Frequentis AG ($FQT)

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's online roundtable of Frequentis AG. I am delighted to welcome the CEO, Norbert Haslacher and the Head of Investor Relations, Stefan Marin, who will guide us through the presentation. And afterwards, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to audio. And having said this, I hand over to you, Mr. Haslacher.

Yes. Thank you very much, and also thank you for joining that online session about the Frequentis results 2025. First of all, I would like to say that we are very proud of what we have achieved in 2025 and a big thank you to the employees around the world who have invested enormous time and dedication to what we have achieved in 2025. So you can see already on the first slide that our order intake went up again significantly by 17% after 5 consecutive years growing our order intake. Revenues went up by 21% and the EBIT margin, we achieved 8.1%. So in detail, order intake was EUR 680 million. Orders on hand, nearly EUR 800 million and revenues grew, as I said, 21%, entirely organic growth to nearly EUR 600 million. EBIT was up EUR 46.8 million, which leads to an 8.1% EBIT margin. And net cash, as usual, was positive EUR 104 million at the end of the year, thereof, EUR 87 million was advanced payments from customers, which is in our business model, very usual that governments usually give us upfront payments according to the milestone achievements then during the program. What I want to like to mention is to be very transparent, we had an EUR 8 million claim settlement, which gave us a positive effect on our bottom line. That claim settlement was a negotiation over the last 3 years with a prime contractor we had in Europe in public safety. And last year, we achieved a claim settlement before we went to court. And therefore, that has -- or had a very positive impact on our bottom line. I would like to give you some insights about orders and projects we have won in 2025. We really secured very interesting long-term large-scale programs in 2025. So first is the APC program in the United States, where we do a rollout of IP-based-toground protocol converter systems in the United States. The budget of the FAA is around $500 million for that program. Then we also received the first orders for the modernization of the voice communication system in the U.S. And what's also growing, but very slowly is our drones business. So Sweden has decided for Frequentis for a low altitude drone operations below 500 feet for public and private drone users, and that contract was also awarded to Frequentis. Those have been the relevant and major order intakes we have achieved in the area air traffic management civil. What was also very successful is our defense business. So we have deployed the first U.S. military digital air traffic control power in operation at the U.S. Army Garrison in Germany. And what is also going forward is the SX500 program in Australia, where we are a partner of Lockheed Martin deploying our voice communication system overall Australia. What's interesting is that the drones business is -- and I come to that a little bit later, is it seems that it's coming more to more into the defense sector due to a lot of incidents we had recently in Europe. So the German Armed Forces have given us a contract where we test military uncrewed traffic management for German Army to integrate drones into a military air space. I have to say that -- and you will see that a little bit later that we have been growing in all of our segments. That's a good thing. So we didn't create any cluster risk for Frequentis. All segments have shown positive development. Also public safety, where we have secured a large contract for the Tinian State Police in Germany, where we deliver an integrated operation and control center as a prime contractor and the control center technologies are already ready for multimedia communications. As you know, our product is LiveX. It's a cloud-based system where we can integrate micro services for big data, for video and also for voice communication. What was also a big success is that we have won a large contract in Norway, where the fire emergency call centers have tendered a new communication solution. And the new system, which we will deliver to Norway will handle calls, radio, video and digital messages also based on our cloud-based system, LiveX. So here are the figures. You see that we have now since 5 consecutive years, 20% CAGR in order intake. So it really remains a very strong year 2025. And also orders on hand grew. And you see that we also have executed orders into revenues -- so currently, our orders on hand book shows EUR 800 million approximately. And I also want to mention again that we only show orders as orders on hand if they are contracted based on the real deliverable contract. It's not the budget of the customer, which is shown here. It's the share which has already been contracted out of their budget to Frequentis. Yes, revenues went up to EUR 580 million. That was a big step forward also based on the APC program, APC program, you can see that in the segment ATM, it was growing from EUR 338 million to EUR 401 and public safety has been growing from EUR 142 million to EUR 179 million. So both segments really show a good trajectory when it comes to continuous growth in our world markets. The revenue split is pretty normal, 70% ATM and 31% public safety and transport. Interesting is here, you see that Europe has been growing from a very high altitude already. But what really gave us a big push last year was Americas. And I have to be very clear here that not only the U.S., of course, the U.S. plays a major role here as there is a lot of budget available in the United States for upgrading the FA infrastructure. So we participate in that. but also Brazil and other South American companies, which are consolidated in Americas played a good role in revenues in 2025. So we have increased our revenue share in Americas from 18% to 27%. Asia went a little bit down because we had some shifts from orders from '25 to '26. They have already been secured in the first quarter of '26. And Australia and Pacific Africa. Pacific Africa is not really a focus of us. It's more an opportunistic market, but Australia did also a very good performance last year. So overall, we had 59% Europe, 27% Americas, 7% Australia, Pacific Africa, whereof most of the order intake and revenue comes from Australia and Asia, 7%. Yes. So the margin profile, as I said, we had a very good settlement with our prime contractor. So we have defended our claim, and we got an EUR 8 million payment out of that claim settlement before a court decision. I also have to say that the last 3 years, we have been filing for that claim. We have been showing only costs in public safety in the last 2 years. And 2025 was the time where we had the recognition of our claim and therefore, for bottom line and top line, we generated an EUR 8 million plus in euros. Therefore, the group EBIT grew from EUR 6.7 million to EUR 8.1 million. If we would deduct the EUR 8 million onetime payment of the claim settlement, the revenue -- the group margin would be in the range of 2024, 6.7% Yes. I also want to mention again, we are in a very stable market. So the major growth path for our business as we are focusing on safety critical control rooms and therefore, national safety critical infrastructures is that the importance of security. And I think it's very obvious that the security situation in the world has changed over the last 2, 3 years, not only in Europe, but as we see also in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia and now also, of course, in the United States. Therefore, the budgets are made available for investments into the security infrastructure, especially in the United States and in NATO countries. What's also important to us is the growth of the amount of aircraft joining the airspace. So there is a big demand of mobility in the U.S., but also in Asia, but also in Europe. So around 3,000 new aircraft enter the airspace annually. And for those aircraft, we need, of course, ground infrastructure and control center workplaces to manage that growing air traffic. That will continue, especially when you see the forecast of Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and other aircraft producers, you can anticipate that, that trend will go on for many, many, many years. What's also a push to us is the new CSR program. It's a single European Sky initiative. It's a joint undertaking between European Commission, European countries and industry. because they have issued a new funding program, CSR with a lot of money available to force industry and ANSPs to change their technology. The technology in the past 20 years was very much spaghetti code. So it is an old structure, how to develop software. That was changed now from a regulatory point of view that they want to have an environment where we talk about service-oriented architecture, micro services and cloud-ready or cloud-native solutions. That means that ANSPs are now forced to reinvest into a technological change in getting rid of the old systems and bringing in new service-oriented architectures. That's a program for the next 5 to 10 years and trajectory-based operation will play a major role in forcing or enforcing that type of technology as in future, there is anticipated that the trajectory is not calculated by the ground forces, it's calculated by the aircraft. And therefore, you need additional and different infrastructure and applications in the control centers to process that trajectory data coming in future from the aircraft. What's also interesting is besides these new technological change and new deployment models is that we've got a lot of M&A teasers in 2025, ongoing in '26. So we see, of course, -- some of them are really not interesting for us because they produce hardware, old structure, old technology, but they do some defense business. Therefore, they expect a very high multiple for their product portfolio, but we are usually not following up on that. But currently, I can report that we have some targets where we want to go more into the depth of that opportunity. They are not large. Unfortunately, there are smaller opportunities, but we are in the due diligence phase in 2 of those M&A opportunities. Currently, the outcome is not clear at the moment. Yes. One growth factor I would like to share with you is our Mission product. I have presented that already 2, 3 years ago after we have acquired Nemogent, that's a technology company in Spain coming out of the Technical University of Bilbao. They have been a pioneer in developing a technology where you can put a software-defined network layer on top of 5G to make 5G available for mission-critical push-to-talk video transmission and data transmission. The interesting thing is that there is a market coming up, which is really huge because there is an obsolescence and the replacement for Tetra and GSMR technologies coming up very soon. The industry has issued a letter to the rail infrastructure organizations worldwide that the support for GSMR will run out by 2036. GSMR is a very, very old technology, and it's in all rail operators currently live in Europe, but also in other countries. And they are now forced to change the GSMR communication technology for communication between train and control center within the next 10 years. Those are huge programs because we have to replace their whole radio access network and put a mission-critical software-defined network layer on top, which is addressed by our MCX. But also the countries now started to tender the replacement of Tetra. Tetra is also a very old technology used by Blue Light forces. So police fire rescue. The bandwidth is very, very low. So you can transmit voice and some text data, which is, of course, inappropriate for a 2026 environment. They want to have a mass data capability, a video transmission capability, which is not possible based on Tetra technology. Therefore, the countries now budget step-by-step the replacement of Tetra with 5G. It can be their own 5G network, but usually, it goes into the direction where they talk to the MNOs, the mobile network operators to have a hybrid network between mobile network operators and their own terrestrial 5G network. And then they need a service Traton on top to make that 5G network mission-critical. We can address that, and we are currently already in some tenders. The first tender we have won in the U.K. where IBM as a prime contractor, together with Samsung and Frequentis delivers a replacement of Tetra in the U.K. and put in a 5G network plus MCX on top to make a mission-critical data exchange possible. What's also one of our investment cases is the area of drones. As I said in the beginning, the European regulation is still lacking results. So the ANSPs are still not responsible for the lower airspace, which is called the nonregulated airspace. And therefore, no one is really responsible. Therefore, the budgets are lacking in the civil area as responsibility is not clarified by the European regulator. We see some ANSPs, air mitigation service providers like the Norwegian ones or the Bulgarian ones or also the Baltic ones, they get some budget available and make the budget available to implement our UTM solution to be prepared for the upcoming European regulation. By the way, we are waiting for that regulation since 2, 3 years now already. But it still seems that it takes another 2 years until we get a paper where responsibilities and obligations are described. Therefore, the market in the civil area is very, very, very slow. Nevertheless, the researches we have available from research institutions say that by 2030, the overall drone market in Europe only, including drones and hardware will be more than EUR 10 billion. We are still waiting for that regulation. On the other side, there is a fast track, which is coming from the military side. As I presented on Slide 2, we have already secured one contract from the German Armed Forces where they give us a contract to test and make a POC for military use cases where they want to -- where they have usually sensors out there, identifying a drone, giving the sensor data to our data platform. Our data platform takes care about an alignment with the ASC to identify if it's a friend or a foe based on registration data or flight plan data. And in case there is a result coming out, we give the data to the effectors to shoot the drone down or bring the drone down by jamming by net or whatever is available. So Frequentis is positioning itself as the data hub for collecting sensor data from different suppliers. checking availability of data from registration or flight plan data from an ASP and give back data in case it's a full result to the effectors, which -- where we are agnostic to any effector suppliers to bring the drone down. What's also interesting is that the remote tower operation is getting traction. Maybe most of you, if you know Frequentis for a longer time, we are waiting for the certification in the United States from the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City to get certification for the use of remote power in the NAS in the national airspace. We are the only provider currently who has done a 3 years certification process in this tech center of the FAA in Atlantic City. The forecast is still Q2 '26, where we should receive that. And then we are the only provider for the U.S. Natural Aerospace, civil and defense who have a certified solution for that remote tower operation. We already deployed that remote tower operation deployable and fixed in a couple of countries. Most of them are currently civil, except the one I've mentioned at the U.S. Army base in Germany and also in Brazil. But Germany also uses our technology and also Jersey uses it for civil purposes. So we think that the next couple of years, remote tower will play a major role in our top line for defense and for civil ASPs. So to conclude before we come to your questions is what is the outlook and management agenda for 2026? I have to say that we started already strong in '26, and we expect an increase of order intake again. Although as I have shown to you over the last 5 consecutive years, we have already shown significant growth in orders, but we think that will continue, and we have a very good feeling for '26. We also aim to increase revenues by about 10%, could be higher. But to be honest, we are a little bit conservative here as there are a lot of tensions going on when it comes to supply chain. You know that the semiconductor producers are focusing on artificial intelligence chips because that's much more margin for them. Therefore, time line and price commitments from Dell or HP currently is a challenge. And we do not know how the situation in the Middle East will continue. Therefore, we said that we aim to increase the revenues by about 10%, depending on the development of the supply chain and of course, of the situations we have in the Middle East. EBIT margin, we will increase. So we think it will be about 7%. That's our guidance now. CapEx is about EUR 15 million and the company funded R&D expenses of about 6% of revenues. For the new guys of you here in the call, I would like to mention that Frequentis has a very conservative bookkeeping rule. So we do not capitalize any R&D. You won't find capitalized R&D in our balance sheet. So we expense all our R&D expenses, which is around EUR 30 million annually. Yes, that was my presentation, and I would like to open up now for question and answers.

Yes. Thank you very much for the presentation and the insights. [Operator Instructions]. We have Mr. Specht.

Okay. So 2 ones to start from my end. First, the situation in MENA, you told us that you have to bring home a part of your -- or large part of your workforce in the region. Has this picture changed? So have you been able to return some workforce? Or is it still more or less a no-go to go to the Gulf region? And then on the RFP pipeline, it would be interesting if there has been any, let's say, changes over the last week. So do you believe that the pipeline has become stronger, softer? Or is it largely unchanged from, let's say, the situation in the first quarter?

Yes. Thank you for the question. So first of all, after the start of the war in Iran, we immediately created a crisis team, which was in alignment with our foreign ministry. We have flown out all our people or brought them in secure -- to secure places in Oman. So there was no casualty on Frequentis employees side. We are very grateful that, that happened in that way. It's still problematic. We -- I mean, our people who are living in the Middle East, they stayed because their kids go to school, their wives or their husbands have to work. So they stayed. It's not that we have to bring out everybody, but we had to bring out the people who are usually not living in that area. The situation is still challenging, although the flights are partially again available. And what we have agreed with the workers' council and the people is that on a voluntary basis, people can fly to the Middle East, but we cannot force them to fly there. Is that an impact to our project performance or to our sales performance? I would say currently not because the salespeople are usually living in the region, so they stay and they are still active. From a project perspective, we have currently a phase in the projects where we can do work from home that reminds us a little bit of corona 4, 5 years ago, where we did the same. So we have conversations with our customers by video that works well. If that continues for a couple of months, then I have to say we have to reevaluate the situation. But currently, we don't see any negative impact. When it comes to the RFP pipeline question, nothing has changed, Mr. Specht. Everything is the same. We are very -- we started very strong into 2026. As I said, Asia has moved some decisions from '25 to '26, but they have already been taken these decisions, and we are grateful that Frequentis was selected as a provider for these type of opportunities. We will -- as we do disclose half year figures and full year figures, we will disclose details after the half year report. But overall, we see a strong pipeline for that. It is unchanged to a couple of weeks ago.

So thank you very much. And we received a question via the Q&A chat box from Mr. -- apologies, my microphone is out. I have 2 questions. I read it out for you. Orders on hand this year grew slower than the CAGR of the last 5 years. Why is this? And what growth should we expect going forward? And the second question is, can you roughly quantify the size of your order book that includes both contracted orders and expected orders already allocated in customer budgets?

Yes. Thanks [indiscernible] for the question. So first of all, the CAGR comparison is is okay, but you have to look into the characteristic of the projects we have won. As I said, APC was a large part in '25 of our project order intake and revenues, and that was a pure hardware play. So APC is that we produce in Texas, U.S.A., we produce 15,000 boxes, which we deliver to the SAA and invoice them. Therefore, also our revenues jumped by more than 20%. And that's not a typical contract we have where we deliver a project over 4, 5, 6 years where the orders on hand value would be much higher than what we can execute during the year. That was the effect of APC. When we roughly quantify the size of the order book, including the available budgets, it's really hard to say, but what we have identified as a multiplier is that we think it's around double. So when we have EUR 790 million orders on hand, the available budget usually is around EUR 1.6 billion.

Okay. Thank you very much. And we are waiting for some more questions. One is again in our chat box, and I'll read this out. It's from Mr. Kruder. You referred to supply chain issues, especially semiconductors. How do you plan to manage this? And how do you expect this to impact your working capital?

I think, again, you have given the answer already to your question as we have decided to buy on stock, so we have pulled out a big order for HP and Dell for servers. We have put them on stock. So it will, of course, increase the working capital for now. But we think over until the end of the year, we hopefully have that executed in programs already and in invoices to the customer. But yes, we, of course, have to stock up our server base as we have to be committed to the delivery dates we have contracted.

Okay. Thank you very much. And we are waiting for some more raised hands or some more questions in our Q&A chat box. So to speak to as wait a few more moments -- this is by now not the case, no more raised hands and no more questions. Well, yes, there is [indiscernible]. By now, we can't hear you, Ms. [indiscernible]. So let's try to hear you. Well, unfortunately, that is not the case. Now you're muted again. unfortunately, we cannot hear you. And there are no more raised hands.

Can you hear me now?

Yes. Now we can hear you.

Sorry for the technical difficulties. I was just wondering about how I should think about potential orders for the remote digital towers in the event that you do get FAA approval. Should I be thinking more from an international orders or ex U.S. basis? Or should I be thinking about the U.S. as the next big driver for the RDTs?

Yes. What we expect, Katie, is that the FAA from a sale point of view will start ordering remote towers for specific airports they have already identified. So the new Transport Minister BAF is very keen in digitalizing the FAA and the remote digital power, of course, is a perfect element of the strategy of the FAA. Therefore, we think it's a question of the rollout capacity the FAA has, but we expect the first orders from the FAA for still airports. As soon as the approval is in, we also expect that the DOD will start budgeting for remote digital towers of domestic United States because for remote digital towers outside of the U.S. National Airspace, they do not need FAA approval. It's only required for air traffic within the U.S. So we expect then '27 and '28 that the military is coming into a play. And we have already deployed for the U.S. Marines and U.S. Air Force remote digital towers, but the locations are not disclosed that it was a classified program.

Thank you. And there is one more question in our chat box. Mr. Wagner, are you involved in refund of custom?

Wagner. No, we do not really pay that much custom because the point is that we have regionalized and localized our workforce in the U.S. already a couple of years ago. So we have been growing now to up to 250 people on site near Washington, D.C., Maryland, Colombia. So there is not much custom or taxes tariffs on our portfolio element as the U.S. does 80% of the work themselves. The only risk we see is that if the tariff situation is coming back, that there could be tariffs on software licenses, but that would also end up in a back-to-back tariff on software licenses. And I'm not sure if Microsoft and Oracle would appreciate that.

Okay. So we are waiting for some more participants with a question signalizing that by raising their hand. Well, yes, Mr. Treisch, you should be able to speak now.

Yes. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay. Let's say, on the pipeline or ordering process, it would be interesting. Are there some, let's say, project types where you have a long lead time that you can, let's say, with your current workforce only work gradually on that could force some customers to start fearing to be left behind and let's say, a kind of panic ordering starts in a certain area because otherwise, the customers would be forced not to be delivered before, let's say, 2, 3 years' time. Are there any areas you can think of?

To be honest, not because the point is that our customers are governments and governments have to follow public procurement laws. And if there are delays in the program, first of all, usually, they are planned already because when you have a large program and a rollout program, you usually have in the beginning, 1 to 2 years to create the master before you go into rollout. Therefore, the investment usually come the first 1, 2 years and then you come into a profitable rollout phase. Usually, that's already planned. But if there are delays, it's always a question who is responsible for the delay? Is it the customer? Or is it the vendor? Usually, it's a mix of both. But it's not easy for governmental customers to do an ad hoc purchasing. They have to tender it again. So they lose too much time and they usually focus on improving the time line together with the vendor in reducing scope or putting more money on the table to increase workforces. So I've never experienced in my business life that the customer has in parallel done an ad hoc procurement for that type of solutions.

Well, thank you. And we are getting back to Mr. Krugger with another question. How are your margin expansion efforts in the air traffic management space progressing?

I think we are in a good way. I think we know where we have to improve. As I said, we spent around EUR 30 million from our EBIT into R&D in changing our portfolio from hardware-centric solutions to software-centric solutions. We started that a couple of years ago in public safety. And since then, we have introduced a software-centric business model and the EBIT margin is double digit since then. A couple of years ago, we started in ATM. So we spent most of the EUR 30 million is spent in ATM to replace our old hardware-centric business solutions with cloud-ready software solutions. That costs money. That's harming the EBIT line. But the more projects we get in where we can deliver and get refunding for that R&D, the better the margin will be. So we expect a better margin in ATM 2026 compared to 2025.

Thank you very much. And we are waiting for some questions or people raising their hands. That's not the case by now. And there are no open questions in our chat box. So with having said this, we come to the end of today's call. Thank you very much. And to all the participants, if there are any questions in the -- after this call, please contact Stefan Marin, Investor Relations. And that's for -- that's everything for all. And I get back to Mr. Haslacher for some closing words and this call afterwards. Thank you very much.

Yes. Thanks for your interest and participation. As I said, we are very proud of our 2025 results, and we are really energized about the outcome in 2026. So we are run on full speed. We have hired 200 additional people last year, 80 of them in Europe and the rest in the U.S. and in other countries. So we are on the growth trajectory, and our ambition is to continue that also in 2026. Thank you for your.