Bucher Industries AG (BUCN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So 2:00 sharp, and as a good Swiss company, I think we're going to start right on time, as usual. Welcome to this hybrid meeting. We have quite some people sitting here in the room, but we also have about the same amount probably and -- listening to us online. So the video conference, as we are producing it now, is going to be recorded; will be available after that, up to the Q&A. The Q&A will not be recorded anymore, just if that is still in question. I will make some comments on the market. Obviously I will also explain some products and some new features that we have and so on to give you a bit of a background for Bucher. And Manuela will then present more details on cash flow, balance sheet and some other topics as well. 2024 was a challenging year for Bucher. Clearly the demand for the products and services of our company declined, I must say, as expected. We already had seen some signs in 2023. So the sales were down below the previous year's level. Actually it was only one division defying the trend, which was Bucher Municipal. They managed to grow. Actually you can see a product from them. So that's the honor that they receive. They can show a product here. It's an electrified truck-mounted sweeper that we produce over close to London, in Dorking. It's a very quiet machine and obviously also very sustainable. The operating profit margin of the group dropped below our expectations, below what we even had anticipated during the year. If you will remember correctly, 10% EBIT margin is our benchmark that we like to achieve at least over the cycle. And we are in a cyclical business. We made progression concerning our CO2 footprint. We managed to reduce that substantially. We'll have some details later on. If we look at the long-term development, I think there's no doubt Bucher is in a very solid position. We have a comfortable cash position. We're at CHF 400 million net debt -- or net cash, I must say. And then we have a high equity ratio of 68%. We are proposing a dividend of CHF 11. And we did announce a share buyback program for the next 2 years. And yes, you also heard or read maybe about some changes that are in planning for next year, as I will then hand over my responsibility to my successor; an internal candidate, which I'm really happy about. I'll give you some details at the end. If you see, percentage numbers here. I must highlight that these are adjusted numbers for any acquisition effects or any FX currency change effects. So just so that you compare the right numbers with what you're reading in the annual report. Basically, order intake was lower. We have mentioned that. And there are probably 2 major cycles that had influenced that. On the one hand, we had the agricultural cycle which had been in a high for the past 3 years up to about mid-2023 and then dropped substantially and continued to drop until about mid of last year. And it's about half of our business has to do with the agricultural cycle with Bucher. And then we had the other cycle, which was glass. We also had some strong years before that. Glass containers were produced strongly and a lot. There was a lot of demand as well. And that slowed down substantially, especially in the second half of 2024. So altogether, order intake came down by 11%, a lot more in the first half year than in the second half year. And if you'll remember correctly, the fourth quarter, we even had a small growth. The other element that didn't help, and I think it's almost a bit of like a post-corona effect, is we were like in a high after the corona, which was the years '21, '22, '23. And then we had almost overproduced for the market. And I can -- think we can generalize that almost throughout -- or most of the divisions. And we've overproduced into a demand situation that was declining, and that's the mismatch that we had between supply and demand. And now this is all leveling out again. And we'll probably see a bit more normalized situation in the future, but that was clearly one of these shock waves that came, after corona, of undersupply 2020, oversupply in the years to follow. And now it's again a correction until it stabilizes, these waves. Sales for the group was below prior year by almost 10%. If we look at the regions, then we must say it was mainly Europe that was suffering. Americas was holding. Asia was doing pretty good. Europe is still the most important market for us. It still has -- 60% of sales goes to Europe. Within the Americas, we saw a bit of a shift. South America was weakening a bit and North America was getting a bit stronger. Kuhn is still the biggest division. It makes up 37% of our sales. Usually it was somewhere around 40%. So there we can see that the agricultural cycle was the strongest -- or had the strongest effect on our sales. We did initiate cost savings. That's for sure. We had to reduce our head count by about 6%. If we count year-end to year-end, we are now at about 14,100 employees head count, not FTEs but head count. And Manuela will give some more precise numbers on that. And as such, I would say the EBIT margin that we achieved in such a downturn of 9% is a solid result. It's not something that gets us hyperexcited, but I think we did the right steps. And it is a solid result for the downturn. We did not hold back with R&D. We have achieved about 4.4% of net sales that went into R&D. We increased the costs overall by CHF 7 million and because we believe we have to continue to innovate our product lines. And then just 2 examples that you can see here. There is a tillage machine. That's a machine that basically runs through the stubble fields after it has been harvested. And the whole idea is to cut the stubbles into smaller pieces and then some of it has to go underground. And the exciting part for us is that we are now measuring basically the pressure that we exert onto this machine. And with this, we are controlling the depth of the machine. If you go too deep, you use a lot of diesel; and it's not necessary. If you don't go deep enough, then you don't have the ground to have a good yield with the next harvest, so you have to have that at the precise levels. Depends on what you have in there, but 10, 15 centimeters is usual. So we have discs and tines that pull through -- or rake through that stubble field to prepare it for the next seeding. We won some awards for that electronic control. And so that's also of -- one topic of automation. So we're trying to help our customers to control the machine better and better. We're taking more and more control algorithms away from him and putting it into an electronic box. Another element that we developed is -- you can just see the sensor here. These are lidar sensors that we put onto sweepers, and they have different functions. And they can watch for safety or they can help to steer the machine. I will show you an example a bit later for that as well. Also there we won an award in Germany. Okay, we did continue to spend CapEx as well. We expanded buildings. On the left side here, you can see a picture of our factory in Latvia, Ventspils. That's where we produce the compact sweepers. We're very happy with this factory, very happy with the work ethics and the setup. And we just decided to add more floor space to it, as we're coming out with a new line of machines that needs an additional assembly line, but we also automated our production more and more. We have robots coming in. It's -- they produce good quality. Obviously, the robots, they can run day and night. And they don't have salary increases at a regular basis like in other cases. Good, but we -- there are many more cases of investments that we did, with buildings in Klettgau; and Delhi; and Italy, Reggio Emilia. Bucher Automation got a new building close to Stuttgart; and, and, and. So we are preparing ourselves for the future. It would not be Bucher like if we would not do so. The energy consumption, which is another topic of interest for us, came down substantially, as you can see. That have obviously had to do, on one hand, with less economic activity. We need a lot of energy, for example, for our powder coating, where we have an oven waiting there. If there's less powder coating, there is less heating needed, but it also have to do that we are generating more of our own electricity. For example, we installed more solar power or photovoltaic cells on our buildings. The installed capacity increased by 56% last year. We now have 9,000 kilowatt peak hours of self-produced electricity. That is substantial. If we look at the CO2 footprint, you can see the upper bar. That is the bar for 2023, where we were at 81,000 tonnes of CO2 emitted. And now we dropped down to roughly 70,000 tonnes in 2024. Substantial reduction has to do with the biggest green bar there, the electricity sourcing. We made it an action item, to source green electricity for our production buildings; and that went pretty well. We also added solar capacity. As you can see, it's a bit of a smaller bar, the first green bar. And then if you look at the lower green bars there: It really has to do with either efficiency, be it a better compressor that needs less electricity; or be it because we just had less to do, less activity, but overall it's a 15% decline of our CO2 emissions. And I think it's a step in the right direction. We will continue down this path. We also set ourselves a new goal. We are always taking 2021 as a base for our CO2 emissions. And we had emissions of 93,000 tonnes in those days, and our objective is now to reduce it by 25% until the year 2028. And we have many ideas how to do so. Good. In the annual report, you will see quite some nice and interesting stories. I recommend that you read them. We show basically how we are driving innovation for our customers, often enough very close and close relation to our customers. And I can show you one nice example which we're very proud of, just as an example. Farming, of course, in Brazil is a very important element. They have about 63 million hectares of farmland that they can use. They're producing a tremendous amount of soybeans and corn and so on and which is it's about 63x the surface of the arable land in Switzerland, so it's huge amounts. And the fields are big, long, straight. That makes it attractive for big machines. They have 2.5 harvests in Brazil because they continuously have actually warm weather and also sufficient rain. So they can continuously harvest it, so it's all about having a machine that is very big to serve your field quickly, that can go fast and that is precise. We came out with a new planter. The planter basically plants in single corns at a very specific distance. If it's too much, [ you use yield ]. If it's not enough, it doesn't grow nicely. And then at the same time, we put next to the plant also fertilizer; and all this, we do at 10 to 15 kilometers an hour with a tractor that maybe has about 500 horsepower. There you can see this planter. It has 13.5 meters width, goes at a high speed. It has tanks, a couple of tanks, of 9,000 liters of volume. It's a huge machine. You can imagine. And then so that we can transport it from one field to the next, we have to put it on the road. And there we have to fold these 13.5 meters into 3.5 meters, so that all falls back, actually 3.2 meters, to be very precise. So that is a really achievement. I think we're very proud. And it's a machine that has a lot of traction in the market. And another element that's important because, when you have 13.5 meters, you can't have it rigid: It needs to be somewhat flexible, so as you run over the field and you have suddenly a small little hump that you have to overcome, the machine has to adapt basically to the contours of the field. I want to show you another element. I mentioned to you that we have these lidar sensors. You can actually see them on the picture, next to the head of the gentleman; or then on the upper left side on the right picture. And this lidar basically has a 3-dimensional picture of what's going on in front and around the sweeper. It has one function that, if somebody starts getting close to the sweeper in -- within the parameter, the sweeper slows down or stops, for security reasons. It also has the possibility to look ahead. If it sees a collision coming with the sweeper, with the brushes; and a car, for example, it can also slow down the machine. So we're taking the task away from the operator more and more. And we also have a function where it can drive along the curb, along the sidewalk automatically, so the operator really can concentrate on using the brushes correctly and driving the fan instead of driving the machine, again a step towards automation. We're helping the operator in this task. And these machines obviously are attractive because, like this, you can use less-qualified operators. In the future, that is the major trend for Bucher Industries, as we're going to automate more and more with sensors and controls and help to do the tasks automatically. One more example is an hydraulic setup that we built for this front loader. That's the company STOLL. And we started integrating electronics into our hydraulic circuit to better control the hydraulic movement. If you have raw hydraulics, there is hysteresis in it. It shakes a bit, all these elements. All this is calculated through the processor real time and it levels it out and controls the valve electronically. That is the whole idea. It makes for much smoother operation and much easier for the operator and the tractor. And another nice picture. It is about controlling the exact amount of glass as it drops into one of these shaping forms. And this glass that you can see here is -- I mean it's fascinating. It's a company in Germany that produces these flacons for perfumes. And that is, of course, a topic of marketing. These are beautiful shaped glass forms. It has -- they're small. They have to be precise in shape and setup. They cannot have any blemishes, so it is really the high art of glass forming. And we have a system where we now automatically cut the glass drop before it drops into the shape, based on camera systems. So there is a camera system continuously measuring each drop as it comes out, measuring the length, the volume. It can then deduct the weight. If it becomes too heavy or too light, it can adjust the cutting mechanism, the plunger mechanism; and that is done automatically. These are tasks that used to be done by very experienced operators. 30 years, he was in a company. He knew his machine, was married to his machine and knew exactly what to adjust so that the gob would come out correctly. Now we're automating these tasks more and more because these people are more difficult to find. So one more example. Now you're really getting hungry. Actually it's for a company in Switzerland which I not -- cannot mention, but they needed these tanks which we produce close to Ukrainian border in Poland, a factory that we bought 3 years ago. And there we have a mixer in this tank. It needs very precise temperature control. It's all stainless steel. It needs to be washable, all that. And that is something we are proud of that we can do that very efficiently and automatic in this factory in Poland, for in this case, the chocolate mass, that stays liquid and needs to be agitated continuously as it's being processed. And like this, I could go on for a while, but well, let's move on to the divisions. And I would start off with Kuhn Group, one more product that you can see here which we are excited about. And we are launching -- we launched it, about 2 years, in France. Now we're launching it internationally, is one of these mixers and feeders. And fact is, when you have a dairy farm, you continuously have to feed your cows. It's a tedious task. A lot of them do it with a truck or so. They drive into the stable then they deliver the food in front of the cows. And then they go out again and they make the tour. And here we have a fully automatic robot that can do that. It drives out to the -- in the farm, picks up the foodstuff, mixes it. It has a screw in the hopper. And then it delivers it to the cow as it drives through the stable. And then it switches over to electric as it drives through the stable and comes back out in the diesel version. That is an automatic feeder which creates quite some excitement in the market because again there it's more and more difficult to find the people that are willing to do that the whole day. So let's talk about the ag cycle. We had a great ag cycle in -- actually it started 2020, which was a bit of our surprise. It went on '21, '22, mid of '23. It was really exciting times, a lot of money in that market. And the demand was incredible for our products and others as well. And if I quickly recall what the drivers are for the ag cycle, it's mostly the farm income. And the farm income has actually 4 major factors. The first factor is commodity pricing, so if the commodity prices are high, obviously it has higher income. Second factor is yield, which is mainly dependent on the weather. Then third factor is subsidies. That is, of course, a political question. For example, in Poland, they're receiving the subsidies now, so there is a bit of an upturn there. And then the fourth factor is costs. Costs can be fuel. It can be fertilizer. It can be interest rates. These are probably major -- the. Key elements. That's why I always start this presentation with showing you the -- where the prices, the commodity prices, were. And on this chart, on the left side, you can see the commodity prices as they developed over the years. And then in the dotted line, you can see the last year, how that came along, yes. The top line, in green, that's soybeans. So we had very good years '21, '22, '23. And then the price started declining over the course of last year, ending up at a low at the end of 2024 and obviously a factor for the farmers. They were making less money on their soybean harvests. Then we have wheat, which also had a very high level. It came down over time; and kind of stabilized at a more lower level, I would say, in 2024. And in blue, you can see the corn price, now here only for the United States, but that, I think, we could apply for many regions, where it continued to come down until about August. And then there was a slight uptick in a better direction, a bit of consolidation. That's good, but overall, the farmers didn't receive anymore the commodity prices they had in the years before. It was a lot better for the milk farmers, a lot better for the meat producers. There the prices were high and stable and attractive, and they were making money. So if we look at the farm income, the most representative graph is probably the one for the United States. Now bear in mind the United States was doing better than Europe last year, but you can see 2024. The farm income came down. That is the blue or the red line is about the same, but you can see it. It had a downwards trend. On the right side, you can see the orange bars, which is the subsidies they received. So 2024 was a bad year for subsidies. We can talk about the expectations for 2025, where they think there should be subsidies available from the government, at least in the U.S. And that should help to drive the farm income. The question remains what are they going to use the money for, but that is basically one of the main drivers for investments. Now last year, if we look at the agricultural cycle, we had one more factor that was important. That was the dealer stocks. We had a situation where the dealers were frantically finding material in 2023. They order whatever they could get. They took whatever they could get. They probably over-ordered here and there as well. And then suddenly, all the tractor manufacturers and so on were able to deliver; and they filled their yards with tractors and machinery. And the dealers were running low on money and they had to hold back with any further orders, so we had a high-supply situation hitting a low-demand situation. And so the dealers were kind of the buffer in between, and they had to take the brunt. And obviously they didn't order too much machinery from us at the same time. All in all, what happened was that we had a low cycle in 2024. It was especially Europe that was affected. In Europe, it was the second effect, the yield effect, which was mostly impacted. We had a lot of wet weather a year ago, if you remember. The seeding started late. The fields were difficult to work in and that -- and the yields were not very good. It was the other way around in North America. There the yields were -- the yields and the weather was pretty good, so the farmers in North America kept ordering. And we made some good sales in the United States but not so in Europe. Here it was mostly -- Germany was very heavily affected, but also some other countries like Poland and so on. All in all, the order intake went down by 11.5%. One other element that's important is always spare parts business, which is somewhere between 15%, 20%. That remained stable. So that part was stabilized, but the machinery part was reduced. The sales itself decreased by even more, by 16.5%. There the Brazilian market was affected. The German, I mentioned before, was affected. 2 larger markets that kind of were holding up was the United States -- and also France, interestingly enough, kept stable last year. We did adjust our capacities. We had to adjust our capacities. We were running under utilization, for example, in Brazil; also somewhat in France. And at the end, we wound up with 8% EBIT margin despite the adaptations. I would continue to Bucher Municipal. That was a nice story. It's a nice machine that you can see here. We came out with it. We produce it in England and in Dorking. We used to produce these big, huge sweepers in Denmark. They were very nice machines 0.5 million in value, but they didn't make real good profit for us, so we stopped that production by the end of last year. We transferred the basics to our U.K. facility. And we set up a modular design for the new machine, which you can see here, the V120. And on this machine, we are now selling successfully in the market. It also has a redefined air stream and ventilation system that makes it more efficient, so we are proud of that. Maybe just as an update also on automation. This machine has 2 engines, basically. It has a diesel engine on the back which drives the fan. And then it has the engine on the truck chassis that drives, of course, the whole machine. And we are -- usually, the operator, when he gets into the truck, he turns on the fan. And he drives it full speed because he wants maximum suction power. He doesn't really need it because, when the nozzles are down on the ground, you don't need as much suction to pick up everything, but he doesn't want to care about looking if everything is blocked -- anything is blocked or so, so he just drives it at full speed. And then we are somewhere at 30 to 40 liters of fuel per hour. We have installed camera systems and make it available to customers, where they now look at the nozzle automatically. And if they see that the nozzle needs to be lifted because there's a bottle rolling in front of it, he automatically drives up the fan, lifts the nozzle, sucks up that bottle then does the reverse again, drives down the fan and puts down the nozzle again. And through that, we believe about 25% of fuel savings can be done; and I think that's an attractive opportunity for our customers. So also there it's about automation. It's something that the operator used to do or maybe didn't. And now we're helping out with more and more technology, with camera systems especially, to drive for a more efficient future. Let's talk about the numbers of Bucher Municipal. So they had a stable demand. The order intake even exceeded last year's level by 4.5%. If I run through the categories that we have: We have these truck-mounted sweepers, the big ones, that you just saw one. They did very well last year. We have a very good position in Europe, by the way, especially also in the U.K. It was also helpful that we could get the chasses that we were longing for in '23 and we could fulfill the orders. If I look at the winter maintenance equipment. Also that rose in the reporting year. There were many projects won for salt spreaders especially. Then we have the production of sewer cleaning equipment to clean the sewage systems. That reached previous year's levels, so it was at a pleasing level. And then 2 elements that had a bit of a downturn were the compact sweepers. We were very good with electric compact sweepers. And there was quite a boom up to '23 for compact sweepers in electric form. Now that boom kind of subsided a bit. There's a bit less subsidies available for these machineries, so we saw there a bit of a downturn. And then the refuse collection had then a great 2023. It was a little less activity in Australia but still at a very pleasing level. So in Australia, we had less order intake than the year before. Overall, Bucher Municipal sales exceeded the previous year by 6.6%. If we look at the regions, it was Germany that drove well. Australia went pretty well. Americas and the U.K., among others, were good. In the United States, we are starting to sell more and more compact sweepers. That's a pleasing element. The division benefited from the higher capacity utilization, continued to improve their EBIT margin. They're now at 7.6%. That's good. I hope we can continue down that path. One of the companies that we were actually delivering salt spreaders from was a company in Italy, in Revello. We own 60% of it. It was always fully consolidated, but we didn't have the full amount. And last year, we decided to buy the rest of 40% from that company, just as an information. I would continue to Bucher Hydraulics. We're one of the top leaders for these power packs, we call them, small hydraulic circuits. What you can see here is an electric motor. Then there is a pump connected to it. The pump is somewhere in the container. That's where you put the hydraulic fluid in it. And in between the electric motor and that pump is the hydraulic circuit where you control the volume and the pressure. And that is what we call a power pack, and we have all kind of different variants from that. We are scaling down. We're getting into a more modular approach. And so that we can serve our customers quicker, we introduced a configurator where he can enter all his data and specifications and we then, hopefully, get the right solution for him in a much faster fashion. Hydraulics was suffering last year as well. Bear in mind about 1/4, 1/5 to 1/4, of their business is agriculture. We're a good supplier to John Deere. We go into big tractors. Big tractors [ is ] crop production. Crop production was suffering, so that was one of the elements that was holding Bucher Hydraulics back, notably in Europe, especially in Germany obviously as well; a bit less in North America, where we maintained our level. China and India went actually pretty well last year in the hydraulics sector. So we had a weak agricultural machinery cycle. We also saw a contraction in the construction equipment sector. And then finally, we also have inverters and converters for electric buses in that division. Also that was a discipline that contracted last year, yes. So the order intake, all in all, came down by roughly about 12.6%. Demand for stationary industrial hydraulics, interestingly enough, picked up. And also the demand for material handling solutions was rather stable. If we look at the sales. They, of course, followed more or less the order intake. They came down by 10.5% compared to the year before. And we had to cut costs, for sure. This was an ongoing trend already since 2023, so we kept doing what we have been doing. Some locations introduced short-term work. We expanded vacation days and so on and so on, had to reduce the head count as well. At the end, we wound up with 10.9% EBIT margin. In the past 2 months, we acquired another company in the sector. It's a company that was producing hydraulic circuits in Scandinavia for the mining industry, for marine applications, also for defense. We're excited to have that small team onboard. Scandinavia itself is the second biggest market, after Germany, for Bucher Hydraulics, so it's good to have another location there. Before that, in 2024, we still acquired 20% of a company that we had bought about 5 years ago, Bucher Hydraulics Wuxi. There were 20% outstanding and we could now double up to have 100%. I would move on to Emhart Glass. It's always fascinating to see these glass factories. I mean molten glass is nice and shiny, obviously, and light. And you -- it's, like a small kid, you will love to touch it, but it's 1,400 degrees. You will only do it once, yes. And then you see them working around these factories. It's the surrounding is tough, I must say. And one of the tasks they have to do is -- so you have this glass, the molt glass, flowing along. And then it's being pushed through 3 orifices. And there it's being cut off to make these gobs that are being shaped. And from time to time -- these are ceramic orifices. They have to replace these orifices, so you take out the old thing. The glass keeps pouring and you have to slide in a new orifice manually. That's the way it's done. And Emhart Glass was pretty clever: They started looking around in other applications. And they went into the metal industry; and they saw, hey, they're doing it differently. And they have the same topic. You have molten glass or molten steel. When you start moving it on to a cold surface, it gets hard. How do you deal with it? How do you make these surfaces work? And they came up with a solution which is very similar to the steel application, where now you can electrically, basically, replace these orifices on the run. It goes very quick; and no manual work involved, except for taking the cooled-off orifice away at the end, a big step forward for all these glass factories. Believe me. It sounds like something small, but for the employees, it's a big step. It's good. It sells pretty well. Customers are excited. Nevertheless, the glass industry actually have held up pretty well until about second half of last year and then slowed down substantially. If we look at the numbers. There we are. The order intake, as you can see, came down by almost 30%. That's the biggest of all divisions. The -- many glass manufacturers are actually -- they're suffering from the high energy prices. They overproduced. Their glass bottle fleets are sitting around in warehouses, and now they decided to stop. And some factories closed their lines. If you also read the newspapers: I know Owens-Illinois is really holding back with investments. Ardagh glass is one of the big four in the world. They have many glass plants. They are in almost kind of a restructuring phase, so there's something -- there's a serious pressure in that industry. So order intake at Bucher Emhart Glass went down, I mentioned it, almost 30% versus a strong year before. It's mainly in Europe and North America where they are affected. Asia and India is actually not doing too bad. And if we look into the future, we can see that there's more and more activity in these areas, also South America; and less in the old Western world. Probably it also has to do with energy prices. The sales. Because we had many orders and big projects that we could still deliver, the sales fell by 10%. Some of the deliveries that were ready for December did not get delivered. The customer said, "Hold off. We don't need it at the moment," so we're carrying it into 2025. And hopefully, we can deliver it this year. The other element that we have is the forming side, and then we have the inspection side. These are smaller machines that have to inspect every bottle. Every glass bottle has to be inspected on machines. That's a business that's about 10% of the sales, but it is growing. We're doing well there because we have new technology involved. Operating profit margin, yes. Well, it's 16.8%. It's clearly the highest that we have within Bucher Industries. That is very pleasing. It came down from phenomenal almost 19%, yes. And so we are still happy that we had the 16.8% under these conditions. I'm coming to the last and probably most challenged division. That is Bucher Specials. Here is just one example, the presses that we make for grapes. Here we came out with a new model, but it's old designed. Some of the customers wanted to have back an old design, which basically means that we are squeezing the grapes in that round barrel, but then the juices flow out into the container. And from there and -- it is picked up. It's easy to clean. For us it's good because it's modular design. We can produce it rather efficiently. And then we put some design elements in there so that it looks like a bottle. I don't know if you recognize the bottle shape into it, a small, little gimmick, as well. It's easy to clean. That's what they like as well. So that's a new product we came out with, but Bucher Vaslin, especially the grape market, the wine market and especially in France, was extremely challenged. A matter of fact, they got subsidies to tear out their vineyards and to reduce the surface for vineyards in France. And this is one of our key markets. And obviously there was not very much demand for presses out there, so Bucher Vaslin came down sharply. We made a small acquisition in Portugal, where we bought a small -- a sales company to go with it, nothing really major. The other company that has to do with juices, apple juice and orange juice, is called Bucher Unipektin. We produce the presses there. That business held pretty stable. Orange juice is at a very high level at the moment. The volumes of oranges are down because of a sickness that's going on in Florida, and as such, the concentrate prices are high. And many small producers are interested in producing their own little orange juice and they're buying small presses from us. Then we have the third business, which is import business for tractors in Switzerland. That followed the general trend of agriculture but was not quite as dramatic as we had it with Kuhn Group, but there was some decline in sales. The inventory of dealers was again the topic there. And finally, we have the unit called Bucher Automation that is mainly a supplier to other divisions within Bucher. It supplies controls for the glass forming market. It supplies controls for Kuhn; supplies controls for Bucher Municipal; and so on; and also for Bucher Hydraulics, the inverters and converters. All these businesses -- or mainly the glass business but also the inverters, converters were down; and Bucher Automation noticed it. So all in all, the order intake shrunk by 8.1%, the sales by 8.8%. And since the signs came up pretty late in the year, we were too late in adjusting our cost. And that led to a very low 2.3% EBIT margin, obviously not our standard objective. I would hand over to Manuela, I think, for some good news overall. And I will come back for the end. Thank you.

Thank you, Jacques. Yes, some really nice pictures and really nice machines. And for all these machines, of course, we also need some investments. And when we do investments, we ask ourselves, do we really create value? Do we have enough financial power to invest in the future? And I would like to elaborate a little bit more on that. So talking about performance. And here you may already have noticed our financial slides have a new look and feel, more pictures, more graphs, comparative values. And as Bucher is really a long-term company, you also have historical figures in the handout which is available online. And this is a clear handwriting also from Jin in investor relation, which did a really good job on our new [indiscernible]. Yes, let's talk about the content, a solid result in a challenging environment. And the EBIT was impacted by declining volumes, higher inventory adjustments and slightly higher IT costs. Deducted by the net financial result of CHF 8 million and income tax of CHF 63 million, we ended up with a profit for the year of CHF 228 million. The net financial result is mainly driven by a really strong cash position and income tax with a tax rate of around 22%. The tax rate was in line with our expectation and also in line with our mid-term projection. The profit and, as a result, the earnings per share fell by 1/3. When we are talking about value creation, then the most important KPI is the return or, in our case, the RONOA. Here coming from the right side, the return on net operating assets after tax amounted to 14.6% for the year, so it's still well above our cost of capital of 8%. 2 reasons: on one hand, the performance, we already talked about it; on the other hand, operating profits divided by the invested capital. Invested capital, you see it in the middle, is an increase. And we ended the year with CHF 1.5 billion invested capital on average. And the main reason is higher investments in property, plant and equipment. And we already heard some really nice examples. Another example is our new building in Klettgau, which also offers space for our trainees or apprentices in the fields of metalworking and mechatronics. Part of the net operating asset is the net working capital. And we were able to reduce in particular inventory, which accelerated towards year-end. However, on the other hand, we had lower advances from Kuhn Group and Bucher Emhart Glass, the reason why the net working capital reduction was only around CHF 30 million. However, this improvement or the reduction of net working capital had also positive impact on our cash flows. We ended the year -- over the year, we were able to produce CHF 200 million operating free cash flow. And this is around CHF 50 million on average higher than our historical average mainly due to the net working capital reduction. With CHF 200 million, we were also able to further acquire some companies; or in this case or for 2024, mainly 2 minority buyouts. We paid dividends of close to CHF 150 million, and we ended with a positive free cash position of around CHF 8 million. With this positive CHF 8 million, we have a very nice, strong cash position of slightly above CHF 400 million. And during the reporting period, we were also able to repay the bond of around CHF 100 million. And we also reduced or further reduced unused credit facility over the year. And our solid position is also reflected in our equity ratio, closer to 70%, so really a strong position also here. We know that our success is due to our employees' expertise and high level of commitment. And to be an attractive employer is important for us, and that also can be seen here in these figures. Here we are talking about head counts. We started the year with almost, close to 15,000 head counts. And we see here a reduction of 5%, but we also can see the turnover rate or the resignation rate. It's almost similar to last year. Here we are talking just about the turnover rate and resignation rate of our regular employees that shows that the most decline was mainly related to temporary or defined worker, in particular in Europe but also in Brazil. On top of that, we also took measures like reducing overtime, holidays, introducing short-time work, adjusting weekly working hours in order to safeguard the job as much as possible. And of course, investment in trainees is important. And here we achieved a similar figure than last year, around 30 hours per employee we invested in trainees. So to come back to our first question. Did we create value? Yes. We achieved a RONOA of 14.5%. We created value for all our stakeholders. We have met the needs of our customers. We maintained strong working relationships with our suppliers. We secured jobs. We paid taxes in countries in which we operate, which is important for us. And we were also able to provide cash to our investors. And second, with a strong operating free cash flow of CHF 200 million; and a very, very solid financial position, we have sufficient capacity to continue investing in future growth and attractive jobs. And to give you a bit more flavor on our outlook, I would like to hand over to Jacques.

Thank you, Manuela. So there we are. We'll come to the end. Manuela will stay with me so that we can, after that, continue with a Q&A. [Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language]

[Foreign Language] Okay, now outlook. Yes, that is a big question mark of how does it continue, obviously. Agriculture is a cyclical business that we know there are times when it goes down and then there are times when it will come back again because we will have to keep feeding this world. There is no doubt about that. The demand is there for foodstuff. It's just where will it be produced and with what machinery. That is the big question. Normally our visibility is about 6 months. And we know that the first half year of 2025 will be challenging, but we can see that it is kind of bottoming out. And in some areas, for example, in Europe, we can start seeing positive trends. You already saw the Q4 order intake which was a bit more promising. And we also believe that dairy and livestock will be more interesting. They are making money. And that demand on that side, which is about half of our business, should kick in earlier. The element that is challenging or remains challenging or at the question mark is what's going to happen with crop production, as the commodity prices are still on the low side. And we at the moment especially see a shift a bit away from Europe as a weak market over to the United States as a weak market, lower demand in the United States, whereas in Europe, for example, U.K., Germany, Poland, we see a revival happening, albeit from a low level. So all in all, the question is, of course, how does it -- how quickly does it kick in? How much does it affect 2025? We assume for the time being that Kuhn Group sales will be at last year's level and that the profitability will be held there where it is, around the 8%. For Bucher Municipal, that is still holding up. Demand is there. Order intake is good. And we assume there will be a slight reduction in sales but overall from -- at a good level and that we can continue to improve the operational profit margin that we achieve with Bucher Municipal. That is the anticipation for 2025. Then finally we have Bucher Hydraulics. There we expect some recovery to happen. Hydraulics is actually a early cycler. Then in other words, if they start producing bigger tractors again, preparing for a crop production market that might come back, they will have to start ordering again our components, as one example. And there are other industries as well, so we believe there will be some kind of a recovery happening during the course of 2025. Obviously the first half will still be very, very subdued. Then at the end, we have Emhart Glass. There we know it will be a challenging 2025 just because the run time until we deliver projects is about 9 months or so. So even if we would get something in now, it's -- the year is almost over. So the projects are low and -- in the first half. We have more capacity utilization in the second half of 2025. We're continuously adjusting the cost level to come along with it. Overall -- there we are. We are counting with significantly lower sales and a profit margin that is also subdued at that moment. And then we have Bucher Specials. There, again, we believe that sales should continue roughly at the same level as we had it this year -- last year, excuse me, but we definitely want to improve the operating profit margin. We're working on that already with cost programs, et cetera. What does that mean if we put it all together? As far as we can see now, we think that the group should have stable sales about the same level as 2024. And we believe that also the operating profit margin should be the same, not counting the sales of a property that we're working on in Niederweningen, and that -- it would increase our EBIT margin by about 1.4 percentage points. The signature should happen today, but we don't know yet.

I just got the message.

It has been signed.

Yes.

That's good.

And this...

And that's no fake. It's really happening as we speak. That's no fake, yes. So signatures. Then closing will be in about 3 months or so.

3, up to 4, months; depend a bit on the condition, closing condition.

Okay, so by then, we should have it in, but most likely, in 2025, this effect will kick in. So that's nice as well. So all in all, first half subdued, second half most likely more optimistic. When and how, that's the big question mark that remains open. We are a company that generates solid cash. We know that. And our dividend policy tells us to pay out about half of the net profit. That's also to be in sync with all the other stakeholders. We have to reduce head counts and so on. We also want to adjust to that, so we reduced the dividends to CHF 11, which is still a good 3.4% dividend yield, so we're not losing our story there, but we have a lot of cash. And that led us to the question, what should we do with it? At the moment, we have no big company that we would like to acquire. And if we would do so, we probably even would do it with debt from the banks. And at that moment, we have to -- we've decided that we would like to buy back shares from our own company and then destroy them over time. Good. The general assembly will be on the 16th of April 2025. We will suggest Manja Greimeier, she is responsible for the tire business in Continental, to join us on the Board. I think she is a good fit, yes. And then we also announced my succession in the typical Bucher style, 14 months in advance, yes, but I think it's good. I mean it has clearly been also my idea to say, after 10 years CEO of Bucher Industries, I think it is the right thing. It's the right thing for Bucher if somebody else comes in and looks at the companies maybe from a different angle. And it's the right thing that we could find somebody that was available internally. We are convinced that Matthias Kümmerle will be absolutely apt in growing into the CEO position. There will be some learning needed, but he will manage to do so. And Matthias has been the leader of Bucher Emhart Glass that ran through a very positive development in the past couple of years. He took over the reins in 2021, but he has been with the company, before that, 10 years. And he even had a stint before that. And between, he was with Hilti. He even lived in China, so he saw something else as well. All elements that are, I think, very conducive to making this -- or taking this position. And he has -- he's a engineer by trade. He studied at ETH -- promoted at the EPFL and made an MBA afterwards in Lausanne. As well, I'm excited that we can hand over his position. We are now looking for his successor, and as soon as we have him installed, then Matthias and I will be traveling the world. I will give him my ideas the way I see the business, and then he will have to make his own opinion if that is right or not. That's the way it goes. I will still be here in a year, so we're working long term. And at the general assembly 2026, I will be happily handing it over to him and wishing him good luck, yes. I will be then 28 years in the industry. I would have been 18 years as CEO, so that's, I don't know, 2/3 of the time as CEO. And I think I can -- also deserve to step down relaxed -- in a relaxed way at that moment. Very good, but up to then, the challenge remains. We still have to run through a challenging 2025. And we're not going to let go because obviously it's a matter of not only honor but also of ambition to make that a good year in 2025. Wonderful. This would be all our explanations, pretty much on time. Now we have candidates online and we have you. You have priorities since you...