Basler Aktiengesellschaft (BSL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, to the Annual Report 2024 from Basler. We wait another 1 or 2 minutes until we are complete and then I will start the call. So it looks as if we are complete. So warm welcome to our annual report 2024. Obviously, it has been another challenging year for Basler, and for the market as a whole. We had a very weak market demand. We also, as a management team, overestimated a rebound of the market. So this is why we had to correct our guidance over the course of the year, and went into another cost-cutting program. Yes, it was also another challenging year, but we also made lots of progress regarding our organization, a change of the organization regarding innovations, new products, and also building up our go-to-market structures further. So having this said, I welcome you to this report, giving you more insights. My name is Hardy. For those of you who don't know me, I've been responsible for operations and commercial since the beginning of the year and also handling the Investor Relations. The presentation and before I start, just a quick reminder of our disclaimer. All the statements I'm making and the management team is making are based on views and assumptions that are available at this time. So by nature, these forward-looking statements that we are making are subject to change and subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties. So the presentation itself consists of 5 different elements. First of all, I start with an executive summary, giving you an overview. Then we come to the financials, digging deeper into all-important financials, having a look at the share price development, but also talking about dividends in Section 3, and then coming to the outlook on point 4. And we will take the presentation, I guess, will take around half an hour. So we have half an hour left for the Q&A session, and I'm looking forward to a lively debate after the presentation. Let's start with the executive summary and with the market environment in 2024. So the German industry for vision components, which we believe is still the third-party indicator that we have, because we have quite some components companies located in Germany, exporting to the world markets. And looking at this, the billings went down by 12%. The bookings went down by 3%. So in a market that in a long-term CAGR growth of 6%, 7%, this shows really how dramatic the situation was last year. So it was the second year in a row that was really challenging from the market conditions. We saw weak demand across all regions and verticals. The only verticals where we saw some improvements were on the one hand, in semicon, but that was very much focused on every technology and production equipment connected to AI and connected also to NVIDIA chipset productions. The other vertical market that we saw improving in 2024 was logistics. This was a little bit more on a broader base, where we see that especially the e-commerce companies started to invest again in 2024 in CapEx in order to improve processes and automation. Whereas in 2023, there was almost a 0 round of CapEx that we have seen. So there was some improvement. The inventory levels, we talked a lot about it after the boom years and then the bus, the inventories grew. So there were a lot of exaggerated inventories in the supply chain and also at our customer side. This gradually reduced over the course of 2024, so that by entering 2025, we are back to a relatively normal situation. But in '24, the real demand, the end customer demand was muted still due to those inventory effects. We had in '24 as well, ongoing high competition intensity, especially in China and the Asia Pacific. And I mean, you know it, the geopolitical uncertainties have even risen. So that was, in a nutshell, the challenges of the market in 2024. How did we do in this environment? So first of all, our bookings and billings, the bookings grew by 15% and the billings declined by 10%. So we outperformed the markets. But again, it was a challenging market, and especially looking at the billings number with 10% decline, that was really a challenge to us. We saw also at Basler's revenue decline in all regions, especially in the second half of the year. Europe cooled off, and started to cool off, and we saw also challenging years in Asia Pacific outside China. China was more or less stable. On the good side of things, we made big progress on our gross profit margin, improving the level on a yearly basis to 45.7%, coming from 42.2%. I will elaborate on this later when we come to the financial sections. So the year itself started with some signs of recovery in the first half year, but then we were surprised by a very weak Q3. And this Q3 triggered another cost-cutting program to lower our breakeven point to by and large, EUR 180 million for this fiscal year, for this 2025 fiscal year. But it challenged us. It forced us again to take action as a management team and do a second round of cost-cutting, which was by no means planned, but that was the reality we faced when we saw the results in Q3. Yes, due to this weak top line, another cost-cutting program was initiated immediately. We had again or realized again a significant loss of EUR 12 million. This EUR 12 million pretax loss included EUR 6.9 million one-off effects related to the cost-cutting program, mainly for severance packages and mainly for some write-offs in intangible assets where we stopped some projects. So by the end of the year, we had again a positive momentum. You will see this later. The bookings picked up, also revenue picked up again. This gives us, at the moment, a good momentum for the start into this New Year for the first quarter, things we see definitely a more relief and better situation. Yes. On the environmental side, we did also quite some progress. Here, the progress looks much more stellar than on the financial side. You can read the progress in our nonfinancial report. You can go on it. It's a very comprehensive document describing the progress in our nonfinancial parameters. Just as a reminder for you, we are striving for becoming NetZero in Scope 1 and 2 by the end of 2030. For Scope 3, we want to tie this more in the relation to sales because we are a growth company, and we have here not a NetZero goal. Besides our own reporting, there is also lots of reporting and ratings you can get from ISS, from MSCI, Sustainalytics and from EcoVadis. Please have a look also where we have quite some good ratings for the size of our company. Yes. With regard to changes in 2024 and then entering into 2025, starting with the executive management team, we had a change in our management team. Our former colleague, Alex Tammer, we worked with together, ended his work with Basler on 31st of December. And we got a new colleague on board, Ines Bruckel, and I promise you to introduce her on the Q1 result report that she has the ability to also personally introduce herself. You can also find some video material connected to our annual reporting where you can get a feeling about her personality. So we had not only a change in executive management team member, we also changed and realigned the resource. Dietmar, our CEO, remain responsibility of product generation, so R&D and product management. He got back HR and organizational development. I carved out the finance, the CFO position or resource and took over from Alex the commercial resource. And Ines, who started 1st of January, she is taking over or took over the classical CFO functions. So with regard to the overall team, as mentioned, we had to go into another cost-cutting program last year. So there was quite some additional head count reduction. We use natural fluctuation over the course of the year, but also in the second half and especially in Q4, we actively reduced again the number of employees. So if we compare the full-time equivalents end of 2023 to the full-time equivalents in 2024, there is a reduction of, by and large, 90 full-time equivalents over that has been realized over the course of the year. We also start with a little bit less or with even less FTEs in the New Year because some of the employees that where we ended our contracts ended with the 31st of December. So the distribution, as you can see, kept more or less the same also with a heavy weight in sales, marketing and R&D. So we still have enough capacity. I get these questions very often, and we are investing heavily into the future of the company with regard to sales and with regard to R&D. If you look at the sales quota at the bottom of the R&D quota at the bottom of the slide, you can see that we are still at around 16% of R&D spend from sales, which is a very high number. Also for us. Normally, our guiding principle is more in the range of 13%, but we are willing to live with this quota for now in order to prepare the company for further growth in the future. Yes, what are the tech trends we want to ride with these R&D investments and also, obviously, with our go-to-market people? Here are some glimpses of the tech trends and ways we want to write. On the one hand, we see that imaging is getting higher and higher performance because the image sensors get higher resolution, higher frame rates. So there is lots of data created that needs to be transmitted and that needs to be -- and this is in the bottom left, needs to be preprocessed also because the amount of data is getting more or less crazy. We also see the networking capabilities in the world in the 4.0, Industry 4.0 world. We also have a change coming from classic algorithms, rule-based algorithms, the future will look like a combination of artificial intelligence algorithm and rule-based algorithms. And we also see a big trend on 2D to 3D imaging. What is not on this slide, but what we also see, is a trend from visible spectrum to nonvisible spectrum to see things with your, let's say, camera systems or with machine vision that the human eye cannot detect. So we have heavily invested in, let's say, addressing those megatrends with our new product lines. And here are some highlights actually. When we look at our product systems and maybe also here connection to our strategy, step by step, we are no longer just selling single components. It's about connecting different components to an imaging core system that our customers can use. On the 2D mainstream system, based on our latest generation of S2 cameras, we introduced a lot of new sensors on this platform and visible, non-visible spectrum. And we also introduced last year the next-generation gigabit Ethernet interface, which is 5GE, to transmit higher frame rates, higher data amounts. In the 2D performance segment, where our customers typically use high-resolution cameras, high-speed cameras combined with a so-called frame grabber, where also a lot of preprocessing functionalities are implemented. We launched new products with higher resolution and also preprocessing functionalities and next-generation frame gravers. In the field of 3D imaging, we enlarge our offering on the top, which is time-of-flight technology where you shoot lights against an object. By the time when the light reflects back, you can calculate the distance of the object and also stereo like the human eye is working. We also introduced new products. And here, we are talking not about a component. These are actually already subsystems, including a lot of processing and including also image analysis and image analysis modules in our offering. And last but not least, yes, we reentered, so to say, our -- and strengthened our portfolio in the line segment. We have been done line scan cameras and systems for many years. But over the course of the last 5 to 10 years, we did not heavily invest due to the fact that new technologies were available, we reinvested again and we launched 2 camera lines. We launched line scan technology on the ACE platform for entry-level applications and with 5G interface, so a more simpler interface, cost effective. And we have super high-speed rates to give you a feeling with a 16,000 line rate, but with 200,000 lines per second readout. So very fast readouts to create, let's say, high-resolution objects when you scan through the object. On the software side, as most of you know, we have the powerful pylon package that is our software development kit, connecting all the different hardware and also including image analysis functions. Last year, especially, we invested or launched the new AI functionality. So on top of rule-based algorithms and image analysis tasks like defect detection or object defect detection or optical character recognition, you see some samples in the bottom of the slide here. We are also now offering AI-based functionalities. This is a new journey, to be honest, because our markets are still very much dominated by rule-based software. However, the combination of AI and rule-based will definitely be the future, and this is why step-by-step, we want to enter also in this technology offering also in order to widen our offering and address the wider market trend. So putting this together, all the actions we did on the product portfolio and our, let's say, continuous improvement and investments in go-to-market, we want to step by step develop the company further from originally a single component camera company for focus on factory automation to a full-line provider for some customers, even an integrated product solutions provider in a wider spectrum of markets in factory automation, medical, ITS, logistics, retail, agriculture and other markets will also follow. Yes, after this executive summary, let's dig deeper into our financials. First of all, the regional distribution of our top line. So total sales have been EUR 183.7 million, so approximately a decline of 10%, as mentioned earlier. The regional mix in this year -- in last year compared to 2023 has not changed much. Asia with 45%, still weak. We come, as a reminder, more from 50%, 54% in the past. Due to the situation in China and also due to the situation that a lot of electronics semicon market, especially the electronics assembly markets are weak, the Asia region is weaker than in the past. Europe, still stronger than in the long-term trend, 37%, but in the same area like in 2023. And Americas, by and large, 18%. So it was another weak year in Americas. Normally, we have 20%, 22%. And yes, in the future, also, we look forward, hopefully, to increase further our share in Americas. The situation is not that we have lower market share in Americas. The situation is more that the -- especially the automation equipment makers are not so strong in North America. And this is why the market at the moment, the addressable market is smaller than in the other regions. Yes, let's go to the quarterly bookings and billings and also some interesting insights here. You see a longer trend of bookings here, the darker blue bars and billings and the lighter blue bars. And maybe again, looking at the last year's development. So we had starting in Q3 2023 back then, we had the lowest point in bookings. And then step-by-step, the bookings started to rise beginning of last year in Q1 -- Q4, then Q1, Q2, as you can see. And then ultimately, and suddenly, there was a significant drop back from EUR 48.5 million to EUR 41 million, which triggered also the next -- another cost-cutting program. So what happened then in Q4 is we saw the market coming back. And we also saw and due to our performance, we were able to win larger projects in Q4, especially in the U.S. and in China. And these projects will be -- will have positive impact on our sales in Q1 because the shipment dates are mostly Q1 and beginning of Q2. So this will give or has given us a good momentum at the end of last year and also for the starting of this year. So with significant -- if you look at the quarter-on-quarter growth or also previous year quarter growth, by and large, 50% on the booking side. So it's quite a jump, very positive sign, but it needs to be mentioned that a significant portion of this additional bookings is based on larger projects. So it's not a mass phenomenon of the market. So on the gross profit side, here in relative and absolute terms, also here, we made good progress beginning of the year. And then with a weaker revenue, also the gross profit margin went down and the absolute gross profit in Q3 went down. We kept it at the level of EUR 20.5 million roughly gross profit in Q4. The gross margin went down in the fourth quarter, but this is mainly due to one-off effects because by end of the year, we had sizable finished good write-off in one of our entities in Korea. We also had a sizable statistical material range markdowns. So this is -- I want to put a note here that it is not a downward trend. We believe that from the level that we have shown here in Q1, Q2, Q3, we are even able within this year, not only to get back to this level, but also to even improve this level further. So structurally, we see the gross margin improvement on a continuous upward trend. What we also have, and this we had over the course of the whole year, I mean, especially in Q3, but we are still from the size of our production capacity, also the size of the indirect organization in operations, so steering the production, but also on the purchasing side, we are still having room for better economies of scale. So the utilization rate is relatively low so that when the markets come back, we are able with the same amount of people in those indirect functions and also with the same machinery park to create more revenue and more. Yes. Going further down in the profit and loss statement with the development on the sales side, with the development on the gross profit margin side, you see that we started the year in Q1 with a loss. We were at least on a black number in Q2. But due to the drop in bookings and in billings in Q3, we went into a loss again. And this triggered, as mentioned earlier, another cost-cutting program. And even though the revenue picked up in Q4, the loss was even bigger because of here in Q4, EUR 7 million pretax loss because we were -- we had extraordinary and one-off effects for the cost-cutting program. And this is the majority of the loss is coming from this. Yes, putting all this together on an annual base, order entry 15% up. This is good news. Sales 10% down. This was for us really a surprise when we look at the beginning of the year, but the gross profit, we -- in total, more or less same level, but the gross profit margin went up by 3.5 percentage points. And as mentioned, this will not most likely be the end of the story because we are working hard in order to improve this further, and we are positive about it. EBITDA, 10% -- EUR 10 million. So much better than the year before, but still on a low level. The adjusted EBITDA, if we take out the one-off effects, EUR 15.5 million, also significantly better than last year. EBIT, minus EUR 9.8 million. So the year before, minus EUR 21.9 million. So also better, but I mean, deep red numbers. Also the pretax loss, minus EUR 12 million better than last year, but I mean, significant red numbers. What you can see is the net income stayed the same. This is not a printing mistake because coincidentally, we had different tax rates. And coincidentally, we are ending up at the same net income in '23 compared to '24 and ending also with the same earnings per share. So let's have a look at the cash flow situation that from the pattern perspective looks different in the longer-term trend, I mean the situation is improving, but we also had challenges along the way in the year 2024. We started in '24 with a negative free cash flow, but were then able in Q2 and Q3 to improve and especially Q3 improve significantly the cash flow -- free cash flow, but the full story of it is that most of the free cash flow optimization or improvement in Q3 came from a better operational cash flow, which came from a better lower amount of accounts receivable that came from a lower revenue. So this is the full story. We had a more or less balanced free cash flow then by Q4. And looking at an annual base, so we started the year with a cash account of EUR 32.2 million. Cash flow from operations positive, EUR 14.6 million, significantly better than last year. Cash flow from investments, more or less same level. And this cash flow also included 2 M&A -- smaller M&A transaction. The one was a small transaction with the company and a share of the company of Roboception, a 3D imaging more or less, it's not a start-up, they are already 10 years in the market, but a small company in the field of 3D imaging, early-stage Munich companies. And the other investment was also is included in the EUR 13.3 million, the remaining shares of our Basel France entity, where we had already entered into a deal 3 years ago with our French distributor, but it was kind of a step-by-step approach acquisition. So free cash flow, more or less balanced in 2024, also improvement for 2023. And financing cash flow looked very different. In 2023, we gained got in cash flow due to some further loans, but also selling treasury shares. When we look into 2024, we had -- mainly we paid back a portion of our loans, roughly EUR 9 million, and this is mainly the situation we have in 2024. So that we ended with a cash account of EUR 21.3 million and the main gap between the cash accounts beginning and end of the year resulted from paying back loans to our banks and also by investing into the M&A targets. The rest was more or less balance out, I mean, not where we want to be, but at least balanced. Net cash position did not improve, stayed more or less on the same level, but with a different structure. Liabilities to our banks by end of the year were at EUR 52 million. And if we look at the cash account and deduct it, we are ending at roughly EUR 30 million, EUR 31 million net debt by end of the year. This is not including the leasing on our buildings. Yes, a quick glance to the balance sheet. Not substantial changes. The balance sheet and looking at the assets here, reduced by 9%. The main changes, some of them I already touched. I mean, we had some changes in fixed assets. This was mainly due to normal depreciation. Rights of use from lease were reduced because of normal leasing payback over the course of this period. And on the inventory side, maybe this is also worth to mention the inventory side reduced by 12%, but majority of it was cash flow neutral because majority of this reduction were write-offs of materials. This is worth to mention. The rest I already touched upon. On the liability side, also the main changes here that we see that also in absolute terms, I mean, on the one hand, we reduced the equity was reduced. This is mainly due to the loss situation. And on the long-term liabilities, you see also, I mentioned this already that we reduced the amount of loans by normal payback of our loans that we have. Yes, this brings me to the third portion of the presentation. Let's have a look at the share situation. So we started the year with, by and large, EUR 12 per share due to the development of the market. So the first half year was more or less a side move because we were on track and then with publication of, let's say, reducing or focusing first to the lower end of our corridor by mid of the year and then with our announcement of the Q3 numbers and our action on another cost-cutting program, the share price dropped. And then step-by-step, improved a bit over the course of Q4, but ended at EUR 8, so significantly below the starting point or below the starting point and significantly below the ambition, obviously, that we have the shareholding structure did not change much in Q4. We got some from investors that are already longer on board, we got some step-up of them. So Universal Norgus and Union Investment. Treasury shares stayed the same. Also the Norbert B family stayed at the same level, also Dietmar, our CEO, holding the same amount. Free float was at the end of the year, by and large, 29%. Yes. With regard to the dividend, due to the situation of the company, we, as a management team decided and also got support from the Supervisory Board to propose the main shareholders' meeting in May to again not distributing dividends in order to go through the difficult phase now and let's say, building a stronger or rebuild a stronger financial cushion. So this is why we decided to make another zero proposal. This has nothing to do with our dividend policy. This stays intact. In normal years, our dividend policy is to distribute 30% from earnings after tax but this should be always decided upon and based on, let's say, on the one, the economic situation on the company. But we also the future investment plans. But we have a long-term track record of distributing 30%, sometimes a bit lower and then a bit higher, but on average, the 30%, but the last 2 years were really difficult years for us. Yes, this brings me to the last part of the presentation, maybe the most important one for you, the outlook. And starting with the assumptions we base our outlook on for the year 2025, our assumption is that the markets will more or less do another sideway. We have made good experience in the last, let's say, 2, 3 months now that are above sideways, but we are careful and this is in line with analysts, also trade associations. At the moment, our assumption when we build our guidance on is a market that develops sideways. We, at Batler, we expect a pretty positive start in Q1. This is mainly due to the project business I explained to you in the earlier slides that we won in Q4 in the U.S. and in China that will be positively impact our revenue especially in the first quarter. For the remainder of the year, if we like it or not, with all the turmoil, the visibility is very low at the moment. And due to the situation that the delivery performance is very good of more or less all participants in the industry, the clients are ordering at very short notices. So this is a situation that is on top besides all macro uncertainties also creating a relatively low visibility. And we have to give you a feeling typically only orders on hand for the next 2 or 3 months. And for the remainder, we have not really orders at hand. We only get customer indications and can read, let's say, our statistical basis ourselves. We also expect geopolitical uncertainties to continue or rise. I mean, this is, I think, nothing needs to be added these times. We see the high competition intensity to continue or even getting tougher, especially in China and Asia Pacific. And we expect that we can further improve our gross profit margin over the course of the year due to our high ambition over we're already running programs for quite some quarters in order to optimize our gross profit margin. On this basis, we believe this year that we will achieve a revenue in the corridor between EUR 186 million and EUR 198 and if we translate this with our current cost structure that we have with chances on the gross margin side, this would translate into earnings before tax margin between 0% and 5%. So for us, this would mean 2025, if we achieve this will be a year where we are back into black numbers. This will be a transitional year from us because from that step in the future, we want to get back to our double-digit growth track and also double-digit earnings margins. So what is the midterm outlook? And here also, we revised because we have now had 2 very weak years at least in our assumption, we had the '23 years, '24 years and also we assume '25 will at least from the market perspective, more flat. And we had to reflect this in our midterm guidance. And this is why we are now guiding on the midterm until 2028 that we are getting back to a growth track of 15% compound annual growth track in the year '26 and beyond. And our aim here is to realize revenue at around EUR 275 million at least 12% earnings before tax margin. On a note here, the earnings before tax margin, if we are on this track towards this revenue stream will be realized earlier. So at the moment, our cost structure would mean that at a level of EUR 240 million, EUR 250 million of sales, we would be able to realize 12% earnings before tax margin. And until we are there at this earnings margin, our focus will also be to bring the company back to this profitability level. This is how we steer the company. This midterm plan comes with some assumptions. It comes with the assumption that the computer vision market will grow again after these difficult years and after this down cycle. And we are convinced that this will happen because we believe that computer vision will make inroads into even more industries and vertical markets and that the automation topic is not gone. It's about the markets and CapEx investments need to come back. And there needs to be also less uncertainties, lower interest rates in the world in order to restart CapEx investments to kick in. We also, in order to get there, need to be successful with our strategy from a single component, mainly camera company to a full line provider/solution provider for certain customers where we can offer customized solutions to them. We are fully convinced that this is the right track, but our execution needs to be successful to get there. So we also, in this midterm plan, we assume that the market at the latest come back next year. So this year, as mentioned earlier, we anticipate a sideway move, but 2026 should be a rebound year in order to also give us some tailwind from the market perspective and not only that we need to get to this EUR 275 million by gaining market shares. So last but not least, this midterm guidance needs also an access to the China market where we need to be able to participate from the China market. China for us is at the moment, by and large, 20% of our revenue stream. We are not believing that we can have super high growth in the future in China, but at least we want to need access to this market to make this happen. All in all, this brings me to the last part of the presentation or of our today's session that is the Q&A. And I'm happy to hand over to Manuela, my colleague. She is explaining how we're going to do this.

[Operator Instructions] First question is coming from Robert.

I have a couple of questions starting with the restructuring, right? So of course, there were cost-cutting measures. I understand that. But I assume that you're not just downsizing considering that you're also developing the company strategically to a full range supplier. So I would be interested in understanding how you thought about where to cost cut, where to restructure in regard of the future development of the company. That would be my first question. My second question would be on the drivers of the gross margin improvements. Will this be mainly scale, mainly the write-downs we saw in Q4? What would what will drive it? And do you see like the around 50% gross margin already feasible this year? Or do other things need to happen first? And if so, what are those things? And the last question would be on working capital. Working capital already improved, but the inventory turn is still not where it once was. So I would be interested if you still see improvement here in 2025 that could bring us to, a normal inventory level with regards to sales?

Okay, Robert. Yes, thanks for these questions. Let's go through it one by one. Well, let's start with the working capital. So on the working capital side, we still have room to improve in this year, even though it went down, I told you it was the effect was mainly driven by reduction by write-offs. So what we believe is this year, there is a potential of, by and large, EUR 8 million to EUR 10 million, if we do a good job to reduce our inventory levels. And this would then mean we are coming close then to a normal working capital level at around, I would say, 18%, 20%. So there is definitely some gain we can realize this year when hopefully, the markets make at least a sideway and not dropping again. But sideway is our real case scenario. So the second question was on the gross margin side. So we have, I think, a good chance over the course of this year to get back to the 50%, which means we do not start with it and have an average value of 50%, but having prolonging the improvement trend by end of the year, we approach the 50% level. And the main levers we have is, the classic renegotiation on the supply side, we have ongoing measures for quite some time on product life cycle, which means we are exchanging parts inside the products and parts that offer the same performance, but for a lower price point for us so that we can lower our cost structure of the product. And the third angle is mainly when we can improve the revenue compared to last year with more or less same capacity, same team. There will be also some indirect cost aggression or economies of scale kicking. On the price side, this would be the fourth lever. I mean, we try hard with some clients. But to be honest, the market is very competitive. Everyone can deliver very quickly. So it's very tough these days to do any price improvement in the market. So the first question you raised were about the personnel reduction. The approach we have chosen in 2024 was very different from 2023. In '23, the majority of the reduction of personnel we did with the volunteer program. And last year, we had a targeted program. So we looked into really different parts of the company and decided to reduce in certain areas in order to avoid losing teams or team members also that we need for our future growth plans. So, obviously, the amount of people that we were able to identify and jobs were more limited, but we were able to identify certain team members and certain areas in China and headquarters, the areas were in different functions so that I would say it is no effect, but it has very limited effect on our future plans.

So we've got another question from Lasse.

If we can start on the demand side, you mentioned sort of China, we've spoken about this in the past, that you don't think as high growth is possible in the future. Can you just run through what's happening in China, particularly now after Chinese New Year, what's changed? And also maybe what's happening on the consumer electronics side? It seems like there's maybe a form factor change on some of the iPhone products, is that enough to drive more investment? Or is that largely just incremental?

Yes. So what we see in China these days is that, in general, the market situation compared to the past, where we had double-digit growth every year, and the market situation is for 3 years now very challenging. And also, it started again challenging because what we see is more kind of a single-digit growth and low single-digit growth. It's better than what we see in other areas. But it's -- for China itself, it leads to the situation that because there are a lot of local players who have ambitious growth goals, they cannot realize, and this is why they also try with low prices to gain market share. And so it's kind of a red ocean situation at the moment. However, things are starting to change and 2 angles. The one is what we see in China is that due to the geopolitical situation, the larger machine builders exporting machines also to foreign countries, start to decouple the supply chains and look for the export machines for Western suppliers and for the domestic markets for local suppliers. And here comes a chance for us, especially for the export machines, where we have a very strong brand. So we are the only, let's say, Western company, sizable Western company left in the China market, and where we have a very good chance to capture this portion of the market. When we look at the vertical market situation, I would say that we still see in China a very weak situation on solar because there's overcapacity. We see mixed situation on battery. So, that's different from maybe other areas like Europe or so that we see still a capacity increase, but to a limited extent. And with regard to 3D, which is also consumer electronics assembly, which is a big portion of the market, we see in the last, let's say, months and weeks, we see some improvement of market demand, but it's not really bringing us to a different level. But it looks a bit different than the starting of last year.

Okay. Understood. Yes, makes sense. And could you share which end market verticals the larger projects were from? Sorry if I missed it on the call.

This logistics is one. So logistics automation and battery production for smartphones.

Got it. And I think I read the accessory share in the overall mix improved. Is that a deliberate improvement? Or was this more of a function of the core camera business being weaker in '24?

No, it's part of the result of our strategy execution to a full-line provider. As you know, it takes quite long because of the design-in mechanisms, but slowly, we are also making progress in the numbers and not only in activities and portfolio. We really see the share of, let's say, non-cameras or products increasing also the share of higher integrated products like the 3D because that's already a subsystem. You have everything integrated, lighting, lens, processing, camera. This is a higher-integrated solution. And we see these non-camera and higher integrated solutions share rising, which is good news because that shows that the strategic activities we are doing ultimately create impact on top line. Great.

And then final question, just on what's the tariff risk for the U.S. business, depending on what happens next week.

Yes. So the tariff risk, from the size or height of the potential tariffs, the number we heard is 10% or 20%. But simply, I think the question needs to be asked to the U.S. administration. What I can tell you is that, let's say, our exposure is at around EUR 35 million to EUR 40 million. If you take half of it, which is typically transfer prices, it's maybe EUR 20 million. So, based on the tariff size, the ultimate risk is between EUR 2 million to EUR 4 million short term. If tariffs kick in, our, let's say, backup solution is to use our production hub that we have implemented 10 years ago in Singapore, because we think that the free trade agreement between Singapore and the U.S. will hold most likely longer than between the trade relationship between U.S. and Europe. So, for us, this means we have a backup solution. It does not come at no cost, re-routing supply chains. But at least the ultimate risk, we only see it for the short term if it kicks in because we would then activate our backup solution step by step.

No more questions from the audience.

Can I ask a follow-up? Just 2 more. Just regarding the dividend, just given where the guidance is for this year, would you be expecting to restart the dividend? Or would you give yourself potentially another year to see how the market plays out?

In the end, we have the dividend policy out. And if we talk more about the upper end of the corridor that we are currently guiding, I think the likelihood is high that the proposal we would then make is also to let our shareholders participate. Because if we also at the upper end of the corridor also our financial situation would already look significantly different at the end of this year.

Makes sense. And the final one is you have the midterm target of the EUR 275 million. I think you said you'd reached the 12% level at roughly EUR 245 million. At what point would you have to reinvest into capacity? I know it's mainly head count, but what's possible under the current operational setup of the business?

Actually, more or less, we would be able to realize the EUR 275 million with current operations. Okay. Then I thank you for the questions. In case someone has questions afterwards, please do not hesitate to contact us. Very happy to set up a call them later. I thank you very much for the attention, and you can be assured that we, as a management team, doing our best to have not a third year with bad news. We want to create good news, and we are working hard on it. Thank you very much.