Bucher Industries AG (BUCN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We're excited to present some nice results I think we have here. It will be myself explaining a bit the business conduct in 2023, it will be Manuela being more precise on the financial data that we are -- that we have, and I'll give an outlook for 2024. I would like to mention as well that we have 3 new phases that are worth while mentioning here. We have [indiscernible] right up front here. Well, you know him already, just [indiscernible] another company. Welcome Jim, when do you start? 3 month? There we are, 3 months. Claudia Mannhart is also there. She sometimes answers your e-mails and so on. New face as well. Saskia Rusch joined us almost a year ago, not quite a year ago as Head of Group Communications. So we will have a hybrid conference. In other words, camera is up and running. There are some people joining us from abroad,, online, and it will be recorded as well. So available afterwards as well up to the Q&A. Q&A, we cut off the recording. We will answer questions. We will give you priority, the ones who are here in the room, and then we will take some questions from the video conference as well, if there are any. That is the way it's going to go. I'll start off with the commentary on the market situation. I will also give you some inputs on projects and investments that we did to improve our environmental impact, and also projects that we did to improve the environmental impact of our customers. That's the key storyline that we put into the annual report this time. So you could then read them up. But I'll give you some explanations. As usual, 5 stories from our 5 divisions and you saw them in that slideshow before, and I will explain them to you. Actually, 2023 was a real fun year. I mean, the results are extremely pleasing, I must say. We were aware that things would cool down already a year ago, but somehow we managed to prolong it, and what we can see is a very strong demand in the first half of the year and then some cooling off as we had expected for the second half. You can see this here on the left chart, these are sales by year. The red line is -- let me see if I can get that. The red line is the one that's interesting, 2023, that is by quarter of last year and the year before. And obviously, you can see the second half there, we had a bigger gap of sales. So we have that cooling down. So overall, we reached CHF 3.57 billion in sales. It's almost on par with the year before. Our production capacities were well occupied, a little less heavy utilized in the second half. Production plans were adjusted already in the second half of last year to -- now adjust to the lower demand. All in all, we achieved 11.9% EBIT margin, which is another all-time record for Bucher Industries. So very pleasing results. The net result will be then presented by Manuela, that would be a highlight of this year. We also have a low light, but that's also for Manuela to explain, difficult news as for her. So the demand for products and services fell in line with the economic slowdown that we had said. The incoming orders, as you can see, that blue line now for 2023, if you compare it with the 2 years before, definitely came down compared to 2022. The incoming orders came down by 17.8%. The agricultural market definitely was -- the agricultural machinery market definitely was weakening. But basically, those are all divisions that had a slowdown, with the exception of Bucher Specials. Bucher Specials managed, also through an acquisition, to increase their order intake. And we must highlight that we are always comparing ourselves with year 2022. Now do bear in mind that 2022 was a year where material and machines were hardly available, people were ordering like mad just to try to ensure that they could get some. It was an exceptional year on the very high side. And now it came down. It's not yet tragic, but obviously, the cool off wasn't visible. So the order backlog decreased as well by 23%, and it's still a good 5 months of sales that we had in the order backlog with the CHF 1.6 billion that we have in the books or had in the books at the end of the year. I must say, if we continue and look at the numbers in relation to the year before, the order intake, as I said, minus 18%, or if you'd be more precise, because we had quite some FX effects happening last year, Manuela will allude on that as well, it would be actually minus 15%. Then the sales itself, slight decrease compared to 2022, 0.6%, but we again take it, acquisition and FX effects, it's a plus 3%. So without that, it would have been another record. The operating result is very pleasing, at CHF 424 million, at par with a year before. And obviously, it was a nice EBIT margin going along 11.9%. And then the net profit will be another highlight, Manuela's job. We employed almost 15,000 employees last year, which was really good. And we look at the way the regional sales developed last year compared to the year before, we can see that we have a Brazil effect. Now, just as a small reminder, in 2022, we had an incredible strong year with agricultural machinery in Brazil. I mean, it was flamboyant, CHF 260 million in 2022. That came down by about 1/3, and that has definitely an effect. So if you look at the blue part of the bar, that's Americas, including, of course, Brazil. And you can see in 2022, we had that peak upwards to 28%. Brazil cooled down, U.S.A. cooled down somewhat 6%, so that diminished again that share. Europe held up pretty well overall, so that kind of strengthened a bit. And Asia is hanging in there in a normal term. Switzerland remains at the 4%, that's pretty solid and stable. R&D is very important for us. We like to spend R&D. Usually, we try to get to about 4%. We managed to get 3.7%. Last year, it's CHF 133 million after all. I'll just show you 3 highlights out of the R&D budget that we presented in November this agricultural robot, we call it Karl, it's basically a tractor without the cabin on tracks, field, and they know they coordinate the tracks that they're going to use and work on. It has an autonomy of about 8 hours, and it will be brought there on a trailer from a farmer, he drops it off, starts the engagement button and off they go and start doing their work. That is the vision that we have. It will take probably another 3 years until we can offer it as a product. It is now in the development stage, but we already announced it at the agricultural show, [indiscernible] Hanover. What is the background of this? Obviously, farmers have more and more difficulties finding employees to run the tractors, or to work out on the field. They prefer to sit in warm offices with Google. So at that moment, these automated machines are becoming more and more attractive for farmers. They work in a slightly smaller scale, but they work day and night, so you drop them off and let them run 2 or 3 of them at the same time and the work is done at this -- on just like it was a normal tractor. The other element that we have is Bucher Emhart Glass. We noticed that to get consistent quality of glass bottles, and that's what we're heading for, we want to basically reduce the rejection rate, it starts right at the beginning, and right at the beginning is where we cut off the glass gob and bring it into the shape or into the form. And in the early days, it used to be done just mechanically and some glass gobs were starting to form sideways or fall sideways. We looked at different shapes. And now we have a camera system, looking from 2 sides onto each of these glass gobs, usually 3 or 4 at a time, and automatically right away, recognize if the shape is changing. And then we start changing the shearing mechanism or the plunger mechanism, pushing out the glass through the orifice. And that's the way we can control that gob shape, and that's the way we can increase the quality of bottles at the end when it comes out and reduce rejection rates. That's the objective. And the last element I'd like to explain is a product that we're launching this year. We already have customers aligned for that. That's the beer dealcoholization plants that we have developed. Dealcoholization is becoming more and more of a topic for beer producers. Beer market is, by tendency, going down. Now, they're mixing it with new flavors, that's 1 element, and they want to dealcoholize it, that's the other element that we're working on. The [indiscernible] accounts about the 20% of beer being sold without alcohol in the near future so they will need these plants. You have different possibilities to dealcoholize beer. You can push it through a membrane, try to get the alcohol out, that's 1 element, which is not so good for the beer itself. You can heat it up, that's even worse for the beer, go up to 80 degrees or 75 degrees, and then try to evaporate the alcohol. Or what we do here, as a matter of fact, is we create a vacuum so that the alcohol evaporates at 37 degrees Celsius. And then we have another trick that we apply, it's alcohol-free beer, means less than 0.5% of alcohol in Switzerland. So there's always a little bit of alcohol left that we have to be clear of except for Arab countries. There, it's different. There it's 0/0, but in Europe, it's still accepted a little bit. So we filter out the alcohol that we evaporated once more for that part that has a lot of taste. And we take that part of the alcohol and put it back into the beer. So the AC part goes back, we still maintain the limits, but the alcohol itself or the beer itself should be tastier. That's what we do with this plant equipment. It raises quite some interest, and it will be sold as of this year. Let me continue investments. They went up in 2023 after we had been holding back in the years before. Now it topped up to CHF 142 million. Investments went into IT, obviously. We are replacing ERP systems here and there. It went into construction projects. And now with construction projects, we built a new building, there's normally a new machinery going in there, it's where you sell them, that we build a new building and we just take the old machinery. Usually, it's kind of an update. And I can give you some examples. Here is a press -- a forging press that we installed in the western part of France, Kuhn-Huard for the Kuhn Group. It's the biggest in Europe apparently. It weighs 350 tonnes, that's only the machine. And then there's a foundation underneath, which is another 350 tonnes, so there are 2 747s already piled on each other. And then we put it on springs to kind of cushion the bumping. So that's -- it's a huge technology. It's quite a project. And because it was so big, we had to build a new building around it. And we put photovoltaic on top of it, at 6,400 tonnes of pressure onto these parts that we use mainly for tillage of agricultural machinery. So while hardened some robots around it that's supplied the parts and so on and so on. Then another element is Klettgau, that's just on the German side of the Swiss border, towards [indiscernible] of Norse, let's say, that's basically headquarter of Bucher Hydraulics, and this office building here is 50 years old, so we thought, yes, okay, after 50 years, maybe it's acceptable to replace it. So we built a new parking lot up here. We put photovoltaic on the parking but and some shades for the employees, and we're building on that old existing parking lot, we're building a new office building for about 180 employees. That should be up and running at the end of the year. Then we have Emhart Glass. Remember, we do assembly in Sweden. And we do assembly in Malaysia. Now, that assembly in Malaysia just got overwhelmed by demand and we have to expand. So we added another 50% of capacity by building a new building down there. We're going to get out of the old one, get [indiscernible] into to do the new building. And to give you an idea, we are talking about a surface of 50,000 square meters of land, and about 27,000 square meters of production space. So that should last for a moment. We also disclosed our nonfinancial data with the annual reports. We spent 380,000 megawatt hours of energy last year. This one there, on the left side. That's 2% less than the year before. Most of it goes into either electricity, which is the red part, the red arc, and then -- or into fuels, which were processed fuels or transportation fuels or heating fuels, that's the blue part. So the most improvement we got was in the red arc, the electricity, we source it different. We had a different mix. I'll show that later to you. But Bucher -- the effect at the end was that we had 9% less emissions year-over-year on CO2, which is, of course, a fantastic result. We'd love to continue on that path. And when we started off in 2021, it was 93,000 tonnes of CO2, and now we're down to 82 almost or 81 almost, and we still have ideas. That's a good part. How did we achieve that? You can see this on this page here, on the waterfall page, you can see actually the fourth -- the first green -- the first 4 green bars are about electricity and then about fuels. And so we have new photovoltaic systems up and running in China, which is, of course, a big leverage for CO2 or in the United States as well. There's more to be added this year. Then we have renewable electricity that we buy, green energy that we buy. Then we have suppliers that now proved to us that they are also sourcing green energy, and we are reusing it, so that is the third bar. And then finally, there was just less consumption through efficiency. Newer machines, I mentioned the new press before that is using less electricity. Although it's bigger and more capacity, it uses less than the old machine that we have. So that will be in there, district heating, we're reusing heat from the paint system in China that helps a lot and so on. Acquisitions are sometimes a bit of a challenge, yes. We bought the company in Poland. Poland is not very good in CO2 emissions. It's all coal electricity. So that went up, and we immediately installed photovoltaic to compensate at least half of it. So we're struggling on that, but that's what's needed. Good. But it's not only our own footprint that we would like to reduce. We would also want to actually help our customers reduce their impact with our machines. And I'm going to show you some projects, how we can do it. One project, I think, which once established in the market is very, very attractive, is the collaboration that we started with a French company called Carbon B. We installed them on our sprayers. And the idea is that there's a camera system watching the ground as the tractor is driving along, and it's looking for the bad weeds in all kind of different daylights situations. Is it cloudy? Is it sunny? Is there a shade? Whatever. And at that moment, when it recognizes bad weed as the tractor advances, the sprayer nozzle goes open, that quickly sprays the bad weeds and then it closes again. And we believe that we can reduce about 70% of herbicides going out through one of these sprayers. That's huge. I mean, that is becoming the new standard of technology. We're talking incredible amounts of liters saved. And that's good for the groundwater and so on and so on. Huge opportunity. The technology is getting there, and that creates a lot of excitement for us. Another element is that we are, of course, collecting more and more data from the machinery that we are providing. Actually, it's a customer using that data. In this case, it is a [indiscernible], which is a collaboration of some agglomerate municipalities around Paris, yes. There, you can see the [indiscernible], and there will be the Olympic Games. So our sweepers will be running a lot of hours now in the summertime. We're excited about that. And they're connected with the operations center of that company that runs 90 machines, and they're continuously looking at the way the machine is being used and what the hours are and so on and so on. And doing that, and also through route optimization, that's also part of the function we provide, we can save energy and CO2 as well. It's about 5% so far that we have detected in that application. I move on Bucher Hydraulics. We have installed a new hydraulic system on this digger of a brand I'm not allowed to say yet because they are very excited about the whole technology. And there are basically 2 elements that are involved there. The first element is, it is kind of a closed circuit in such a sense that there's only so much hydraulic fluid needed and transported as it's needed to move any of the cylinders. Conventional hydraulic circuits have a continuous flow. It's just, they open it up for the cylinder or not, but there's a continuous flow. The pump is continuously running. With a diesel engine, that's not a problem because the diesel engine has to run in any case. But with electric diggers, like this is going to be the future, the smaller diggers are going to be electric. You need a pump that's variable. So it only powers up when you want to move something, and then it holds it there. And the next trick that we have on this installation as well is when it lowers the beam, which is the most force, the hydraulic oil gets pushed back, it goes through the pump, drives the electric motor that's behind it, and charges the battery. So it's recuperation. So it's basically on-demand hydraulic fluid and recuperation as it comes back down, and that creates quite some savings. Now, talking right, up to 70%, depends on it how you calculate it, but that's a requirement so that you can run hydraulic systems with battery-driven machines. And I think we have a pretty clever solution there. If you look at Emhart Glass, I'd like to show you this example. A usual glass plant probably has about an output of 220,000 tonnes of glass a year. It's a continuous flow. Continues through 220,000 tonnes per year. The unfortunate part is that of these 220,000 tonnes, it's probably about 13% -- 13% to 15% is reject. So we heat up the glass, we form the bottle. We look at it and we throw away again. That's a lot of waste. It's just because there are small little mistakes. So we do the gob-forming is one thing. But often enough, we recognize that these machines are not adjusted precisely. We have service technicians, running from customer to customer, looking at the machines, giving them a report on what to improve to reduce the amount of rejects. And I mean, we're talking about tonnes of CO2, we could reduce it by, I don't know, 2%, we get 87% to 89% of [indiscernible]. We're talking About 2,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, and that's crucial. So we have potential, just by providing knowledge to the customers. And finally, there is this new filtering system that we sell through our great press company, [indiscernible]. And That filtering system used to be just a pump driving the wine through the filter and pushing hard. And now we have a system where it measures basically also how much of filtration is really needed and adjust the pump power accordingly, and that as well allows us to reduce, obviously, the amount of energy that we need to filter a certain amount of wine. And just to give you an idea, I mean, these systems, they can handle 36,000 liters per hour, so, lot to drink. So I will move on now to the divisions and some reports. I'll start it with Kuhn. By the way, this machine is a lower conditioner. In the words, it cuts the glass. It tries to destroy the cells at the same time and then it pulls it together on the belt and put it into a swath. The special thing about it, it's really big, 30 meters in diameter. So that's a very good powerful machine. It won a prize, the farm machine of 2024 prize last year, which is given, handed out by agricultural journalists, so I think they know what they're talking about. When we talk about Kuhn Group, I always start off with the commodity pricing because that's important. It has an impact on our farmers, and the farmers are the more interested in buying new machinery or not. And we look at that last year. The picture was a bit grimmer. Basically, it started off very well at the beginning of 2022. On the left side, you can see crop prices for cash crops, we take the wheat, which is basically the red for the United States. Pardon my sharing there. And then the orange one for Europe, you can see it continuously started slightly down. The same goes for corn, nice as well, came down the blue line. What held up a bit better was soy, soybeans, that held up a bit. So that was okay. But overall, for the farmers, it meant more pressure. Now, bear in mind, there was another troublesome situation for the farmers last year. We had drought, Drought in Europe, we tend to forget it, it's only 6 months ago. Drought in Europe and drought in the United States, on both sides. So the yields came down as well. If we look at the other part, that's the milk price, that's important for hay and forage business of ours. You can see the European price that came down to rather lower levels. The U.S. price kind of repeated a bit, but it's now again on the way down. So there's pressure there as well. The only thing that really held up was wheat prices. Wheat prices still went well last year. That was the only positive news for farmers on that side. And the effect is that the farm income has now shifted from a flamboyant 2021 going up to 2022. And now, it is, again, sliding downwards, and there's still no end in sight, and that's why the uncertainty about -- with farmers is rather high in Europe as well as in the United States. By the way, subsidies, you can see they're not expecting a lot. On the right side, you can see the bars, you can see 2020, when Mr. Trump tried to make farmers happy. But that's, at the moment, more relaxed. So the farmers are very cautious about the future or the near future. And then all the regulations that comes on top of it, the uncertainty about that. So that's also one of the reasons why they are protesting. That's for sure. And that we felt. So as of midyear, it was -- everything was cooling down. For the dealers, there was one more effect that came on top of it. And that was the fact that the main suppliers for the dealers are tractor manufacturers. And suddenly, with the supply chain that started working, the tractor manufacturers started producing all the tractors that had been ordered before and they got them all on to the lot of the dealer and they picked up the money. So the dealer was running short on cash at the end of the year because the tractor manufacturers have enforced them to take everything that we had ordered, that came all at once. So there was less cash available also to buy anything else. We have these preorder programs, and that had come down substantially for us at the end of the year. So many effects that we're playing hand in hand, and that kind of dumped our demand. We'll talk about that maybe a bit later once more. When we look at the effects overall, you can see the order intake that have cooled off that I corrected for exchange rates, and we are at minus 28%, almost. That's quite a jump, albeit from a very high 2022. I have to highlight that. And then net sales, which came down somewhat in 2023, also a bit of an FX effect, obviously, as well. And then the order book fell in consequence down to CHF 670 million or 34% less than a very high level before. Now CHF 670 million is still 5 months of orders. So still at a fair level, I would say, but definitely no more the excitement that we had in the years before. Sales I mentioned, CHF 1.42 billion in sales, which is 6% down, a lot less than we had expected, but the effect is coming now. I mentioned Brazil, [indiscernible] came down a lot. We had higher labor costs, which were basically compensated by lower material costs as component prices came down again. So overall, we wound up at 11.4% of EBIT margin, I think, which is still a very good EBIT margin for Kuhn Group, given the circumstances, and we're happy for that. And as you can see, we look at the employees end of the year, we already correct it for the less the lower demand. We already started working on that topic to get our capacities down, minus 3.7 year-end, now it's even a bit more. Once more, [indiscernible], the CityCat V40e is the new model, basically the same size like that one, full electric that we launched last year. It's a very successful model, by the way. It seems to have a sweet spot in size. It can work on the sidewalks but it also can work on the streets. And so pretty maneuverable. So people like it. We sold it in many cities, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Genoa, The Marseille, Paris, the big ones, Berlin, Stuttgart, [indiscernible], and yes, Lozan, Geneva, so on. The electrified version holds up 8 hours. So it's pretty light, in general, the electrified sweepers, of course, still have a good demand. It's about 1/5 of the sweepers that are sold as electric version from Bucher Municipal. Bucher Municipal had a lot more stable demand. The market situation was more favorable than, of course, agriculture, and order intake fell by 7% compared to the previous year, which was again high based on the people trying to get sweepers as good as they could. We had some fewer orders in sweepers. We had some fewer orders in sewer cleaning. One of the contributing factors last year was the trouble that the utility companies had in the U.K. First half of the year, utility companies, which belong by the way to private equity, a lot of them, Thames water and so on, they were getting into struggle because they -- the interest rates are going up. And suddenly, that investment was causing problem at the same time they should invest, which they don't like to do. And at that moment, there was a high uncertainty and all the contracting stopped. It picked up again in the second half year. That went well again, but that had an influence on the overall result. Refuse collection, that demand increased. That's our Australian business, by the way. Winter maintenance is roughly unchanged. And then, of course, what we're continuously driving upwards is maintenance, service and spare parts. The sales exceeded the previous year by about 8%, and we will take it and correct it for acquisitions, and FX, mainly then it's even more at 13%, as you can see on the right side. The order backlog remained at the high level of 2022. That's actually good news for this year. It's still more than 6 months. And the operating profit, yes, that could have been a bit better, 6.3%. Now we have a onetime correction there. We had inventories that were not correctly valued in Australia. We had to do that. It would have been above 7% if we recollect that. But so we had 1 acquisition that we did last year. We acquired a rental company in [coastal] Paris for the whole of France, where we basically rent out sewer cleaning equipment and sweepers. The effect is not very nominal, about 10 million additional sales there. Hydraulic Power, what you can see here are -- is basically a power pack, as we call them, hydraulic power packs. They're compact in design. Usually, they're made for electrification. There's electric motor connected to it. They serve 1 or 2 circuits. They are highly configurable. That's the good part about it, it's scalable. They're compact in size, so they fit into also mobile machinery. It's something that's going to increase, especially with the upcoming of more and more electric machinery in the future. There, we saw an early decline already. Bucher Hydraulics is always an early cyclical business. So we saw that coming down. The order intake fell by 12% compared to a strong year, I must say, or 9% if you exclude the currency effects. And it really hits the construction machinery, industrial machinery, extrusion machines, for example. It hits agricultural machinery in the second half. John Deere, a big customer, they start slowing down demand because they delivered all the tractors, which are then sitting on our dealers' lot. So all that came down and slowed down. There was 1 element that maintained good business, it was material handling. So the sales basically still remained at last year's level. Shows good, the 2022 level. We had some increase in Europe still. That's only sales, not order intake. And we had a decline actually in North America and China, which kind of compensated that a bit. As usual, Bucher Hydraulics had a very good cost structure and a very disciplined approach. And so their profit margin reached 13.9%, which is, again, an excellent result. The order backlog normalized down to about CHF 230 million, again, compared to a very high 2022. We'll move on to Emhart Glass. Remember, we have the glass forming business, but we also have an inspection business. And in the inspection business, we introduced the new machine that does the inspection of the sidewalls of a bottle. So every glass bottle needs to be inspected. That's by rule. And we have to look at different dimensions of the bottle and look for any inclusions and so on and so on, misproductions. And in earlier days on these machines, we had to program the failures. So you brought in a new bottle. That's what the bottle looks like. And look for there, a failure here and failure in that, and then you have to adjust the camera so that eventually, you would see that failure. And that will take about 3 hours to adjust a machine so that it can run afterwards smoothly. We reversed the process. Now we have artificial intelligence in these systems. We take bottles that have 0 failures. We run them through the machine and tell them, that's what the bottle should look like. And the machine automatically itself defines what failures could look like for itself based on experience, and then starts running to look for these failures. And that lasts less than a minute. So that is a big advantage for the customer, comes out pretty well. That's only for the sidewall inspection. The other inspections still need to be adjusted. Obviously, we're working on the next levels for that. Emhart Glass, net sales basically at last year's level, or we corrected it for FX, it would even be a plus 4%. The order intake, although that cooled down a bit. Our customers notice second half of the year that they are probably overproducing glass bottles, that the demand was coming a bit down, the high economy or the strong economy was slowing down, and we're feeling that. And at that moment, together with regulations and energy prices and so on, they slow down their projects for a moment to figure out what's going to happen. And where is it going to happen? European customers were much more affected by that than other customers. And that, we could see basically in the order intake. And I'll show it to you later on once more. But for this year and even for the first half of -- sorry, for last year and even for the first half of this year, we're running at full capacity, that's not a problem, but we know there will be a slowdown later on. Order intake fell by 10% for that given reason. Sales remained at the CHF 524 million, roughly. And then the operating profit margin was an excellent 19.5% than whoever has been following us for a couple of years. I mean, we were at 7% like 8 years ago, and we never believed we could get double digit, and now we're running at 19.5%. Many factors that helped, also the Swedish crown there, but -- and they did a great on improving the operations. So coming to the last division, Bucher Specials. Bucher Specials has 1 unit -- there are 4 units. And this is pressing -- apple pressing, grape pressing in there. And then we have got the import business for tractors as well into Switzerland, which is another business. And then one is called -- used to be called Jetter, and we renamed it Bucher Automation now. They moved it into new buildings, so they put some new colors on that. And they produce a lot for Emhart Glass. And what we need is, because there's a lot of machinery, electric motors moving the glass farming machinery day in, day out. And for electric motors, you need drives, you need something that controls the electricity that power that is provided to these electric motors. And that's -- these are the -- these drives. They're in the closet next by, and they basically drive the motors in the machinery, and we had to produce a new set of these drives. That's what you can see here. They look very unsuspicious basically, but they provide, in a very precise act, the energy required to drive the motor. They control where the motor is. So there's a loop there. Now here, we have a setup where it even can run 2 motors from 1 of these drives, which is new as well, and it has a new [indiscernible] system that communicates better amongst each other. Tacting is extremely important. That's really by the hundreds or the thousands of a second where these motors have to be driven to coordinate everything. So Bucher Specials, Again, the mix [indiscernible]. We have Bucher in [indiscernible], where we had a declining demand. The grape presses came down. Main reason probably the drought as well. So the when you have noticed the effects of the drought, especially in the main markets like France, Bucher Unipektin had a stable business, that is the presses for apples, but that is also vacuum, drawing and the filtration, beer filtration. Bucher Landtechnik, I mentioned that's a tractor import business, that is running very slow. At the moment, we're almost at the lowest of tractor immatriculation in Switzerland that we had for many, many years. And then Bucher Automation, the company that I mentioned before, that is growing again now. There are 2 factors there, that is Emhart Glass, doing pretty well. And then the other factor is that Bucher Hydraulics is starting to produce their converters and inverters with Bucher Automation, which they use to source from somewhere else and now they're converting it to Bucher Automation. That's why we invested into a new building there, and then we're driving up that production. Sales increased altogether by 15%. Bucher Automation is 1 element. And then we had 1 acquisition that we did in Poland. I mentioned it before, which also helped to grow sales overall. Without that acquisition, without currency, the growth would be still at 9%, which is respectable, just as much as the operating margin, which is at 8.3%. A lot of information to digest. That's Bucher Industries, welcome. I'll hand over to some interesting numbers from Manuela.

Yes. Thank you, Jacques. And good afternoon from my side. Yes, innovation that inspires our customers or how our customers can improve their footprint. Our focus topic's in our current annual report that you also have in front of you, crop protection, cleaning fleet and filters in sync with each type of wine or stories that we just shared with you. Innovation is a key success factor for us. And in particular, to defend also our strong market position that we have in several cases. And as it also is written in our ESG report, included in the annual report, we strive to create value with our products and solutions. In some cases, it can take years before we see a positive impact in our figures. But the good thing is, we are more than 200 years old, and we are a long-term oriented company. However, financial questions, did we create value with our innovations over the last -- from the past 5, 10 years back? Do we have enough financial power for further investments in innovation, but also in our employees? Two questions, but we would like to elaborate a bit more. Net sales were at the prior year level, with price increases more or less compensating the negative currency impact. 2023, almost all currency were against us. Against the Swiss franc, all currency dropped or our main currency dropped by 2% and 10%. It's roughly 2/3 of our sales in euro. The negative currency impact was mainly coming from the euro in our case, means our organic growth rate of 3%, which was completely in line with our historical growth rate, 3% to 4% over the last 10, 15 years. The EBIT margin was 11.9%, just above the prior year's really good margin and clearly above our long-term target of 10% was mainly due to good capacity utilization, higher production efficiency because of the improvement in the supply chain, and the price increases already initiated '22 or even 2021. Two notable one-offs or whatever the definition is of one-offs, impacted the result. The operating profit of Bucher Municipal was negatively impacted by an additional value adjustment of 5 million on inventories at one side in Australia. In Australia, we have roughly 8, 9 sites for Bucher Municipal, that was a smaller site, but we had a value adjustment of 5 million. And then on group's operating profit, it's included a gain of 10 million from the sale of our real estate. Operating profit less financial results and income tax expense give us a profit of the year of CHF 356 million. Really nice financial result, CHF 12 million was characterized by higher interest income and the result of short-term investments. Jacques mentioned, Brazil was booming '21 and '22, and it was not just sales, we also generated cash. We repatriated some of the cash, but franc buys [indiscernible] less part of it in Brazil. Brazil still really high interest rates, and the main part of the financial result on the positive side was coming from Brazil. The reduction in the effective tax rate to 18.5% is mainly due to a geographical shift in taxable income as well as some special effect in Brazil. Also here, less income in Brazil, 2023 compared with 2022. More taxable income in Switzerland, with lower tax rate coming from Bucher Emhart Glass is resulting in a lower tax expense or tax rate. Given the lower tax rate over the last years, we have slightly adjusted our expectation for the effective tax rate in the midterm. The tax rate expected for 2024, more on the lower end of the range between 21% and 23%. And the profit as a result of the earnings per share increased by 6%, which will lead us then to our dividend, which is covered by Jacques. As you can see on the right of this chart, the level of average net operating assets increased by 19%. The main reason for the increase, higher inventories, but also even more significant lower advanced payments from our customers due to the downturn in Kuhn as well as some investments, as Jacques explained, which gives us internal and external growth. The average turnover. Our inventory turnover remained at the low level. But at the end of the reporting period, we already experienced that we tend and will reduce our inventory, clearly, a focus topic for 2024. The increase in our net operating assets had a negative impact also on our return, which we can see on the next slide. Let's start with the right side. On the right, you can see still a really high return on net operating assets of close to 25%, which is clearly above our long-term target of 20%, and significantly higher than our cost of capital. [indiscernible] for almost 25%, with an investment of CHF 1.4 billion, I think, quite a nice return. But on the negative side or less pleasing, when we are comparing it with an exceptional high 2022, we see, we have a decline of around 4 percentage points, mainly coming from higher net operating assets, as I explained just before. Starting on the right, we have a minus or a free cash flow after dividend payment of CHF 24 million. The high outflow of cash is mainly due to the increase in net working capital with CHF 191 million, but also due to higher investments. Despite these outflows, the operating free cash flow was CHF 123 million. It is higher than prior year, and this is mainly due to a good operating performance. The cash used for investing or investment amounted to CHF 128 million, and the main focus was on the construction project of Bucher Hydraulics and Bucher Automation in Germany, as well as Bucher Emhart Glass in Malaysia, as Jacques also explained. For 2024, we expect around CHF 150 million CapEx. This will include the remaining part of the building that I just mentioned before and also a refurbishment of our biggest site in France, [indiscernible]. Building several buildings from Kuhn Group cover an area of almost 26,000 [indiscernible] square meters, square meters. And here, the aim is to achieve energy efficiency, technical improvements as well as some process optimizations. This will, I think, over 5 or 10 years, so it's self-starting point for the refurbishment in [indiscernible]. We started into the year with CHF 457 million net cash. Given the free cash flow of CHF 24 million or negative free cash flow, some currency -- negative currency impacts, we ended the year with CHF 396 million net cash. Given our outlook and the expected reduction in net working capital, which we already started at the beginning of this year, we expect a net cash level somewhat around CHF 500 million for 2024. This also includes an acquisition or a minority buyout that we just signed last Friday. We will buy back the remaining part of our winter maintenance equipment, Bucher Municipal, 40%, with a purchase price of CHF 26 million. We will see the cash out, but keep in mind, we've already fully consolidated the venture maintenance business so there will be no impact on order intake, net -- net sales and so on. We will have the cash out and a shift in the equity from minorities into Bucher. As you can see on the right, the equity ratio was 61%. And this solid financial position continues to secure our flexibility. We know that our success is due to our employees' expertise and high level of commitment. To be an attractive and fair employer who offers exciting work is important, of course. Nothing new, but also here, we made further improvements. During 2023, our new employee policy came in full force, and it covered our values principal standards in dealing with our employees. In the first line, the number of employees remained practically unchanged to the prior year. Here, we are talking about headcount. Included in this number, we have around 400 trainees, an increase of 7% worldwide. Also here, our commitment into the trainees and training. Another target or limit that we have is 22 hours training, internal, external training. Here, we achieved 29 hours per employee. Also here, clearly exceeding the target. This was partly due to internal development opportunities, leadership training courses and an increase in number of health and safety trainings. To summarize or to answer the questions from the beginning, it's a yes and yes. So did we create value with our past activities and innovation, I would say, with 25% return on net operating assets, we clearly created value for all our stakeholders. This is due to a strong profitable growth. Do we have enough financial power for further investments? Yes, we have a very solid financial position, which allows us to further invest in innovation, but also in our employees, and I think that's perfect. Over to you. Jacques, giving us the outlook.

Thank you, Manuela. So in a nutshell, 2023, once more, I think we can say, Bucher Group held up pretty well longer than we had expected based on the strong order book, but it was cooling off at the end, very visibly, they made good profits. Bucher Municipal continued with solid sales throughout the year, actually been improving in the second half. And finally, also being able to deliver. And the profits were more below our expectations, there was some onetime in there. Bucher Hydraulics continued a decline that we'd already anticipated, but as usual, it's very disciplined in costs. So the profits are very, very appreciated and accepted. Bucher Emhart Glass, they had strong capital -- strong capacity utilization throughout the whole year, and as such, also created strong profits. Some of it helped through a Swedish krona that was devalued. So there was a bit of tailwind there, but excellent profits for Emhart Glass. And finally, Bucher Specials, but really was Bucher Automation, Bucher Unipektin, which were holding up very well, compensating a bit for the other 2 units, but they created solid profit as well. So on the profit side, we are very happy. We have too much net working capital, one way that reminds me of that every day. And I think what is also very nice is we improved our CO2 footprint substantially in 2023. And we still have many ideas. For me, that's the roundup of last year. Yes. But that's already 2 months away. We're already in the new page. Actually, we're already aware that things are cooling off and we are used to cyclicalities very clearly. That has been our business for 200 years. So nothing so amazing. But of course, it's always a bit of a change when you come from these incredible strong years, '21, '22, '23, and now we have to adjust again to the new reality. That goes particularly strong for Kuhn Group, obviously. You can see it here. We just added the order intake of last year, with the red line once more, just so that we have a comparison with Kuhn Group. You can see seasonality that we have with order intake, Q3 often, we take these early orders for the next year, and that has been substantially weaker in 2023. So overall, the demand for agricultural machinery has fallen significantly. We're aware of that. It will touch most of Europe more than probably U.S. and South America. It's less affected there. It will be touching more for forage and harvesting and less the [indiscernible] farming, but still both will decline. And the dealers have full stock. We know that as well. So overall, we count on a declining sales of Kuhn Group in 2024, and also as a result of lower profit margin, but we aim to maintain 2 percentage or 2-digit percentage values with Kuhn Group, so 10% and more on the profit margin side. But Kuhn will provide continued Bucher Municipal. There, the situation or the demand is a lot more stable, especially here in Europe. Sewer cleaning vehicles, probably going to be slightly stronger. Other categories might decline slightly. But overall, it should be a wash interest in electrified machines and also the service that we provide remains stable. So sales will be probably at the previous year's level, and the operating profit margin, we would definitely like to improve further. Bucher Hydraulics, the downward trend is continuing. Now it's more agriculture that's coming down. Construction machinery is still on the way down. One element that we can see in a positive way is China. China is now slowly [indiscernible] out and starting to pick up again, which is positive after a couple of years now. So all in all, we still believe that there will be a slight decrease in sales for Bucher Hydraulics, and also as a result, a slight decrease in operating profit margin. Maybe on a side note, Daniel Waller will retire after more than 2 decades of successful leadership of that division. And we hired somebody new, Frank Mühlon from ABB, to join us to run that division. That will happen in mid of the year. And then we have Emhart Glass. There, you can see order intake 2023, the fourth quarter, minus 50%. Now, that's frightening, yes. Now bear in mind, there's one thing Emhart Glass has these bigger projects. So if a project suddenly gets delayed by 3 months, it hops into the next quarter. And then you have these big swings on that side. So it's probably not as frightening as it looks like, but there will be a cool off. So especially second half, we think will be a cooler. So overall, we think there will be a decline in sales. First half year should still be okay. Operating profit margin probably no longer be as high as we had it in 2023. And finally, Bucher Specials. There, we see some growth impulse happening with Bucher Automation. We're going to in-source more and more of the hydraulic business there, the converters and inverters. And otherwise, the rest of the business will stay rather quiet or even be diminished a bit lower, Bucher Landtechnik, for example. But overall, it should be sales and operating profit margins at roughly the 2023 levels. As a result of all these divisions, what we see for Bucher Industries is that sales should go down slightly compared to 2023. And then we will also have lower operating profit margins, but we believe that we can maintain it at double digit. The net profit, as a consequence as well, will probably be lower than the very high 2023 that we had experienced. These are all the numbers and information. Just some update. Annual general meeting will be held on April 18, in the afternoon, standard agenda, except that Philip Mosimann is going to be retiring, that we had announced. Whereas Urs Kaufmann, who's already on the Board, is going to take over as a Chairman, that's going to be new. The dividend, we increased slightly by CHF 50, it happened to be CHF 13.50 per share. That's our suggestion to the general assembly, which will yield 3.8% relative to the lower year-end price of CHF 353.

And we are ready for all the questions. As usually, probably about agriculture. And I will start with any questions that we have here in the room. And then we will pick up questions that will come from the video conference. [Operator Instructions] But I will start it off. Mr. [indiscernible]?

[indiscernible]. Could you just remind us because I have it in my mind, but all this H1, H2 in Kuhn Group. For the full year, it was down 27.5% organically. How much was it down in H2 versus H2 last year?

I don't have that number by heart. But probably [indiscernible] is already looking for it. Can we get back to you, Mr. [indiscernible]?

But it was, of course, significantly higher, more down than the 27.5%?

And you're talking order intake?

Yes.

Yes. Well, I can just give you a graphic idea. There you are. There, you can see order intake for Q1 and Q2 on the first 2 points. Blue is 2022, red is 2023. You can already see that it started coming down.

So the gap is bigger in the second half.

Exactly. Now bear in mind, just one reminder, in 2022, we had that shortage of components we were not able to deliver. And then supply or delivery times got longer and longer and then people just added to their orders to make sure that they were still in line to get machinery. I mean, in 2022, we were handing out, selecting the customers receiving machinery. It was a different situation, but there's clear, 2023 has changed.

Okay. Then how much transaction exposure do you have on the currency side? So how much is coming from Europe going to other markets or from Switzerland into other markets?

Yes, for Kuhn, from Europe, we shift part of it to U.S. But actually, I would say, more or less on the group level, we are more or less naturally hedged with exception of Bucher Emhart Glass, where we benefited from the Swedish krona. But other than that, and then on a yearly basis, we have the budget hedge program. So on a yearly basis, we are hedged. However, it's just for a year, of course. But I would say transactional impact on the profit is not material.

Okay. So the gain in the financial result on the currency side, you mentioned, I mean, I suppose these were hedges, right?

No. In the financial result, it was really investments in Brazil in reals. So the investments in Brazil itself and the higher interest rate caused the higher financial result. So it's not impacted by the currency.

But that was in the interest results? A currency part, if -- I think, no?

Yes. But that's in the financial result, the currency part.

It was less negative than last year.

Yes, that's true. But it's not coming or not particularly coming from the reals. It's more what we have when we financially sold euro a bit. And then last year, we were negatively impacted by a special situation in Russia. So it was more that the negative impact in 2022 was coming from Russia, has not yet the millions in mind, but I'm thinking it was 4 million, 5 million. And this is this year, not included in the that.

My last question, price volume, I mean, what was it? I mean 5 divisions is clear, but still in '23? And -- and do you still do something on the price side in '24?

In '23, we probably have maybe an average of a price increase of maybe 3% in it. So basically, almost like the FX effect that we lost is -- has been compensated through price increases. That's roughly an estimate in an average overall divisions. And are we doing something in 2024? In agricultural, no. Municipal, we have to see. So if anything, it will be definitely lower than what we had in the past couple of years.

Okay. And the 3% was mostly a spillover effect from '22? Or did it exactly?

Full year effects, we had a few increases on the [indiscernible] Municipal side, but a lot more tamer than we did a year before.

Yes, [indiscernible]. I also have a few. You mentioned capacity adjustments, I think, in Kuhn Group. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit more on that? And then I would like to give you an add-on on that one.

Okay. Yes. Well, I mean, the capacity adjustment happened with head count that we have. We are used to seasonality. We are also used to cyclicality. That's why in many of these, especially French factories, we work with temporary staff. And we are now continuously reducing the temp staff that we have available. And it's not so much the case in the United States. There, we have more of these short-term contracts in many case, but it's mainly for France. And we are ready to going down to the bare minimum of the temp staff in France very likely this year.

Can you quantify how much your [indiscernible] go down with that?

Yes. Well, I don't want to be too specific. I mean, but we're talking 5%, 6%, 7% that we have.

I don't know if you remember, but I think it was on the upper side of the city a few years ago, we had a similar situation, coming out of a strong year or a strong half year and we saw the slowdown coming. You were saying double digit is the aim, right? And I asked you the same question, and you said, yes, we should make it, and then it didn't quite come. I don't know if you remember that. But I wonder, what is different now? The year was 2015, '16, I just checked.

Yes, it was a different year. Yes. No, I mean, welcome to reality. I mean, let's face the facts. We probably have a visibility of about 6 months, that's what I've always been saying. And now the question is, how is the year going to evolve? There are some elements, if the weather plays along, the yield will be better for the farmers. That could be a supporting factor. We don't really know how long it takes for the dealers to sell off their material. That is difficult to say because only then the demand will set back in. But we're not at 0, it's just lower, we're not at 0. So will the farmers suddenly order on the short-term notice instead of taking that taking advantage of preorders? These are the questions that will drive this year or not.

And on the other hand, is, of course, the flexibility, as Jacques mentioned, the cost structure and it also depends a bit on the rebate. So we talked before about price increases. There will be known in agricultural business. I think here, it's more the pressure, but we have to give some rebates that already started end of 2023, in particular, in Brazil, and had also a negative impact on the profitability of Kuhn Group, which we have seen in the second half of 2023. So that will be also a bit of a question mark. And also our competitors already started to give here and there some rebates.

About 50% of our costs in Kuhn Group are material cost, yes. So we're working, of course, with our suppliers to start bringing that down. Steel price probably has an effect of 20% to 25% of the sales. And on Kuhn Group, these are all elements that we have to weigh in. And -- but we don't have any glass ball, but that's at the moment the visibility that we have.

Can I ask you 2 more questions. One should be a quick one, just understanding on the Bucher Automation side, the same sourcing that hydraulic is doing. I imagine you see it in the Bucher Specials sales, but then all this goes away from the intercompany sales, so you don't see really an increase of that amount in sales. You should probably see the profitability.

That's correct It's correct what you said.

Understand, you're correct.

In part, it's also a new business. So it's not just specials and hydraulics has been compensated. So we really expect an increase of these inverters and it's new business that we more and more taking over from [indiscernible] into Bucher Specials.

Okay. Just there a number that you -- can be made quantifiable?

Yes, we are -- at the moment, we're probably heading for a 10 million plus growth in that sector.

So net growth, so excluding the wash from the reinsourcing?

Yes.

Okay. Great. And then a question, I'm sure that both will tell me I'm too critic, but I would like to look at the return on net operating assets, which I believe is great. But with a critical eye, if I look at your asset ledger here, I see that the net book value, for example, a plant of machinery, 160 million is less than 1/4 of the -- at cost value. The same is valid for a fixture, less soft for land and buildings, of course. But you mentioned 50 years factory that you now finally have to upgrade. So I wonder, if you are not sort of underinvested too much, and your park is a little bit low, how old, and now you have to enter a period of higher investments.

I mean, yes, we were on the low side for the past couple of years, was 2.5% to 3%. And an industrial company like us probably has to be more or close to 4%. That's probably the realistic renewal rate. Now you took value, a 50-year-old office building, there it's unproblematic. When we look at the machinery, we don't hold it for 50 years. The machinery is being replaced continuously, actually. Most of the investment goes into a new machinery. And that's new CNC machines, or the very big exception, the hot press that we have. But otherwise, it's continuous improvement in CNC robots that is ongoing. Yes. There. I do not believe we're on a -- we fell back. I think we're still on a very good level. Now 3 of the buildings that are getting a bit old.

So since we are talking about that, can you put a number on the CapEx for this year?

But this year, we expect around CHF 150 million. It always depends a bit on the supply chain. We're still waiting for some machines that we order in 2022. But however, we expect around CHF 150 million for CapEx.

Including ERPs or ERP on top?

ERP is included, but as Bucher is very conservative, we try to take part of the ERP system, in particular, if it's not capitalizable already due to profit and loss statement. So we do not capitalize it and then depreciate it. So it's off. So I wouldn't say that there is a big amount of ERP included in CapEx.

I'll turn it now to [indiscernible].

Let's talk about innovation. So the agro robot, that looks very attractive to me. Tell us more about it. What's the target price? What's the business plan? What are the technical characteristics?

Yes. As I said, it's a research project going into the development project. And it's something that has to be seen very long term. Why? Because the adoption rate of new technology with farmers, I had to learn that in the past 8 years, is also slow. Farmers said there will be probably some industrial bigger farms buying 1 or 2, trying it out, then seeing if this works or not, and then they will start investing over time. So we're talking about a time period of 10 years definitely. And at the moment, we -- this time, in this time frame, we cannot give you a number. Pricing should be like a tractor roughly.

Do you think that you will sell the robot like tractor? So becoming basically a tractor manufacturer? Or do you think it's a learning exercise to have better implements, which fit to the tractors' orders produced?

Yes. That's almost a strategic or philosophical question. I mean bear in mind 1 thing, with implements, it's us doing the work. It's the implement working in the ground. It's not the tractor. Tractor is destroying it, it is compressing it actually. So the tractor is only the power platform and the communication platform. And we now merge these 2 elements together a bit better and then make it work in sync a bit better. That would be, of course, the ultimate idea, yes. And we have to work in that direction. But I don't have a sufficient proof to tell you that's going to be the future.

Last question in the same direction. Where is the competition currently with this exercise?

Yes, there are 2 machines out in the market. They are probably at the same level. So they are -- their prototypes around being tested, roughly about the same weight, no cabin, one is on wheels, which kind of increases compression. The other one is on tracks, which has been a similar setup. And to our knowledge, the others cannot have any fleet configuration. That's what we are pushing for, multiple machines on the field, but that will have to be confirmed. But that's the differentiation that we can see. Tractor manufacturers are probably going more into the direction of, well, let's provide a tractor and then you can push a button, get out of the cabin, and the thing starts pulling off. There are advantages and disadvantages to that concept. And we will be still providing implements behind these tractors as well. So maybe it's an additional business. We have another robot, by the way, that's running and already offered. The [Aura], which is basically a feeding robot exactly. So it goes out into the silo, it picks up the food stuff, it takes up more food stuff and mixes it, goes back into the farm, into the barn, exactly, it navigates based on internal pillars, and then it starts providing the food stuff to the [indiscernible]. And then it goes back out, and does the tool like that. And that's successful, that's interesting. So there will be more and more of these applications coming, yes.

And maybe also coming back to your question, [indiscernible]. So we are excited about all these innovations. However, as you know, as there is not a big bang or a revolution. So it's an evolution over time and not the big material impact that you see in 1, 2 years in the sales. But I think it's important to stay in the market.

I would ask just 1 main question. So in your outlook, you say that you expect slightly lower demand. But I must say from your comments, on the different divisions, on the current situation, that sounded much more cautious around demand. So can you maybe say how you reconcile that? Or what are your expectations for demand? Or do you have indications of improving demand?

No. As I said, I don't think that the second half is going to be the question mark in CHF 0.02. The second half for agriculture is probably 1 question mark. Will it improve? How what will happen there? And then possibly for Emhart Glass, where it will cool off further. These are probably the bigger question marks. Bucher Municipality seems to hold up. Hydraulics is still under the cent, but more visible, more calculatable. And Special is on a smaller scale to have an impact, yes. Just to all video conference and participants, if you have a question, raise your hand, and we will see that afterwards. Sorry, [indiscernible].

[indiscernible], UBS I have a couple of questions. And the first one is about the net working capital plans. And I would like to ask whether you can give us some more indications about that for 2024 and also beyond?

Difficult questions are for Manuela Suter.

No. As I mentioned before, we are starting into the year with around CHF 400 million net cash in [indiscernible] and we expect a cash level of CHF 500 million, and that clearly includes expected -- especially given the outlook with lower net profit, includes a deduction of net working capital. Is it 30 million, is it more, that's difficult to say, but it clearly will be a reduction, and it already started beginning of this year. That's also to do -- we see a shift from December into January, I would say, around CHF 50 million up to CHF 70 million, just as a revenue recognition issue or revenue recognition, we did not record the sales in December, but we have it now in January or February. And also, this will give us reduction. When you have a look at our inventory, most part or the most increase is now really sitting in the finished goods. So also here, we have a clear indication that we should and we'll be able to reduce how much it will be, we will see during the year.

Sure. And speaking of net cash, are you thinking of any like activities to return cash to stakeholders event?

All of the possibilities. Keeping it, spending it on acquisitions. What can or how can we develop the dividend is a topic, obviously, the share buyback, all of it. It is a discussion point, that's for sure. We're aware of the cash situation. Now that said, we've -- we're rather stable what our shareholders is concerned. And so we also can also be comfortable of maintaining some cash. But it is a topic that we are aware of and we're talking about. It's not that we're completely ignoring that issue. It's a Board discussion topic.

And I have one last one, and that's about the growth cadence that you planned for '24, especially for agriculture and the hydraulics business. Do you have some kind of visibility over it in terms of like first and second half of the year? And also maybe for the different quarters?

We would not inform you about it. That would be too much of hypothesis, yes. But as I mentioned, I think the first half year will be -- we leave a bit of the order book still, but after that, it will slow down. And then we'll have to see a bit how our mood is changing over the year to hope for a stronger second half in agriculture. Hydraulics will be impacted by agriculture, I assume as well. That will be clearly visible. The question is going to be compensated by other industrial activities. Be it these mobile drives that I said or be it China coming back again or maybe other areas of improvement. So there are probably centers, not like Kuhn Group, it is more moderate. Questions, Mr. Sauter?

Torsten Sauter, Kepler Cheuvreux. Actually, I have 2. First, like considering the downturn in various end markets, can you remind -- can you remind us of the aftermarket exposure that you have in the various activities on group level as well, and how it has developed over the years? And then considering the -- basically in the same context, considering the net cash position that you have, how about converting this into a financing division for the group so that you basically earn like a bank, right, a recurring revenue stream on the equipment financing?

That's what General Electric gave up on, I think, no?

Yes. But I mean, obviously, you're more conservative company and you have, of course, all these fantastic machines in field, right, and maybe you can earn more from them.

Yes. Well, I mean, we always have this ambition of making 20% on capital employed. And then i suppose you do financing, the question is can you get to 20%. You have to kind of, combined with sales or anything of this. So that is -- I think that's still further away, if anything. Aftermarket exposure, it's about 15% with agricultural machinery. It was Bucher Municipal, that's in the same range roughly, calling it off the top of my head. Now, Bucher Hydraulics, we don't know we provide components, some go in the aftermarket, some -- there's new business. We have no differentiation there. With Emhart Glass class, what we call spare parts or replacements, so it goes 40%. We were already at 50%. So that's a strong element, very stabilizing element and profitable. I remind you, we have a very interesting contract with [indiscernible], providing us all the spare parts. And then Bucher Specials is a bit of a mixed bag. And we have to -- it's really an estimate. It's probably about, again, the 10%, 15% that we know, that's roughly it. So all in all, except for Emhart Glass, it's somewhere in the range of 15%.

And then is there a way to structurally increase the share? I mean, regardless of the cycle, obviously.

Increase the installed base, and then you have more spare parts to go with it. So there's no big bang or so. But I mean, professionalizing service is one of the initiatives that we would see throughout. For example, Emhart Glass, I mentioned the example before. Bucher Municipal is pushing and continuously developing that business in the right direction. That's -- that's a very good element. Kuhn Group has been strong ever since. So actually, that's one of their strong points compared to competitors, is service and spare parts. Small reminder, I mean during the season, we have 24/7 service of spare parts. You can call it 2:00 o'clock at night. We will dispatch the parts and let it out and we should get it into Europe within a day. That is the way we do it, and that's required in these moments. Good enough?

Maybe [indiscernible], coming back to your question with regard to net working capital. I think we are talking around it's like [indiscernible] of CHF 100 million, it's a reasonable amount. And with that, we will come back more or less to 17%, 18% of our sales. I think that's a magnitude that we have in mind when we are talking about 2024.

If there are no more questions here in the room. Oh, there we are. Mr. [indiscernible]. And then I see 1 question on the on the video conferencing side.

I have a question on Emhart Glass. You said that margin is somewhat correlated with capacity utilization. And now you're increasing capacity in Malaysia by 50%. Isn't it fair to assume that maybe in '25, the margin will be quite lower because of the ramp-up capacity?

I mean, that's Malaysia, which is maybe about half of us. And we're talking about assembly capacity. So we have price production in assembly. We are adding more seats where we can do assembly, yes. And Malaysia is about maybe half of the -- not quite half of the assembly capacity. So overall, we're talking about maybe 20%, 25% capacity increase. That's 1 element. And if we build buildings, we don't build them for 2 years. We get into the project and we assume 5 to 10 years. That's the time frame we have to look for. But it just was time now to do that next step. But yes, of course, it could be that there's a little bit of a downturn, and we'll have to get through that as well. That's for sure. Now, the building is more energy efficient, so it should use this less of that. And the other element -- and we write off the buildings in a very long scale. That will be 20 years, 30 years.

You see even more than that, 30 years around.

So the question is almost much more, how much of the machinery do we put into that new building and for how much capacity do we need that. And a matter of fact, in that new building, there will be a whole section blocked from any usage so that we don't lose efficiency, because we know that when there is space available, things start sprawling, that's like at home. And so you keep it tight, you keep it organized, and that's what we're going to do.

And then I have an understanding question, because you said in -- for Kuhn Group, you said that you expect a stable development in North America, and everything I read from the U.S. Department of Agriculture is blood, sweat and tears. Net income down 25%, and they're under this assumption, I have problems with the assumption of a stable market. I would expect the market to be down quite a bit.

U.S., North America and South America, less affected, less affected than Europe, not unaffected, less affected. There was a misunderstanding, I'm sorry about that, but less affected.

And maybe not living from the past, but nevertheless, in North America, we still have an order book which is more -- is higher than in other areas in average. In particular, Kuhn [indiscernible] here, we are talking definitely more about more than 5 months as it's the average nowadays on the group. Good and at moment, I would ask Mr. Kuenne, who joined us. You should join us on the screen, and then we'll give you the -- and you will have to turn on your camera and your microphone obviously so we can hear you and your question.

Yes, I have a few. For Kuhn, I was wondering, you showed the smart spraying system that uses the cameras and artificial intelligence. It's good that the farming system has more data, use more data to become more efficient. But at the same time, I think the large tractor OEMs, they want to launch similar equipment. And I was wondering if there is an issue with your data from these players going into the systems of the farm on the tractor? Whether John Deere or [indiscernible] would allow you to basically use that platform? Is this software and this AI platform independent? And is it easy to use for the farmer? That would be my first question.

I'll get to that one. Yes. A matter of fact, I mean, it has nothing to do with the tractor because basically, what you need is a database that has all the pictures of the bad weed. And this database has to continuously improved. The recognition rate has to continuously be improved. And that doesn't pass through the tractor. I don't know which database tractor manufacturers are using, but at the end, it's, again, it's not the tractor detecting the bad weed. It's the sprayer, and the sprayer tractor manufacturers have it, John Deere has it, and we have, too. So they use some technology. They use a database. We use some technology. We use a database. And the database we are using is not exclusively fee for Kuhn, there are other producers also on that database. So we're probably collecting data at a similar rate or even maybe more than others. And that's the trick. It's not tractor data. It's no machine data at all.

The location of the equipment is structured data, I would think. And if the [indiscernible].

Yes. No, sorry for contradicting. It's the camera system and the data box and media box is basically on that sprayer. And the camera systems are the -- are in the boom. It's not in front of the tractor. It's on the boom, on the sprayer boom.

I was thinking the GPS system, that's in tractors. So the positioning of the system tractor and implement business tractor data. So John Deere started that maybe 20 years ago. I was wondering if there's a potential clash of systems there?

No. By the way, our GPS units cost peanuts today at a high precision. Not an issue.

Okay. My second question relates to Hydraulics. I was recently attending the Sandvik Capital Markets Day, and they presented a new strong [indiscernible] that uses a lot of hydraulics -- oil hydraulics systems. And they said, okay, if we switch this system from diesel powered to a pure electric, we save about 90% of the hydraulics oils in the hydraulics systems. So I'm wondering if more and more earthmoving equipment and tractors and implements become driven by smart motor, so motor plus drive instead of hydraulics, isn't that a high risk for you to lose business, structurally lose business, if not, why not?

Yes. Yes, we are aware of that issue over time here and there. A hydraulic drive will be replaced by an electric solution. I believe that as well. That's one of the reasons why we did buy or invest into that mobile drives, the inverters and converters. There's one element which cannot be replaced yet. These are lateral movements. Cylinders are just much more powerful than motor draining a spindle, there's the dust and everything, that is, at the moment, still pretty irreplaceable. It is really rotative movements with lower forces that can be replaced by electric motors, and that's where there is an immediate risk lateral movements that will take another decade before there's anything visible, I think, on the market that could replace that. It will be a combination in the future on the machinery that we are serving. And we want to also provide a combination to our customers. So this part will be hydraulic. That's what we have as a solution. And here, you need to invert a converter, maybe even the electric motor to do that part of your movement on the machine. That is our vision. But there will be some kind of a switch over, I would agree with you.

Okay. Understood. My last question is on Municipal. I was wondering if 20% of the smaller sweepers are already electric, and there's even higher percentages for you going forward and battery costs become a big issue for you or the hedging of battery costs. I was wondering what the system currently is, how do you hedge your costs there? And what portion of the sweeper is currently battery costs? So what portion of the vehicle is battery?

Yes. It's -- I cannot give you a percentage, but it's substantial. The batteries are still expensive. That said, battery costs are coming down. Next generation, now we're working again with a Chinese supplier, which technically at the moment, according to our assessment, are the leaders. So we're looking into that. But that's a topic. And just to give you an information, I mean, we have electric sweepers. And from the outside, they remain the same, the electric motors and so on, they remain the same. And probably within the last 4 years or 5 years, we already replaced the battery system 3 times because the cell development is happening so quickly that we have to stay ahead of the game on technology. So we're continuously reviewing where, which cells, which battery packs are becoming available, how the price development is and what we should put into our systems. That is an ongoing topic. Prices as well, yes, an interesting element, but it's coming down as well. That's there's no doubt.

So it's a big margin boost this year then from these sweepers? Is that what do you expect? the higher margin there?

No, because the price pressure on electric sweepers is increasing as well. There's more competition there. So I would say it's probably in line of those improvements. Good. 40 minutes to 4:00, and I do not see any further hands. I see a lot of thirsty people. I suggest we continue to the informal part. There will be drinks and a little bit of food, there will be food served in the back. We will be around, happy to answer further questions, obviously. Thank you for attending. We appreciate your interest. Have a nice afternoon.