Koenig & Bauer AG (SKB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to today's conference call. Thank you for joining. And as just announced, we will, of course, walk you through our year-end results throughout the course of today's presentation. I'm here together with CFO and my colleague, Dr. Alexander Blum. And I will start as usual and give a brief overview of what is happening at Koenig & Bauer, some of the highlights and what we're working on, and set the frame for what happened in 2025 and what we expect in 2026. And I'll hand over to Alex for walking you through the slides and the figures in more detail. So we announced already a few weeks ago with our preliminary results that we're quite proud and happy to announce that we met our forecast for the full year the way we had promised the capital markets already at the beginning of 2025 when we first announced our guidance. We were able to close the year despite all of the surprises and changes and uncertainties and hurdles we had along the way. We're happy to again confirm with the final numbers that we met our original guidance within the original range and closed the year out positively. I think more important under point two is that we not only achieved our EBIT corridor that we originally guided for; we were able to close out again with a very, very strong Q4. We closed the year out with a positive free cash flow, and Alex will walk you through that in a few minutes. But considering where we were at the end of September, this is a great result in Q4, and we're able to announce that for the full year we generated positive cash flow. I think the other good news is our continuing high level of order backlog and good, solid order intake, not only in Q4, but as I'm sitting here on March 26 of -- towards the end of Q1, we can already today confirm that we will publish Q1 order intake higher than Q1 last year. So year-on-year, we're expecting a stronger Q1 order intake, which I think is an important message to all of our stakeholders, our employees, our customers, but of course, also our shareholders, that order intake in Q1 had a slight uptick versus prior year, and that gives us a strong foundation moving forward. Of course, the year is still very uncertain with the events that happened now at the end of February in the Middle East. The overall economic situation remains challenging. But we will, of course, publish our guidance -- are publishing our guidance today for the full year again and confirming that we expect a stable business performance in 2026 on both turnover and on EBITDA. And there's nothing in the first 3 months that make us change our opinion on that. The order intake confirms that we're on the right track. And again, going forward, we'll see what other surprises the world has in store for us. Under point three, I think it's important to walk you through a little bit. We -- in challenging times, it is important to readjust priorities and take a look at strategy and take a look at what our focus areas are on. So we started announcing just last week our new IMPACT strategy that is the theme around our annual report, and we'll be talking about this for the years to come, about what IMPACT is and what it means for us. So on the next page, just really why something like IMPACT? Why are we announcing a new strategy? And at the end of the day, it is about a strategic realignment. It is about recognizing that there are new market realities out there, that the world is continuously volatile and any strategy that expects that to change, we're convinced, is wrong. The world will remain volatile. And despite volatile times, we must be able to continue to develop our business, improve our business, shift to take advantage of new opportunities, despite all of the geopolitical or other tensions around us. And that's what we've been thinking about for the last few months, is how can we frame it? How can we talk about a new strategy, not just to you, our shareholders and capital market stakeholders, but also for our employees, for our -- for other stakeholders, for our customers. And we settled on IMPACT. And IMPACT, I think just the word itself, it's a strong word. At the end of the day, it's about making an impact for our business, for our bottom line, for our customers and for each individual Koenig & Bauer employee. It's 6 pillars, that I'll talk about on the next page. And these 6 pillars are going to be the way we frame our initiatives, our focus areas and our priorities in the years to come. So starting with intelligence. Of course, it's -- everybody is talking about it. We know that AI is going to have a massive impact on society, on business, on our industry and on Koenig & Bauer. And we have started this AI empower program last year, we have great technology, and we will be pushing as a core part of our strategy, not just for establishing artificial intelligence internal at the individual workplace at our employees to improve efficiency, but more importantly, how can we leverage artificial intelligence in our products, in our software for automation and for our customers. So it's something we'll be talking about in the years to come. Also a very clear message, it's about go-to-market. We have a fantastic portfolio. We've spent, and most of you on the call know it, we have spent huge amounts of time, effort and money the last years to expand our portfolio, to improve on our strategy and to address new markets. And now it's a focus on scaling those products that are now finished and ready to go. At the same time, we have to go into the markets where they're growing. We know that Europe continues to remain weak. We know that the growth is happening in Asia, in Latin America and India. And we have to -- we will focus and are focusing more on how to better address those markets, including reorganizations and strengthening our local teams. It's, of course, about people, not just us. It's also about our customers. So how can we not only invest in our global teams and strengthen our local organizations, but also help our customers to be better trained, to be better equipped to handle the challenges that they face? At the top right, adaptability. At the end of the day, that's about resilience. There's no R in impact. But at the end of the day, what is behind adaptability? It's about attacking these volatile times by increasing our resilience or adaptability. That means, on the one hand, focusing even more on structural cost and structural cost flexibility, but also on strengthening our recurring revenue, our service business, our consumables business, software, recurring revenue to lead us better through tough times. The fifth pillar is competitiveness. We know that a company like ours with a strong footprint in Germany, in Europe has its weaknesses in its structural organization, in its footprint. And it's an overarching point for German industry, what can we do to improve our competitiveness on the world stage? It's not only about leaner process; it's about really optimizing our manufacturing costs and our supply chain. And only by doing this we would be able to win in these growth markets that are strongly focused on mid-tech. So also here, you'll be hearing a lot about our initiatives to improve our competitiveness in the coming quarters and years. And finally, it's about technology. Technology is the core of our DNA. We are and will and want to remain technological leaders in all of our business areas. But this means going beyond classical CapEx, machine building. We have to embrace new workflow and software solutions. We have to continue pushing in digital printing to remain at the forefront of industrial digital print, and we have to focus on the automation trends and robotic trends that will change our industry. So IMPACT is a strategic framework that, again, we will be talking about a lot in the coming years. Because it's strategy, it's a multiyear program. It's not just about short term, next quarter. It's about how we expect to build and maintain Koenig & Bauer fit for the future. And that's something we're announcing to you as of today. And to make that a little bit more easy to understand, at the end, it's not just about 6 pillars. It's about coordinating our many, many initiatives within these 6 pillars. And I brought 5 examples with me today so you can better understand what we really mean by these various fields that we're focusing on. Top left, we announced in January that we'll be closing our manufacturing facility out of Frankenthal on May 31, 2026. So this is a plant -- it's a traditional plant, over 100 years, in the printing industry. It's been a subject of restructuring rounds in the past and the decision to ultimately close it. It's 75 employees. It's not a huge plant. But at the end, it does generate structural cost savings. It does generate efficiency in the group. We'll be shifting some of that work to our plant in Wuerzburg. Some will be outsourced into lower-cost countries. And at the end of the day, it's a clear business case that we can reduce AFT. This is all about resilience, this idea of adaptability, reducing our structural costs and making ourselves leaner and with less of a footprint than we have had in the past. Number two, Digital 1.0. This is about go-to-market. We have the broadest digital printing portfolio for industrial applications of any competitor out there. Some of our competitors, for example, Landa, have gone into insolvency. So we're alone in some of these markets. We have the technology. And 2 examples we can also announce today, we just closed an order on an additional RotaJET in Q1 of this year. So these are big programs, large programs, 2-digit million euro contract orders for the RotaJET that we successfully closed again in Q1. The VariJET, which we've been developing together with our joint venture partner, Durst, over the last few years, we're now installing the fourth machine. This is the first post-beta phase machine that's now being installed as we speak at a major customer in an Eastern European country. So we're moving forward with scaling up our new products, scaling up our digital printing. And this is clearly part of our go-to-market: sell the portfolio that we have and ramp it up. Third, AI Empower initiative. We launched last year a massive program to train up over 500 employees at Koenig & Bauer. We have over 30% use rate of AI on a regular basis at the company. We have great technological partner in Google and a group-wide rollout of artificial intelligence under that intelligence pillar in our strategy. And on the bottom right, you see technology. It's about embracing software, embracing new ways of doing business. We announced our Vision and Protection product at the Capital Market Day in August of last year, and it's ramping up. We've now started to certify our first customers. They're paying for a certification so that they can then be certified to their customers to offer protection technologies, authentication technologies into the packaging market for various applications. And the market is accepting it. We've had great blue-chip customers working with us over the last few months to get certified, to validate the business model. And we see a huge demand from Asia, from South America, from India, for example, for protecting pharmaceutical packaging, protecting high-end packaging. So many different applications. And it's another good example of our pillar, technology, and how to embrace software going forward. And the fifth example I brought with me is the people. It's not just about training our employees or training our customers. It's also about strengthening our local organizations. We spent a lot of time, and I personally spent a lot of time, in the last 3, 4 months of last year, visiting China, visiting India multiple times, visiting Middle East multiple times, to talk about what are our local strategies. We know we have the right products coming out of our facilities in Germany, but how to bring them into the markets. And I think Middle East is a great example today. We need a strong local presence in the Middle East for times where we're unable to send our technicians from Germany to the Middle East. So we need stronger partners in the various local markets. We have them already, but strengthening these relationships, becoming more resilient for these volatile times is a big part of our strategic framework going forward. So all these 6 pillars, they interchange, they overlap, one feeds the other. And I don't want to overdo it today that this is the big number one topic, but I think it's important that we have the strategic framework, that we align not just ourselves, but our employees, our teams and our customers for the challenges going forward. And I think with this framework, we have the right way to talk about it, the right way to structure it, and it's the way we'll be talking to you going forward. So that was a brief introduction. And then I would hand over to the CFO, my Board colleague, Dr. Alexander Blum, who will walk you through the rest of the figures. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Stephen, and very much welcome and good day from my side as well. The year 2025 was also not only marked that we achieved our targets, but also by very important events to Koenig & Bauer, and it is the year, the 40th anniversary of our stock market listing, which we celebrated in August 2025. And we did our Capital Markets Day on the same day in connection with this celebration, and we had a wonderful event at the German Stock Exchange at Frankfurt. With regard to our numbers, in 2025, we saw an order intake of over EUR 1.2 billion. This was expectedly -- we saw there a normalization effect compared to last year, the year 2024. In 2024, we had a very strong effect with regard to the fair, Drupa, which is, of course, for offset printing, an important -- very important trade fair. But also with regard to the banknote business, there we saw some exceptional high order entries from the Federal Reserve Bank out of the United States. Having in mind these 2 effects, we see a natural decrease compared to 2025 -- 2024. But with regard to the overall level, we are very happy that the order intake 2025 was on a very solid level. This also translates into an order backlog of over EUR 970 million. Again, it is a little lower than 2024. But having said before, these 2 exceptional events also influenced positively the order backlog 2024, but having in mind that an order backlog still close to EUR 1 billion is not a normal situation for Koenig & Bauer compared to a few years ago. With regard to revenue, we increased slightly our revenues due to promising developments in the segment of Paper & Packaging as well as in the segment of Special & New Technologies. I will show you, present you the numbers later a little bit more in detail with regard to our segments. But we also saw that Koenig & Bauer was able to grow the business again in 2025. On this slide, you see our regional split of our revenue sales. And you'll also see that we had an increase of over 30% in our Asia Pacific region. And this is a very, very strong growth momentum for us as these markets performed very nicely in the last year. And also, we strongly believe that they will perform even better in the future. And therefore, it was for Koenig & Bauer a successful step in 2025 to increase our market share, our market position, demonstrated by an increase in our revenues. The operational performance increased significantly due to efficiency improvements, due to some -- the effects out of the old program, Spotlight, but also due to positive volume effects. And we had a significant lower amount of nonoperating extra items in 2025. So our results also normalized quite a lot in 2025 compared to 2024. The overall profitability steadily improved over the last 2 years. And what you find on this slide is the LTM EBITDA, operating EBITDA, which reached a level of 6.1 million -- of 6.1%, excuse me. And it shows the increase compared to the last to the last 2 years. And it also demonstrates that the work that Koenig & Bauer did in the last years with regard to improvements of efficiency is paying out. This slide just demonstrates we met what we have promised. We met our targets. We kept what we have promised. And we met the guidance that we gave to the capital markets. Our free cash flow position also was positive in 2025 due to a very strong and outstanding final quarter last year. It clearly showed that, again, the seasonality, unfortunately, is quite strong in our business model, and we are very eager to level it up a little bit and clean it up. But it is, unfortunately, due to the dynamics of our business, not that easy. However, it is a very positive result that, after we had a cash-intensive first half-year of 2025, that we still reached and managed -- that we successfully managed a positive year-end closing with a positive cash flow of over EUR 7 million. This also, these developments with regard to profitability and cash flow, also improved our balance sheet. The equity ratio improved to 24%. Our net working capital position decreased to EUR 281 million, which is a ratio of lower than 22% of -- compared to our revenues. This also is a positive improvement compared to last year. And our net financial position slightly improved by slightly -- by close to EUR 4 million. The Paper/Packaging segment, you find on this slide, and the overall dynamic of the market shows that we have a slight increase in top line, that we have slight decrease in top line by -- excuse me, that we have a slight decrease in the order entry level of minus 3.9% due to especially the strong effects in 2024 with regard to Drupa fair, but also due to the geographic challenges that we faced in 2025, especially with regard to our U.S. markets. However, revenues slightly increased by 1% and EBIT improved significantly up to EUR 46.2 million within the Paper & Packaging segment. The situation in our Special & New Technologies segment was nearly the same, only that the order intake situation was more challenging in 2025 due to the big order intake in the banknote business in the year 2024. That's why we find there a decrease in order entry by minus 19.7%. However, we grew the business due to the out -- to the very high order backlog or the high backlog that we reached, and we are now delivering the machines and working on the open orders. And we were able to improve the profitability of this segment significantly due to all the positive effects by program Spotlight, which focused especially on the S&T segment, with special regards to the digital and web-fed business. The digital and web-fed segments or business units you'll find on this page, and there you especially see the challenging situation with regard to order entry. The flexo business, developed quite good in last year. However, we saw a high demand restraint in the capital-intensive web digital printing machines. And this is especially the HP business on the one hand and, on the other hand, the RotaJET machine business, which is our own machine. These machines require higher capital investments. And due to the shift in our markets due to geographical challenges, this segment was especially hit by these developments with lower order intake than expected. The revenue decreased by minus 15%. But again, the profitability, even with the lower revenues and lower order entry, was able to -- we were able to increase it significantly and to improve it significantly by over 45%. Looking at today's market environment and situation, we unfortunately see -- and of course, that's not new to you at all, and this is also true for a lot of other companies, but we face a lot of -- still a lot of uncertainties with regards to U.S. trade conflicts or the new geographical crises and risks that arose beginning of this year. So it means the situation is not yet stable. And we at Koenig & Bauer expect to have again a challenging year with regards to the overall economic and geographical situation, which we need to tackle in 2026. However, we feel very comfortable to keep our business performance stable even though the geopolitical crises are there and even though the environment is quite volatile. We also announced, beginning of the year, that we shifted our guidance from EBIT to EBITDA, of course, both operating KPIs, because we strongly believe that this is a better KPI to, first of all, show the comparability with our peer group on the market. On the other hand, it is much more appropriate to have a link to the operational cash generation and it is also something which we see with regards to the coming IFRS 18 new accounting standard. So from our perspective, this -- today was the right time to change the guidance principle from operating EBIT to EBITDA. With regard to the guidance for 2026, we say that our revenues are expected to remain stable and to end up at the same level as last year's revenues of around EUR 1.3 billion. And also our operating EBITDA is expected to remain stable at a level of around EUR 80 million. With regard to our 2 segments, we expect that Paper/Packaging segment remains more or less stable. However, we are facing there a slightly lower profitability due to intense competition and due to geographical situations at the markets. And on the other hand, with regard to our Special & New Technologies segment, we expect an increase in revenues and also an increase in our profitability, which will help us to stabilize our business and also to shift our revenues and our business more to new technologies, which you are quite familiar with and which you also find on this page on the very right hand, for example, Vision and Protect or the Kyana. So as key takeaways, we want to emphasize that we further successfully improved our profitability in 2025, which was for Koenig & Bauer a very important step forward and an important goal to reach. We also have a very solid order backlog for 2026 with close to EUR 1 billion in sales. And we also expect that the order intake in the first quarter of this year is higher than the order intake in the first quarter of last year. So these 2 aspects show -- demonstrate to us that we will be able, even due to all the crises and uncertainties, to remain our business on a stable level and a solid basis, on a stable level, with a stable performance compared to the performance -- the financial performance of 2025. And we are very happy and eager to further successfully develop, especially our Special & New Technologies segment with the banknote business and the new technologies. This is the end of our presentation and we are very happy now to step into the Q&A and answer all of your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Patrick Speck from Montega AG.

My first question is on your guidance. I mean you're guiding for a stable business performance in this year and again an EBITDA of EUR 80 million. Is it fair to assume then that your net result should be slightly negative again as it was last year?

Thank you for your question. No, we expect that our earnings this year will be positive. Our earnings before taxes in 2025 have already been positive. And only because to a very high tax result, negative tax result, our earnings became negative in 2025. But this tax result was extremely influenced by the deferred tax assets, which we needed to a certain degree to revaluate them. And they influenced the tax result by minus EUR 10 million negatively, and we don't expect this effect to happen again.

And if you expect a positive result then, should we also expect that you will be able to pay a dividend this year? I mean it's a bit early, I know, but most analysts, or the consensus, expects it. And I think one of your comments in one of the former earnings calls was that you are targeting for a dividend. So what conditions must be met from your point of view?

According to the dividend policy that we also published, we need to -- we at Koenig & Bauer want, first of all, to achieve a minimum earnings level before we pay dividends. And we very likely in this year, this situation will still be a little bit too early. We are happy to show that we are on the right track, and our goal is to show a positive net income in 2026. But maybe 1 year too early with regard to the payment of dividends to our shareholders.

Yes. Understood. Another question on your order backlog. Could you let us know to what extent is your strong order backlog protected by price escalation clause?

So I think first major answer is that, I mean, all of our contracts, I mean, allow customers to cancel, but we have received no cancellations. Also since the escalation of the war in the Middle East, we've had no cancellations coming from that region. So we don't see a problem there. Pricing since COVID times, from the time of 2022 when we had the high inflation rates, that we protect ourselves on that front for sudden shifts and sudden changes. That's our normal course of business, and we feel quite comfortable that we have that under control. And yes, I think -- I hope that answers your question.

Yes, fair enough. And lastly, could you give any updates on your project with PowerCo?

It's ongoing. That's the best update I can give you, and it's a good update. There's nothing new to publish. Be assured, we will publish when we have news. But I think the main message is, and that's positive, it is absolutely ongoing with the full support of our team and Volkswagen. And it's a joint development project with very high management attention.

And it's also a project which takes quite a while, so that we are not yet able to publish any positive news. It's not un-normal or unexpected. It is still in course of the normal project duration that we expected.

Ladies and gentlemen, this was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Dr. Stephen Kimmich for any closing remarks. I'm sorry, we just got one question coming in. So the next question comes from Johannes Ries from Apus Capital GmbH.

Yes. I thought there would be more questions. Maybe on the IMPACT program. How much this program is also reducing your cost base? Or is it more a different target you're following with the project, if I read it right?

Yes. We call this a strategic framework. It's not a project. It's just a way to align ourselves and align our projects to ensure that we have a common direction for the entire group and that we're focusing on the right things. So there's no price tag or cost we put on it. At the end, it's all in our ordinary course of business of how we manage our various initiatives, various projects throughout the world. But as mentioned, as we talk about individual projects, for example, the closing of Albert-Frankenthal, or other future initiatives, of course, we'll talk about price tags or sales for various initiatives within that framework. But at the moment, we're simply announcing the new framework and the new direction and the new priorities. And there's, of course, going to be more to come.

But within the framework, I think we can also -- clearly, what we have shown today is that there are strategic aspects and renewals included as well as, of course, efficiency improvement programs with regard to cost base or to machine costs.

Yes. And structural costs.

And structural costs.

On the regional focus, you mentioned Asia was strong last year and you expect it stays and get even stronger in the future. You also invest in people there. What could be maybe the share of revenue of Asia in 2 or 3 years or so? Is that one of the main drivers you're still targeting to increase your revenues in 4, 5 years to EUR 1.5 billion?

Yes, absolutely. It's a mixture of geographic growth and our new product portfolio. But clearly, the market data is clear that Asia Pacific and Latin America are growing faster than the rest of the world. So we want to grow with it.

Your direct business in Middle East, how big was it? Is it -- which maybe now is directly affected by the Iran war?

I think we'll have to publish -- we've never published that separately. It's not a 3-digit million figure. It's significantly below that. But it's significant enough that it's important for us, and the growth is important for us. But it's not a -- it's within this EUR 109 million on Page 12. The EUR 109 million: Africa, Latin America, Middle East, is within that figure, but we haven't broken it down past that.

On the new businesses, is it -- if I read it right, Vision and Protection has started stronger than Kyana?

I wouldn't say stronger than. We're launching them both at the same time. But we've given a lot of updates on Kyana in the past. We just picked Vision and Protection as an example, but it's certainly not an exclusive example.

Okay. But Kyana is also developing like we expected?

Yes, we're signing customers every quarter. I mean customers are signing up to Kyana as we speak.

AURAVEO is also something which is, yes, show customer interest and signed maybe some orders or some contracts?

With regard to AURAVEO, there are a lot of test cases running right now with quite prominent brands. Until now, we cannot disclose any of these discussions that we have. But we are quite confident that with -- during the course of 2026, there will be positive news from AURAVEO.

And last question, any update on your maybe discussions, maybe talks with Mr. Leibinger?

I think that's something you'll have to ask him.

Okay. Nothing new on this front. Okay, thanks a lot.

So ladies and gentlemen, this was now the last question. So I would like to turn the conference back over to Dr. Stephen Kimmich for any closing remarks.

Okay. So thank you very much for your interest and your attention and for taking the time to listen to us. For me, it was the first time publishing annual results as a CEO in my new role. And if we can bring one thing across, I think it's not just me, it's with Dr. Blum, with our new management team around us, Koenig & Bauer is heading in the right direction. I hope we're able to convince you of that, in challenging times. And we're looking forward to talking to you again in a few weeks already about our Q1 results, where we're already confident we're going to show you great order intake. And we'll stay in touch. So thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your week. Bye-bye.