KSB SE & Co. KGaA (KSB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Dear ladies and gentlemen, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the KSB earnings call on the half year results of 2026. My name is Sonja Ayasse, and I'm Head of Corporate Communications. Our main speakers today are our CEO, Dr. Stephan Timmermann; and our CFO, Dr. Matthias Schmitz. After our joint welcome, Matthias will do a deep dive into the numbers of Q1 and Q2, followed by Stephan, who will summarize and also give an outlook on the remainder of the fiscal year 2026. As usual, we will have a Q&A session at the end of this call. So please send in your questions using the little chat window anytime during the next hour, and we will get back to you. This call will end after approximately 1 hour. And as usual, we will publish a recording of the KSB earnings call on the KSB website, under Investor Relations. But now I know that Stephan is very much looking forward to welcoming you personally. So Stephan, I pass on to you.

Thank you so much, Sonja. It is indeed a huge pleasure to welcome you and to give you a short overview regarding the agenda that we have. A few words from my side. And then for sure, the key part of today's presentations will be the financial update of the first half of the fiscal year 2026 by Matthias. I will then try to summarize it once more, give you an outlook and put a few words in terms of where do we see the fiscal year of 2026 in terms of long-term perspective. And then as you said, Sonja, questions and answers for all those who have questions at hand. I welcome you, of course, in the name of the entire Board. Matthias and me, we have been given the job to present the figures. But of course, we do this in pleasure for the colleagues which are not here today, Stephan Bross and Ralf Kannefass. Having said this, a little bit of housekeeping. As always, we will concentrate on the figures of the first half year. These figures do not blush. At the same time, especially regarding my part, then at the end of the presentations, we will give certain guidance, best estimations regarding the future development of the company. And these, as you know, these are no juristical guarantees. This is the best true and fair view that we, as a Board, have at the time. And having said this, it's now a huge pleasure to hand over to you, Matthias, to give us a deep dive into the first half year of the year 2026. Matthias, please.

Thanks, Thank you, Stephan. It's a pleasure this time to give this update. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you, Stephan. I also want to take the opportunity to welcome you in this call. My pleasure today is and my duty, of course, to guide you through the figures of the first half year 2026. Let's first talk about order intake and sales. We have increased the order intake by 8.8%. We have increased our sales revenue by 0.4%. So what is the message behind increasing order intake in these difficult times, in this very difficult political and economical environment. We are a company that is growing despite all these circumstances and in order intake and sales and of course, on profitability, we are on our path in order to fulfill what we have promised in our Mission TEN30. We are showing a reported EBIT by EUR 98 million. EUR 98 million means this includes already effects from the first-time consolidation of Saudi Arabia, EUR 16.6 million. We talked about it in Q1, and we have spent EUR 12.3 million for the implementation of SAP HANA. Talking about SAP HANA, let me make one special remark. First of all, in this year 2026, we will spend approximately EUR 26 million for the implementation of HANA, which means we are then more or less on the same level as previous year. Second message I want to give to you, SAP HANA project is running well, is on track, and we will go live in the first quarter of 2027, as it is planned. We also can talk about an equity increase by EUR 45 million. And here, you have to take into account the EUR 61 million after tax we had -- we paid dividends of EUR 53 million. And later, I will elaborate a little bit about the OCI effect of EUR 37 million. You know OCI is other comprehensive income. These are effects that are only going through the equity, but will not be shown in the P&L. Yes, we are a growing company. So for that reason, we have -- we had to increase compared with the end of the year, our working capital by EUR 85 million. Here also, you have to take into account the first-time consolidation of Saudi Arabia. This has an effect of approximately EUR 23 million. This is the half year highlight of KSB. Now let's go and make a little bit of deep dive. First, let's compare the figures with 2024 to 2026. Again, you see order intake and sales revenue is growing. Yes, our EBIT is behind previous year. I will come to this later because what we see, what we are realizing is a strong quarter two. So the company is back on track. In order intake, of course, we have increased the order intake by 8.8%. And here, you have to take something into account, which is valid for '26 as well as for '25. Also, we are only in the middle of the year, the currency effects -- FX effects compared with the previous year amount to a level of EUR 44 million. What does that mean? We are showing an order intake increase by EUR 150 million. Calculating these order intake effects for FX means that we have grown -- we should take them like-for-like to a level of EUR 190 million. If you compare Q1 with Q2 in the order intake, you see that, of course, Q2 is lower than Q1. Again, this is due to the big order intake we got by a great job, a big job in our Energy division. Let's take a look at sales. We have increased our sales by 0.4%. And also here, you have to take into account currency exchange effects with a level of EUR 37 million. That means eliminating this FX effect compared with the previous year, we have grown by far more than EUR 40 million. We have grown by far more. This is a company that is growing. You can read our lips. We fulfill the growth path that we have in mind. Let's compare Q1 2026 with Q2 2026. And one thing is really obvious here, we have increased our sales by nearly EUR 50 million. We have increased our sales by nearly EUR 50 million Q1 to Q2. Where did we increase our sales? We increased it in pumps, and we, of course, have increased our sales by EUR 27 million in SupremeServ. In all the meetings we had, I explained you that we are suffering in SupremeServ a little bit by the economy. But here you see SupremeServ is on its way back to track. The EBIT, of course, is being influenced by the sales. And you see now that we have an EBIT of EUR 98 million, that means we are a little bit lower in pumps. We are a little bit better in valves, and we are a little bit worse in SupremeServ compared '26 with '25. And the reasons are obvious. The reasons are obvious. First of all, we had a not so good Q1, if you might remember. Secondly, we see that we have an increasing margin pressure. We see an increase in competition by Chinese competitors also in other areas. So the price pressure is increasing. And of course, with all the sales we did, we had to cover higher energy costs as well as logistic costs. On top, I mentioned it before, in the first quarter, our plants were not as much utilized regarding our capacity than we had in mind. Let's make a deep dive and compare both quarters. I'd like to start with the Q1 2026. And you might remember that Stephan Timmermann and I -- he's close to me here right now, that we -- when we had our press conference, that we said it might be that the first quarter 2026 does not fulfill our expectations. Indeed, it did not. And indeed, this was reflected also in the stock market. And now take a look back to what we have achieved so far in Q2. We have EUR 64 million profitability, and we have a higher profitability in pumps. It increased by EUR 19 million. And take a look at SupremeServ. SupremeServ is the profit contributor in the second half of the year with EUR 46.3 million profitability. What does this mean? Yes, we had a weak quarter. Q2, we see we are back on track. And I can promise you that the second half of the year, we will be even better, of course, than the first half of the year. And I take now the moment to make it summarize, yes, we stay in what we have promised in our prognosis. Here is a short overview about the EBIT impact. And of course, we cannot cover all the costs. You see that the cost of materials have increased from a ratio of 39% to more than 40%. Here, the higher costs are integrated also to the logistical energy cost as well as material costs. You see we had an increase in other income. This is due to the first-time consolidation of Saudi Arabia. And of course, some other expenses are on the level of EUR 232 million. Here, the implementation costs for SAP HANA with an amount of EUR 12 million are integrated. Again, we increased the total output of our operations. Here, you see the development in material costs. We were very low in the first half of the year 2025. We were above 40% in 2024. And of course, as we are not confident with this cost of material level, we have launched special programs in order to reduce our cost of material. Our earnings after income tax is on a level of EUR 60 million. And what I really want to line out, we have a level of -- in our tax ratio of 31.7%. You might remember that in the last years, we had an up and down in our tax rate due to special effects. Now I can say our tax ratio at the end of the year will be anywhere on the level of 31%. This is our running rate for our tax ratio. So also here, we are in line with what we have promised and with the plans we are executing. Finance income is a little bit lower than previous year. You see here all the major effects. It's interest expense for pensions. We have some hyperinflation effects that we have to take into account in Turkey and Argentina. And of course, the way how we calculate lease liabilities when you activate them in your balance sheet, we have to differentiate also interest expenses. This is an amount of EUR 1.5 million. And so you see it's a pretty stable consolidation we have here. Also tax will remain stable now and in the future. Let's take a look to the balance sheet. Yes, we increased the total sum of our balance sheet to nearly EUR 3 billion. And here, we have to work out that the noncurrent assets increased due to the investments. The current assets increased due to the working capital. And despite all these economic effects, we still have a stable, slightly increased equity ratio of 48.4%. I want to take this opportunity in order to underline this is a very solid balance sheet. This is a sustainable balance sheet. The increase in equity, how is it being influenced? On the one hand, of course, because of the earnings after taxes, we made dividend payments of EUR 53 million to all of the investors. And of course, we have 3 types of other comprehensive income translation effect for currency, pension, and the total sum for a lot of other smaller effects. At the end of the year, we also will have a better equity as we have right now. We are going on to do everything to further strengthen our balance sheet. Working capital, there are two ways to look at it. On the one hand, you can say, your working capital has increased to a level of 29.7%. This is true. Bear in mind, once this management started, we were on a level of some 34%. We have decreased the working capital. And now we have reached a reasonable level of, let's say, 29% on average. We think it might be better at the end of the year. We are a growing company. And so our task is once we are growing, we have to utilize working capital, but it should be amongst the level of 30%. And this is what we're striving for. Therefore, we have a lot of action in place. We follow that up on a regular basis, and it works out we are below 30%. Free cash flow. Yes, at this point of time, we see a free cash flow due to the reasons I have told you before that is lower than in the last year. And I can tell you it will improve in the second half of the year. We are aware of this situation. So what has happened -- and two things you have to take into account. First of all, we see a lower cash flow in the operating activities due to lower EBIT. And of course, we had a first-time consolidation effect of Saudi Arabia with EUR 16.6 million. So this has an effect on your earnings after tax, but it has no effect on the cash flow. You have to bear that in mind once you want to make a kind of a link between earnings and cash. Secondly, I think you're aware that we have increased our shares in Aromatic, in Eco. And we made -- we increased our shares in KSB Group, which is a pump and service group in East of Europe. Yes, we paid prices for them in a double-digit number. This also affected the free cash flow. The investments are still on a reasonable level, EUR 48 million. And we invested this as we are starting to build a new testing facility. We invested already EUR 4 million for that, a new testing facility for the energy department. We invested at GRW in the new CNC machine. And of course, we are modernizing our large parts production in Pegnitz. So what does this mean for the net finance position? There's one very good way to read the chart. Take a look at 2024. You saw that at the end of 2024 until the mid of '25, the net finance position went down and it came up afterwards. The same in this year, we see that the net finance position to the end of June on a level of EUR 200 million. And the major effect here is, of course, that we paid EUR 53 million on dividend. The curve you're seeing right here is the curve we are facing year-on-year. For this reason, I can tell you the net finance position will increase until the end of the year. I think it will not be on the same level as in the end of 2025, but it will definitely increase by far more than EUR 250 million. Market capitalization. Actually, we are talking about a market capitalization of more or less EUR 1.5 billion. I saw that our preference shares today have increased by EUR 50. So I'm absolutely convinced with the outlook we give you with a strong quarter two we have that our profitability will further increase. I can confirm we are on our way to fulfill Mission TEN30. And I think really, for this reason, I'm optimistic the share price will increase as we are steadily increasing the value of the company. Let me summarize. We have increased the order intake by 8.8%. We have increased our sales revenue. We had a second quarter which was much stronger than the first quarter and which gives a positive out view for the second half of the year. So that means stronger sales revenue, EBIT as well as net financial position are expected in the second half of the year. So for this reason, we confirm the outlook for 2026, and the outlook is being summarized here. I do not want to read all the figures. But again, we are on our way to fulfill what you can see here. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Matthias, for your very positive and bullish summary of the first half of the fiscal year 2026. And my job is now to wrap it up into the overall picture. And I would like to frame the boundary conditions that we are in today. Even if it might sound a little bit boring and to show how boring it is, these are the boundary conditions that we had in 2025. And as you know, 2025 was the most successful year of the company in the history of recording. You now ask, have these boundary conditions significantly changed, especially in the light of the continued positive development of the company, I must clearly say they have changed a little. Only the ingredients of the soup have somewhat changed. And if you want the real big ones, of course, February, end of February, we had the unfortunate beginning of the Iran war, which is still ongoing, and which has huge repercussions all around the world in the smallest part of the continents where you wouldn't even expect them. Then we have a slowdown in China, also nothing new, but the impact is becoming more and more graspable and also visible all around the world, especially by the efforts of our Chinese competitors, which I comment in full respect for what they are doing in exporting their products wherever they can. And it is not only the car industry, but also in the pump industry. Then we have the economic downturn in Europe. Unfortunately, no true recipe in place yet to get the upswing going at short notice. And the big impact for us is, of course, the automotive industry especially in Germany and with all this automotive industry, the automotive supply industry and the tool machine industry. So this is a tough cookie if you know how big our exposure in Europe is. And last not least, the geopolitical fragmentation, which you know better than I, all of this really leads to boundary conditions, which have a multitude of impacts. What is our remedy? And this might sound very simple, but we are responsible of leading a company of 17,000 employees again, through the sixth year of wild economy, cost awareness, extreme pressure and focus on costs, prudence in what we do, be it investments, be it working capital, be it the risk mitigation, but also a lot of confidence and a little bit of optimism because, again, if you lead a company, you have to be optimistic. And coming to this optimism and putting it a little bit more graspable, what are our chances and our chances, they are there irrespective of the boundary conditions. The big one is at the moment, data center and data center for KSB, this is a big field of activity. It starts with the energy production where our power plant division, of course, steps in and then goes into the cooling, the primary circuit, the secondary circuit, the water supply, a real turf for KSB, and we are getting our foot into that door. Power generation, worldwide as populations grow, power generation is necessary. As the climate gets warmer, more power generation is necessary. And of course, the big consumer again is data center. Water, wastewater, if you were in Europe at the time, you can see we are really lacking water. And this lack of water, this has repercussions, positive repercussions on KSB, and be it that pumps, which pump water out of deeper areas below the surface are now necessitated for farming and who makes the best in the cars in Europe, it's KSB. And we see a nice demand there, a short-term demand solely based on the change of weather in Europe this summer. And last not least, despite the fact that we are with own organizations in more than 100 countries, there is still a lot of room for expansion because KSB from the heating cellar to the nuclear power plant, we have such a big portfolio, and there are a lot of countries where our brand label is strong, but we still have opportunities. And having said this, what is our way forward? Resilience in what we have started in our company strategy, flexibility in terms of the company setup. As soon as we see downturns, we have to react very quickly, and this is what we do. We focus on costs. We focus on liquidity. We focus on our profit structures. Of course, we utilize AI and all possibilities of digitalization. And SAP HANA for sure, as the biggest digitalization project that we're running at the time, it will have an impact on our costs. And last not least, and this is the one that I want to deep dive with a few comments, a little bit more, take care of our structural costs because as the seas get rougher, you have to see that your ship gets lighter. Otherwise, in a dark big trout of valleys, you might hit the rocks, and this is not what we want to do. So if you continue with our strategy, everything that we have put in place from KSB SupremeServ via voice, via our customer orientation, Mission TEN30, the big cookie that we are now really focusing on is the question, how can we worldwide reduce our structural costs. And here, we basically have two packets of measures, one short-term measures. And here for this fiscal year, Matthias forgot to mention it or gave the pleasure for me to mention it. We saw the downturn coming from the Iran war, and we took action rather quickly and asked our organization to reduce structural costs, variable structural costs up to the amount of EUR 30 million in order to safeguard our EBIT. And the nice thing about KSB, we have a management, if you whistle, they execute. And this, for sure, will help us not only grow our EBIT, but also mitigate any risk should there be a turndown in turnover, which I do not see at the time. And the next part of the structural cost will, of course, be to look into our headquarters worldwide and to see how we can make them a little bit more lighter, a little bit more flexible for the future to come because our target is clear. We want to grow our profitability. And having said this, summary from my side, what do we do? Of course, we study the daily headlines in order to extract what trends do we see. We mobilize, we adapt our organization accordingly, but we lead with our long-term target. And our long-term target is to make this company by 2030, a EUR 4 billion-plus company with a return on sales of more than 10%. And this is what my Eagle -- our Eagle stands for. With this, I thank you so much for your attention. And now Sonja, hand over to you. And I think now we have a nice half an hour for questions and answers.

Indeed, thanks a lot, Stephan, for your presentation and also Matthias for your insights. So it's now time for us to open the Q&A session. Therefore, we will move to our little Q&A corner. Please give us 2 minutes and we will be right back with you. You can use the 2 minutes also to send in your questions, we will be glad to answer them. See you in a minute. So we are back, and thanks very much for sending in your questions. So let's start right away with the first question related to data centers. Stephan, I'm addressing you. Could you provide more details on the size of orders for cooling pumps for data centers? Were these orders from different customers? And do you expect further orders in this area in the coming quarters? What do you estimate the annual revenue potential of this market opportunity to be? And who are the key competitors in this market segment? Are data center pumps more margin accretive than other applications?

Yes, Sonja, a lot of questions, exciting questions regarding data center. And I'll just come -- start from the bottom. Are they more accretive than other applications. Data center pumps, these are huge packages of pumps, and that makes them extremely interesting. We're talking about numbers where the smallest order is 100 pumps. And the vision that the customer groups give are in the thousands. And this is standardized pumps and one type, this for a factory, this is the best that we can have because we have economies of scale. We can really streamline the logistical processes from the procurement side to the own manufacturing side. And so far, this is a highly attractive business for us in terms of economies of scale. Who are the customers? Of course, I cannot tell you explicitly the names of the customers because this is really a top secret business. But I can tell you there are 2 huge customer groups. And these are the Chinese and these are U.S.-based companies. And probably I guess these are all the big names in the business of AI, with really large-scale orders. What makes this business extremely exceptional also for KSB is the speed. For some strange reason, maybe this is connected to the genetics of AI, speed is of essence. And we're not talking about months, we are talking about weeks. Customers expect prototype pumps in 4 weeks, and they expect the first orders to be executed in 2 months. And this is something where we really have to streamline our organization. And since I follow this in terms of somewhat guidance and godfathering, I am fascinated how our colleagues in China team up with their colleagues in Germany and make it happen or in France, or wherever these pumps come from. And of course, I have asked the question, how big is this business going to be for us. The last estimation was, but this is accumulated that in the next 3 years, they expect about EUR 100 million in terms of order intake from data centers. But I feel this is not the holistic calculation because data centers, as I told you, it starts with the electricity generation. Outside of the data center, it continues with water generation. And as you know, a lot of these data centers are in the middle of nowhere. And it then ends in what you probably connect the data center, the cooling processes. And here, we have the primary circuits and the secondary circuit and the firefighting and the cooling of the building, the HVAC. So a lot of business. Fast, extreme pressure in terms of delivery, but also connected to this urgency, the willingness to pay good margins and to give us the chance to execute with economies of scale.

Thank you, Stephan. So we take away, it's a matter of speed, actually. Matthias, I have a question for you. The order backlog should provide good planning security, but the EBIT guidance range remains relatively wide. What did prevent you from narrowing the guidance range? And how confident are you in achieving the midpoint of the guidance range?

So first of all, if you take a look at your order backlog, I think it's the first time that we have an order backlog of more than EUR 2 billion. Taking this into account, you must bear in mind this order backlog is not only an order backlog for the actual year, but it has an extent of 3 and sometimes also on to 4 years, taking the big energy project, nuclear business projects into account. And of course, due to the big energy order we got, the order intake -- the order backlog increased by this more than EUR 150 million. So that means, yes, the order backlog is higher, but it's not only the order backlog for the end of the year. Secondly, to give you a little bit guidance or an idea, if you have an order backlog, a rough calculation by some means that the order backlog we have is gives us full work for the next 6 months. That's a little bit kind of an estimation. And I think for that reason, there's no reason to narrow the guidance range. I don't think so. Regarding the question, how confident are you in achieving the midpoint of the guiding range, I am confident.

That was clear. Thank you, Matthias. Stephan, I have a question for you regarding the Iran conflict. So how does the Iran conflict impact your business currently in the Gulf region and in Asia?

I think basically from the two sides, one from the demand side, of course, there are no big investments at the moment directly in the near states which are impacted the most. This is Qatar. These are the Emirates. This is Oman. In Saudi, it's already a little bit different. The further you come away from the center of gravity, the bigger the investment appetite, which was very big rests. But I am sure that this investment appetite, which is there, it will resurge. It's just being somewhat strangled as long as the outcome of the war is not clear. And there, I think we all have the confidence there is a visible horizon for the end of this war. The second impact is in the producing plants, we have a lot of orders which were supposed to be invoiced and sent into the region. Transport into the region is extremely difficult. And a lot of the customers are not willing to take the pumps and valves that they have ordered. So they remain in our plants, be it in Halle, be it in India. And of course, this postpones turnover. And out of both, if I were to summarize it, Sonja, it's just two chances the turnover will come, the one which is in the packed crates in our plants and the demand, be it for new building or be it for refurbishment of damaged plants, this will be present as soon as the investment possibilities are there again. So opportunities.

Very good. And I would like to add another question on the Iran conflict, and that's the impact on the forecast corridor. So is it more likely that you will end at the lower end of the guidance than at the upper end due to the ongoing Iran conflict. But I think here, Matthias already made a clear statement.

I confirm what I said. I'm confident we reached the midpoint.

Yes. Thank you for confirming that again. Then we have a question on the cost of materials ratio, which has increased from 39% to 40%. Has KSB been able to increase the selling prices? And did competitors also increase selling prices?

Very clear, yes. From 1st of June onwards, we increased our prices in alignment with the competition. So it's always a game who goes first and who follows how. The first ones raised their prices in May, and we then adjusted worldwide in June. Basically, based on the fact that our transport costs have gone up in many countries, the supply of raw materials. Again, India, let alone due to the gas shortage in India, foundry articles have increased by price 25%. And what we can pass on to customers, we pass on. Otherwise, we change our supply chains, which is, in many cases, not done overnight. So this is basically the mixture, passing on costs and finding alternatives. But we have raised our prices, yes.

Thank you, Stephan. Then we have a question on the EUR 30 million reduction in structural costs that you just mentioned. So Matthias, how much of this was delivered in the first half of the year and what is to come in the second half? What was or is the one-off costs associated with this? And is it being taken above the line?

Yes. So in the first half of the year, we could take out of that approximately value beyond EUR 10 million. So that means in the second half of the year, there will be an even bigger effect. This is due to the reason that in the first quarter, we had to work out this program. So far and until the end of the year, there will be no one-off costs because all the measures we are undertaking right now in order to safeguard the budget and our prognosis for the year 2026 do not contain any structural measures.

Thank you, Matthias. Then there is a question on Chinese competition that you mentioned. Is it mainly within China or increasingly outside of China, too? And which end markets is it mainly seen in?

The competition in China in itself, this is horrendous. And the reasons are rather simple. A key driver for the growth of the economy in the last years in China was infrastructure spending. And everybody happily lived on this. This infrastructure spending by the government is over for fiscal reasons of the government. The supply of Chinese products are there for the little bit of the cake that is left in China, everybody is trying to get his part, and this is a purely cost-driven business, where, yes, due to our reputation, due to our people, due to our connections, we get a small part of the cake. But this is just a small part of the cake. The much bigger part of the cake now for Chinese suppliers is the export business. And they have exported since decades. So this is nothing new. But now this is being driven with a high level of professionality, I must say, which you can admire and the starting corners where they are under the radar screen, be it South America, be it Africa, where they have been in the market long term. Now it's just becoming much, much more fierce. And now, of course, they're also coming to Europe. And you see it in the car industry. I think this is in the headlines, the BYDs, which are now coming also to Germany. Do we like it? No? Can we prevent it? No. We are in competition. And today, Chinese products, many of them, they are of good quality, and we have to adapt accordingly.

Then I would like to continue with a question on the capacity utilization. Can you comment on that? And on the production process efficiency in the second quarter, what development do you expect for utilization levels in Q3 and Q4?

I can take over this question. When you talk about production and capacity utilization, you always have two parts. One, the variable part, the flexible part. And here, I must say I'm extremely proud, especially for the European plants. We have an extreme amount of flexibility together with the labor representatives and the unions to breathe according to the load. If we have a little load, we work into time accounts. We have a lot of load, we work out of time accounts. And this is what we utilized in the first half of the year. What you can, of course, not change overnight are the structural costs, the investments that you have made into the factory, that is there. And this then hits you as soon as your turnover is lower than your breakeven, then you will have to bear these costs. And these are the things where I said in terms of SG&A costs on the office side, there we just have to come up with clever remedies, how we are more flexible to adapt. Now as we look forward into the second half year, and this you can see if you compare all of our second half years, the second half year for whatever reason in mechanical engineering is always much stronger than the first half year. And this is what we not only expect, we already see in July, and this is what we count on. And going back to the question of the workload that we have, there is no reason whatsoever why this should not also materialize this year.