 or the Yamaha R9. So our new motorcycles are well received in the market. It's not only the 990, also the 990 DUKE R has just recently won against 4 contenders, but also the SUPER ADVENTURE, the 390 ADVENTURE R and the 390 ENDURO R, which are coming from India are incredibly well received. We are entering a new class with them, which we haven't had and therefore, really good and great to see that despite the noise, we really have managed to keep really the trust of our loyal customers and also the dealers. And this slide should just give you a reflection of how those motorcycles are received. I've mentioned before, the motorsport we have last year, and please allow us because it's really about emotions and you need to feel it other than just see it on a slide. As I said before, we had the most successful season in the history of our group in 2025, winning 29 championship titles in all those classes, which you see below. [Presentation]

So racing is our DNA. And luckily, it's not only 2025. If you have followed the news of 2026 and what we have achieved now in January, only the first couple of weeks, we won the first 2 Supercross races in front of 75,000 people in the stadium in Anaheim and San Diego, and we were also able to win the Dakar Rally now for the 20th time. There is no one who has been more successful than KTM in the Dakar Rally. So coming back a little bit to numbers and our performance. We're showing you here our market development. Of course, this is a little bit -- not a little bit, but heavily influenced by the insolvency and us being away from the market and being away from production for almost 9 months in total. If we take the last quarter of 2024, our relevant market in that time grew by 7.8%. We're very transparently showing how we have performed, KTM Group minus 27.4%, KTM minus 28%, Husqvarna minus 27% and GASGAS minus 19%. As said, a reflection of our previous year. Here, you see a breakdown where we sold our motorcycles. And I think this is, again, a big achievement that we have managed to keep the retail at an incredible high level. 272,000 motorcycles were sold to end customers last year. If you look to wholesale, 209,000. This was intentionally because we said part of the restructuring is that we need to have the patience and we need to be brave enough not to sell in to allow the market to recover, and we have managed to clear out really substantial inventories, which I will show you in the last slide, but -- or in one of the next couple of slides, but this shows you, as said, our wholesale and retail and how they have spread across the globe. Here, you see the development because we wanted to give you really a deeper insight how it's developed, what I told you before, first half of the year and second half of the year, global sales are the ones which we are making out of Mattighofen. We have also our sales out of India, which then total up to the 209,000. But if you look to the global sales of 50,000 units in the first half year and 80,000 in the second half year, so 60% more. There is a clear positive momentum. And the recovery, as said, then leading up to 130,000 in total. And we have managed to reach -- I mean, normally, I would never mention it because with revenue, you cannot buy something. But despite really all these negative noises, despite all the obstacles and being closed for such a long time, reaching EUR 1 billion of revenue is still also an achievement of our sales team. Here, you see an overview where we produced the units which we have sold. So 48,000 of those units were produced in Mattighofen. And we have roughly 120,000 have been produced in India, 8,700 in China. We had also up until October production in Spain. So that was also one of the restructuring measures to close down the production in Spain and shift it to Austria and the production in Italy was at that time for a couple of months MV Agusta, which was, as said, part of the company at the beginning of the year, leading up to a total of close to 180,000 vehicles. As said, most importantly was to keep it below the retails to allow the market to recover. And this is what we see here on the next slide, a little bit historic explanation why we came to that crisis. If you look to the dark orange, these are the wholesales. So what we are selling to our dealers and the retail is the amount which the dealers are selling to end customer. And if you look to '19 and '20 and '21, the retails, especially during corona, they picked up. There was more demand, and we had adjusted our production and accordingly, the wholesales. But in 2021, for the first time, retails were lower than the wholesales. This continued to be in 2022, drastically -- a drastic drop and also in 2023 and wholesales were kept stable in 2022 and 2023 for 2 years, and this led to the really high inventory of 270,000 motorcycles in peak times, which we had ahead of us. We immediately jumped on the brakes in the last quarter of 2024 before going into the insolvency proceeding. This is what you see in the bars of 2024 that wholesales were then stopped, where luckily, and this was really the important thing, retails continue to be at a high level. And in 2025, we managed to really keep the retails at still a high level, as I just showed you, but substantially reduced the inventory by dropping the wholesale. So this is how we have developed so far. And this led to a total stock reduction of more than 100,000 units. So out of the 248,000, which we had at the end of 2024, not everything was a bad stock because we need to have a certain stock levels to operate in Australia, in the U.S. because there will be always motorcycles on ships, in transit or at dealers. But I would say roughly 140,000 was a bad stock, which we had at the beginning of 2025. And out of this 140,000, we managed to reduce now roughly 101,000. We are planning to reduce that in Q1 of 2026 by another 26,000. So we are really back on track to recover. There is, of course, a lot still to do, and we will touch upon it for sure later also in the Q&A, but we are really clearly going into the right direction. Just important questions, which we assumed or received even before, how did it affect our dealers? Our dealers is one of our most important assets, which we have compared to other competitors around the world. You see 4,794 dealers was the number at the end of 2024. This had roughly 220 CFMOTO dealers and 200 MV Agusta dealers. So if I take this number out, you can see that really the number of dealers which either we terminated or which terminated with us was a relatively small number. So the big fear which was out there in 2025 that there would be a lot of dealers resigning and not believing in us has luckily, and I need to knock on wood, not happened, and this remains really a very strong asset of our group. So I would now hand over to Petra to lead you through the key financials. We will issue our audited financial statements in a couple of weeks. So it is limited key figures, but Petra will guide you through them now.

Thank you very much, Gottfried, and a very warm welcome also from my side. As you might have read, I'm the new kid on the block. I've started with KTM in September 2025. And I'm very proud and pleased to present the preliminary financials of 2025 to you today. As Gottfried has said, it was a very difficult year for KTM, doubtless without any doubt. Nevertheless, a little bit above EUR 1 billion in revenues is a big success. We have -- on the graph, you can see we've splitted it into half year 1 and half year 2. You also see the increase we have been able to achieve in the second half. One distraction throughout all the numbers, which I present to you today is, of course, the restructuring gain of roughly EUR 1.2 billion, to be precise, EUR 1.193 billion, which you can see, of course, in the P&L, in the cash flow, in the balance sheet. So it's all over the place. And therefore, we have also decided to show you how we have been doing operationally without the EUR 1.193 billion of restructuring gain. With that restructuring gain, the company has achieved an EBITDA of EUR 874 million, an EBIT of EUR 748 million and a profit before tax of EUR 663 million, leading into a net profit of a little shy of EUR 600 million. The margins, I think we can disregard because, as said, they are distorted by the restructuring gain. We have managed to achieve those numbers with a significant reduced headcount of roughly 30%, leading to 3,782 headcounts worldwide. Adjusted, however, if you compare apples-to-apples, if you like, then an EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA of EUR 319 million are comparable to EUR 481 million in the year 2024. So we -- you can see that the company has significantly, also being very humble because the number is negative, been able to improve the situation. Please take count of that this has been achieved even though the top line has been reduced by 46%. And therefore, a lot has been done on restructuring and getting cost out. And as Gottfried has already elaborated to you, coming back to what our DNA is, we design, we produce and we sell motorcycles. Over the page. Just for reference, the BMAG Group in 2025 had as a business segment, motorcycles, the bicycles, which is, as you can see from the number, in the wind-down phase already. And then, of course, also others that are basically the holding of BMAG itself. Coming to the balance sheet. What we see is a significant reduction in the balance sheet itself, roughly 34% coming down from EUR 2.396 billion to EUR 1.586 billion, so a reduction of EUR 810 million, basically coming out of the debt side, which is -- doesn't come as a surprise to you as we have been in solvency and we spoke about the restructuring gain already. In a nutshell, the debt has been -- sorry, [indiscernible], in a nutshell, the debt has -- we have managed to reduce based on the back of the [ quota ] by half. So from EUR 1.6 billion to a little shy of EUR 800 million is our net debt. And that has, as a consequence, based on the very high EBITDA and net debt of 0.9x and an equity ratio of 24.3%. So on the very important KPIs, we have managed the turnaround very, very nicely and will do so forward-looking. Lastly, I also want to share a glimpse on the free cash flow, where you can see the net profit of EUR 590 million coming down to a free cash flow of minus EUR 34 million. Again, being very humble, the second half being way better than the first half, leading to a plus/minus -- or EUR 4 million plus, so almost black 0. This is clearly our main focus area for the year 2026 to regain profitability and to regain liquidity in the sense of free cash flow. We are working very hard. As you might have read recently, we have announced that we will let go of 500 colleagues. This is not coming out of the restructuring, but this is a consequence of geopolitical and macroeconomic situation of the world. We want to have KTM positioned very resilient, forward-looking to be prepared, firstly, for a profitable future, but also to be prepared for any potential headwinds ahead of us. With that, I come to an end of my part of the presentation, and I would hand back to the operator to take your Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And we received the first question from Mr. Hesse. So he would like to know. I'd like to understand the retail levels have been normalized and what kind of growth we should anticipate for the next couple of years. When can we expect volumes to return to 2023 level?

So thank you, Mr. Hesse, for your question. As I said before, we don't put the growth target in first place. For us, it is really gaining and coming back to profitability in first place. So the overall goal for 2026 is to have a very strong and positive free cash flow. We are fighting hard to really get our cost under control. We -- and this is what we have also said in the ad hoc statement. We have said that we are planning to significantly increase our sales and consequently also the revenues. This is what we have stated at the moment coming out of insolvency, we're not able to give really a guidance yet. Let's see how the next quarters are performing. Hopefully, you can hear that we are confident, and this is why I said before, for me, the most important one was that the retail levels really were kept at a very high level despite not being able to have new products on the market. This had really an incredible effect because you cannot always incentivize someone with a discount to buy an old motorcycle. So we clearly lost potential not having new motorcycles available and on the market. And only we started at the end of July. So some of them were only available in November when it started to get foggy and where it's misty and now cold since a couple of months in large parts of the world. And therefore, achieving those retails and now having new products on the market, which are well received, which now dealers are calling and say, "Gottfried, for the first time, we're selling without a discount. We're selling at sticker price." Those are, for me, the most important news. Yes, we had to work with discounts to work off the large inventory. But KTM -- neither KTM, Husqvarna or GASGAS have ever been a discount brand. It was always a premium brand where we were selling through performance rather than through price. And this is what we want to keep. So intentionally also in 2026, we're keeping our volumes lower than retail levels. We, of course, will closely follow the retail trend. And as much as we can increase then our production, we will do so to follow it. But we are -- as said, we are optimistic despite the global recession fears, everything what's going on with tariffs in the market. We've seen our low levels in 2025, and we are definitely planning to outperform the market growth. So the market growth rate is for us not a reference because that was also affected by our reduction. So definitely, we have the ambition to grow faster than the global motorcycling market in 2026. And this is unfortunately as much as I can tell you and guide you and give you a feeling of how we will really develop during the next year.

Another question. And on the profitability, when can we expect the company to return to its historically 8% to 10% EBIT margin?

Similar question. We said -- or I said also in previous statements that 2026 will not be possible as I just said we keep still a 1-shift production here in Austria. We're still eyeing those wholesales and as said, being patient and brave enough not to sell in more. For 2027, we said for the first time, I think we can expect to see another big improvement in terms of profitability and the years to come should definitely have the ambition to meet the historic margins, if not better and higher ones. I tried to show you how really streamlined the company is already today. We are really focusing on our core. We're getting rid of unnecessary external warehouses, everything. If you see 15 years of growth, that's very normal that you're, of course, building up, but I can tell you that we are now really reshaping and resizing the company to a different level. And therefore, both Petra and myself are very ambitious to also then drive future profitability.

The next question. Lastly, on cash. Is the company happy with the current cash levels to navigate the current restructuring? Or is there risk of further capital raises?

To have really a different play, I would hand over this question to Petra.

Thank you very much, Gottfried. Indeed, a very good question because, as I said, profitability and liquidity, so EBIT and free cash flow are the 2 KPIs we very, very closely monitor to see at least what we have been managed, and this gives you a bit of a translation of our situation. We have been managed to set up our factoring line. Again, we have managed to get a working capital line up and running. So we are now on a good path, on a solid path forward-looking these -- there is another -- as you will know for sure, there's another big ticket coming ahead of us to be refinanced latest in May. We make very good progress on this one as well. And I'm confident that we can share with you in the upcoming weeks and months also good news on that end. So asking me, of course, more cash is always better. Are we well equipped? Absolutely, yes.

All right. And then Bajaj now holds around 75% of the shares. Is there a plan or expectation of a placing at some point to improve liquidity?