Stratec SE ($SBS)

Welcome, everyone, to our full year 2025 financial results conference call. With me today are Marcus Wolfinger, CEO of Stratec; as well as our CFO, Tanja Bucherl. As usual, following the presentation, both will be happy to answer your questions during our question-and-answer session. Be aware that this conference is being webcast live, and you can download the presentation either from the webcast or from our website. Finally, please allow me to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement, which we have on Page 2 of that presentation. And with this, it's now my pleasure to hand over to Marcus.

Yes. Thank you, Jan. As Jan mentioned, we would like to give you an overview of our actual events in 2025, followed by the financial review and certainly the interesting outlook over this year 2026, but certainly looking a little bit further downstream about our funnel and pipeline and everything else we believe will drive the company's growth in the next couple of years. And after that, we would love to answer your questions. 2025 was certainly impacted by geopolitics and uncertainties in the global markets, creating challenges not exclusively in those reported fields like supply chain and sales, but also in like decision-making processes worldwide, particularly within our customers' development funnel and so on, et cetera. As a result, we have to perceive it as an above peer group achievement that the company's top line could be kept stable and with that, robust. Despite these difficulties and still lacking scalabilities and economies of scale, the overall performance in 2025 was satisfactory as the profit margin remained within the initially targeted range. This demonstrates the resilience of the business model and the effectiveness of cost and earning management measures. We made significant progress in the development partnerships and particularly the outlook after 2026 shows that the area where we brought in new partners or new programs over the past couple of years is now leading to that we really get the rubber on the road with new development programs and new programs which are coming to the market in the upcoming quarters. At the same time, we have to observe that particularly with the uncertainties in 2025, the development funnel is not as strong as it used to be. So the next couple of years will most likely be dominated by the programs coming to the market. Probably a lot of follow-up systems, a couple of new systems, but the growth, which is coming in the years between 2026 and the year 2030 will be driven by instrumentation sales. I think that's the positive sign. And with that, certainly returning economies of scale and an improved margin profile. We have this positive outlook for 2026 and beyond. I will touch details later on. And one of the key highlights certainly is that despite those effects, we are keeping the dividend proposal stable with EUR 0.60 per share, which has to be confirmed by the AGM in June. With that, I would like to hand over to Tanja. She'll give us the financial review of 2025.

Thanks, Marcus. Also welcome from my side to today's call. So let's take a look at the key financial figures for 2025. As Marcus has mentioned, we actually continue to operate in a very challenging environment that has also affected our customers' order behavior and has given us additional strains on our supply chain. Having said this, you see in that volatile market environment, we generated revenues of roughly EUR 251 million. This actually represents a decline of 2.6% compared to the prior year or 1.1% on a constant currency basis. As expected, also the earnings level declined in 2025. So the adjusted EBIT is around EUR 40.6 million with a margin of 16.2%, down from 19.1% in the prior year. The adjusted EBIT amounts to around EUR 25.2 million with a margin of 10%, down from 13% in the prior year. So this decline in the profitability versus 2024 is actually mainly due to the higher earnings contribution from our development and service recorded in the prior year 2024, which was expected, forecasted that this will not will be repeated in 2025. In addition to this contribution from the development and service high-margin portfolio, the product mix effect in other areas, increased input costs and currency exchange rate effects had actually a negative impact on our margin development. Nevertheless, very important for me is that at the end, we were at the lower end of our initial guidance for the adjusted EBIT margin of 10% to 12%, and we achieved that despite this lack of the planned revenue levels that we actually had. And this was mainly due to our ongoing cost management that had a positive impact in the year. On the next slide, we see now the transition from the adjusted to the reported earnings. Based on the adjusted EBIT of EUR 25.2 million, several onetime items occurred in 2025. The first one that you see on that page are the regular and planned PPA amortization of EUR 3.1 million. Second, there was the extraordinary inventory write-off of EUR 4.3 million. The third bucket are the impairments on intangible assets of EUR 6.1 million. As you know, during the preparation of the consolidated financial statement 2025, the annual impairment test is required to be tested. And out of that, we recognized this impairment loss, which is actually not cash effective. This is also a very important note on that side. The impairment that we show here is mainly related to a delayed market launch and reduced sales potential for one product family of the DiaSorin brand. Adding to these 3 effects, we have another onetime effect such as consulting and reorganization costs of around EUR 2.5 million. That means in total, the result of the reported EBIT is EUR 9.1 million and a slight negative consolidated net income. So we are showing you this reconciliation very transparently because the adjusted result is reflecting much better our operational profitability of our business, while these onetime costs, especially the impairments, are mainly addressed for the balance sheet cleanups and our ongoing focus on the future growth. In terms of revenue, as we mentioned, we see the slight decline of this [ 1.1% ] on a constant currency basis. But there is also one positive note. So the demand for the MDx systems has continued to stabilize following the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as you all know. At the same time, we are seeing a growth in immunoassay systems. We also see that the performance, especially towards the end of the year, is particularly encouraging. In the fourth quarter, we achieved actually a double-digit growth in our system sales. On the other hand, these ongoing uncertainties in the global trade, geopolitical tensions and the resulting effects on our customers' ordering behavior and the supply chain has had a negative impact. In addition to the prior year comparison, we see again this huge impact from the high-margin service parts consumables and the development in service segments, which were exceptionally high. Overall, we could frame out for the picture as follows. So the environment remains very challenging for us. And based on our 2026 order forecast, we see that this trend or let's call it, this shift to the second half year of the year continues also in 2026. Now we see on the slide the breakdown of our revenue by the business segment. So you see our systems business remains our most important revenue driver and is benefiting from the growth momentum mentioned earlier, particularly in the immunoassay segment. On the second part, you see our service parts and consumables, so the recurring revenue, driven by our installed bases of systems, which is for sure also very important to our business model. In 2025, we actually see especially here the volatile ordering and -- ordering patterns of our customers, mainly attributable to logistics and cash flow optimization at our customers. Last but not least in the bucket, you see the development in service revenue. You see as well here the decline. As also mentioned earlier, this is particularly given by the strong year comparison to 2024. Overall, the revenue structure that you see on that chart confirms that we are building on a very diversified portfolio with a growing share of recurring revenue. Let's have a look to the adjusted EBIT and the EBIT margin. So the adjusted EBIT declined by 24.8% to the EUR 25.2 million. The adjusted EBIT margin stands at 10%, down from the 13%, as mentioned also already. So this is a decrease of 300 basis points. The factors are contributing to this. First, we had this exceptional high earnings contribution from the development services and also from the service parts in 2024, which could not be replaced in 2025. Second, we faced the margin pressure due to the less favorable product mix, the higher input costs and the negative currency effects. On a positive note, our efficiency program that we have installed already several years ago and structural measures are having a noticeable impact on the cost base. And this is giving us the confidence that we will be able to increase the profitability again in the coming years as a growth and economy of scale, scale took fully place. Last but not least, we see now a very mixed picture in the cash flow for 2025. So you see the operating cash flow is in a minus of EUR 0.4 million. This is actually significantly below the 2024 figures. The main driver for that is our very strong back-end loaded business performance in 2025, especially into December 2025, which leads to a significant increase in the trade receivables with the related contribution later on now in the Q1 of 2026. At the same time, we have started to reduce our inventory levels, which remain elevated. So the inventories, as you see, stood at around EUR 113 million at year-end, already below the prior year figures of 2024. Our investment ratio in property, plant and equipment and intangible assets at 6.5% of revenue was actually below the targeted range of 8% to 10%. Here, we were intentionally selective and focused without jeopardizing the strategic projects of Stratec for the upcoming years. The net financial debt has risen to approximately EUR 112 million. This is corresponding to a net financial debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 3.3 compared to 1.9 in the prior year. Despite this increase, our balance sheet remains solid. So the equity ratio stands at around 55.7%. In addition, as you know, we successfully completed the refinancing of the bridge loan in 2025 and negotiated and signed a new syndicated loan of EUR 125 million. These measures secures our financial flexibility while we are still working in parallel to improve our cash flow and the debt ratios again with a very strict working capital management program. With that, I would like to hand over to Marcus again.

Thank you, Tanja. Let me walk you through our financial guidance for 2026 and beyond. Sales in 2026 is expected to grow in a medium to high single-digit percentage range on a constant currency basis. As always, the important information lies within the imprint. As already mentioned into our ad hoc announcement where we disclosed, among others, the prelims, we clearly mentioned that the sales growth will predominantly materialize in the second half of the year. I think this is something which was observed over the last couple of years that we were always trying to pull in the back-end loading of the year, and it got actually stronger and stronger. This year, we actually foresee that we move the customer forecast more towards like midyear in order to be able to supply the products then towards the end of the year. And as a result of that, the first quarter is expected to see a sharp reduction in sales, which comes along with a dip in profitability. We -- this should -- first of all, this is not happening as a surprise. And secondly, we have those measures in place. And if we are looking into our resource allocation and in those elements, like incoming goods, et cetera, that we are have well-established structures to satisfy the requirements of our customers and to satisfy the orders, which came in and are coming in these days, as mentioned, in some cases, we actually moved the forecasting system in order to be super safe in terms of abilities to supply more towards like an ordering system away from forecasting. Regarding the EBIT margin guidance, we foresee a previous year level of 10%. Certainly, we see some further effects from our efficiency gains as well as from scalability. Unfortunately, those gains will be partly offset by a higher input cost contribution. And we actually foresee and actually already see the impact of the geopolitical conflict that certain raw materials are actually seeing further price increases. On the investment side, the intangible and intangible assets combined, we see a range of 6.5% to 8.5% of sales. Long term, and again, even further important is here the imprint for the years between 2026 and 2028 on the basis of 2025, we have a nice ramp-up in certain products. I'll touch base on that in a minute. And the new products are certainly the growth driver. New products doesn't necessarily mean new products. Often, we have drop-in placements, which are then positioned in like slightly different markets, even those markets where higher throughput or worldwide distribution is happening for those products. We see and foresee a slight recovery, not a material recovery. However, a slight recovery in the MDx system demand. I don't want to like stress the situation too much how many molecular instruments were placed during the pandemic. And after that, certainly the market was saturated for a certain period of time. And we definitely see that this is coming to an end. However, in our forecast for 2026 and then beyond between 2026 and the year 2030, the recovery doesn't play a meaningful role anymore. Then certainly, we see an initial contribution from early-stage products as well as from those transitions of new product generations with partly higher selling prices or the fact that at the tail end of the positioning of those instruments, other instruments will accelerate as well. Then between 2026 -- sorry, then between 2028 and 2030 after the 6% to 8% growth in the period between '26 and '28, we foresee a 10% to 12% compound annual growth rate for those years. Again, continuously increasing revenue contribution from new products. And again, new products doesn't necessarily mean products which are launched then. These products are hitting the market between now and then and are then in their actual growth rate. And then we foresee dynamic growth with the service parts and consumables business as a result of the growing installed base. I think this is only a natural evolution that as the fact that we went sideways between literally 2022 and 2025, certainly, the installed base didn't grow anymore. And as a result of that, our service parts and consumables business didn't grow, particularly not those elements which are related to our installed base, the consumables -- consumables business certainly grew during that time. I think, again, it is super important to highlight that if we are looking into the breakdown of revenues that we certainly saw 3 material changes over the past 5 years. So historically, we are coming from a development contribution of, say, 10% to 20% with the service parts contribution from 30% to 40% and then the remainder instrument business that certainly changed, twice during the pandemic and then the years after that with supply crisis, et cetera, that changed the budgets of our partners were allocated into more product life cycle management in order to keep the products young in order to overcome that situation that on the input material side, product life cycle shortened. On the other hand, everybody was trying to prolong and push out the product life cycle on the sales side because of grandfather renewals and regulatory and because of like you can do that, that's a means to an end to push out product life cycle by 2 or 3 years. And we are coming to the end of that situation, which means development budgets are now reallocated into new product development. Downstream, that means that on an absolute like euro or dollar level, development and sales will continue to see nice growth rates and a robust, but it will be overtaken by instrument growth. So if we look into the review mirror in like [ 20 20 30 ] we will see that at least partly we are returning to the historic percentages of contribution of the relevant product classes like split into instruments, consumables, spare parts, maintenance parts and development. And the return of economies of scale and our cost efficiency improvements will then drive the margin going forward. That's why our margin targets based on a real bottom-up calculation and a bottom-up approach. So we only took certain instruments into consideration. I'll touch base on that in a minute. The adjusted EBIT margin will be on an at least 13% level by 2028. And then followed by the 2 years between 2029 and '30, the EBIT margin will be at least on a 15% level by 2030. So back to historical EBIT margin strength, certainly coming along with the associated cash flow and all other KPIs to where we believe that we can return into historical areas. However, I think it's worth mentioning that there is one KPI which we don't expect to return to historical levels, which is probably inventory level. I mentioned before that we see more obsolescences on the input side at a higher cadence and within shorter time frames as compared to historical data points on the same talking that our customers are pushing and continue to push our product life cycles in terms of longer sales of the same platform, which means that we will face last time buys. In most of the cases, these last time buys are then paid by our customers, but they are sitting in our inventory. So in the meantime, about 10% of the -- Tanja mentioned that elevated inventory levels are actually for those last-time buys. So inventory level has to be perceived like more specifically where are they coming from. This is not from products which have run rate. This is actually saving supplies in the future. And certainly, we have to see that there is a threshold. If a product is only like 5 or 7 years out to sunsetting, typically big interventions into development, which are then leading to reverification and revalidation and reapproval and [ re re re ] in such senses redevelopment or in such cases, redevelopment doesn't make too much sense. And in this case, we are more shooting for like last-time buy in order to tackle of the latter. I think it is important to mention that our guidance does not include our full funnel and our full pipeline. The forecast does not take into account any revenues from analyzer systems in the OEM setup, so which means our classical business model where we use background technologies based on new developments and background technologies that we develop analyzer systems and consumables, which are then specific to the customer, but they are our technology, like this is what we call an OEM setup. And again, allow me to repeat what I started to say that this forecast does not take any -- into account any revenues from analyzer systems in an OEM setup where the product is already in development, but the development and supply agreement is not yet signed or finalized and the customer has not yet placed an order for that. And the sales growth is actually tackling sales growth rate at a constant currency level. I mentioned the upcoming launches. And this is one of the first times where we have decided to try to put a little bit more meat around the bones what's actually coming up and why do we derive growth from that. Like in the discussions we had at the tail end of the pandemic, we believe that the launches, which -- the product launches, which happened through our customers during the pandemic and shortly thereafter could offset the dip in the molecular space as a result of the saturation of the market in molecular during the pandemic. The ramp-ups were slower than expected. They are only able to show traction these days and only in some of the cases. That's why I think it is important to talk about launches and what launches actually means for us and for our customers. So we have given the product names. Please bear with me that these are actually random and a slide hints to the actual technology behind that or product names or foreseen product names of our customers. So please do not expect us to follow up on the project names. Internally, certainly the project numbers differ from that. So we have here Project L on our list, which is a next-generation, fully automated immunoassay analyzer for an existing customer. The beauty here is that this instrument is a direct drop-in replacement, which means it is not foreseen to go through this growth phase from day 1 on in the mature markets and in the majority of the markets. It will replace the predecessor solution one by one. The menu is comprehensive. The menu provided by our customers, obviously, is comprehensive from the get-go. So we do not expect to go through a phase. On the beauty side here is that the product comes along at a higher throughput range and for a slightly elevated price. So this is not actually a volume driver. This is a price driver on the one hand side. And on the other hand side, the positioning of the instrument in a higher throughput environment is actually giving a chance to the smaller brother of that instrument, which is coming from us as well. And that segregation is actually leading to a demand effect on the lower platform as well. So I would actually consider this as a double strike. So then Project M is a next-generation molecular instrument, again, a direct drop in replacement. Status as in the previous case for Project L is design transfer to series manufacturing. So no technical challenges anymore and a clear timetable and time line together with our customers. And the Product M is actually specifically made for decentralized testing in the molecular space. So again, derived from the market need for solutions like that to be positioned mainly in the United States and markets where decentralized molecular testing is playing a meaningful role. Then we have Project R. By the way, this is assorted by when those products will hit the market. It's not assorted by size or how meaningful that is. That is actually like on the time scale. So Project R, again, is a product family for an existing customer. The predecessor solution consisted out of 2 solutions, out of 2 instruments. One came from us. The other instrument came from one of our competitors. We got a competitive win. So we have set a scalable solution for the high throughput markets and the lower throughput markets with the same -- we call that core modules. So the core of the instrument is comparable. This has huge advantages for our partners in terms of serviceability and service part supply. And at the end, it gives us a real scale because, like I said, it's not only replacing our solution, it's replacing the solution of one of our peers and therefore, will lead to aggregated growth here. The status is in -- the system is in system verification and validation on customer side. So again, minimal technical risk. Then we have Project N, which is a multiplex molecular solution, again, particularly placed in the United States market is designed with the specific needs of highly decentralized testing environment. And again, instrument design is completed. Assay transfer is happening within our customer side. And you see this actually means that the launches are now not happening within the next few quarters, but downstream then. But again, nice supplement, nice allocation of those resources, which are ramping up manufacturing here at Stratec. Then we have Program H, which is a product we won at the beginning of this decade. Status is prototype design is completed and assay development at customer side is ongoing. High-sensitive immunoassay, one of those market niches where everybody expects huge growth rates. So high-sensitive immunoassays are particularly used like in neuro or oncology. So those areas where like the aging population and the demand in the Western world is leading to further treatments where at this moment in time, a couple of hundred of different kinds of treatments are in development or in their approval phases. What we typically see in diagnostics is that new treatment leads to new diagnostics and new diagnostics demand particularly for neuro, high-sensitive immunoassay will play a meaningful role in the future. This is where we already have a good footprint. We have a number of instruments and consumables in the high-sensitive immunoassay market. So one of the growth drivers we see. And then certainly, we call it -- it sounds a bit boring module business, but it's definitely important for us and growing is that still there is a number of customers which are doing in-house developments. They do not reinvent the wheel. We are providing customer-specific setups where we are not selling modules in terms of we sell a pump and everybody could use or build such pump, which is commoditized. We are developing specific modules, which are then fulfilling and only fulfilling the requirements of the customers, which has huge advantages from a pricing perspective, but also from approval perspective. Let me briefly walk you through the market trends in our different -- typically, we call it franchises, application segments. We call it franchises in order to take a different throughput classes and technologies alongside with applications. So there is no good work for that. We internally call it, therefore, franchises. If we are looking into the surveys provided, the growth of the IVD space is not as high as it used to be before the pandemic or even during the pandemic. However, still very solid growth rates. So low to mid-single-digit growth rate is expected to happen during those forecast periods we have given. In the immunoassay space, everybody expects a strong growth rate. Certainly, this is no longer ELISA or those, let me say, very old technologies, certainly, high sensitivity or the transfer of single molecular [ non-plaque ] technologies into immunoassays is playing a role. Certainly, like for applications like in the neuro space where no DNA or RNA is concerned, but enzymes are concerned. Certainly, the immunoassay choice is the method of choice. So we have a number of applications within proteomics and therefore, certainly, immunoassay is accelerating faster than everything else. Then in the molecular space, definitely the ongoing trend so far only happening in the main markets in the United States, not that much in Europe or Asia. The ongoing trend to decentralization in molecular. But certainly, as in most of the cases in this world, the United States has a leading role. So the decentralization is actually in the United States is actually mainly coming from the reimbursement system. The reimbursement system in Europe and Asia does not yet support a higher degree of decentralization in the molecular space. But for us, we believe that Europe will come at the tail end of the development. Then certainly, the molecular space will see certain recoveries as particularly those instruments, which were placed prior to the pandemic or during the pandemic saw some extraordinary high wear and tear. The field service organizations of our customers and therefore, our supply with spares and replacement parts certainly showed that, again, this is a means to an end. You can only keep a product so and so long in the field with service measures. And then there is a point where the placement of a new instrument is making an economical sense. And we see that some of our customers are in accelerating cadence moving towards that trend. Then certainly, what we see our franchise of complex sample prep, we see that the breakthrough discoveries in genomics and cell therapy are driving a way, way, way higher demand in sample prep than that used to be the case. If we were talking sample prep 20 years ago, this actually meant pipetting from a donation vessel into a microplate. In the meantime, often the complex sample prep is actually more complex than the full analytical process used to be the case 20 years ago. That's definitely one of the drivers here. Then hematology and other routine testing. Certainly, the area sees material pricing pressure and a lot of competition coming out of China. Highly commoditized market. We still see opportunities here and there, but only like in markets where specialization plays a role and where differentiation from the commoditized suppliers are playing a meaningful role. This market, like in the Western world, is almost entirely in the hands of Sysmex and Beckman Coulter. There is a number of smaller players like us, but probably only like 5 to 10. The majority of them highly specializing like we do, so like in those areas where instruments are put into the big track systems, the players I've named before are playing a role and only special markets, players like us are playing a role. And then certainly, immune hematology overall market which is not growing that much. There is only like only a few players, not even a handful of meaningful players as we have an active cooperation with one of the market leaders, particularly high throughput, the cost efficiency requirements and workflow optimization is calling for new instruments and innovation, and that's actually what we do here. Let me hand over to Tanja now. She will walk us again through the bridge, how we believe that the historical profitability will return in the years to come. And then we would love to answer your questions.

Thanks, Marcus. So despite these market trends that we heard now and our internal launch pipeline, we are introducing also our business excellence initiatives, means different pricing measures, targeted portfolio optimization, operational excellence and therefore, also higher capacity utilization in our location. And those are building up actually the key drivers of our planned margin expansion. So when we start on the left side on that chart, you actually see the starting point of the adjusted EBIT margin 2025, 10% in 2025. The next blue bar is showing you our target for 2028, where we want to achieve a margin of at least 13%; and by 2030, at least the 15% on the right side of that chart. So how do we will achieve those figures? Between 2025 and 2028, we expect actually headwinds together of around 260 basis points due to exchange rate effects, mainly driven by our U.S. dollar exposure as well as a less favorable sales mix. But we are countering these headwinds with targeted measures with our business excellence initiatives. So the commercial initiatives and the portfolio optimization will contribute positive 100 basis points. And the biggest ticket and lever in that will be the operational excellence and improved capacity utilization. This will deliver roughly 460 basis points. In the period from 2028 to 2030, we anticipate another mix effect as we expect our system business to grow more strongly than the service parts. At the same time, we plan additional improvements in pricing and portfolio as well as further efficiency and economy of scale. Together, this lever will enable us to increase the adjusted EBIT margin to this 15% by 2030, as already mentioned. With that, we would end our today's session, and we would like to hand over back to Sandra to open the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Michael Heider from Berenberg Bank.

Yes, thank you very much for the presentation and for giving the details on your future sales growth and margin expansions. I have 4 questions, 2 are related to the future plans and 2 other ones. So the first one maybe on the DiaSorin write-down that you had. Can you maybe be a little bit more specific on the projects that you are talking about? Then secondly, you're expecting a sharp decline in the first quarter in revenues. So sharp decline. Is this something around minus 15%? Or how would you phrase this? And then on your targets, midterm targets, you also talked about new customer wins of some of these projects. Can you give a little bit more insight here to what kind of customers are we talking about? So these are be bracket customers in what area are they active? And how did you get these new customers? Then on the margin expansion, as just explained by Tanja, so the main margin expansion is coming from the CE and OE excellence programs. Can you also be here a little bit more specific? I mean if we look at the time frame '25 to '28, if I'm not mistaken, this should mean something like EUR 10 million cost savings? Or where is this exactly coming from? And that's it for the moment.

I will start actually with the first question on the DiaSorin write-offs. So as we have also communicated in our talk announcement, it's actually one product family of the DiaSorin business that we have needed to impair. It's attributable to not of our -- one of our core businesses, actually one of the niche businesses where we wanted to enter. It's the veterinary business. So this is the project that we are talking about. And as we said, this is mainly due to the cost increases that we have faced due to the delay of the project start and the revenue drop that we have seen in the forecast for the upcoming year for this project.

Then, Michael, you brought up the Q1 again. Again, we want to be super careful in trying to comment that we probably saw that Q1 was not one of the best quarters of this industry with the profit warnings we saw like with bioMériux, Qiagen and others. Again, like let me try to set the stage. This has absolutely nothing to do with the strong quarter 4, at least not as far as we are concerned. So we didn't pull in 2026 Q1 activities into the last quarter in order to meet our goals there. We definitely see that the demand coming from the markets are tremendously shifting to the second half of the year and even there towards the last quarter. And we see -- definitely see that in our forecast in [indiscernible] where we see that. So Q1, and again, it will not be super good. We flagged that already in the -- announcement. I mentioned that before, where we covered Q1 and covered our prelims as well. So I think if you would expect sales in the area where we used to be in Q1 of 2024, this would be a rough guidance as far as top line is concerned. Then certainly talking about new customer wins. And allow me like I'm typically saying everything in Stratec as a story. We have to see that the growth which we foresee to happen between let me say, 2026 in particular, but then in the quarters thereafter with those platforms I walked you through, this has nothing to do with new customer wins. These were the new customer wins we saw between -- to give it a widespread between 2019 and say, 2023. What we definitely see these days is that particularly in 2026, that the funnel became thinner and more technological driven. I think like those crisis do not make it our customers easier to take decisions. We have to see that over the next instrument platforms will be driven by a higher degree of local for local. So we expect that the Indian market, the Chinese market, the U.S. market will see derivatives as compared to those markets which will be addressed in Europe and the regions of the world. Back in the days, an instrument was developed under, say, a global umbrella and then only in really small areas customized for the local market. We believe that these times are over. At this moment in time, nobody wants to pay the extra cost for the local-for-local approach, but everybody needs it, and that's actually leading to a certain paralysis in terms of decision-making processes. Our development pipeline, particularly towards market launches like with software development verification is super strong. The area where we have to catch up is actually early stage to bring in new development pipelines. We see a lot of opportunities, have more leads than ever. However, we have to put this through the funnel in order to make it real development programs. We see huge demand like in proteomics, I mentioned that before. We see huge demand in like cell and gene therapy. We see huge demand and obviously, the associated diagnostics with that. And what we definitely see is that there is a transfer from the traditional detection methods more towards optics and high-precision optics, and this is where we are really very well positioned. Your last question was about margin expansion. So at this moment in time, we had to set up a plan. We set up a plan in a way that we know which instruments will come to the market. We have already dedicated plans with our customers, particularly for -- on that pipeline slide, those elements on the left-hand side, they are already set on a time scale. So we know when those instruments will come to the market. Margin expansion during that time will not come from product mix. Actually, product mix will provide a certain headwind. Therefore, we have set up margin expansion. Margin expansion here means, and Tanja mentioned that already. It means that we have and are looking into manufacturing there. It means that we have to look that we are doing the right products at the right side of Stratec and probably pull in back development depth and probably outsource the right part. So there is a number of programs ongoing, certainly supplier management and other areas. So there is -- this is not just that we set up a plan and set up a goal. There are actually already concrete measures. Here, we have to see that our supplier network is a very robust one. And we have to see that changes to such a supplier network means a lot of work in terms of qualification, in terms of regulatory, in terms of incoming goods and so on. And then certainly, we are working in an environment where we have to ensure supply, which means we have a certain lineup of contracts with existing partners. And that's why all those measures will take some time, but they are already lined up. I hope that helps.

It seems that there are no further questions. Back over to you, Mr. Keppeler, for any closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you, everyone. This concludes the conference call. If there are any follow-up questions, please do not hesitate to contact us and the entire Investor Relations team. Thank you, and goodbye.