medmix AG (MEDX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to medmix H1 2025 Results Webcast. [Operator Instructions] The webcast will be recorded. Please note that the recording by participants for publication or broadcast is not allowed. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to Domenico Truncellito, Head of Communications and Investor Relations at medmix.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Domenico Truncellito, Head of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations at medmix. I'm joined by Rene Willi, our CEO; and Jenni Dean, our CFO. In the interest of brevity, we will assume that you have read the disclaimer on this slide regarding forward-looking statements. With that, I will now hand over to Rene.

Also from my side, good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to present the half year 2025 results to you today. Jenni will guide you through our financial performance. I will update you on our business review and our strategy as well as our near and midterm outlook. On Slide 4, you can see the highlights for the half year 2025. We significantly increased gross profit and profitability above the range of our full year guidance despite decreased revenues. Gross profit increased by 240 basis points to CHF 82.5 million. We clearly see that the savings generated through our growth and efficiency program and our strategic initiatives are going through to the bottom line. We are ahead of plan with our growth and efficiency program, which, on the one hand, is aimed to unleashing growth by reallocating resources to our strategic priorities and, on the other hand, improving our performance by strategically reducing costs. Of our original CHF 30 million target, we have secured CHF 15 million so far. This means we have executed initiatives that will generate CHF 15 million of savings. Of this CHF 15 million, we have realized, in the P&L, CHF 8.5 million of savings in H1 2025. I will give you more details in the strategy section of this presentation. Operating cash is slightly down, mainly driven by our decision to build up dental inventories to mitigate the impact of U.S. tariffs and improve service levels overall for U.S. customers. Another highlight in the first half of this year was our recognition as just 1 of 9 Swiss companies to achieve an A score in the sustainability ranking by CDP. In our Healthcare segment, our Dental business unit continued to grow significantly above market in the first half of 2025 as we successfully expand our sales outside the impression category. We are very pleased with the development of our Surgery business unit, which grew 26%, partly because of low comparable in H1 '24, but mainly because of new customer approvals. Drug Delivery declined mainly due to missing non-repeat project milestones that were booked in H1 2024. The dual-source impact was very low in the first half, but we expect a higher impact in the second half of 2025. Our first PiccoJect auto-injector devices for clinical use have been produced and delivered to our customers this year. We have a solid pipeline of projects for a mix of originated drugs, biosimilars and generics for a broad range of indications. In our Consumer & Industrial segment, our Industry business is performing well with slightly negative revenues year-on-year in H1 2025 and improved profitability, especially when considering sluggish end markets heavily impacted by geopolitical uncertainty. Our Valencia facility is delivering the full portfolio of industrial products, and we progressed well on increasing efficiency and profitability through leaner product flows, automated production processes. We have started commercial production from our Atlanta facility, which will ramp up as we start to in-source volume currently with our U.S. subcontractors. In our Beauty business unit, year-on-year growth in H1 was always going to be challenging given the extremely strong H1 in '24 and a slowdown of new orders booked in H2 2024. The first half of 2025 was marked by lower commercial activity and customer project delays. We expect this lower activity to continue in the second half. We have seen an increase in customer projects activity in Q2 2025, including winning our second largest order ever. These orders will provide revenue growth momentum in 2026. Given the slowdown, we have accelerated existing cost-out measures to adapt the cost base to business volumes and protect profitability, and we have identified significant new initiatives to be implemented immediately. I will elaborate on this in our growth and efficiency section of this presentation. With this, I will hand over to Jenni, who will take you deeper into the financials.

Thanks, Rene. Our main KPIs can be seen on Slide 7. As already explained, our revenues declined year-on-year. Foreign exchange rate effects of minus 2% impacted underlying organic volume growth during the period, which stood at minus 4.6%. Both segment gross profit and gross profit and the margins for both expanded significantly despite these lower revenues. Importantly, we see from our profitability metrics that our strategic actions and cost-out measures, impacting both margin and OpEx, are flowing through to the bottom line profit. I have a slide on that later. Our adjusted EBITDA margin is now close to 20%, ahead of our full year guidance range of 18% to 19%. This was mainly driven by higher Dental in the mix at improved margins and margin improvements in our Industry and Beauty business units. EBIT increased 22.2% as a result of the higher gross profit and our implemented strategic initiatives. Operating net cash flow is slightly lower year-on-year as we have built inventories mainly in our Dental business to mitigate the impact of potential U.S. tariffs and improved service levels of our U.S. customers. Our leverage ratio improved slightly year-on-year, driven by lower net debt. On Slide 8, you can see the half year '24 to '25 revenue bridge. As mentioned before, strong growth of the most profitable health care businesses, Dental and Surgery, was offset by a decrease in Drug Delivery and in the C&I segment. Foreign exchange effects, mainly the weakening dollar to Swiss franc, negatively impacted underlying organic growth year-on-year as well. On the right, you see the percentage revenue contributed by our business units: Consumer & Industrial contributed 60%, 5 points lower than in 2024; and Healthcare, therefore, 40%. Slide 9 shows our full year health care -- our half year Healthcare and C&I gross profit year-on-year. Total gross profit segment grew by 1.6% to CHF 107.9 million despite the decline in group revenues, delivering a strong segment gross profit margin of 47.9%, a year-on-year increase of 390 basis points. Healthcare segment gross profit increased 7.5% year-on-year, in line with the revenue growth. Resulting segment gross profit margin was a strong 62.7%. Dental and Surgery business unit volumes and segment margins grew year-on-year, partly offset by the volume and segment margin pressure from the Drug Delivery business unit. Consumer & Industrial segment gross profit decreased by 4% year-on-year due to the impact of the decrease in Beauty volumes. The segment delivered a robust gross profit margin of 38.3%, though, an increase of 370 basis points year-on-year. This was driven by the operational efficiency gains through our growth and efficiency program in Industry and Beauty business units. Slide 10 shows the walk from our adjusted EBITDA in half 1 2024 to half 1 2025. The decline here from CHF 46 million to CHF 44.9 million in absolute adjusted EBITDA masks the success of the growth and efficiency cost-out initiatives. The decline in absolute adjusted EBITDA is driven by 2 factors. In the first column, you see the impact of the volume shortfall year-on-year in Beauty and Drug Delivery of CHF 5.3 million. And in the final column, you see the impact of minus CHF 4 million on our profit. That's actually related to the fact we guide and report on adjusted EBITDA. And for half 1 2025, we have lower non-ops or one-off adjustments and lower amortization after the end of some technical GEKA amortization in half 1 '25. As previously mentioned, we have realized a significant CHF 8.5 million of cost-out savings through our growth and efficiency program. CHF 5.5 million of this is included in the CHF 7.1 million you see in the middle of this chart, which is increasing our contribution to profit for margin and mix. Also included in this number are impacts of accelerated Dental sales, offset by tariff impacts, bringing the total to CHF 7.1 million. The remaining CHF 3.3 million is part of the CHF 0.9 million increased contribution from OpEx. Offset against the savings of CHF 3 million were adverse transactional FX impacts and net impacts of provisions for litigation, restructuring and reinvestment in the health care business unit teams. Slide 11 shows that our EBIT is positively impacted by our segment gross margin growth. EBIT increased 22.2% year-on-year and EBIT as a percentage of revenues stands at 7%, a 170 basis points increase compared to the same period a year ago. The EBIT metrics clearly show the benefit of our growth and efficiency initiatives, which drove higher Dental in the mix at higher margins and Industry as well as Beauty operational efficiency gains. On Slide 12, you can see the walk from our operating net cash flow in June '24 to June '25. Operating net cash flow slightly decreased to CHF 15.3 million. The lower ONCF is primarily due to inventory buildup in our Dental business unit to mitigate potential U.S. tariff impacts and to increase service levels for our U.S. customers. With that, I would like to invite Rene to come back and discuss our strategy and outlook.

Thanks, Jenni. In February, I presented our strategic priorities, which you see on this slide. We have refined our strategy in order to create a sound foundation for our future growth. Our strategic priorities focus on the adaptation of our organizational setup to enhance our customer proximity, pace of innovation and ensure clear accountability. In the past half year, we have significantly strengthened our management team with seasoned leaders. Jasper Den Ouden joined medmix as of March as Chief HR & Sustainability Officer. Jasper brings extensive international HR leadership experience. He most recently served as Chief Human Resource Officer at SR Technics Group in Zurich and drove key initiatives in digital transformation, talent development, ESG and organizational change. We are also very happy to welcome Francisco Faoro and Oliver Haferbeck to our executive leadership team. Oliver was appointed as the new Head of Drug Delivery business unit in June. He brings a wealth of international leadership experience in the health care and medical technology sectors. Most recently, he served as Head of Gerresheimer Advanced Technology and CEO of Sensile Medical AG, where he led innovation advanced drug delivery systems. His tenure at Gerresheimer was marked by a strong focus on strategic growth, technology advancement and operational excellence. Francisco Faoro joined medmix as Chief Technology Officer in May. Francisco brings an extensive international leadership experience in technology and innovation. He held various senior leadership roles at Straumann Group, successfully preparing multiple implant innovations, which he created significant growth momentum. Prior to his tenure in the dental field, Francisco had several managerial positions in brand management and product development within the orthopedic and polymer processing industries. As we have stated in our results section, our Dental business unit continues to grow strongly above market. We have increased our focus on faster-growing product categories to further reduce our exposure to the impression category, which today is below 40%. We are building strategic partnerships with our key OEMs to foster collaboration and provide them a competitive advantage. We have increased our innovation pace and have a strong pipeline in several categories such as cementation, adhesive, et cetera. As an example, we will achieve launch readiness for our new applicators ecosystem, CliX, end of this year, which is a paradigm shift when it comes to precision, ease of use for the dentist and sustainability. I will provide you more details in the innovation section of this presentation. In Surgery, we are growing high double digit and have started the second phase of ramp-up of the Atlanta site, which now produces a full range of validated Surgery products. With these new facilities, we have increased customer proximity in the world's largest health care market. This enables us to build a full portfolio of value-adding services and to become a strategic partner for customers. We have benefited in the first half of the year from very successful product launches of our customers. Furthermore, we continue to in-source manufacturing to increase value creation as well as securing an improving service level. For our Drug Delivery business, the primary strategic focus is on commercializing our 2 next-generation device platform, PiccoJect and D-Flex. Both are at the beginning of their life cycles, and we have received a positive response from customers. As previously communicated, the increase in allocation of production to one customer's second source persists in 2025, but is skewed to the second half of the year. In our Industry business unit, our primary strategic focus is taking cost out, improving operational efficiency and therefore, profitability. In H2 2025, we will begin ramping up our in-sourcing initiatives in Atlanta to enhance value creation. Volume growth is, of course, also important. Our environmentally friendly product portfolio continues to make the difference with our customers. Following SIKA, which recently decided to switch its current portfolio to our greenLine product range, Huntsman and Gurit, 2 other customers, important customers, have also started to use our greenLine portfolio. Furthermore, our team has launched a new multiyear, high-volume supply partnership, which adapts and introduces our ecopaCC solutions to the aerospace market. As for our industry, our primary strategic imperative for the Beauty business unit is to improve profitability. We have focused on quality of our order books, which means we have been selective in accepting customer projects. While we have good traction in our growth and efficiency initiatives in Beauty, revenues have continued to decline, and we see a slower-than-expected recovery in the Beauty revenue trends in H2 2025. We have, therefore, accelerated the existing cost-out measures and identified new actions to adapt the cost base to business volume and protect profitability. With regard to new projects, we have seen an increase in customer activity in Q2 2025. And we're also able to win new tenders, which will provide revenue growth momentum in 2026. The growth and efficiency program is progressing well as we see savings flowing through to the bottom line. I will give you more details on the next slide. As communicated, we target cost-out of CHF 30 million over 2 years with most of the actions to be executed in 2025 and a significant portion of the savings expected to have an impact already in 2025. Part of the cost-out will be reinvested to pursue our health care growth strategy and increasing efficiency in our production facilities. We will continue to invest in R&D, which will ensure we stay at the forefront of innovation. As you can see in this graph, in 2024, we have realized savings of CHF 3 million. For 2025, CHF 70 million are planned, of which we have already secured CHF 11 million until June 2025. And we have realized in the P&L CHF 8.5 million. With regard to the Beauty business unit, we have accelerated cost-out measures already planned and identified additional savings of CHF 3 million. We will accelerate automatization projects further, optimize the supply chain and review organizational setup. Let's move to Slide 16. On this slide, you see our exposure to U.S. tariffs. Our mitigation actions and the maximum 2025 gross impact on the P&L we foresee based on the latest expected tariff rates and timing. We are well positioned to weather the disruption caused by U.S. tariffs due to our global footprint and our strong customer relationships. With our Atlanta and Elgin sites, we produce local for local for our Beauty, Surgery and Drug Delivery business units. Some Dental U.S. customers are served through our hub site in Switzerland, and we serve some U.S. industry customers out of our Valencia and China site, which exposes us to U.S. tariffs. Assuming that we would not increase prices to the maximum forecast impact with latest communicated tariffs and timing, we will be 1 point of profit in terms of EBITDA. We have actually already communicated price increases to impact the customers starting 1st of July 2025, and we'll work with customers and monitor the situation carefully throughout the remainder of the year. On Slide 17, you see our capital allocation principles, which remain unchanged to what we have shown in February. Needless to say, these are integral to our strategy and are shown in descending order of importance. The focus of our capital allocation is, on the one hand, to strengthen our foundations and, on the other hand, to invest in profitable growth. Let me now talk about our innovation capabilities, which are vital to fuel our future profitable growth. We have innovation projects in every business unit. In the past, we have already spoken about our sustainable innovations such as shadow printing, greenLine, ecopaCC and C&I as well as about our innovative product platform, PiccoJect. Today, I'd like to focus on Dental and Surgery. Both have strategically important projects, achieving launch readiness this year and will provide growth momentum in 2026 and beyond. Slide 19 shows a good example of our investments in faster-growing Dental product categories. Here, you can see our new CliX Drop applicator, which represents a paradigm shift when it comes to precision and ease of use for the dentist. Nowadays, dentists had to apply liquid by handout of a conventional bottle. Clearly, the current technology would not allow for precise dosing and would generate a lot of waste of very expensive material needed for the dental treatment. This is also messy and not convenient. With our new applicator, dentists can precisely apply the liquid without any waste. It is easy to use, maximizes control and maximizes applications per cartridge. Interest from our globally leading dental OEM customers for this innovation is very high, and CliX will be available to these customers in 2026. Just to complete the picture, this slide shows the internal part of CliX and the cartridges, and it is more than an applicator. It allows the dentist to apply liquids, adhesives and shells out of the same system, just by changing the tip and the container. The container can be used multiple times, treating multiple patients. Some engineers told me that using CliX is as simple as switching coffee capsules in an espresso machine. But because it can be used for adhesives, liquids and gels, it's actually more like a machine which can make coffee, tea and ice cream. We are really excited about this innovation. On Slide 21 is an example of an incremental innovation in our Surgery business unit. The Vented G-System significantly reduces the time required to prefill the syringes by our surgical OEM customers and tissue banks. This provides them significant efficiency gains. Also, the vented syringe allows for more effective hydration and mixing of bone graft material in the operating room. The vented syringe will be commercially launched in the second half of this year and is a good example of quick time to market of our incremental innovation solutions. I really like this innovation as it does not only provide a better experience for the end users and the surgeon, but also provides a competitive advantage for our direct OEM customers in their supply chain. With this, let's go to our outlook. As we stated in our February outlook, 2025 will be a transition year as we laid the important foundations for a stronger and more resilient future. Based on H1 2025 actuals and our outlook for the full year, we now expect a full year revenue decline similar to that seen in H1 2025 on an FX-adjusted basis. Our 2025 guidance for profitability with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18% to 19% remains unchanged as does our midterm guidance over a 3-year period with a compound annual growth rate in revenues of above 4% and adjusted EBITDA margin of above 20%. With this, I will hand over to the operator for our Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] We will now start with some questions from the board. The first question is from Patrick Rafaisz, UBS. Dual sourcing in Drug Delivery, did you say you expect a higher impact in H2? And are we safe to assume that for 2026, this is then fully washed out?

Thank you, Patrick. It's correct. In H1, we have seen very limited impact of the dual sourcing. So it was really not -- the decline was driven by a onetime payment we got of a project which was closed, and we have not had that in this first half of the year. We expect more of this dual sourcing in the second half of the year. And in our assumption for the full year, we have assumed that it's washed out. Whether this happens, of course, that depends not on us. It depends also on the tools, the second source of our customers, which we cannot influence. So if it's not washed out, that means actually that our results for the second half would be better as we have seen already in the first half of the year. But in our planning, we assume that it will be washed out at the end of the full year.

There is a follow-up question from Patrick Rafaisz. Beauty, you mentioned incoming projects in Q2 suggest growth in 2026. Can you add more color?

Yes. So at the beginning of the year, actually, we assumed that we will have more projects coming in also that request for quotes. These were all delayed, but they came then actually later in the year, and we saw it now coming actually. And we have one large project. Actually, it's our second largest project that we have ever won in Beauty. But because it came later, it will not have the impact as we have expected in the second half of the year, the impact will come actually in 2026. And it's a global project, which is really for a global customer for all different regions worldwide.

There is another question from Patrick Rafaisz on Dental. How should we think about H2 growth after the H1 channel loading due to tariffs?

Yes. I would not say it's channel loading. There were 2, I think, particular important effects we have seen in the first half of the year. One was, because of the tariffs and our customers wanted to avoid that, yes, they have accelerated these orders, and this will probably impact the growth in the second half of the year. The second positive effect we had in the first half of the year is, as I already mentioned, we are now working more and more as a strategic partner for the large global dental OEMs. And there was a onetime milestone payment for a project, which we have with one of the leading global OEMs. And when we look for the full year, then the growth will be more in the normalized way as we have indicated before.

Another follow-up question from Patrick Rafaisz. Can you walk us through the details of the CHF 4 million non-ops in the margin bridge?

Yes. Thank you. I will leave that question to Jenni.

Patrick, thank you for the question. We actually don't have CHF 4 million of OpEx in the bridge. The CHF 4 million is amortization and non-operation add-backs. I guess you're talking about the adjusted EBITDA bridge. And so in there, as you can see in the P&L statement, we have CHF 2 million of non-ops this year compared to CHF 3 million last year. So CHF 1 million less non-ops. So of the CHF 4 million, CHF 1 million comes from that. And then the other CHF 3 million is from the step-down in amortization from last year to this year as we ended the amortization of some of the customer and R&D goodwill that we booked when we acquired GEKA.

A question from Simeon Gutman. Does the maintained midterm guidance imply that you expect now substantially more growth as of 2026 as you reduced 2025 revenue growth guidance? So are we looking for double-digit revenue growth as of 2026?

No, we do not expect double-digit revenue growth as of 2026. But in the long run, in the 3-year plan, we stick to the 4% plus.

At the moment, there are no more questions on the board, so if someone wants to ask an oral question. We have one, [ Charlie Firma ].

Can you hear me now?

We can hear you.

Okay. You have CHF 8.5 million of savings realized.

We can't hear the question.

You have realized savings of CHF 8.5 million in the first half and CHF 15 million of secured savings. Can you tell me the difference? What this actually means?

Okay. So the question was you have realized CHF 8.5 million out of CHF 17 million, if you could explain what that actually means in the savings.

Cost savings.

So what we were trying to demonstrate was our progress towards the original CHF 30 million target of cost-out versus our '24 baseline. So of the CHF 30 million, then what we said was that for this year, we have realized CHF 15 million, meaning, for example, we have ordered CapEx -- or ordered plant and equipment that would deliver an automation benefit or we have released some people or not hired some people that will have an impact down the track, but it's not necessarily visible yet in the P&L. And so of that number, CHF 8.5 million, we could really demonstrate what's in our P&L or impacting positively our P&L for this year. And so as I said in the bridge, we have around CHF 5.5 million that's really coming from operational efficiency initiatives, for example, automation projects predominantly in our back office in Germany and Valencia, Spain plants in our C&I segment. So it might be semi or full automation of lines that were previously manual assembly or it can be better vision systems that improve the flow-through or decrease the amount of checks, quality checks, that we need to do afterwards to improve the rate of production. So that's one sort of element. It can also be improving our processes, leaning out our processes, so we have less steps in the process. We improve our service levels and improve our profitability. So that's more on the operational side, and that was about CHF 5.5 million of the CHF 8.5 million that we realized. Unfortunately, in our margin, you don't see that full impact, and that's because we had the volume decrease in Beauty and Drug Delivery, and we had some tariff impacts. So they sort of mitigated that in the margin a little bit. On the OpEx side, so selling, G&A, R&D, these costs, then we had about CHF 3 million of upside there, and this was generated through leaning out our headquarter functions, streamlining our processes, taking layers out of the organization. We reviewed our IP strategy and the different elements that we pay for in terms of trademarks, et cetera. So we decreased that a little bit. And overall, we tried to really maximize the profitability by really focusing on where we need to reinvest a little bit in R&D and our product managers to accelerate some of the programs there.

Mr. [ Firma ], I think now your line is open again, and we got rid of the background noise. Does this answer your question? Or did I word it...

I'm still wondering how much of the CHF 30 million you target in savings will be reached this year?

Operator, we still can't hear the question.

Mr. [ Firma ], can you please repeat one time and then I will repeat it?

I'm still wondering how much of the CHF 30 million targeted savings in total will be reached this year?

The question was how much of the CHF 30 million of savings targeted will be reached this year?

Sorry, can you repeat, how much of the...

How much of the targeted savings of CHF 30 million will be reached this year?

So far, we've identified CHF 17 million. So that is our target for this year. So far, we've realized CHF 8.5 million, but we expect the full CHF 17 million to be reached. We have just launched a new CHF 3 million of initiatives in Beauty, and we will be assessing in the next few weeks how much of that we can also bring into 2025. So somewhere between CHF 17 million and CHF 20 million is our target for this year.

Yes. And of course, some of the impact will come later. Particularly, when it comes to FTE reduction, then this will not impact immediately, and that's also something depending on the country, and it's then saved because it was executed, but the financial impact you will see actually then 3 months, sometimes 6 months later.

Mr. [ Firma ], is your question answered?

Yes.

No question for now. I will move back to the question board. There is one follow-up question from Patrick Rafaisz. Last one for me, he says, a clarification on tariff impact. Can you quantify the price increases as of July? And will this fully offset the 1% point margin headwind?

The answer is that, yes, we should be able to compensate most of the price increases, but there may be a lag depending on the delivery timing of the revenue versus when they're paid. But the intent is to do that. So far, we've seen about 1 million of impact in half 1. But as we said, the price increases only start 1st of July, so there will be a bit of a lag in that sense. And so far, the targeted price increases would cover about 2/3 for this year of the tariff impact.

I have a question from [ Michael Schultz ] now from the board. You said you only will have 1 percentage point EBITDA margin loss from U.S. tariffs before passing them on to clients. Can you explain this by making an explanatory calculation?

So with our current level of revenue, 1 point of EBITDA is around CHF 5 million. So if we just have the tariffs and we don't pass any price increases on, based on the current level of tariffs, which is not clear, especially for Switzerland and the timing of the tariffs, which is also not clear for any of the countries, then we expect a maximum impact of 1 point of profit, so between CHF 4 million and CHF 5 million. However, right now, we are discussing with our customers, negotiating and we're expecting that we can pass on 2/3 of that in this year as price increases.

So Alessandro, if you want to put the question in writing or have me tell it, please move ahead. Otherwise, the question board looks empty by now. So I think I can hand over back to medmix for closing remarks.

So thank you very much for your question. I think this was really very good questions, and I think that's important. There's an uncertainty, I think, with the tariffs and the geopolitical risk. But from our perspective, we are very well positioned to really react on this. We have the agility. We have also the customer relationships, which puts us in a good position that we work out the solutions with them, and so it will not impact us too much. And we also think, in the long run, particularly with our pivot into health care, we made very good progress. So happy then also to provide you more light on this in the course of the second half of this year. Thank you.

Thank you. I just checked the board. Still no more questions. With that, I thank everyone for attending this event, which we will now close. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye.