PFISTERER Holding SE (PFSE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to the first Deutsche Börse Scale Summit. My name is Judith, and I am very pleased to welcome you on behalf of [indiscernible]. This new format brings together investors and high-growth scale issuers to enable a direct exchange on strategies, positioning and investment stories. Each presentation will last 20 minutes and will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A session. We warmly encourage you to actively participate in these discussions. And with that, I'm pleased to welcome Johannes Linden, who will guide us through the presentation on PFISTERER Holding SE. And with no further ado, Mr. Linden, the stage is yours.

Thank you. Thanks a lot for the warm introduction. I'm very happy to have been given the opportunity of introducing PFISTERER to you today and we really appreciate your interest in the company and the following presentation. PFISTERER is being organized and led by a co-CEO structure. We are 2 co-CEOs. My name is Johannes. I'm the one talking to you today. And from a functional point of view, I'm responsible for the functional areas of finance and operations with 30 years of industrial experience, always in the B2B business in different environments. I have gained international experience living and working in the United States and Italy and in China. And meanwhile, I'm in the southwest of Germany at the top of the world, so to speak, when it comes to electrical infrastructure, connection technology, and that's what I would like to share with you today. Apart of myself, there is my colleague, Konstantin Kurfiss, he is a real industry expert in the field where PFISTERER is active. He's taking care of sales and technology. And in this particular industrial environment, he's been working for more than 20 years, meanwhile, more than 16 years here at PFISTERER. Now what is PFISTERER all about? The electrical infrastructure is consisting of an indefinite number of individual pieces, which all have to be connected together for electricity to flow from one component to the next. And the picture that you see here is illustrating a product of PFISTERER. This is in the center of the picture. There is a metal connector where the fitter is fixing the connecting screw. You see on the very left, there is a tremendous diameter of cable. This is also true on the very right. And the connector is connecting these 2 ends of a cable in order to allow electricity to flow. And due to the indefinite number -- well, of course, it's a definite number but it's an uncountable number of pieces that have to be connected in the global grid. In this area, we are striving to be the preferred partner for innovative, reliable and also mission-critical electrical connections. And everything that is connected also needs to be insulated, so also for the insulating solutions. PFISTERER is quite a profitable company. We have seen in the fiscal year 2025 revenues of approximately EUR 450 million, which is representing a growth year-over-year of 17.4%. We have gained an order intake of approximately EUR 550 million, which in itself again was a growth of close to 30%. And we booked an EBITDA margin in the calendar year 2025 of 17.8%, which in itself again was a growth of 0.9 points relative to the previous year. With an order book of EUR 334.4 million that we brought into the calendar year '26, we believe we have a very solid basis of also continuing good business in this year and of course, also for years to come. And the team at the change of the year was consisting of 1,378 people. Meanwhile, we are more than 1,500. What is PFISTERER a little bit more detailed. How is PFISTERER being characterized? Well, first of all, we look upon ourselves, and this is based on the feedback that we receive from customers and other market participants that we do have a leading market position. This is reason amongst other things, by the fact that we are cable agnostic. You have seen earlier in the picture where the fitter was connecting 2 cable ends. We have a cable independent connecting technology. That means every cable that is out there in the world can be connected using PFISTERER technology. This is not the case with the majority or even up to all of the market participants next to us. So we believe this is giving us a very strong position. PFISTERER has a global market and also production and sales setup with 19 international companies, 5 factories in the United States, in Germany and the largest factory in the Czech Republic. We are in connection with our global supplier network, we are able to provide secure technology at the same time with the footprint of an internationally acting company. PFISTERER is in the area of connection and insulation technology, meanwhile, since 105 years, the company was founded in 1921. And over these -- yes, more than 1 century, we have earned a reputation of being technologically excellent. We are counting 166 patents as ours, and we cover with these patents, the technologies and the experience over 105 years, we are covering the entire power value chain. And with this, I mean from the generation of electricity over the transmission up to the distribution to the individual consumer from low voltage over medium voltage to high voltage, you will find the connecting and insulation solution from PFISTERER if you are looking for a reliable and mission-critical connection. This is illustrated also here on this condensed landscape. You see on the upper area of the landscape, examples of electricity generation. For instance, at the 12:00 position, there is a nuclear power plant at the 1:00 position, there would be an onshore wind farm on the 11:00 position. It's an offshore wind farm. In the center of the picture, there is illustrated a solar PV field. As long as electricity is being generated, it needs to be connected somewhere because it is not exactly consumed where it is being generated, but it needs to be connected to the consumer, which typically takes place through transmission lines. They could be underground systems but they could also be overhead, cable lines at the 7:00 position. It could also be an under-the-water connection where PFISTERER is supporting the transmission of electricity and after the transmission then comes to the distribution. And again, you will find products from PFISTERER from the low voltage over the medium voltage to the high-voltage area, even up to the highest voltage areas and with the highest, I'm talking about 1 million and more. Now we think that with our leading market position and also superior technology, we are in an absolute growth market underway. Why is that? On the one hand, we are convinced that we are living in a world where the electricity demand is growing. And at the same time, also the need for electrical resilience or energy resilience and the answer to that is electricity in many cases, where this energy resilience is also being asked for more and more. The global population is growing. There is a trend to decarbonize, decarbonization. We do see the consumption of electricity growing for e-mobility, for heat pumps. Maybe those 2 factors are more Asian and European focus. It is growing also very strongly for the reason of data centers driven by AI investments and business perspectives, maybe this is, at this point in time, even stronger in the United States than what it is in Germany or in Europe right now, but it's also growing very strongly in Asia. So there are a number of factors which we already see today, which are pushing electricity, which is causing the demand to grow, and this is expected to continue also for decades to come. That's the demand side. Now this demand is meeting an electrical infrastructure that is characterized by a couple of supply changes. These changes have to do with the fact that now there is a growing demand but it's meeting an overaged infrastructure because there was a relevant underinvestment for the past 30 to 50 years in this electrical infrastructure. At the same time, also the technical situation in the grid is changing. If in the past, there was always a hierarchy from the generation centrally, it was flowing to a decentralized consumer nowadays with localized electrical generation, but at the same time, even bigger centralized power generation, for instance, offshore wind parks, you have a totally different situation where electricity is flowing sometimes from left to right and sometimes from right to left. So a different technical demand where the outdated and overaged grid is simply not capable of dealing with. At the same and very last argument, due to these even bigger power generation factories, now you have the need of longer distances to be covered through electrical transportation, which then technically leads to higher voltages, also to a trend in favor of DC technology, direct current instead of alternate current AC technology. And again, that is pushing the investment behavior. And what that means is illustrated now on the S type of a graph on the left here. On the vertical axis, you see the investment -- annual investment into the electrical grid. On the horizontal axis, you see a time scale. And it becomes evident that the investment in the grid until the year 2020, '21 what it has been in the area of GDP growth, this is now picking up, picking up already since a number of years and expect it to continue to pick up even steeper for the years to come and to last for at least the next 10 years, other people say for the next 30 years. So we think this increase of investment is a substantiated hyper cycle of investments into the electrical grid amongst electrical generation. And yes, that's why we are convinced that we have a very good prospect of market development for products of PFISTERER for many years to come. So how are we doing this? How do we want to capture the market opportunities that we are identifying. Well, we have developed the PFISTERER strategy house, an integrated strategy for the coming 5 years, lasting until the year 2030. And amongst a couple of pre-requisites that we are working on as an organization, we have -- from a product market point of view, we have developed 3 individual programs, which are characterized by the 3 pillars of the strategy house that you see here. First of all, on the very left, we have a program in place where we are pushing our today's core markets and the core businesses. If you look into the details of the product segments and the market regions we are reporting, you will see that not every product segment does have the same relative strength in every of the regions we are dealing with. While this has historical reasons, we believe there is a lot of potential due to the technical superiority of the solutions that we offer that we can grow the existing products in the regions where at this moment in time, they appear to be lower than what we think they could be. So this is pillar #1 left. Then second to that, we believe we have relevant room to expand our boundaries. By this, I mean expanding the boundary of existing technological solutions, adapting them to international markets slightly, bringing them closer to the individual requirements in the geographical region where possibly we see growth for us to grow but also to expand our program in terms of sales representation. For instance, last year, we opened a company in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia in January of this year. We opened up a training center in Saudi. Last year, we acquired Power CSL, which is a specialized company in providing connecting solutions for subsea applications. So we believe by continuing on the same path, there is also potential for PFISTERER to continue the growth track. And then there is -- finally, there is a third growth pillar that we see. This is future trends and real innovation. For PFISTERER, that is at this moment in time as the lighthouse project for us. That's the entering of the HVDC market space on cable connections. PFISTERER has been providing solutions for overhead lines in HVDC already for decades. But now we are adding, and this is going to take place next year. We will be adding a complete program for already proven 320 kV and still work in progress 550 kV on the cable accessory market for HVDC interconnector and electricity highway solutions. This is a global trend. We see a tremendous growth potential in the HVDC applications, and we believe this will be giving us further tailwinds on the development of the company. If you now look into the past, I was referring earlier to the numbers of '25. If you look over the past 4 years, you see already a quite positive revenue development with the growth rates of 15% or 17% as it was last year. And if we take the consensus that the analysts we have been explaining our ideas to, the consensus revenue that they have determined on their own, we should be seeing another growth year of 15% this year. Within the midterm planning until the year 2030, we are looking for an organic growth in the area ending at EUR 800 million to EUR 900 million. On the right graph, you see the profitability development characterized by the profitability mean of EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA. Here, we have managed to develop the company starting from 15.6%, all of this is IFRS to 17.8% over the past 3 years. Based on the backlog that we have, also looking at our, I believe, quite successful quarter 1. The consensus of the analysts has determined that this year is good for 19.2% EBITDA margin. And while PFISTERER itself hasn't given the guidance on that number, we have shared our conviction that by the end of the decade, we're going to be in the highest teen or the low 20 percentage margin on EBITDA. And with all of this, I would like to close the presentation and sharing with you our belief that PFISTERER is active in a large and fast-growing market that we have a unique positioning and a superior value proposition based on the cable agnosticity on the one hand and a tremendous amount of experience and technological backup through the patents I was talking about earlier. We have a global operational footprint, and we are serving our customers in more than 90 countries. And based on the multifaceted growth strategy, we are convinced that we will continue to push our financial profile even more into elevated heights than where it is already today. Thank you for the moment, and I'm happy to answer questions if there are any.

[Operator Instructions]

I think Mark is with team here. I think he check the raising hand function. I believe that has been...

Wonderful. And then [indiscernible] also raised his hand and you may be able to unmute yourself now, Mr. Haino. And we first move on to the questions in our chat box. What are the main competitors, Mr. Linden?

Well, there is not one main competitor, I would say. It depends on into which of the product segments that we are working in you want to look at. There is for cable connectors, in particular, on the high-voltage and super high-voltage arena, the main competitors would be integrated cable system manufacturers, we call them, Prysmian, Nexans, NKT to name them, they are offering the cable and also the integrated cable connector solution. So that's a system that they are offering. The downside to that is they aren't providing the connector to anyone else, but only to their own. And other cable companies who are looking for a connector wouldn't like to buy from their competitor, but they would really like to work with independent cable agnostic companies such as PFISTERER. So this would be one area of competitors. Then there is a second category. These are also cable connecting companies such as TE or 3M to name 2 American companies. In the overhead line business, again, would be an American company such as Hubbell or MacLean, they would also be providing solutions that could be doing a similar job that what PFISTERER is providing. All of the companies I was referring to are listed companies, stock-listed companies.

And what do you see as the key structural risks to your business model? And how are you imagining them mitigating?

We don't see any significant structural risk in the sense of there is a realistic scenario where the electricity demand is collapsing. We think electricity is requested, and there is no scenario foreseeable other than the world is going down, that the electricity demand will be collapsing. So this being said, of course, in our growth plans that we have, we do have risks, simply in the sense of that we are not managing the growth in a proper way that we are trying to eat more than what we can digest that we are maybe doing premature merger and acquisition as we do have the financial funds to act in that way. So I think it's more from a managing point of view that we could be, yes, getting too aggressive. So how are we managing this? I think with 2 experienced co-CEOs, which have seen a lot in their professional experience and also by committing to the market that in the coming 2 years, there won't be any significant merger and acquisition, but we are focusing on developing the company, on investing into growing our capacities in growing these capacities by brownfield expansions instead of building new factories in new countries with new management and new governmental conditions. This is not what we are doing. We are focusing on continuing what we have been doing in the past. And by doing so, we think we are mitigating the risk of biting off too much. We think we are mitigating this successfully.

And how has becoming public actually changed the company? What have the real benefits turned out to be? And how do you plan to leverage being listed for your growth and strategy going forward?

Well, the second half of the question, by turning into a public company, including the capital increase that was connected to it, we have collected monetary funds inside of the company that is securing our investments for the coming years. So including the investments and the funds that we have collected, the positive operational and also free cash flow we are generating, we can invest for the coming 5 years, our investment program, which is adding up to a number in the area of EUR 270 million. So for a company of the size of PFISTERER, I think quite a reasonable investment program in the sense of this is relevant, needs to be managed well. I was talking about that earlier. The first element of your question, this public company, I mean we all know that the stock market can get slippery once in a while, yes. So you need to do things with caution. You need to try to improve your predictability. You need to be accountable on the predictions that you give. And we are raising the bar inside of the organization in order to meet all of these expectations. And this is of course, this is a new expectation we have to deal with. So this is changing the company, turning into a more professional company at the end of the day.

And who are the main customers?