RATIONAL Aktiengesellschaft (RAA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] online.com. [Operator Instructions] And so we estimate the call not to take more than 1 hour. And now with that, I want to hand over to Peter. So Peter, the stage is yours.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Rational is powered by and strives for customer satisfaction. This is our DNA, the financial performance for us results from this. And that is why we need to regularly do customer satisfaction surveys, and so we did it this year. If our partner, B2B International, we generated 3,210 responses in 17 different markets. And we are very happy that after a best-in-class awesome result in 2021, we were even able to further increase our customer satisfaction measured by the so-called Net Promoter Score, NPS to 64. Even though our business was challenging in the last year due to component shortages, extremely long delivery times and price increases, our NPS increased by 3 points from 61 in 2021 to 64 in 2022. We are very proud of these excellent results, but we are far away from being done, working on customer satisfaction. What is even more important to us are the feedbacks from our customers, implying improvement potential. These results are presented and discussed in all subsidiaries where we work on actions to further improve in delivering customer benefits, and I would like to use this opportunity to thank all my associates at Rational for this great result. Customer dedication is our DNA, as I said, that is why I insist on showing you some customer stories before we get to the financials. Let me take you on a journey to China. Mitang in China prepares traditional Cantonese cuisines in its 2 outlets in Beijing. The challenge for them was to effectively control labor costs and raw material costs, plus the owner is committed to finding a healthy array of cooking Cantonese cuisine. With the RATIONAL cooking intelligence, we can help our customers with both of her challenges. Thanks to the application team in Shanghai, we are very successful in preparing traditional companies' food. So we also could help Maggie switching from traditional equipment to iCombi and keeping guests satisfaction high. Restaurant visitors won't recognize any difference between the food out of an iCombi and being prepared in the traditional way but the restaurant definitely will. Its energy consumption will be way lower. Its food waste will be minimized and its guests enjoy healthier food. We often get asked about the customer group that got attention during the COVID crisis, the delivery business and so-called ghost kitchens. They both are not new to us and have been customers before COVID already. One of the fastest-growing meal delivery companies in the U.K., Love Yourself Meals, supplies its subscribers with a range of tasty menus built around a variety of healthy diets. With sustained growth, Chief Director, Michal Snela and his team were finding it a challenge to meet targets using traditional kitchen appliances. They needed to increase output and reduce the hours of the working day. Installing an iVario Pro XL in addition to their self-cooking center has been their solution. At the same time, they have reduced their energy bills. Michal is so impressed with RATIONAL that he has become a brand ambassador, opening his kitchen to foodservice operators interested in learning more about RATIONAL cooking systems. With that, I would like to switch to sales revenues after 9 months. We display 2022 in red, the previous year in gray and also 2019 as the pre-COVID, let me say, normal level, also in gray. We started very successfully into 2022. Q1 was the best first quarter ever with EUR 225 million. Then Q2 was the best quarter in company history until we ended Q3, which again marked a new sales record. With EUR 274 million in sales revenues, this is 33% above Q3 2021 and 18% above the second quarter 2022. As a result, 9 months 2022, were the best 9 months in company history in terms of sales revenues. With sales revenues of EUR 732 million, we were able to grow by 25%. The good availability of electronical components, FX and pricing effects were major reasons for the strong growth figures. On the other hand, the success of the iVario is still stunning and very promising for our future. You see that on the right where we display the iVario. The iVario will, for the first time, exceed EUR 100 million in sales in 2022, with EUR 98 million, it grew by 63%, compared to 2019, it almost doubled. The iVario offers unique customer benefits and therefore is highly accepted by the markets. In addition, we had less delivery issues since its CPU was less short. The iCombi on the left side was growing to impressive EUR 634 million in 9 months by 20%. We exceeded the pre-COVID level of 2019 by more than 13%. Since we had several price increases, it is important to also look to unit level. The unit sales in 9 months 2022 were up around 2%. In Q3, up by around 6%. Let's have, as usual, a look at the sales split by regions. We see the sales revenues 9 months again, previous year and as well as the 9-month sales of 2019, the pre-pandemic year. As said before, business performance is driven these days mainly by component availability and furthermore by our disposal of available parts and finished units to the regions. Let me summarize the most important remarks. North America, on the upper left, especially the United States, were leading in terms of absolute sales growth, with a plus of 46%, this is our major growth market. Latin America, known to be very volatile, made up ground compared on the previous year and grew by 65% to EUR 39 million. Germany and Europe, our oldest markets grew by 21%, respectively, 23%, nevertheless. The rest of the world grew by 28%. The only and slight decline in Asia is mostly coming from less sales in China, which was affected by the lockdowns earlier this year. These effects are still not caught up until now. We just got an information that, for instance, Yum China, had to close 10% of their sites in October due to zero COVID policy and complete lockdowns. From Asia, I would like to switch to Japan. In 1992, RATIONAL Japan was founded as our first subsidiary overseas. To put this into perspective, just in 1996, we produced our 100,000 combi-steamer. Now the installed base in Japan is around 50,000 units on its own. My Board colleague, Markus Paschmann, was happy to celebrate the 30th anniversary together with our Japanese colleagues. Japan is more comparable with our European markets, than with other Asian markets. We have a team of around 70 U.i.U.s in Japan, which makes it one of our bigger sales outlets. With around 4% of sales, it is also a very important market for us. So yes, thank you again on this amazing journey. And as you can see, our colleagues had a lot of fun celebrating their 30th anniversary, on to the next 30 years. Finally, I would like to mention an award that was given to us a few days ago. As you know, due to the shortage of electronic components, our production process was not as it used to be. Nevertheless, RATIONAL was awarded Factory of the Year 2022 overall winner by [indiscernible] and the [ Süddeutsche Zeitung ], very [ reputable ] newspapers in Southern Germany. Next to operational excellence, promoting and retaining our U.i.U., our team members was positively highlighted, and we are very proud to have been awarded this award and thank all of our colleagues who have contributed to that. With that, I'm glad to hand over to Jorg Walter.

Yes. Thank you very much, Peter. We have seen earlier the details about our sales development. And now I think it's very important I've already seen a very discussed topic. We are looking now at the development of our order backlog. In this chart, we show the historic development of the order backlog during the last 5 years. During the normal years 2018 and 2019 and also in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the order entry, these are the light gray columns and the sales, the darker gray columns on the right were basically at the same level, and the order backlog was stable around EUR 70 million. In Q2 2021, the orders increased dramatically, while the sales level stayed due to the raw material disruptions on a lower level. And the longer lead times led even to more orders until our order backlog reached in Q2, a record level of around EUR 400 million. Now in Q3, 2 things that are related to each other, they come together. First, due to the high shipping level, we decreased our order backlog. And since with the availability of electronical components, our lead times for new orders are going down, dealers don't need to place new orders so much more in advance. For us, this is really a positive thing that we are now able to decrease our order backlog, which in the end means we come down to shorter lead times. But still, the EUR 330 million are still an extremely high level, and we are expecting this to decrease further in the coming months in order to get back to a normal business environment. So right now in some markets, for example, like in U.K., we can offer delivery times in around 4 weeks already now. Overall, our lead times are currently between 6 to 8 weeks. And we think that if the current situation continues, we can look at normal lead times at the end of Q1 or the beginning of Q2 2023. Maybe also important to mention, in addition to the reduced lead times, we're also confident that we can end this topic with reducing semi-finished units. This will soon be over. Currently, we have still 6,200 units on stock, which is already 20% decreased versus December but we think that soon, we can end this topic as we have already done with the iVario. Currently, we have no more semi-finished unit of the iVario on our stock. Now let's have a look at the second challenge that we are facing since over a year now, the development of the raw material and component prices. In the diagram on the right side, you can see here the price development for the alloy surcharge for plastics and for phosphates as an indicator -- phosphates for indicator of our cleaners. And for the first time in a while, we see some prices of raw material to stabilize and even to go down. For example, the alloy surcharge, you see the red line, and also the polymer prices, plastics, the blue line, they tend to have seen their highs in the past. Even the prices for phosphate, they are quite very high, but at least also, they stabilized in Q3 on a high level. So this alloy surcharge will also have an effect on our stainless steel costs. We will benefit from that. We will see the changes with a 3-months' time lag in our book. And -- but the outlook is a little bit difficult because we know that the energy crisis and also the general wage inflation, it is difficult to predict how the next steel contract next year will look like. As you know, as a countermeasure, we have increased our sales prices already twice on a worldwide scale, and we did a third price round in the U.S. market in May. And we see in Q3 now a stabilizing effect in our gross margin. And balancing the price effects on sales and on raw material purchases. This will remain our focus also in the coming months. It is too early to say whether we will have a next pricing round right now. But as I said, we will monitor the situation very closely in order to react flexibly. Now let's have a look at the full P&L. To summarize, the gross margin is still a challenge. But due to the high sales volume and the under proportionate increase of the operational expenses, we offset most of the negative effects in the gross margin. We have -- if we look at the full year, we have seen -- earlier, the sales growth of 25%, Peter has mentioned that. The gross profit increased by 21%. The gross margin is down 1.7 percentage points against previous years. But here, it's important to mention that compared to the Q2 result. Our gross margin in Q3 increased already by 1.2 percentage points. So there are positive signs of a stabilizing gross margin. And as our price increases come through to the P&L, we expect this trend to continue in the next month. Looking at the OpEx, we had an under proportionate increase of our operating expenses by only, so to say, 20%, and this had a positive effect on our EBIT margin of 1.4 percentage points. Inside OpEx, you see that sales and service costs are increasing over proportionally by plus 26%. This is due to higher activities in the sales organization. That means more customer events, more traveling activities that are back to a normal level. But also you see here higher shipping costs for the higher volume and higher shipping prices. Overall, we were able to increase EBIT by 22% to EUR 163 million. And this is also, Peter mentioned, we had a record sales. So this is also a new record earnings for the 9 months, and we will see that later on the chart. The EBIT margin, the half year EBIT margin was at 20.3%. Now after Q3, our EBIT margin is at 22.3%. So just the third quarter had a positive impact on the year-to-date margin by 2 percentage points. And in the third quarter alone, our EBIT margin was at a good 25.6 percentage level. Now when we look at the EBIT, it's also important to mention that we have some tailwinds from the FX side due to the weak euro. Without this, our EBIT growth would be around plus 10%, which is still an over proportional growth compared to our unit growth, Peter mentioned earlier of plus 6%. So now here, we are looking at the profitability EBIT of the different quarters. We see that Q2 was a really challenge to us. Despite a good sales level, peter mentioned, at that time, it was the highest sales of a quarter, the EBIT was quite low with only EUR 45 million. This is due to a low gross margin and a quite higher cost base. Now in Q3, the EUR 70 million is a new quarterly record and already mentioned it that the margin was quite positive with 25.6%, which is more than 6 percentage points above the Q2 level. And also, we have a look in the long-term development of our EBIT and EBIT margin. And here, we see that in the last year, we achieved an EBIT, after 9 months, of EUR 134 million, and that was a comparable level of 2017. This year, despite all the challenges that we mentioned in the gross margin and the higher input costs, the EUR 163 million EBIT is above the precrisis level of EUR 160 million. We already discussed the lower level of the EBIT margin due to the challenges in the gross margin. And also in addition, you see the enormous pricing effects on our sales and COGS are lowering our EBIT margin on top of that, even if our absolute EBIT is growing. So compared to 2019, our unit volume is more or less on a comparable level. But we achieved -- and we -- now in these 9 months, we achieved a higher absolute EBIT level, but the margin you see is 4 percentage points down. This is basically a mathematical effect I just mentioned. Looking at the balance sheet, there is nothing special to report. It is very solid. The equity ratio is at 73%. The increase of the total assets of EUR 75 million is due to, first of all, an increase in inventory due to the buildup of the semi-finished units. I mentioned earlier this is around plus EUR 24 million. And secondly, we had an increase in trade receivables of around plus EUR 46 million, and this is due to the higher sales in general, especially due to the higher sales level at the end of the last quarter. Now when you look at the cash position, liquid funds were down EUR 55 million. This is due to the dividend payment of around EUR 140 million that took place in May. And when you look at other assets, these include EUR 42 million of short-term investments. So if you add up the short-term investments and the cash position then more or less the dividend and the special dividend that we were paying out in 2022 are already more or less back in our books. Peter started our presentation with looking at the customer benefit position, and we are convinced that only satisfied employees can create long-term and sustainable customer benefit. And this is why we really care also about our employees, and we conduct, regularly, surveys every 2 years in order to understand what is happening. And we just conducted a study this year and a questionnaire survey this year. And we have, again, very good results. Even in these turbulent times, 87% of our employees are proud to work for RATIONAL. And the results that it make us very especially proud is that they are satisfied that our employees and our U.i.U.s are satisfied with their working relationship with RATIONAL. They like the cooperation in their teams, and they feel that their direct managers creating a trusting and open atmosphere, creative atmosphere and this is the basis for -- yes good working results and, as I said, produce in the end, sustainable customer benefit. Yes. Now we come to our outlook. And as we stated, with our ad hoc in September 29, we expect 2022 to develop better than our original guidance from March this year. This is mainly due to, first of all, a better availability of raw material and components that was already better in Q3, and we expect this to continue in Q4. And secondly, stabilizing gross profit margin due to positive pricing effects from our pricing increases we made earlier this year and also a stable FX position on our EBIT. So provided that there is no serious deterioration in the supply situation and the macroeconomic situation, we expect sales growth of around 23% to 28% compared to previous years and an EBIT margin of between 21.5% and 22.5% for the full year 2022. Long term, we continue to believe that the crisis brings new opportunities where we can benefit. We still have a large free market potential that will ensure a constant demand in the coming years. There is a need for intelligent cooking equipment that is rising because the shortage of skilled workers in the kitchens that are growing, and last but not least, increasing of -- the increase in energy costs and food costs underline the importance of sustainable and energy-efficient cooking technologies. And with this outlook, I'm handing back to Stefan.

So thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jorg. So we will come to the Q&A session now in a few seconds. So -- but between that, I want to use the time to make, again, some more marketing for our RATIONAL IR talks. We started this year and the good information for anybody here, I would say we have, in the meantime, 4 talks and we had more than 50 participants. So I think it's -- we are quite successful, and I hope you continue to visit the talks in the future as well. So some plans for next year, I want to announce here is that we want to do some so-called follow-up talks, approximately 1 week after the calls, the announcements we do in order to be able to answer further questions arising after the call. And what we also want to do is that we want to start a so-called focused talk format, meaning that we will shed light on some special topics. For example, as shown in this slide, the specialties in the sales process, the iVario connected cooking or whatever that might be interesting. And with that, then I want to invite you to the next meetings on the 24th of November and the 15th of December. And I hand over to Nicole now for questions and answers.

So I'll start with the first 2 questions for Peter. Do you expect that the success story of the iVario overseas will continue or even accelerate?

Absolutely. So far, all signs are very positive. Customers see the huge step-up in speed and accuracy the iVario brings them. Especially the feedback from the Americas is brilliant.

What led to the strong increase in solid iVario.

The main and first reason, of course, is that the iVario was not that much affected by supply shortages. So simply, we were able to deliver faster and more. As I said, the feedbacks from customers are great. We have ongoing strong demand in the biggest 2 markets which are France and Germany, the 2 oldest markets, but also from overseas business, we see a very great picture. In U.S.A., we almost tripled. So all in all, the iVario is bringing a revolution to the kitchen as did the combi-steamer in the last decades.

A couple of questions for you, Jorg. The first one is a rather long one. You had a historic level of around 3 to 4 weeks order book. In my eyes, the order book is too much in the middle of discussion. The business model with very short lead times is implying a comparably small order book. So I would expect the order book to significantly come down in the coming months. That is normal for me. Could you please comment on that?

Yes. Thank you very much for this question. It is absolutely right, and we are expecting that our order book increase or decreases during the coming months, let's say, month by month in order to really come back to our normal former business model. It's not only being able to deliver on a short-term basis to our customers. It's also about our sales force is active in the street contacting new customers, finding new customers and being able to pursue them inviting them to cooking shows. So the current situation with the long lead times is really hurting our company. And therefore, we really expect to come back to normal lead times. And in order to do so, it is necessary that the order backlog is coming down to a normal level.

How is order intake developing? When do you expect to have the order book back at normal levels?

Currently, we see that on a monthly basis, let's say, the order book is maybe at around 70% to 80%, 70% of our sales level. So each month, we are decreasing step-by-step. But for me, more important than the order book is really the delivery time. So once the delivery time is back to 2 to 4 weeks, I think this is a normal operating model, and I expect to come back the order backlog to a normal level during the course of next year. This probably, I don't know, it's difficult to say. It probably takes around 10 months until we are really down to this EUR 70 million level. But if it will maybe remain at EUR 100 million, this is also fine for us. For us, it's important that the lead times are normal.

Order book on precrisis level in Q1 2022, what does that mean?

Yes. I just explained that a little bit. So a normal order book is around EUR 70 million. But as I said, maybe it will stay at EUR 80 million or EUR 90 million. And this is what we expect during the course of the next year. And I would rather, this statement that we have at the end of Q1, a normal level, I would really attribute that to the lead times. Order book will stay a little bit longer on a higher level.

Book-to-bill seems to be significantly below 1. Is this rather due to low orders or high sales?

Yes, it is due to both, actually. Currently, we have high shipping numbers because our supply level with electronic components is good. So -- and we have the orders on hand. So our shipping level is high. And at the same time, with the shrinking lead times, we receive less orders because, as I said earlier in the presentation, the dealers are not -- it's not necessary for them to order so much more in advance. And therefore, also currently, we have a little bit lower level of incoming orders, which is not worrying us.

What are the recent ordering trends by region?

Well, we see that basically, it is, let's say, the ordering trend is quite comparable in all regions. We have Asia, we have seen in Asia that our sales level in Asia is a little bit on a lower level. And this also we see in the order intake. So it's not a big deviation between the sales that Peter explained earlier in our order intake.

Why was the cash flow so low?

This is mainly driven by higher increases in the receivables and also in the inventory buildup that we did this year for the semifinished goods.

If the increase of inventories of plus 30% in trade receivables plus 40% against previous year due to the higher business volume.

Yes. the trade receivable, this is really our DSOs, they are very stable at 43 days. And because our September sales were very high. This is why we also have a very high receivable position. And the inventories, as I said earlier, we have this still semi-finished products on hand. This is why our inventory is at a little bit higher rate, but we will start to finish this process with producing semifinished products. And therefore, we expect our inventory level to go down in Q4 and further going down in Q1 next year.

A couple of questions for you, Peter. Given that the EBIT margin in Q3 is at 25.6%, what do you expect for fiscal 2023, costs on raw materials are coming back, price increases get effective, et cetera?

We hope for your understanding that, as usual, we will not yet discuss any 2023 questions. We will present 2023 forecast in March 2023.

Should we expect margins like in Q3 also for the next quarters when the sales volume stays on a comparable level and further pricing impact plus positive FX impacts help to compensate for higher energy costs, et cetera?

Yes. That's true for Q4 2022, if all those assumptions realized in a positive way, as mentioned in the question. And as I said before, for 2023, we will publish our forecast in March '23.

Thank you, Peter. Another question for you, Jorg. Was there a significant effect on margins from selling of the unfinished devices? Or were there any other effects on margins?

Well, in case of the semifinished units, the impact is rather limited. Really, the transport costs may be -- may already be in our costs if the units are in overseas. But in Europe, everything is made here in Landsberg, the semi-finished production and the finishing process and will be directly shipped from here. So it is a very limited impact on margins. And other than that, the question was any other effects, special effects, there were no health or special effects other than the just operating leverage. So the high sales volume that really led to the good EBIT margin in Q3.

Next 2 questions are for you, Peter. How was the price effect on sales?

The price effect on sales so far was approximately 7% to 8%. And of course, there is more impact to come in the coming months.

Could you maybe explain what the pricing effects expected for this and next year are? Will there be further price increases?

As I said, 9 months, it was between 7% to 8%. Next year, we assume another 7% to 8% with the current price increases already decided on. We -- as Jorg said, we have cost development and let me say, sales development on our radar. So at the moment, we have no decisions taken to have another price increase. It might be that we will do individual adoptions of prices in different markets.

Jorg. Do you expect to reduce working capital in Q4 similar to the order backlog?

Well, working capital inventory and receivables, they are not really related to the high order backlog. They are rather depending on the -- on our sales level, and we expect that receivables to be more or less stable with the enhanced sales level. As I said earlier, DSOs are stable at around 44 -- 43 to 44 days. And the inventory will go down due to the semi-finished units that will go out of our balance sheet and total inventory will therefore go down together with it.

And the next question is again rather long. One of your analysts appear to be taking the shine off your excellent numbers today as he cites a drop in orders, which the press release since is effectively returning to normalized levels. Looking at the prior press releases, I can find other order numbers for the start of this year and at Q1, Q2 and 3, however, no actual numbers prior to that. Are you able to supply that data?

Yes, I think actually, we supplied the data already in our presentation. There is this chart with the gray column of order intake and the darker gray column of sales level for 2018, '19, '20, '21 and '22. And there, I think the message is very consistent. There was never really a big difference between order intake and sales. And as I said earlier, the order backlog was quite stable. It was never really a topic really to talk about. We started to talk about because our sales level in Q4 last year were dropping sharply. And I think at that point, it was important for us to mention that the drop in sales was not due to lacking orders, but it was due to lacking supply with raw material. And this is the reason why we started this discussion about our order backlog. And now I think once we started the discussion now we are -- we want to be transparent. We are going to continue to communicate those numbers until we are back to a normal level. And I think then it's very uninteresting information, and we -- probably we'll skip that then in the future again.

Peter, how big is the effect of your digital solutions in the nonunit business?

Compared to the unit sales, our digital solutions are not yet visible in sales. We still offer a wide range of solutions for all customers for free. And we have a few contracts with bigger key accounts where we also charge our services, but this is still a very low figure.

What were the major reasons for the strong development in North America and the weak business in China?

The weak business in China, as I said, is -- especially due to the complete lockdowns of several big cities or regions in the last months. You all know that from the newspapers following their zero-COVID strategy, means that restaurants are closed, that businesses are closed, supermarkets are closed and that our salespeople are not able to go out and visit customers, they rely on calling them using social media and so on, but it is not our sales activity, and we cannot install units as nobody is allowed to drive into those locked down areas and so on. So for China, that's the main reason. For North America, we have a very good sweet business. That's still the main driver for all our markets, as you know, but also the key account sales have developed very well. And I think also we still have no signs of recession in the U.S., also inflation is also high and Fed reacted in a better and quicker way than ECB, for instance.

Who is most and who is less affected by the latest developments like energy increases, labor shortage, et cetera.

Increasing factor prices improved the economics of our equipment. It saves money for energy. It saves money for raw material. It saves money for labor and also for space. So we cannot and should not distinguish industry segments like, for instance, catering versus restaurants from more or less affected since there are well-run operators or stores in every segment, such as poorly managed stores and operations in every segment. So, of course, the economic pressure is raising, but investing in innovative equipment such as RATIONAL iCombi Pro or iVario is key to withstand this pressure.

Does RATIONAL have enough components on stock for Q4 to keep production on Q3 level.

We are assured that deliveries will be made. But as usual and as normal for us, we do not hold massive stocks in our plan. So as some of you know, we work on a kanban system. That means we resource what has been used. Of course, we have higher safety stocks and so on. But as far as we know, we should get enough components, especially those electronic components so that we can keep that high shipping rate as informed earlier.

Could you please comment on the slight decrease in R&D costs in an environment of generally rising costs? Do these falling costs mean that you are reducing your R&D efforts? And if so, how does this affect your future product portfolio and new releases?

We capitalized some R&D expenses of around EUR 5 million without that the R&D costs would have been around 10% higher. I can calm all of you. We do not cut any R&D expenses and knowing that this is key for us, keeping our lead in innovation and customer benefits, that is, of course, something we don't do.

A question on guidance. Revenues for Q4 seemed conservative. Is there something that could harm Q4?

We remain cautious. Of course, there is still the risk of shortages of components or logistical congestions. We sometimes are waiting for containers, at the moment, that's much more the issue. And such think could harm sales revenues in Q4. As of today, we do not expect that to happen.

What do you expect for next year in terms of volume growth?

Yes, that is, first, too early to assess, and second, as I said, we will give our official guidance for fiscal year '23 in March, including, of course, also information on unit growth.

Margin in Q3 was good. Do you expect Q4 to really worsen drastically so that it just ends with a [ ad hoc ].

No, we expect Q4 not to worsen drastically. As just explained, we did not change our forecast for 2020, but we no longer mentioned, let me say, the second -- the lower scenario in our release today since it becomes, of course, very unrealistic with every day. So we -- yes, there is some upward potential, but let's see how the year then really ends.

Looking into the near future, where do we see the [indiscernible]?

We, of course, see, as everybody, more difficulties and challenges in today's society and economy such as war and decoupling, and this is much more than we also in many years before. But even in a more volatile environment, we see more opportunities for RATIONAL in the long term. Think about energy efficiency, think about labor shortage, think about cooking intelligence. So our company can weather times of less growth caused by less dynamic markets.

How -- sorry, that is -- the next question is for Jorg. How confident are you that once the initial backlog normalization period is completed, that order intake will stabilize.

Yes. Well, when we look at our long-term business model, we are very confident that this will happen. Short-term wise, I have explained earlier that we are expecting the time that it takes that our order backlog is at a normal level will probably 10 months from now on. And everything else, we will then comment in March 2023 when we come out with our guidance for the full year.

How optimistic are you that you will be able to generate volume growth in iCombi in 2023?

This is the same answer we had earlier. So we are -- currently we are in the middle of our planning process. So just this morning, I had planning presentations. Tomorrow, I will have the next planning presentation. The numbers are not ready yet. And it's too early to discuss and to disclose those numbers now.

A quick Q4 outlook. Given the pace of iCombi delivers now, continuing FX tailwinds and price increases feeding through, is the Q4 guidance not rather conservative?

I think I can just comment or add to what Peter just mentioned before, we are conservative with our numbers and our outlook. And if everything is like it is, like with tailwinds and a very stable supply, there is certainly a little bit of upside in the numbers there.

There's a lot of explanation of the order book. But what is your view on the underlying normalized demand for each product category?

Yes, long term, we have a positive perfect conditions for our solutions. As we mentioned earlier, with the energy, rising energy costs, the shortage of labor. So the long term is good. Short term, the company, it's -- we could see, depending in the different regions in the world, how these different regions go through this crisis mode that we have right now. So we see that inflation probably will have an impact of how the spending of people is, for example, like they go out in restaurants. And for us, it's very difficult to assess right now how much impact this really has on our sales for units, for the iCombi and the iVario. As we said earlier, our units bring benefit in any -- even in crisis times, it is there are good reasons to invest into our equipment. So it could be a benefit. But for sure, if the general condition is quite tense that might also impact us.

Getting back to the current order intake. You mentioned mostly due to the fact that dealers no longer need to preorder nearly as early and that it is not worrying for RATIONAL management. Does this mean that in terms of end customer demand, you're not seeing a deterioration in demand?

Yes. We are absolutely convinced that with the free-market potential that we see on one hand, and on the other hand, the good solutions, the superior solution that we can offer our customers that the demand, whether it is a restaurant, whether it is canteen, whether it is a hospital, the benefit for investment in our equipment is there. And therefore, I think also the short-term ordering impact is quite low for our outlook.

So there's now one more question for you, Peter. If raw material prices continue to decline next year, will your customers allow you to maintain higher prices. A number of your competitors will face FX tailwinds. Will you be forced to respond if they become more aggressive on price?

Yes, this could be, we will see. Our competitors usually are more aggressive in price increases than we are. We were late in increases, and we were moderate in increases. So we will see whether they will be also aggressive in price cuts that's open.

Okay. So thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jorg, and thank you, Nicole, for the very long and tough Q&A round. So what I want to do at the end now. First, let me apologize for the technical issues we had. I think we had some quality issues, we did not have the last times we will improve on that the next time. And again, I want to invite you to the IR talks. And we will announce -- this is maybe the important information, we did not give out yet. We will announce the annual report and the figures for the full year on the 28th of March. And then we will also have, again, a call and the balance sheet press conference, and we hope to have you there as well as today in this call. With that, I want to close, say thank you, and take care, and bye-bye.