GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft (1G.MI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GEA Group AG Pre-Close Call Q3 2025. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Oliver Luckenbach. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you very much, Heidi, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Oliver. I'm the Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined by my deputy, Rebecca, and my colleague, Eduard. We welcome you to our Q3 2025 Pre-Close Call. It's actually the first pre-close call as a DAX 40 member. So since the 22nd of September, we are now playing in the Premier League. As today's call will contain forward-looking statements, it will be conducted according to our disclaimer. I will not read the disclaimer, but please be aware of the cautionary language that is included in our safe harbor statement, which is part of our presentations you can find on the Internet. We will now address topics, which we also discussed during recent conferences and road shows. And afterwards, you will have time to ask questions. Let me start with our guidance. We confirm our group guidance for full year 2025, which we raised in August. Organic sales growth is expected to be between 2% and 4%. EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses is expected to be at the corridor of 16.2% to 16.4%. And ROCE, return on capital employed, here, we guide 34% to 38%. Second topic, customer industries. In foods, we see continued activity, especially on the project side. Beverage, here, demand is at prior year's level. Dairy processing continues to look promising and has been the growth contributor in every single quarter since Q2 2024. Dairy farming, here, the market sentiment is very positive in most regions. For pharma, the pipeline looks good. And finally, new food, here, we expect the demand likely to remain soft in 2025. That gets me to the second or third topic, order intake. We expect that 2025 will be another good year for GEA. The pipeline continues to look promising, and we are seeing that customers continue to negotiate orders. We also continue to see good base order business. Concerning large orders, we are in very interesting discussions and are optimistic that we will see some of the large orders kicking in, in the second half of 2025, but we can't pinpoint to the specific quarter when they will be signed. In Q3, we have seen large orders, so orders above EUR 15 million with a total volume in the mid-double-digit million euros area. As you can guess by hearing this volume of large order, Baladna cannot be included. As communicated, the announced order signed with Baladna will be booked in the second half and as it is not yet included in Q3, it will be booked in Q4. The translation FX effect is expected to be negative as we have also seen in the second quarter. On sales, topic #4. Organic sales growth has been 1.2% in H1. The increased guidance stands at 2% to 4% organic sales growth for the full year as we do expect an acceleration in growth in the second half. Q3 should already show a step into the right direction. Translation FX effects also here are expected to be negative. Topic #5, EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses. The H1 EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses was 16.1%. On the rolling last 4 quarter basis as of the second quarter 2025, we have also achieved an EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses of 16.1%. However, for the full year, the guide is 16.2% to 16.4%, which we are very confident to achieve. That's it from my side, and I will now pass over to Rebecca.

Thanks, Oliver. Good afternoon, everybody. So regarding topic #6, cash flow, what to keep in mind for the third quarter? Regarding CapEx, please keep in mind that we increased our CapEx expectation for the full year with our H1 results. We expect CapEx of around EUR 255 million for the full year 2025. In the first half, we had EUR 92 million. Net working capital to sales ratio for 2025, the target corridor is 7% to 9%, and the ratio will most likely be within this corridor towards the third quarter. Topic #7, additional financial information, just as a reminder, depreciation, amortization, we are guiding for the full year 2025 EUR 210 million. In the first half, we had EUR 100 million. Regarding the financial results, we are guiding minus EUR 30 million for the full year, and we had in the first half, minus EUR 19 million. And the tax rate for the full year, we are guiding 29%. And in the first half, we had 28.8%. This closes the topic we wanted to address in today's pre-close call, and we are now happy to take any questions you may have. I will pass on to you, Heidi, for the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] We will take our first question. And the first question comes from the line of Sven Weier from UBS.

Just first one is on the order intake commentary you made, Oliver, regarding a mid-double-digit level of orders above EUR 15 billion (sic) [ EUR 15 million ]. So this sounds fairly similar to what you had in Q3 last year. I was just wondering how we should think about the typical seasonality you typically have from the base orders at least in Q3. Is that something to keep in mind when we compare our thoughts against Q2 where you had no big ticket above EUR 15 million? That's the first one.

Yes. Thank you very much, Sven. Yes, as we have mentioned already, we have just also mentioned it again. In the second quarter of this year, we had an overall order intake of EUR 1.3 billion without any large order. And what we have heard so far, it is too early. We do not have the final numbers. But so far, there are no indications that there's any negative development in our base order business. A big part of this is service business, as you know, which is a recurrent business. It's a very stable business. So yes, we continue to see a very good development of our base order business. And on top of this, you also might remember, there was no large order in Q2, and now we have seen some large orders, as mentioned earlier, in the mid-double-digit area. And as I've also said, Baladna will be booked now in the fourth quarter, yes. So we are quite optimistic here and very positive.

Yes, because normally, you have a bit of a step down in base orders between Q2 and Q3 in the prior years. That's why I'm asking, right? But instead, you have the big ticket that you didn't have in Q2. So that sounds to me like a wash potentially. Second question I had was just if you had any updated thoughts on -- obviously, we saw a bit of an update on Section 232 in terms of tariffs. Are you still kind of repeating what you said earlier that tariffs should be more or less kind of a neutral factor? Or do you have any update on this side?

Yes. So let's say the good news is that there is no update. We also looked into this in particular, the team here at GEA. And as we have mentioned earlier, during road shows, conferences and so on, if at all, at the very end, there shouldn't be an impact bigger than the very low single-digit million euro number or EBITDA because the last majority already was or in the meantime is based on that, we can pass on these kind of tariffs to our customers. And also on the back of this so far, there are also no indications of any very negative or sluggish order intake development in the United States. So that is the good news here.

And would you say that what you said on beverages, because that's the segment that stands out in terms of being more flattish, would you say that's the segment where you see most impact of tariff uncertainty because that's what Krones has mentioned a few times?

This is Rebecca speaking, Sven. I think actually, I remember the statement on beverage actually was coming already earlier from our salespeople. So I would not necessarily see that really in relation to tariffs. Maybe tariffs have not helped the situation, but to my knowledge, actually, we got the sale of the -- upon the salespeople also actually irrespective of tariffs.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Klas Bergelind from Citi.

I just want to come back to -- I'm sorry if I get disconnected in the middle of this. My phone is a bit strange. I hope this works. So my first question is coming back on the tariffs. So just to clarify, the 18th of August extension of steel and aluminum imports, the pure steel content, not value add of 407 products of 50% on the pure steel content, you are still comfortable that you are not going to get impacted by that and you can pass that on. I just want to be extra clear in terms of, yes, what I think Sven asked about before.

Yes. No, that is what I also mentioned earlier. We know there's a lot going on, and we have a team here doing more or less nothing else than following closely what is happening in the U.S., and we also looked into this specific question. And here, the outcome also was that, that is something we can pass on. And as I've mentioned earlier, so far, also we haven't seen any negative impact here also on order intake in the United States, yes.

Okay. Got it. My second one, Oliver, is you said that the sales growth into the third quarter is taking a step in the right direction. I'm just trying to understand if you could be a little bit more specific. Are we sort of going towards the 4% level? Or is the year going to be very back-end loaded in terms of deliveries out of the backlog from new machine sales?

Yes. So far, we said that it is, let's say, back-end loaded in the sense of that it will be driven by the second half of this year, but let's say not only by Q4. You might remember that we had very good especially large order intake towards the end of last year, a lot booked in our LPT, Liquid & Powder Technology division. Here, we start normally with the engineering phase, and it just takes some time before we can start with our, let's say, sales recognition. But as I've mentioned earlier, we do expect here a certain kind of pickup already in the third quarter, and this will then continue towards the year-end, so Q4.

Got it. And in the second quarter, you had, particularly in SFT, a very strong margin, and you were talking about that new machine sales was also driving better utilization on the new machine side and that we shouldn't be too concerned about mix of new machine sales growing faster than the service business. How do you look at this? I mean you said you're very confident on the margin guide, of course. But is -- when you look at the third quarter, is mix not an issue as well? Should we, i.e. see the utilization on the new machine side more than offsetting any mix implication if you see where I'm going with the question?

Yes. Yes. It may be a little bit too early to be here too specific. But what we have, let's say, also mentioned when we had this question on road shows, on conferences, there are 2 topics that need to be considered. But we have seen also last year, double-digit organic sales growth in our service business. There are no reasons why we also expect this business to continue to grow, most likely not at these very strong rates going forward. So there's always a certain kind of mix impact, especially if you think about LPT versus other divisions. But nevertheless, also point to what you have just mentioned, there will be a better utilization in our factories, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the margin will be negatively impacted. As I've mentioned earlier, we feel, let's say, very comfortable with the 16.2% to 16.4%.

[Operator Instructions] There seems to be no further questions, I would like to hand back to the speakers.

Yes. Thank you very much, again, for participating in today's pre-close call. And with the end of this call, as you know, we start our quiet period and are already very much looking forward to talking to you again on the 6th of November, the day of the release of our Q3 numbers. All the best from the entire IR team. Stay healthy, and have a good time. Bye-bye.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.